The Focusing Training Program for Healing Professionals

Benefits of Working from a Focusing-Oriented Perspective:


  • You have a positive, holistic view of your clients’ symptoms and difficulties

  • Your clients feel more empowered and better able to give themselves support between sessions

  • You can spot the small steps of change that add up over time to real life progress

Benefits for the Practitioner:


  • You feel more comfortable and confident during client’s sessions

  • You show up in sessions as yourself, genuine and real

  • You have a way to process your own 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.

Natalie Bryant photo

“Before Focusing Training, I didn’t have a way to teach my coaching clients how to move through uncomfortable emotions and that left me feeling impotent, pushy, and unprepared. Now, I have a method to show my clients the power of going inward in a safe, gentle way. We often think that change has to be difficult or challenging, but Focusing has taught me it can be gentle and beautiful. The secret of Focusing is realizing you don’t have to change anything–you can just be with your emotions as they are.”

~ Natalie Bryant

“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

Hi, I’m Ann Weiser Cornell, and I’ve been teaching and developing Inner Relationship 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 how to bring this work into therapy. So I developed the Healng Professionals Track as a supplement to my Focusing Training Program. 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.

What's Included

For every week of the Path to Lasting Change course, you get a resource related to that week.

1

Where to Begin

Ann Weiser Cornell and Carol Nickerson discuss how to begin bringing Focusing to your clients. Plus: Chapter Two of Ann’s book, Focusing in Clinical Practice, and Ann’s article, “Questioning Questions.”

2

Presence & Therapy

Focusing-oriented therapist, Helene Brenner, describes how she attunes to her clients using her own body sense. This is the fundamental way to bring Focusing into any therapeutic modality even before a word is spoken.

3

Why Focusing Works

A number of resources describing the research that led to Focusing so you have a firmer understanding of why Focusing works and the benefits it brings to your clients.

4

Understanding Felt Senses

Ann walks you through the differences between felt senses and emotions so you can begin to notice felt sense moments in your sessions, which are the gateway to change.

5

Somatic Process

Listen to master facilitator, Eugene Gendlin, describing how he helped clients feel embodied felt senses because what is felt in the body can change more readily.

6

Helping Clients Pause

Listen to Ann talk about how to help clients pause and slow down, which is an essential part of getting felt senses.

7

Moving Beyond Words

Ann shares how to help clients stay on their experiential track and tune in to the level of meaning and discovery that’s below the words.

8

Empathic Responses

An article by Ann on “The Power of Listening,” going into the history of empathic response and how you can use those responses to enable clients to connect to their inner world, facilitating the Focusing process.

9

Backed by Research

An article by Marion Hendricks Gendlin on the research basis of Focusing. Understanding the rich history and research basis of Focusing gives you a way of talking about Focusing with agencies and colleagues.

The Focusing Training Program is led by

Ann Weiser Cornell

Ann Weiser Cornell

Jinevra Howard

Jinevra Howard

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“This has really changed the way I do therapy. I have a totally different reaction when a client hits something difficult. Now I say, ‘Oh, riches!'”

– Sue Roberts

How to Register

To enroll, visit the webpage for our online Focusing Training Program Your Path to Lasting Change and choose the option with the Healing Professionals Track.

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The Fees

The Healing Professionals Track (including the private web page with additional audio and video content, the Q&A sessions, and the panel discussion on clinical applications of the course material) is $200 in addition to regular course fees for each Path to Lasting Change course.

The Schedule

The full Focusing Training Program is made up of Path to Lasting Change Parts One and Two. There will always be a Path to Lasting Change Part Two scheduled to follow a Part One, at the same time of day and day of the week.

Recommended Resources for Therapists

  • Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change

    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.
    $32.00

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.

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