June 21 2011 – Tip #285

More on feeling the feelings of the person you're Focusing with
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Last week we heard from Vonna, who wrote: "When the person I'm companioning has strong feelings, I start to have those same feelings in my own body. Yesterday I was with someone who was Focusing with a tight squeezing feeling in her chest, and I started feeling that in MY chest. Is this supposed to be happening? I find it a bit scary."

I responded that it was not supposed to be happening, and gave Vonna some tips on not feeling her Focusing partner's feelings.

Then I got an email from R.D. Bolam, a gifted therapist who combines Focusing with Hakomi (and a longtime friend of mine). R.D. convinced me that I was wrong: it IS normal to be feeling the feelings of your partner. I'll let him tell you why:

"Mirror neurons, those organs of human empathy, pretty much guarantee we'll be experiencing somebody else's feelings in our own body–especially in an intimate setting like a Focusing session. These experiences in our body are a wonderful help to the Companion as they provide the ground for our reflections being genuinely empathic rather than clinically detached. Sounds like your correspondent is uncomfortable and unfamiliar with such resonance, and while I agree that the excessive taking on of others experience (i.e. an inability to distinguish the origin from the echo) is problematic, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Psycho-physical resonance is normal, healthy and helpful."

Psycho-physical resonance! Isn't that a great phrase? Next time you feel an echo of what your Focusing partner is feeling, you'll know it's psycho-physical resonance, and be grateful we can do it.

What R.D. is saying makes total sense to me. Gene Gendlin also says it doesn't help to "just reflect" what the other person is saying; you need to take it in, get it, and say it back from your "getting" of it. That sounds like another way of talking about the same thing.
Feeling your partner's feelings AS your partner's feelings

I still stand by most of what I said last week. If you are distracted by feeling your partner's feelings, if they are uncomfortably strong, it can still help to use Presence language — "YOU are sensing…" — and be aware of what you are feeling.

The resonance in your body of what your partner is feeling may be natural, but those feelings are theirs, and this Focusing turn is theirs. If you the partner have any feelings that are uncomfortably or distractingly strong, what you can do to be Present to your partner is inwardly acknowledge what you are feeling. Don't push it away or try not to feel it. Just sense it as it is.

After all, we're not so separable from each other: there may be two people, but there is one interaction, and that belongs to both of us.