“Focusing makes it MORE difficult to communicate with other people.”
Noa writes: “It seems that the more I do Focusing, the more I live in my own inner world, cut off from communication with other people. It’s like I live in a different world from them, and I feel lonely and invisible. Focusing seems to make it more difficult to communicate with other people. Do you know what I mean?”
Dear Noa,
It sounds to me like Focusing is helping you to discover the richness of your inner world. I know my own experience, when I first began to do Focusing, was astonishment that I had a whole world inside of me… my own opinions, my own reactions, my own points of view. Before that, I had mostly been following along with the people around me.
Once I began to do Focusing, I started to realize that I didn’t always enjoy what my friends wanted to do. I didn’t want to go along with my parents’ plans for me. This presented me with a new problem: how to communicate about this. There was nothing in my background that prepared me for having different feelings and opinions from the people around me! Especially since the feelings I had discovered through Focusing were subtle and nuanced, not easy to explain. I had a whole new inner world but no skills for communicating about it.
One thing that helped me was learning Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which I discovered around the same time as Focusing. I learned how to tell people how I was feeling in a way that made room for their having different feelings, and even more important to me, I learned to hear other people’s feelings and needs without thinking I had to feel the same way.
So, Noa, if I understand you correctly, I had a similar experience to yours. Focusing introduced me to a rich inner world but Focusing alone did not have ways to help me communicate with other people.
The depth and richness of Focusing communication
The only people I didn’t have trouble communicating with were the new friends I was meeting through Focusing. We would meet to exchange Focusing sessions, and we enjoyed each others’ company so much that we did other things together as well, like poetry readings and sharing opinions about the state of the world.
I became totally enchanted with being around Focusing people because they didn’t assume they already knew how I felt. Instead, they would turn to me and ask, “And how is that for you?” And then they would wait while I took time to sense inside before answering.
This was really a whole new world!
Today almost everyone who I socialize with also knows Focusing, and part of why I teach Focusing is that I love to live in a world of people who listen to each other, and who don’t assume we already know how the other people feel. It makes life so much more interesting!
(And, Noa, my advice to you: Do Focusing with those feelings of ‘lonely’ and ‘invisible’ that are coming up for you. Your experience might be different from mine, but your process itself will show you what is going on for you and what you need…)
