> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Gendlin-Focusing--Au-centre-de-soi-NE/671555

• GENDLIN EUGÈNE, professeur de psychologie à l’université de Chicago.
- Focusing, au centre de soi : Une porte ouverte sur le langage du corps. 2010, Editions Pocket Evolution, 248 pages.
- Focusing au centre de soi, 2006, Editions de l’Homme, 170 pages.

Based on research at the University of Chicago, focusing is a new technique of self therapy that teaches you to identify and change the way your personal problems concretely exist in your body. Focusing guides you to the deepest level of awareness within your body, where unresolved problems actually exist, and only on this level can they change.

**Focusing** by *Eugene T. Gendlin* was my first book I really wanted to give up on this year. I'm always very hesitant to pick up non-fiction books, especially those that touch on self-help or psychology in any way. There's so much misinformation and only mildly informed, untested theory out there, and I'm just not qualified to judge what is good and what isn't. An unqualified reader such as myself is likely to be taken in by somebody with more writing skill than knowledge, and I really can do without that sort of thing.

**Focusing** was recommended to me, but it starts out trying to sell me things. It tries to sell its own brilliance ("couldn't do without it!"), and innovation ("studying some questions that most psychotherapists don't like to ask out loud"), and services (repeated mentions of telephone advice services available). If your book tries to sell me on its brilliance and related services without even presenting its case first, I feel like the door-to-door salesman just rung to sell me a washing machine that I don't need. The writing is always either selling or talking down to the reader and I found it very offputting – I don't like the cheap manipulation that comes with this style of writing.

The core idea is listening to your body, and experiencing bodily shifts (positive feelings of a knot opening etc) when trying to figure out a problem – basically a meditative practice. This is very plausible to me, but the writing made it hard to get through the material. So, spoilers, here is their methodology:

1. **Calm down**: Sit down, calm down, breathe for a bit. Then list the things that feel like they're currently a problem for you.
2. Choose the problem you want to work on. Keep an emotional distance and instead figure out how your body feels when concentrating on that problem (this will be uncomfortable). Disregard your inner monologue (i.e. analysis, guilt, etc.).
3. Focus on finding the word (or maybe a very short phrase) that *exactly* describes your *feeling* regarding the problem. You'll notice when you hit on the right one, because your feeling will change (usually ease). This will take a while.
4. Compare the word/image you found in the last step and compare them with the feeling you found and defined in the second step. Make sure they match (i.e. trigger a shift in feeling), otherwise repeat 3. Pay attention to how your feeling shifts now that you have a good name for them.
5. Trigger a clearer understanding by focussing on the name you found and concentrating on some questions, like "What about this problem makes me ____?", or "What's the worst/most ____ about this?", or "What would it take for this to feel ok?". *Wait* for the answer to bubble up, don't trust fast answers (which are probably just preconceived notions of how your mind *should* work.)
6. Accept the answers you find, without judgement. You can always decide to disagree with them later, but you have to accept them without judgement first.

The first step is a bit like unfocused meditation, maybe even metta meditation. I liked the question "How would my body feel if this problem was somehow solved?" as an entrypoint to exploring a problem. The other steps are more focused meditation, and all involve being calm, slightly distanced, and taking some time (at least half a minute or a minute) of waiting for answers to show up. Not terribly exciting, and worse for the fact that it sees itself as more of a therapy approach as opposed to a meditation thing. ( )

This is an original book; I haven’t read anything like it before.

It is a book I will have to buy since I can’t fully get how to “focus” just be reading the book once. It will need to be practised and worked with.

The book tells us how to contact our body, ask it questions and get answers.

It “works for any kind of ‘stuckness’.”

Traditional therapy often doesn’t succeed. The skill of focusing can help those people.

Focusing “will enable you to find and change where your life is stuck, cramped, hemmed in, slowed down. And it will enable you to change – to live from a deeper place than just your thoughts and feelings”.

People can do focusing for themselves and with each other.

The change process in focusing feels good. The skill is not easy to explain and many people (like me) can do it only after practice.

In focusing you make contact with “a special kind of internal bodily awareness – a ‘felt sense’”.

A felt sense is not an emotion - “it is vague and murky. It feels meaningful but not known. --- When you learn how to focus, you will discover that the body finding its own way provides its own answer to many of your problems.”

“The process brings change.”

A therapist is not necessary. “By yourself or with a friend who knows how and when to keep quiet, you can achieve focusing results,”

“Only your body knows your problems and where their cruxes lie.”

Focusing consists of six movements. When these are successful there is a physical change in the body, a felt shift. Then the problem seems different.

The nature of the problem changes as each shift comes. “Without tapping the deeper bodily level, which is at first always unclear, one would stay stuck with the thoughts and feelings of what the problem appears to be at the beginning.”

What the problem seems to be about changes with each bodily shift.

One effect of the focusing process is to bring hidden bits of personal knowledge up to the level of conscious awareness. But the body shift, the change in a felt sense, is the heart of the process.

A felt sense will shift if you approach it in the right way. When your felt sense of a situation changes, you change, and therefore so does your life.

It is an “unfamiliar deep-down level of awareness” that psychotherapists have not found.

The stages of focusing are a bit complicated so I can’t explain them here.

I do not find the process easy, in fact I can’t at present even feel any “felt sense” but I absolutely believe that focusing is something that is possible to learn and that it will be helpful for me when I do.

Gendlin provides us with elucidating and convincing case histories of people he has helped with focusing.

The book also includes a very useful chapter called “The listening manual” explaining how to listen optimally.

Focusing can help free stuck relationships, even those which have been stuck for a long time.

Though this is an old book I have found a bookshop on the net where I can order it and will do so.

I can firmly recommend the book. ( )

155 - Applied Psychology, psychotherapy, self-therapy