+1 for asking the question. I know you were probably asking Christian and not me, and Christian’s answer is likely to be the more valuable one, but here’s my two cents:
My sense is that there is no other 5⁄6 … that what people claim to get is greater introspective access and greater sensations of relief or clarity or certainty, and that what I do provides me the same benefits.
If I were really reaching, I guess I’d imagine that genuine Focusing provides more of the benefits that meditation does? Increasing one’s ability to induce states, increasing one’s ability to deeply relax and clear one’s mind, that sort of thing?
I could also see the real version perhaps doing a better job at capturing nuance and subtlety around the edges. Like, following the predictive processing model, one might imagine that Focusing is about lowering the volume on the top-down predictive signals, so that more of the bottom-up perceptive signals can register and be heard. I suspect that the process I’m doing successfully avoids drowning out important bottom-up signals, but I wouldn’t be immediately dismissive of someone who claimed I was crystallizing things too soon or forcing things to fit into a premade box when they might actually be a slightly different shape.
Most of the times I’ve encountered people fretting about that sort of thing, I think they ended up overstating their case (it seems like they’re trading one failure mode for another, and are susceptible to overfitting and being oversensitive and convincing themselves that fleeting and unimportant signals are real and super relevant). But I maintain uncertainty about that, and certainly even if they’re too far along the spectrum I might nevertheless be at the wrong point myself.
I’m sorry for my late reply, I didn’t check whether there were unanswered messages.
When I said it’s ⅙ I meant that it doesn’t distinguish the different steps of focusing and their value.
Let’s say I’m Bob and I’m angry with Alice because she was supposed to take out the trash.
“Alice should have taken out the trash” might be a description of a feeling you get when following the process Conor proposed. It’s something that feels true.
In Gendlin’s model you would first make clear your space to focus on the issue. In some contexts that’s more important than in others.
The second step in the felt sense. There are processes happens when the felt sense enters awareness and there’s connection with the felt sense.
The third step would be finding the handle. “Anger” would here likely be a good handle. The handle itself isn’t the story of what caused the emotion. Step 4 is then validating whether you got the right handle.
Before learning Focusing I had the ability to feel my felt sense clearly but I didn’t have a relationship to my feelings as being named with words like “anger”, “sadness” or “curiosity”. That’s a valuable thing I got from Focusing and it generalizes for me really well to situations outside of formal Focusing.
The last step of Focusing is Questions&Answers. In this case a question might be “What should I do about it?”
This is where sometimes interesting answers come up from system I. Here it might be “I have to talk with Alice about the responsibility in the house”
Getting such an answer from system I can go along with the emotion releasing. Just getting to “Alice should have taken out the trash” might not be enough to release the feeling.
What do you think is the other 5⁄6 (or 2⁄3)?
+1 for asking the question. I know you were probably asking Christian and not me, and Christian’s answer is likely to be the more valuable one, but here’s my two cents:
My sense is that there is no other 5⁄6 … that what people claim to get is greater introspective access and greater sensations of relief or clarity or certainty, and that what I do provides me the same benefits.
If I were really reaching, I guess I’d imagine that genuine Focusing provides more of the benefits that meditation does? Increasing one’s ability to induce states, increasing one’s ability to deeply relax and clear one’s mind, that sort of thing?
I could also see the real version perhaps doing a better job at capturing nuance and subtlety around the edges. Like, following the predictive processing model, one might imagine that Focusing is about lowering the volume on the top-down predictive signals, so that more of the bottom-up perceptive signals can register and be heard. I suspect that the process I’m doing successfully avoids drowning out important bottom-up signals, but I wouldn’t be immediately dismissive of someone who claimed I was crystallizing things too soon or forcing things to fit into a premade box when they might actually be a slightly different shape.
Most of the times I’ve encountered people fretting about that sort of thing, I think they ended up overstating their case (it seems like they’re trading one failure mode for another, and are susceptible to overfitting and being oversensitive and convincing themselves that fleeting and unimportant signals are real and super relevant). But I maintain uncertainty about that, and certainly even if they’re too far along the spectrum I might nevertheless be at the wrong point myself.
I’m sorry for my late reply, I didn’t check whether there were unanswered messages.
When I said it’s ⅙ I meant that it doesn’t distinguish the different steps of focusing and their value.
Let’s say I’m Bob and I’m angry with Alice because she was supposed to take out the trash.
“Alice should have taken out the trash” might be a description of a feeling you get when following the process Conor proposed. It’s something that feels true.
In Gendlin’s model you would first make clear your space to focus on the issue. In some contexts that’s more important than in others.
The second step in the felt sense. There are processes happens when the felt sense enters awareness and there’s connection with the felt sense.
The third step would be finding the handle. “Anger” would here likely be a good handle. The handle itself isn’t the story of what caused the emotion. Step 4 is then validating whether you got the right handle.
Before learning Focusing I had the ability to feel my felt sense clearly but I didn’t have a relationship to my feelings as being named with words like “anger”, “sadness” or “curiosity”. That’s a valuable thing I got from Focusing and it generalizes for me really well to situations outside of formal Focusing.
The last step of Focusing is Questions&Answers. In this case a question might be “What should I do about it?”
This is where sometimes interesting answers come up from system I. Here it might be “I have to talk with Alice about the responsibility in the house”
Getting such an answer from system I can go along with the emotion releasing. Just getting to “Alice should have taken out the trash” might not be enough to release the feeling.