The Focusing Training Program for Healing Professionals
You Can Be Effective and Empower Your Clients
Focusing has been linked in over 50 research studies with positive outcomes in therapy including greater emotional regulation, more satisfying relationships, and increased self acceptance.
In the Focusing Training Program for Healing Professionals, you’ll learn an experiential, body-oriented process of self-awareness and emotional healing that you can immediately bring into your work with clients.
What People Are Saying
“Ann Weiser Cornell approaches Focusing with both moment-by-moment sensitivity and years of depth. This is one of the most profound therapeutic techniques of which I am aware, and may even be said to be the basis of all good therapy.”
Jeffrey Mishlove, author of The Roots of Consciousness and host of TV and radio show Thinking Allowed
Create Better Therapeutic Relationships
Here’s What You’ll Learn:
- a practical, step-by-step method for taking any problem or stuck situation and finding relief, insight, and new steps of action, so you feel bigger than your problems and in control of your life – and ways to help your clients do this too
- a process that lets you help your clients be in touch with the very place in them with the potential to open up into flow, change, and new possibilities
- a facilitative language that enables you to be supportive of your clients – and yourself – without pushing (and so without bringing up resistance)
- a sense of greater confidence and ease that you can be available for what your clients are bringing and at the same time able to guide them to be present and available to themselves
Does This Sound Like You?
You want more ways to be helpful to clients who:
- don’t know what they feel or feel “nothing”
- struggle with self-criticism and confusion
- feel stuck in their lives
- talk about feelings rather than having them
- get overwhelmed by intense emotion
- struggle with depression, addictions, and other effects of trauma
When you bring Focusing into your process,
your clients are able to experience real change.
Benefits of Focusing-Oriented Therapy:
- You have a way to give your clients immediate support
- Your clients will feel more empowered and more able to give themselves support in between sessions
- Your clients start to open up to a fuller life and will have better connections with others, more peace with old issues, a greater sense of life being on track
You’ll Feel:
- More comfortable and confident during psychotherapy sessions
- That you are showing up in sessions as yourself, genuine and real
- You have a way to process feelings and reactions that come up in your work with clients
For an article about Inner Relationship Focusing by Carol Nickerson that includes a story about how she used IR Focusing to process feelings about a client, click here.
Do I fit the Healing Professional description?
From our perspective, Healing Professionals include: psychotherapists, coaches, bodyworkers, spiritual directors, physicians, healers, nurses and anyone who meets with clients for the purpose of healing and growth.
With the Healing Professionals Track
Combined with the Focusing Training Program, our Healing Professionals Track provides additional audio and video content specifically tailored for Healing Professionals (HPs) who want to bring Focusing into their work with clients. In the Focusing Training Program, a blended course with both HPs and non-HPs, you’ll learn the Focusing process for yourself, including partnership exchange (by phone). You’ll build skills in accompanying a Focusing process, from the art of reflecting to the facilitative language of skilled guiding.
You’ll also receive:
- Special Audio & Video Content to support you in bringing Focusing into your client sessions. You’ll receive exclusive access to a private web platform with audio and video content specifically relevant to healing professionals
- Live Q&A Calls to answer your questions about bringing the course material into client sessions. These live, interactive Q&A calls with the course instructors occur two weeks after the end of each level – four times over the entire program (more on this below)
- Email Support in addressing the special issues of healing professionals throughout the program
More about the Q&A Calls
What kind of question might you ask?
You might have a question based on a specific client that you tried working with. For example, “I suggested my client might sense how she feels something in her body, and she gave me a blank look, like I had asked her to stand on her head.”
You might have a question about a type of client issue, like, “I’m wondering if Focusing can help when people have experienced complex trauma and their body doesn’t feel safe to them.”
You might wonder how to get started with Focusing with your clients, as in “How do I shift into a Focusing way of working with people I’ve already been working with another way?”
Really any question is welcome! Those are just a few examples.
If I take this training, will I be teaching my clients how to do Focusing?
No. In the training we’ll show you how to seamlessly bring a Focusing presence into your client sessions as a way of being. Your clients may never even hear the word Focusing in their work with you.
CEUs
Levels courses meet the qualifications for continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. Focusing Resources, CAMFT Approved CE Provider #62524
Focusing Resources is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. Focusing Resources maintains responsibility for this course and its content.
