“My Focusing doesn’t ever bring insight or knowledge”
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Annie writes: “I partner with other focusers and often notice a beginning, middle, and end to their Focusing sessions which usually includes some new knowledge/wisdom and a sense about how to be with something or themselves.
“My Focusing sessions bring up images here, feelings there but then come back to the same emotion which feels like deep sadness. The pain/sadness grows stronger and bigger as I focus on it and I am able to stay with those feelings and grow my Self-in-Presence and ‘hold’ this very large emotional energy. But that is usually all that happens. I usually don’t receive any information or wisdom from it. I do feel great relief/release at having felt deeply what’s there and stayed with it as it grows and releases. Could it be that I need to focus longer or can Focusing be, when faced with long held deep pain, just cathartic?”
Dear Annie,
First of all, what you’re doing sounds beautiful. You’re able to stay with the feelings that are there, you are able to be Self-in-Presence and “be the space” that compassionately holds that large emotional energy.
The fact that you are feeling relief and release from doing that is the body’s feedback that you are offering your process exactly what it needs right now.
I hear that you are wondering about the ways that your Focusing process differs from that of your Focusing partners. The easiest answer is that everyone’s Focusing is different, not only from other people’s but also different over time. So you might well find your Focusing changing over time, not because you got better at it or because it’s not OK now, but just because things change.
You ask if Focusing can be “just cathartic.” And that would be contrasted with getting insights, new knowledge, a kind of fresh understanding as your partners seem to be doing, right?
This brings up a very interesting point about what IS the actual change process with Focusing. It’s something radically different from what most people imagine. The change actually comes neither from catharsis nor from insight.
This takes a little time to explain, and to really take in, because the usual understanding on our culture is that emotional change comes either from insight or from catharsis. So bear with me… and prepare to have your usual assumptions stretched or changed.
Let’s start with what you are doing when you spend time with something you feel. “The pain/sadness grows stronger and bigger as I focus on it and I am able to stay with those feelings…” That’s not what I would call “catharsis,” which refers to feeling and expressing one’s feelings as fully as possible. Instead, what you are doing as a Focuser is being able to stay with the feelings. That’s a different matter entirely.
As Self-in-Presence you are staying with and sensing directly what it’s like, freshly, right now. As you do that, you are contacting the implicit dimension of feeling, the place where something has never until now been contacted as it is.
This IS the body’s wisdom… whether or not it forms itself into words. YOU are there, sensing how it is… and that’s quite different from “just feeling it.” Do you agree? And what you are sensing is the body’s formulation of what something in you is (has been) going through. Just this, just how this is now… You are Self-in-Presence, holding and bearing witness to exactly how it is.
The reason that this kind of awareness brings change is that it supplies exactly what has been missing. This kind of awareness allows the body process to move forward into the next steps of life-energy. The relief and release you feel is a body knowing that those next steps are happening. Knowing what those next steps are is not so important, and comes later.
So yes, Annie, your Focusing is fine, not because it is cathartic, but because you are being with what is there exactly as it is.
