Focusing Resources

Year Founded: 1991

Model of Therapy: Inner Relationship Focusing

Inner Relationship Focusing, developed by Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin, is a client-centered, body-based therapeutic practice that emphasizes supporting the client’s positive relationship with emotional and somatic states. Within an interpersonal context of safety and respect, the clinician helps the client to cultivate an ability to turn toward and gently connect with emotional reactive states, so that felt senses can form. Clients are supported in an inner contact with a felt sense, which allows new possibilities to emerge for emotion, thought, and behavior. Inner Relationship Focusing is emotionally supportive and accepting, leading to positive attachment experiences both between therapist and client and within the client. Clients learn empowering skills of self-support to bring into daily life.

Focusing is the ability to drop down below repetitive concepts and emotional states, and freshly sense the implicit dimension of some life issue in the body. Research on client process, performed by Eugene Gendlin and others at the University of Chicago, demonstrated that clients who spoke articulately about their problems did not do as well in therapy as those who, in some moments in the session, were in contact with something freshly and immediately felt that they could not articulate easily—the “felt sense."

Focusing can only be brought effectively into clinical settings by clinicians who are able to do Focusing for themselves. Clinicians can use Focusing for self-care, for deepening understanding of interpersonal issues with clients, for making transitions between clients and at the end of the day, and of course for their own life issues.

Focusing Resources offers two different training programs for therapists and counselors. Both are based on the understanding that clinicians learn Focusing first for themselves and then learn how to effectively bring Focusing to their clients.

• Turning Obstacles Into Doorways
  Do your clients get stuck in difficult emotional states? Get our free
  mini-course with six immediately useful tips for working with tough client
  issues. Learn how you can help clients transform how they relate to
  uncomfortable emotions in a way that supports and facilitates change. Plus
  find out more about Focusing, an embodied process for healing that's been
  linked in over 50 research studies with positive outcomes in therapy,
  including greater emotional regulation, more satisfying relationships, and
  increased self-acceptance.

• The Focusing Training Program: Healing Professional Track
  This is a 20-week program in four segments offered by phone seminar, taught by Lucinda Hayden, Carol Nickerson, and Ann Weiser Cornell. Participants learn and practice skills of Focusing and being a “Focusing partner.” The program is open to the general public. Additional content for healing professionals—articles, audio, and video—is offered on a private web page. A consultation phone call to address bringing the process to clients is offered one to two weeks after each segment. Access to future calls is included at no additional charge.