What Focusing Brings to Therapy
Body-Mind Psychotherapy: Accessing The Wisdom Of The Body
We are born with the innate ability to sense how we feel moment by moment and use that awareness to navigate life. However, societal emphasis on intellect and reasoning, coupled with experiences of hurt during our upbringing, often causes us to lose trust in our bodies, feelings, and alternative ways of knowing.
Our minds strive for clarity, certainty, and correctness, often feeling impatient with the vague, hard-to-describe bodily awareness that reflects our direct experience of life. This becomes problematic in situations that bring confusing information and feelings, a sense of stuckness or something missing. How can we use our minds to connect with present bodily awareness instead of relying on assumptions, doubts, or repetitive mental loops?
Focusing offers simple, clear steps to relearn and refine this natural skill, reconnecting mind, body, and spirit into a unified whole. In Focusing, the body is seen as an “experiencing body”—a totality of being that transcends the traditional division between body, mind, and environment. The body is an ongoing interaction with its environment, sensing subtleties and implicit meaning in situations that often cannot immediately be verbalised. As such, the bodily knowing is of a far more complex nature than rational knowledge.
Our conceptual minds seek meaning by identifying patterns and creating order, often dismissing what is vague or unformed as dis-order. In contrast, in applying the Focusing process we recognise that what is unclear or emerging often holds a greater, more intricate order yet to be articulated. Eugene Gendlin (1981) described this as a "felt sense"—a bodily knowing that bridges the gap between what is known and unknown. This "felt sense" contains implicit meaning far more complex than rational knowledge.
The term focusing is a visual metaphor that evokes the process of carefully bringing blurry or vague sensations into clarity, much like adjusting binoculars. Yet, the process also entails a receptive, auditory quality—a kind of inner listening that tunes into the quiet whispers of the heart and the deeper continuity of being.
The Receptive Quality of Focusing
The key to the successful Focusing process lies in receptivity and the quality of awareness and relating to our experience. This involves approaching one’s experience with friendly, respectful curiosity and compassion —similar to the qualities of a good therapeutic relationship. With this Focusing attitude and relational emphasis therapists and Focusing companions model the quality of relating to clients that change the way they are with themselves and their unfolding experience of living in the world. Clients gradually learn to be with their unfolding living experience with a sense of safety, trust and compassion, the qualities that provide the felt experience of a secure attachment bond.
While Focusing as a method can be integrated into many humanistic, existential, and all relational therapeutic frameworks, FOT is a fully developed therapeutic approach grounded in Gendlin’s Philosophy of the Implicit. FOT is a person-centred experiential therapy that belongs to the humanistic tradition. It conceptualises the human body as the interactional living process between organism and environment, which the person experiences “from inside” (Gendlin, 1996, p.2). Thoughts, emotions, sensations and situations are all experienced bodily as events which imply further events, as hunger implies eating (Gendlin, 1984). In this way, the body always, in every moment, implies its own next life-maintaining and life-enhancing steps. These steps move the organism in its life-forward direction. When what was implied is unfulfilled, that creates a stoppage is created in the process, which is experienced bodily, often painfully – as a sense of something missing. Therefore, psychological ‘problems’ are seen in the FOT as stopped processes. Even the most difficult experiences inherently contain a ‘knowing’ of what would bring forward movement and inner “rightness”.
The Process of Focusing-Oriented Therapy
FOT works by engaging with the felt sense of a problem or situation. This involves attending inwardly to one’s direct, embodied experience and a felt sense, which holds the context and complexity of the situation as it is lived. Even the forming of a felt sense begins to create change - new knowing of what is implied is experienced bodily, bringing felt relief or release and the emergence of new possibilities. Incremental, life-forward steps emerge, fostering movement toward a more integrated and vital sense of self.
FOT creates a relational process that encourages this kind of experiencing, providing a safe, holding environment where clients can relate effectively to their own processes. This inner relating requires the client to ‘be with’ whatever arises with an attitude of open, interested and empathic attentiveness. By relating to – rather than identifying with – their experience, clients gain greater clarity and develop a strengthened sense of self.
The Therapist’s Role in FOT
FOT therapists bring their whole-body presence to the therapeutic relationship, fostering safety and empathic attunement. This involves not only understanding the client’s words and emotions but also tuning into their own felt sensing of the relational field and co-experiencing of the client’s process. This deep experiential listening allows therapists to support clients in navigating any emerging difficulties in their inner relating, deepening their process and making sense of it. FOT therapists facilitate the client’s ‘own’ change through the experiential change-steps of their unique process. In this sense, FOT sees therapy as “the coming forward of the person” (Gendlin, 1996, p.56) into a more coherent and integrated sense of self.
Research consistently shows that the strongest predictors of positive therapy outcomes include the quality of the therapeutic relationship, the therapist’s personal characteristics, and the client’s own resources (Hubble, Duncan, & Miller, 1999; Wampold, 2015). Focusing-Oriented Therapy helps clients identify, honour, and express their inner realities, access their inherent resources, while transforming the judgments, doubts, and fears that block access to their innate wisdom.
The Embodied Presence of the Therapist
FOT therapists ‘walk their talk’ and practice Focusing to enhance their self-awareness and broaden capacity for effective therapeutic presence with every client. They are in touch with their own felt senses and have access to embodied situational knowing in the relational field that includes both what is going on for the client and between themselves and the client. In other words, the therapists' bodily felt experiencing is an inner synthesis of their own experiencing in the moment; their personal values and beliefs, previously acquired professional knowledge and expertise, as well as the client’s experience. This self-awareness allows therapists to navigate transference and countertransference with greater ease and clarity, listen more deeply, conceptualise client experiences more effectively, and maintain their own well-being.
As Wallin (2007) observed, a therapist’s authentic personal involvement, emotional responsiveness, and subjectivity are not barriers but essential features of effective psychotherapy. Therapists who embrace Focusing deepen their personal development, address their own stopped processes, and cultivate the grounded, integrated presence needed to support their clients’ growth.
Through Focusing, both clients and therapists access a richer, embodied way of knowing, fostering transformation, integration, and a deeper connection to self and others.
- Gendlin, E. (1981). Focusing, Second Edition. New York: Bantam Books.
- Hubble, M. A., Duncan, B. L., & Miller, S. D. (eds). (1999). The heart & soul of change: What works in therapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
- Wampold, B. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: Models, methods, and findings. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
- Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford.
