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"How Can I Give My Daughter Some Focusing Insights?"
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Jan writes: "Thank you for the invitation to ask questions,
here is one I'm sitting with as a parent. Observing my
daughter grow up into adolescence I see she becomes so
easily identified with new and large feelings and sensations. I
really wish I could provide my daughter with some of the
Focusing insights, but am not clear how to introduce this,
wishing to avoid the intellectual and abstract concepts we can
talk about as adults. Do you have any tips on introducing
Focusing to younger people?"
Dear Jan
First let me pass on to you something my daughter taught me.
She was sixteen years old, weeping and raging at the same
time at some awful (to her) thing that had happened. So I
offered her an idea about what she could do.
Exactly what I hated when my own mother did it to me!
"Can't you just LISTEN!" she raged back at me. I was so
grateful to her for being able to tell me so clearly exactly what
she needed. Luckily, I do know how to listen, and I could do it
when I was asked.
Of all the people in the world, why is SHE the hardest one to
remember to
listen to? Perhaps because I have all those voices in my own
head, the ones that say I "should" be a good mom, I should be
able to help her, and most of all: she shouldn't have to suffer.
But why not? Would I take her suffering away? Would I take
away her chance to find her way to deal with it? Maybe this is
the best chance she'll ever have, with me there listening, to
learn how to find her own balance, her own center, in all the
feelings.
(She is 19 now and doing really well...)
So the first thing I'd like to say to your question is how much
our kids' emotions are first an opportunity for our OWN
Focusing. We have a big job here, to work on staying in
Presence and finding our trust in him or her as a person who
can work things through. We know how to listen, let's listen. The
listening space is very powerful. Let's give the
space of listening until they ASK us for more.
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Wait Until She Asks...
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OK. So assuming your daughter or son has seen you using
Focusing, or has heard you talk about your own experience with
it, and they ask you to show them something. Or they ask your
advice: What can I do when these big feelings come, Mom? Did
you ever have such big feelings when you were my age?
Then, when they ask you for it, is the time to offer Focusing.
I would suggest an offer that is low-key, very casual, like this
is no big deal. As soon as it seems like a big deal, it becomes
something they might fail at, and they don't want to.
"Sweetie, one thing to do when feelings are so big like that, is
to put a friendly arm around them."
"Maybe you could give
that sadness a hug, like you would if it was your little sister."
"The funny thing is, I've found that big feelings like that can
talk back to us. I wonder what yours might want to say to you."
"And maybe you can let it know you hear it."
A man I know kept offering to talk to his son about Focusing.
Every offer was refused. A year passed by. Recently, he says,
the 20-year-old picked up the book and started reading it, and
likes it a lot. Enough time had passed that the young man could
"find it for himself."
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