The Focusing Training Program is led by:
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| Ann Weiser Cornell, author of Focusing in Clinical Practice |
Lucinda Hayden | Carol Nickerson |
How to Register
To enroll in the Focusing Training Program – Healing Professionals Track:
1. Register for the Level course you would like to attend
2. Add the Healing Professionals Track while in the shopping cart
The Fee
The Healing Professional Track, including the private web page with additional audio and video content, the extra Q&A session, and the panel discussion on clinical applications of the course material is $75 in addition to regular course fees ($295-$425 depending on the course).
The Schedule
The full Focusing Training Program is made up of Levels One, Two, Three, and Four. There will always be a Level Two and Three and Four scheduled to follow a Level One, at the same time of day and day of the week, in succeeding terms. You may not see those later Levels on the course calendar yet, but you can rest assured that they will be taught.
Level One: The Door Opens
Some of what you’ll learn:
- a way to access your body’s wisdom which allows you to get in touch with rich information about your life and your life’s direction
- a powerful listening process that lets you be supportive of other people – and yourself – in ways that will improve your relationships
- a structured plan for taking these lessons beyond the course and into your daily life
Level Two: The Path of the Companion
Some of what you’ll learn:
- practice in cultivating Self-in-Presence
- a supported process for coming into body awareness at the start of the session, called “Leading In,”
- about the “edge,” and how that is the key to transformation
- advanced listening skills that will improve your relationships
Level Three: The Guide’s Journey
Some of what you’ll learn:
- more ways to start the Focusing process and deepen your inner connection
- very specific and powerful ways to go beyond just “being with it,” including the remarkable “not-wanting and wanting” process
- new and useful ways to reap the benefits of the positive, enjoyable feelings in your Focusing process
- how to be a more graceful Focusing Partner
Level Four: The Center of the Maze
Some of what you’ll learn:
- the most typical block to Focusing and how to help shift this experience
- ways to manage your inner critic
- more ways to help yourself (or a partner) when you are feeling overwhelmed by strong emotional states
- wider understanding of the concept of “body” and what makes our bodies so wise
- how to let go of “rules” and still do Focusing
- -Roy Gould, psychotherapist and life coach, New Brunswick, Canada
"I have been working as a coach and therapist since 1988. From the very first week in Focusing Level One I took what I was learning in to my client sessions, with amazing results. I deal a lot with anxiety issues… and after 30 minutes of Focusing my clients were saying, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ Focusing has helped with my own anxiety issues too. I have to say that the decision to take this course ranks up there with the best decisions in my life.” - Carol Ivan, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Newton, MA
"I'm so glad to have discovered this work. Over the years I've been dissatisfied with how I'm doing therapy with my clients. I've gone out and learned various therapeutic techniques and approaches and found that they're good in certain ways, but something was still missing for me. So I just kept looking for something more effective. Inner Relationship Focusing just clicks with me; it allows me to focus with the client on whatever is most present for them, and at the same time teach them a way of being with their inner experiences that will help them be emotionally and psychologically wiser and more astute. And learning this approach from Ann was wonderful; she is a great teacher, and I think her attention to facilitative language is invaluable."
Hi, I’m Ann Weiser Cornell, and I’ve been teaching and developing IR Focusing training programs since 1985. I created these programs because I saw people struggling with procrastination and action blocks, sinking under low self-esteem and severe inner criticism, having a hard time feeling grounded and making confident decisions, and most of all longing to live the fulfilling lives they knew they could live but never quite getting there.
At first my programs were designed for individuals themselves but more and more psychotherapists kept asking me to create trainings for bringing this work into therapy. I agreed – but with one very important proviso. Healing professionals who want to use this work with clients have to learn it for themselves. How can we take other people to a place we don’t know how to go ourselves? Plus, your ability to be in a Focusing kind of contact with yourself is contagious – your very presence, even without words, becomes a healing containing space for your clients.
Recommended Resources for Therapists
Focusing in Clinical Practice by Ann Weiser Cornell
Ann Weiser Cornell, who has been teaching Focusing to clinicians for over 30 years, shows step by step how to bring Focusing into any kind of clinical practice. Designed to be immediately useful to working clinicians, this book shows how to help clients get felt senses and nurture them when they appear, how to work with clients who have difficulty feeling in the body, how to support clients who experience dysregulating emotional states, and more. Plentiful examples and vignettes show specifically how the process works at the moment-by-moment level.
Hardcover Book: $29.95
Visit our friends at GoodTherapy.org, a leading online therapist directory and mental health resource dedicated to supporting and advocating for ethical therapy practices. Join GoodTherapy.org to grow your practice, access online continuing education, and support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
Focusing Resources is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. Focusing Resources maintains responsibility for this course and its content.
