Making therapy experiential: On the practice of integrating focusing in psychotherapy1

Bringing focusing into therapy does not mean doing therapy with now and then a focusing session. It means making therapy experiential in nearly all, even the smallest interventions. In this presentation I want to show this with many concrete small examples. A client in a therapy session may be close to the experiential level, or he may be far away from it. A client is far away from the experiential level when he is only describing happenings in the outside world, for example, or only keeps asking reassurance from the therapist. The client brings his personality difficulties into the relationship with the therapist. There are several layers of pre-experiential functioning. When the client is far away from the experiential level the therapist cannot use the usual focusing suggestions. At these layers we must help the client, gradually and with respect for his pace, to come bit by bit closer in the direction of the experiential levels. This will be the first group of examples. In the second group we will see examples where the client brings his personality difficulties in the relationship with himself. For example, the client says in a demanding and blaming way: “I must be able to accept that”. It requires specific activities from the therapist to help the client to work through this inner blockage. We can develop focusing oriented questions that gradually unfold the different experiential layers stored away in this sentence of the client. The third group of examples show how to intervene when the client is in the neighbourhood of the experiential level; in this area there are not so much experiential blockages but rather a lack of focusing skills or not using them. In the focusing ability innumerable small bits of focusing or subskills of focusing can be distinguished, and these may be brought in by the therapist where they may be helpful