“My problem is that I cannot do this work on my own.”
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Kristin writes: “When I do Focusing work with my therapist it is a profound experience in which I feel physical and cognitive shifts. My problem is that I cannot do this work on my own. I have a severe block to the things in my life that actually make me feel good: exercise, writing, meditation etc. I realize that Focusing is a great way to deal with blocks, but what if you can’t even bring yourself to even start the process?”
Dear Kristin,
You are not alone! The majority of people cannot do Focusing on their own, without training. Receiving sessions from a therapist, however wonderful, is not training in being able to do Focusing by ourselves.
Even WITH training, Focusing alone can be elusive.
So does that mean that Focusing is another thing we have to pay for forever? Is Focusing something we have to depend on a professional to give us?
Absolutely not!
In between paying a professional to take us through Focusing, and having to do Focusing alone, is the
amazing, wonderful world of Focusing partnership.
You can have one, two or even three (or more!) Focusing partners with whom you trade sessions. Half the time is for your Focusing, and the other half of the time you listen in Presence while the other person does Focusing. If you’d like help and support in doing that, we’ve designed our Focusing Training Program to help people form Focusing partnerships and to feel comfortable (and skillful) doing them.
So that much is clear. But I do sense there is more to your question….
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Kristin,
I get the sense that you would like to do Focusing on your own so you can have it with you in the midst of your life, at the very moments when you are making choices about exercise, writing, and meditation. (And struggling with what feel like severe blocks to doing those things.)
As a person who used to have painful writer’s block, I can relate. But my own experience tells me that it was Focusing in partnership that changed my writer’s block forever. I felt shifts in my Focusing session, and the next day my relationship with writing had changed.
The trick was, “ordinary” Focusing didn’t work. I needed a special approach, one where I invited a part of me that was outside my awareness. I’m talking about The Part that Doesn’t Want to Write. I needed to invite that part in under a flag of truce, promising it that I wasn’t going to lecture it or explain things to it or even talk to it at all… I was just going to listen to IT tell me about itself.
The results were amazing… and I created a course around what I learned that luckily is available for anyone to purchase.
I would just say one more thing to you today. The feeling of not being able to “get yourself” to do Focusing might well be part of the power struggle of the action blocks. The blocking parts think that the purpose of the Focusing is to try to get them to behave. (And they could be right!) So you really really need to cultivate Self-in-Presence, that state of not trying to get anything to do anything, in order for all your parts to feel safe enough to let you do Focusing.
That — plus a Focusing partnership — and you’ll be all set!
