Working with Long-Standing Issues
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A few weeks ago in one of my classes, Ellen F. expressed frustration. "For about a year and a half I’ve been Focusing three or four times a week, and seems like a lot more should have changed by now. All the stuck places still feel stuck. Seems like there’s big, complicated tangles that I’m not really making progress on untangling."
So in today’s Tip I’d like to share what I offered to her at the time, and also share, with her permission, what has transpired in the two weeks since then.
But first, here’s some more from Ellen: "I feel like it has something to do with not having a sense of continuity and progress from session to session. I feel better after each session, but the big picture never seems to change."
I suggested that she pick one issue that feels big or central or important, and think of it as a "project." I suggested she make a kind of commitment that she would keep returning to that issue, that "project," whenever she did Focusing, unless of course there was something else that really did need attention instead. I recommended starting a kind of journal for the project, and make some notes after each session about where she’s gotten to, and let that be the starting place for the next session.
When I was working on my most difficult issues, the greatest progress I made was when I would deliberately return again and again to the same issue, reminding myself by reading my notes where I had gotten to after the last session, and then inviting that as the next starting place. Big changes occurred, some that seemed almost magical if you didn’t know the weeks of steady gentle attention that had been paid.
What Ellen Did
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One week later, Ellen told our group some interesting news. She had chosen to bring attention back to her stuck issue in several Focusing sessions during the week. In the first one, there had been no change that she could perceive. In the second one, something started to shift.
The most interesting thing about that, to her, was that in the first session she had been much more calm and accepting about "nothing" happening, because she had a long-term view. "It took the pressure off any one session to be the one in which I got the big release."
This week, two weeks after the initial question, Ellen is even more pleased with her progress.
She starts each session by doing a short re-cap or summary of the key insights from the previous session, and inviting a fresh felt sense of the issue. The notes she took after the previous session help her do that summary.
She can see now that it takes conscious decision and effort to keep coming back to an issue that is neither the most recent nor the easiest thing to be with. And yet how rewarding it is! "The feeling of watching something unfold from week to week has been really satisfying."