Trying to do Gendlin’s Focusing, as described in his book, did nothing for me.
What actually motivated me to work on introspection was hitting a couple of overlapping updates at the same time:
reading a book called Raising Your Spirited Child, which encourages parents to help children name their emotions as a way of moderating toddler tantrums
getting the advice that naming my own emotions would moderate my own emotional outbursts
learning to “tune in” to my fetus kicking in my belly, and feeling it go from “I can’t feel anything” to “that’s clearly a kick.”
What these all have in common is the attempt to detect subtle feelings, physical or emotional, instead of just rounding everything to “nothing” if it’s not “severe pain.”
The problem with Gendlin’s book, and with this post, is that it tells you how to do Focusing but not when to do it. When a feeling is salient enough for you to notice it as “something”, you’re probably already doing some Focusing on it, and adding the official process doesn’t obviously help. The magic seems to be in identifying structure in the feelings that feel like “nothing” to you.
“Does your stomach hurt right now?” “I don’t know!” “How can you not know!” “I don’t know how I would possibly find out whether my stomach hurts or not!” <--- that’s an example of something feeling like “nothing”, where focusing/meditation could reveal “something” underneath.
The problem with Gendlin’s book, and with this post, is that it tells you how to do Focusing but not when to do it. When a feeling is salient enough for you to notice it as “something”, you’re probably already doing some Focusing on it, and adding the official process doesn’t obviously help. The magic seems to be in identifying structure in the feelings that feel like “nothing” to you.
I agree, now that you’ve pointed it out, that being told when to do Focusing would also be very valuable; but my own experience, at least, doesn’t agree with the rest of your paragraph.
My experience has been closer to, if I have painful feelings, then I am very aware of the fact that I do have painful feelings; the default inclination of my mind has been to try to push those nasty things away, but they’ve insisted on coming back, which has led to a very blatant and obvious mental conflict that would have been impossible to miss.
What learning Focusing, and related techniques, has done is not that I notice the feeling as salient; rather the magic is in changing the response to the noticing, from “push away the feeling” to “look closer at the feeling to see more of its underlying structure”.
My guess is that this might point to a difference in how the-minds-of-people-like-me and the-minds-of-people-like-you function: maybe you’ve been better at actually successfully pushing the negative feeling away whenever it arises, to the point that the feelings have stopped consciously registering anymore, and you need to start with learning how to notice their existence. Whereas for me, the negative feelings have been so strong that I’ve been unable to push them away, so never learned the habit of automatically successfully pushing them away, and I can skip the “learn to notice them” phase and apply Focusing more directly.
That’s a true and important insight. But to be fair, this comment doesn’t tell me when to do Focusing either? Like, it points out “a feeling of nothing could be a feeling of nothing, or it could be a place where you have insufficient sensitivity and resolution.”
And in general, thinking strategically and building a habit of trying to develop sensitivity and resolution whenever, such that you’ll have it when you need it, sounds good.
But I’d love to know from people like you or Brienne when it was (most useful)*(most surprising) to have tried a Focusing-esque move and found value where you didn’t think there was anything prior to embarking on the attempt. It’d be really cool to develop an explicit partial model of “expectedly unexpected opportunities for Focusing.”
Trying to do Gendlin’s Focusing, as described in his book, did nothing for me.
What actually motivated me to work on introspection was hitting a couple of overlapping updates at the same time:
reading a book called Raising Your Spirited Child, which encourages parents to help children name their emotions as a way of moderating toddler tantrums
getting the advice that naming my own emotions would moderate my own emotional outbursts
learning to “tune in” to my fetus kicking in my belly, and feeling it go from “I can’t feel anything” to “that’s clearly a kick.”
What these all have in common is the attempt to detect subtle feelings, physical or emotional, instead of just rounding everything to “nothing” if it’s not “severe pain.”
The problem with Gendlin’s book, and with this post, is that it tells you how to do Focusing but not when to do it. When a feeling is salient enough for you to notice it as “something”, you’re probably already doing some Focusing on it, and adding the official process doesn’t obviously help. The magic seems to be in identifying structure in the feelings that feel like “nothing” to you.
“Does your stomach hurt right now?” “I don’t know!” “How can you not know!” “I don’t know how I would possibly find out whether my stomach hurts or not!” <--- that’s an example of something feeling like “nothing”, where focusing/meditation could reveal “something” underneath.
I agree, now that you’ve pointed it out, that being told when to do Focusing would also be very valuable; but my own experience, at least, doesn’t agree with the rest of your paragraph.
My experience has been closer to, if I have painful feelings, then I am very aware of the fact that I do have painful feelings; the default inclination of my mind has been to try to push those nasty things away, but they’ve insisted on coming back, which has led to a very blatant and obvious mental conflict that would have been impossible to miss.
What learning Focusing, and related techniques, has done is not that I notice the feeling as salient; rather the magic is in changing the response to the noticing, from “push away the feeling” to “look closer at the feeling to see more of its underlying structure”.
My guess is that this might point to a difference in how the-minds-of-people-like-me and the-minds-of-people-like-you function: maybe you’ve been better at actually successfully pushing the negative feeling away whenever it arises, to the point that the feelings have stopped consciously registering anymore, and you need to start with learning how to notice their existence. Whereas for me, the negative feelings have been so strong that I’ve been unable to push them away, so never learned the habit of automatically successfully pushing them away, and I can skip the “learn to notice them” phase and apply Focusing more directly.
That’s a true and important insight. But to be fair, this comment doesn’t tell me when to do Focusing either? Like, it points out “a feeling of nothing could be a feeling of nothing, or it could be a place where you have insufficient sensitivity and resolution.”
And in general, thinking strategically and building a habit of trying to develop sensitivity and resolution whenever, such that you’ll have it when you need it, sounds good.
But I’d love to know from people like you or Brienne when it was (most useful)*(most surprising) to have tried a Focusing-esque move and found value where you didn’t think there was anything prior to embarking on the attempt. It’d be really cool to develop an explicit partial model of “expectedly unexpected opportunities for Focusing.”