[Note from Sunshine Regiment] A++ To Conor and cauliflower for asking clarifying questions in response to a low information comment that could easily be interpreted as antagonistic.
That’s … not a very helpful comment? Either repeating something wrong, or rubbing salt in the wound by repeating something right and unpleasant that I’m clearly already aware of.
Edit: the above meant to be “sad” not “attacking you.” Apologies for the dickishness inherent in the original wording; I’ll hold off on replying until I have enough time to not be a knee jerk next time.
The thing I’m actually (weakly) claiming is that I’m not missing 2⁄3 of what Focusing has to offer—that people who got really excited about the gains inherent in Gendlin’s system are now wandering around unreflectively claiming that people who do something else are doing it wrong or missing out, and failing to account for the fact that people’s minds have different shapes and work with different inputs and that there might be more than one algorithm that achieves what Gendlin’s algorithm achieves.
To put it another way: how could one falsify the claim that I’m only getting 1⁄6 or 1⁄3 of what Focusing has to offer? If the claim isn’t falsifiable, then I’m inclined to distance myself from it. There are some people (I’m not saying you’re one of them, but I’ve encountered them) who basically believe it so strongly that it caches out to “we’re writing you off until you get around to drinking the Kool-Aid and then admitting you were wrong all along.”
I can definitely imagine a world in which I’m just blind and blindspotted, and that world is one of my relatively-high-probability hypotheses, but in fact I feel like I have access to every one of the gains that anyone has ever described getting through Focusing—I just don’t get them through Focusing myself.
I would also like to hear ChristianKl elaborate. My feeling about the Focusing book is that it’s like a set of instructions for solving a puzzle that is hidden inside a box. Many of the steps are things like “1. Open the box. 2. Locate the components of the puzzle with your hands. 3. Arrange the components together for convenience. 4. Pass your hands over the pieces to get a physical sense of their shapes.” The first three steps you really only need to be told once, after which you get it, and on subsequent puzzle-solving attempts you can generally do steps 1-3 implicitly and only really need to exert effort for step 4 and beyond.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m missing some nuance in how there are many subtly different ways of opening the puzzle box that yield different results.
In the book Gendlin says that the steps are really just to help people learn, they aren’t at all necessary to the process, so I think Gendlin would himself agree with that.
>That’s … not a very helpful comment? Either repeating something wrong, or rubbing salt in the wound by repeating something right and unpleasant that I’m clearly already aware of.
One of the big things that *I* got out of studying and practicing things like “focusing” is that “pain is just information” and the litany of Gendlin can actually be true in a very “felt sense” sort of way. The thing you describe as “rubbing salt in the wound by repeating something right and unpleasant that I’m clearly already aware of” can actually be a very helpful thing *if* it triggers the introspection required to deal with the provoked discomfort (though obviously unhelpful and and unwanted if it doesn’t). Whenever I have something that stings like that, I try to focus on what exactly it’s saying until there’s just nothing left for it to say. Of course, in order to get to where you can do that you often have to focus on the meta pain that is telling you not to look at and all that, but when you get down to it, it *really* helps. It even works with purely “physical” pain like when you break your foot.
Things that are still painful are places where I haven’t fully integrated the corresponding information yet, and are therefore places where I’m at risk of making unnecessary mistakes. I *want* the painful disconnect brought up so that I can learn from it. I also find it a lot easier to get explanations out of people when they can tell that I’ve taken in what they have to say, I take it seriously, and it’s not a painful thing I’d rather flinch from.
This fits with my model of e.g. guilt, shame, FOMO, as being persistent signals à la “some part of me thinks I really haven’t internalized this lesson yet” that won’t go away until it is learned more thoroughly.
+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.
I don’t think you are doing it wrong. It’s just that you do 1⁄6 of what Focusing has to offer (or maybe 2⁄6).
[Note from Sunshine Regiment] A++ To Conor and cauliflower for asking clarifying questions in response to a low information comment that could easily be interpreted as antagonistic.
That’s … not a very helpful comment? Either repeating something wrong, or rubbing salt in the wound by repeating something right and unpleasant that I’m clearly already aware of.
Edit: the above meant to be “sad” not “attacking you.” Apologies for the dickishness inherent in the original wording; I’ll hold off on replying until I have enough time to not be a knee jerk next time.
The thing I’m actually (weakly) claiming is that I’m not missing 2⁄3 of what Focusing has to offer—that people who got really excited about the gains inherent in Gendlin’s system are now wandering around unreflectively claiming that people who do something else are doing it wrong or missing out, and failing to account for the fact that people’s minds have different shapes and work with different inputs and that there might be more than one algorithm that achieves what Gendlin’s algorithm achieves.
To put it another way: how could one falsify the claim that I’m only getting 1⁄6 or 1⁄3 of what Focusing has to offer? If the claim isn’t falsifiable, then I’m inclined to distance myself from it. There are some people (I’m not saying you’re one of them, but I’ve encountered them) who basically believe it so strongly that it caches out to “we’re writing you off until you get around to drinking the Kool-Aid and then admitting you were wrong all along.”
I can definitely imagine a world in which I’m just blind and blindspotted, and that world is one of my relatively-high-probability hypotheses, but in fact I feel like I have access to every one of the gains that anyone has ever described getting through Focusing—I just don’t get them through Focusing myself.
I would also like to hear ChristianKl elaborate. My feeling about the Focusing book is that it’s like a set of instructions for solving a puzzle that is hidden inside a box. Many of the steps are things like “1. Open the box. 2. Locate the components of the puzzle with your hands. 3. Arrange the components together for convenience. 4. Pass your hands over the pieces to get a physical sense of their shapes.” The first three steps you really only need to be told once, after which you get it, and on subsequent puzzle-solving attempts you can generally do steps 1-3 implicitly and only really need to exert effort for step 4 and beyond.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m missing some nuance in how there are many subtly different ways of opening the puzzle box that yield different results.
In the book Gendlin says that the steps are really just to help people learn, they aren’t at all necessary to the process, so I think Gendlin would himself agree with that.
>That’s … not a very helpful comment? Either repeating something wrong, or rubbing salt in the wound by repeating something right and unpleasant that I’m clearly already aware of.
One of the big things that *I* got out of studying and practicing things like “focusing” is that “pain is just information” and the litany of Gendlin can actually be true in a very “felt sense” sort of way. The thing you describe as “rubbing salt in the wound by repeating something right and unpleasant that I’m clearly already aware of” can actually be a very helpful thing *if* it triggers the introspection required to deal with the provoked discomfort (though obviously unhelpful and and unwanted if it doesn’t). Whenever I have something that stings like that, I try to focus on what exactly it’s saying until there’s just nothing left for it to say. Of course, in order to get to where you can do that you often have to focus on the meta pain that is telling you not to look at and all that, but when you get down to it, it *really* helps. It even works with purely “physical” pain like when you break your foot.
Things that are still painful are places where I haven’t fully integrated the corresponding information yet, and are therefore places where I’m at risk of making unnecessary mistakes. I *want* the painful disconnect brought up so that I can learn from it. I also find it a lot easier to get explanations out of people when they can tell that I’ve taken in what they have to say, I take it seriously, and it’s not a painful thing I’d rather flinch from.
This fits with my model of e.g. guilt, shame, FOMO, as being persistent signals à la “some part of me thinks I really haven’t internalized this lesson yet” that won’t go away until it is learned more thoroughly.
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.