What if your client keeps talking? Read on…
A Reader writes:
I have a client who I know would benefit from Focusing but they never stop talking! How can we help our clients pause and feel the body if they don’t seem to want to pause at all?
Dear Reader:
Before you can help anyone do Focusing, you need to start by being centered and in touch with yourself.
Next, from that centered and empathic place (we call it Self-in-Presence), you tune in to the person — what they feel and what they need.
It’s true, talking quickly and non-stop isn’t pausing. But what is it? A expression of nervousness? A worry that if one slows down, some unwanted feeling will come?
Or perhaps it’s that nobody ever listened before and this is their chance to get something out and have it really be heard.
Gene Gendlin wrote:
“We cannot usually get people to shift their attention if we ignore what their attention is focused on.” (Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, p. 51.)
If it will be possible to invite your client to pause and feel in the body, it will happen because you are listening to what matters to them.
“Ah! What you’re saying sounds really important. I wonder… if this might be a moment to pause and just feel that whole thing.”
And then maybe this is not the moment! The talking goes on. There is more that needs to be said. OK, and that’s important too. Let’s reflect back what we feel the person is trying to have heard.
What allows Focusing to happen within a healing relationship is a sense of safety and trust. Safety and trust are built when you do more than just “allow” the person to talk — you are interested, and you are listening for what matters to them.
And then… in the right timing… sensing inside can occur, and next steps can happen in the person’s life.
