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5.0 out of 5 stars
Listening into Psychotherapeutic Focusing...., October 7, 2009
This review is from: Focusing-Oriented Therapy: (Fot) (Paperback)
"Vasudeva listened with great attention. It was one of the ferryman's greatest virtues that, like few people, he knew how to listen. ...the speaker felt that Vasudeva took in every word, quietly, expectantly, that he missed nothing... He did not await anything with impatience and gave neither praise nor blame - he only listened... Siddhartha felt how wonderful it was to have such a listener who could be absorbed in another's life". Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
In his
Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method (see my review), Eugene Gendlin, developer of Focusing, states that first & most important is the client-therapist relationship. "Its quality affects all the other [therapeutic] avenues [that is, all other ways of therapy, such as Experiential Listening, Focusing, CBT, etc.], because they all happen within the [client-therapist] interaction." But after client-therapist relating, next in importance comes "Experiential Listening", which while based on Focusing, does not come out of any Focusing "step" or "stage" direction.
As a Focusing-Oriented therapist & counselor for over 25 years, I absolutely agree. After our relating, or more accurately, within our relating, what we do most of all, often most important of all is listening. Even stronger: how we relate is best & most shown through the quality, as Gendlin might say, through the manner of our listening, of taking in & giving back our sense of our client.
In Neil Friedman's Focusing-Oriented Therapy, his chapter on Experiential Listening, which begins with the Hesse quote above, draws on 50 years of experience, thought & teaching from many masters - Rogers, Gendlin, Cornell-Weiser, Kathy McGuire. It also draws on Friedman's 30 years as a Focusing-Oriented therapist, and as a student & a psychotherapy client of Gendlin. That chapter, the heart of Friedman's book, is perhaps the best beginning summary of this special kind of listening.
Friedman's chapter on Experiential Listening, alone, is well-worth the book.
Friedman: "Experiential listening is an empathic, supportive, non-interfering way of saying back to a person the felt essence of his or her message and checking with the person to make sure it has been said back correctly."
But experiential listening is so much more: "Experiential listening helps people clarify and articulate their inner processes, explore issues, get past stuck places, and carry their experiencing forward... Listening helps people toward their felt senses."
That last sentence - clarified by a soundbite from Gendlin, "Responses point" - captures the essence of Focusing-Oriented Therapy. Which is not that the therapist gives the client Focusing directions. Rather, through the therapist's presence and their listening, the therapist points the client back to their embodied experiencing, especially their felt sense. This is what makes Focusing-Oriented Therapy so effective. More accurately, this is what makes Focusing-Oriented Therapy effective as it merges with not just Focusing, but with the techniques of, literally, any therapy.
For a long time, research on psychotherapy fairly consistently showed that all therapies were equally effective. Campbell Purton, an English Focusing-Oriented Counselor, in
The Focusing-Oriented Counselling Primer: A Concise, Accessible, Comprehensive Introduction (Counselling Primer Series)(see my review), calls this the "Dodo Bird Effect", after the Dodo Bird in Alice in Wonderland, saying at the conclusion of the race, "Everyone has won, and all must have prizes."
This result seems puzzling, unless it's combined with a half-century of research that points to therapeutic change as linked to client's ability to speak, act, think, listen, take-in from their felt senses. (See Dr. Mary Hendricks summarizing 80 research studies, this on [...])
That's the point, the basis of Focusing-Oriented Therapy: You don't have to change your theory. You don't have to change your therapeutic techniques. You only need, in all you do, to point & take feedback from what Gene calls "the client's client", the client's felt-sense. This is true whether listening, or doing a cognitive reframe or restructuring, a systematic desensitization, a family communication training, an interpretation, some psycho-education, assessing, a goal-setting/re-setting or an empty chair technique. All "interventions", all "responding" are directed toward the client's felt sense: noticing whether it has an effect, whether it carries forward the client's felt sense.
This is certainly my experience, as I use all the above techniques & more. Among other things, I'm trained in CBT, family therapy, NLP, experiential/gestalt techniques, humanistic/client-centered techniques. And I have clients who are multi-problem & often difficult, even severe: bipolar, Asperger's, combat PTSD, schizophrenia, Reactive Attachment Disorder, child abuse PTSD, borderline, depression, OCD & more. I work with children, teens, adults, and I tend to see people in families or couples, though I also see individuals. Focusing-Oriented Therapy helps me integrate and target these responses in sway making both theoretical sense & therapeutic effectiveness.
Through many understandings & even more dialogues recording in therapy sessions, Neil Friedman's book is one of the best in teaching the core skill of Experiential Listening, listening that points both my client & my interventions toward my client's felt sense. [By the way, I didn't study with, meet or communicate with Dr. Friedman who, sadly, died this past year.]
What's a felt sense? It's a special form of "experiencing," a basic Gendlin term. Friedman: "Persons are experiencing processes. We apprehend the world moment-to-moment through our experiencing of [our bodily interacting with] it. A flow of experiencing is always ongoing ..."
"Gendlin uses the term experiencing `to denote concrete experience... the raw, present, ongoing [flow] of what is usually called experience...'"
Regarding a felt sense, Friedman says, "When I make direct reference to my experiencing, Gendlin calls what I find a felt sense... A felt sense is a `bodily felt, implicitly rich sense of some situation, problem, or aspect of one's life.' It is `the holistic, implicit bodily sense of a complex situation.'"
Friedman starts by giving basic Focusing-Oriented terms, using his experience and often quoting from Gendlin. His writing is straightforward, easy-going. His chapter on Focusing, while not sufficient to teach Focusing, is clear, with many examples, some extended. Examples are a real strength in this book, especially as Friedman uses not only himself as therapist, but others, often Gendlin.
This book's final third combines Focusing/Listening with other therapeutic interventions, again, with many good examples. But Friedman doesn't show directly how, say, a CBT therapist integrates a Focusing-Oriented sensitivity into his work, but rather how Friedman, a Focusing-Oriented therapist, integrates other approaches. For example, Friedman discusses his use of "interpretation".
"What do I do after making an interpretation? This is crucial. If it is clear that my response has `struck home' - if my client expresses the equivalent of a deep sigh, a `yes,', and then something fresh and feelingful comes... we go with what has come."
"If not, if my client is silent, or changes the subject, or looks peeved, I want to check in with him. I want to know what my client is experiencing, and whether and how it relates to my intervention... `Did that comment of mine say anything to you?'... or `What came up in your when I said that?' or `OK, that was my trip; now where are you?'
"In this way, even a `wrong' interpretation - poorly timed, off the mark, more true of me than of my client - can be useful. Again, as we saw with self-disclosure and listening, the checking-in is all important... I am not invested in the correctness of my interpretation [or any intervention].... What will move the process forward now - that remains the basic question."
Here's the guideline to bring a Focusing-Orientation into your practice: how does it affect your client's experiencing? It's OK to get it wrong. Most of the time, I suspect, we all do. The key: recognizing when this happens, and getting back on track.
One concern: Friedman's chapter on body-centered therapies. Many body-workers work in a Focusing manner. But as a male psychotherapist working with children, teens and/or female clients, many abused, I'm extremely leery, and not only for my own legal safety. Touching can bring up much in clients. And in our society, clients may hide their responses or just dissociate, not to mention sexualized reactions, which are tragically common. Frankly, except when others are present, and except for brief comforting, supportive or playful touch, I won't.
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