Nobody wants a technique.
I am often asked this question: “How can I bring Focusing to my (son, daughter, wife, husband, partner, good friend) who really needs it but resists when I offer a technique?”
You can understand where that person is coming from, right? Maybe you’ve even beenthat person. After all, who wants to be offered a technique!
When we get the feeling that the other person is bringing in a technique, it feels like we’re going to get the opposite of what we most want in a relationship: genuineness, connection.
Therapists and other healing professionals: this is true of your clients too! They want you – your genuine presence – not your techniques.
So the question is, How can we use Focusing to become more real, more present, in our relationships?
Two ways: listening, and pausing.
Listening… and pausing.
“Seek first to understand,” Stephen Covey wrote. Any relationship goes better when we are truly interested in the other person’s feelings and point of view. With Focusing, it’s even easier to do this, because you have learned how to tune in to the essence of what the other person is going though and expressing. You know how to get it.
And if you really get what the other person is going through, it doesn’t matter if you say back their words, or just take their hand… what you do from that genuine place of receiving will not be a technique.
The other powerful way to bring Focusing into every relationship ispausing. Pausing is what makes Focusing possible. If we are barreling through our lives, reacting quickly, then we are operating on less than our full intelligence. Impulsive reactive states are never where wisdom comes from. Think of your last argument!
Just by pausing, we can gather more of our full self. We can have the way we feel, instead of just acting out of our feelings. One way to bring a pause into a relationship is to say, “I appreciate what you are saying… I need a minute to take it in…”
Listening and pausing can change a relationship so much, that our friends and family may start asking us, “What are you doing these days that makes you so calm and open?” Then we tell them about Focusing! 😉