Would you like to help your clients have breakthrough moments that lead to real change?
Is This For You?
Are you a therapist who is passionate about helping your clients heal from old hurts and live fuller lives?
Do you want to help your clients get beyond telling the same stories, being sunk in the same painful feelings, avoiding and shutting down over and over?
Most of your clients do well of course… But if you have a few clients who are stuck, you’re probably searching for ways to help them connect with their own fresh life energy and capacity to move forward with their lives.
In the research on Focusing done at the University of Chicago, clients who tended to do best in therapy were able to make contact with a fresh and immediately felt bodily experience that they could not easily put it into words – a felt sense. The felt sense was a doorway to change.
At A Glance
Who | For psychotherapists and other healing professionals who want to help more clients move beyond stuck repetitive patterns and into new possibilities. |
What | An interactive, video-based CE course taught by Focusing expert, Ann Weiser Cornell, that shows you how to spot, invite, and facilitate your clients’ felt senses. Full Course Description |
Where | In your own home or office, on your own computer or mobile device, anywhere and anytime. |
Why | Because you are passionate about helping your clients experience real change. |
When the felt sense forms, it is the person’s next step of change already happening.
How to Invite and Facilitate a Felt Sense:
Discover cues and prompts you can use to help clients move from storytelling into present moment awareness, where change can happen.
Working with More Challenging Clients:
Explore how to help clients who struggle to feel in the body, have trauma histories, or have a hard time being present.
About Your Guide
Ann created Inner Relationship Focusing with her long-time colleague, Barbara McGavin, to help people learn to listen compassionately to all the inner voices. Along the way, Ann and Barbara developed a radical new process for relating to the self-blaming voices inside them. It changed their lives, and it became their mission to help others transform as well.
For over 35 years now, Ann’s been teaching this practical, revolutionary process to people all over the world. With The Doorway in a Moment on-demand course, you get the benefit of Ann’s expertise and the chance to practice the simple, yet revolutionary process of Focusing with her gentle, compassionate guidance so that you can bring that same simple, revolutionary process into your work with clients.
Ann is the author of Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change, The Power of Focusing, and The Radical Acceptance of Everything. Today she is internationally recognized as one of the leading innovators and theoreticians of Focusing.
In The Doorway in a Moment, you’ll learn how to:
- Spot the subtle indicators that your client is having a felt sense
- Support your client in valuing and staying with a felt sense – at the edge of change
- Invite your client to move into felt sensing from storytelling or intellectualizing
- Use unobtrusive prompts that can mesh with any modality or style of therapy
And you’ll also learn about:
- Working with clients who are out of touch with body and emotions
- How getting in contact with the bodily felt sense is a key process for releasing trauma
- Assessing what your clients need based on their level of “experiencing” (and what that means)
One Therapist’s Experience with Inviting Clients to Stay with Felt Senses…
“I notice that the ‘speedy’ client, one who may be involved in telling the same repeating story, describing it quickly and with a worried or desperate tone, begins to shift in moments after being invited to a [felt sense]. She becomes contemplative, her speech naturally slows, and she can listen from a reflective and curious place. Even her body looks completely different. A relaxed attentiveness comes, rather than a vigilant rigid body posture. This client doesn’t seem to be the same person that walked through the door! The material that moments before appeared hopeless and chaotic is now taking on the quality of a deep and interesting conversation within the person. Fresh information is coming now, not the ‘same old same old’ that the client has heard herself say far too many times without effecting meaningful change and a movement forward. This is exciting to the client to have newly emerging information about her situation for the first time, and it feels good to me as a therapist to have provided a container for something new and ‘life forwarding’ to come.”
-Lauren Mari-Navarro LCSW, quoted in Focusing in Clinical Practice, p. 64
You might be surprised to learn that some little known but revolutionary research on client process done in the 1950s could give you new tools and fresh insights for your stuck clients. This research (done by Eugene Gendlin and others at the University of Chicago) studied the clients’ manner of experiencing.
Rather than looking at what clients were saying, the researchers looked at how they said it. The remarkable result was that clients who spoke articulately about their problems did not do as well in therapy as those who, in some moments in the session, were in contact with something so freshly and immediately felt that they could not articulate it easily.
Successful clients sounded like this: “It’s funny… there’s something I’m feeling right now… I can’t say it very well… um…”
Contact with something freshly felt is one indicator of contact with a felt sense – a freshly forming, wholistic, bodily sense of some life problem or situation. The research showed that some clients get felt senses naturally and others needed help to allow felt senses to form.
A felt sense is a doorway, an opportunity to go beyond fixed concepts and stuck patterns. We (and our clients) often miss those doorways, perhaps because our culture puts such a premium on being clear and articulate or perhaps because waiting with something unclear can feel almost terrifyingly uncertain. Yet if we want our clients to be able to move out of their well-worn roads of familiar repetitive concepts and emotions and into the fresh experience they are longing to feel, we need to help them have and stay with their felt senses.
This is done through subtle empathic prompts and un-intrusive invitations, set within a matrix of empathic attunement and relational awareness. These subtle prompts can be done within any modality of psychotherapy, from psychodynamic to CBT to somatic.
Helping clients find and stay with their felt senses is a way to help them move off the well-worn path of familiar concepts and repetitive stories; it’s a way to support the release of trauma-based frozen structures as well.
In this course, Ann Weiser Cornell shows you how to recognize, invite, and facilitate your clients’ felt senses. You’ll learn practical and specific methods that you can begin to use with your clients immediately.
Are You Ready to Invite Your Clients to the Edge of Change?
Help Your Clients Move Beyond Their Most Stuck Issues
Register Here
CE Credits available, see details in FAQ section below
Note: This is an interactive video course. Video was recorded during an actual live course and has been edited. Sound quality may vary.
What Happens When You Order
Secure Checkout
Click the Add to Cart button above and you’ll be taken to your secure order page.
Login to Your Account
Complete your order and set up your free account with Ruzuku, our online course provider.
Begin Your Course
Once you’re in Ruzuku you can access your program and get started.
Learn Wherever You Like
This course is accessible by computer, tablet, or smart phone. If you can connect to the internet, you can connect to this course!
Be Supported In Your Process!
You won’t be going it alone! You’ll have access to a forum to chat with other students, plus access to Ann for parts where you might feel stuck
Available at Your Convenience!
You can move through this course as quickly or slowly as you like. You’ll also have lifetime access to the material, so you can revisit it anytime
Interactive Materials
This course includes a beautiful PDF workbook to help you integrate your learning. There will also be checkpoints during the course to check-in on your progress.
Is there any time limit to the money-back guarantee?
Well, our accountants wouldn’t like it if we left that open forever, so let’s say within one year of purchasing the course.
How am I going to fit this into my life right now?
The great news is that you can take this course whenever it works for you. You get content when you want it, plus lifetime access. No stressing out about being somewhere on time. Way less pressure to move through the material at a pace that might not fit for you. The lessons are compact and set up so that you can do them in small bites or big chunks depending on your learning style and your availability.
Do I get access to the course all at once?
No. You’ll have access to the first Module of the course as soon as you sign up. Every 7 days, you’ll get a new module released to you. We provide the content in ‘small bites’ like this because taking time to practice the material and move forward in small, consistent steps supports you in making the kinds of changes you really want to make.
Tell me more about the classroom environment and how course content is provided?
Sure. The classroom is virtual and taught in a learning platform called Ruzuku. Materials are provided via a combination of video, audio slideshows, and written content to cover a variety of learning styles. There is a forum so you can connect with other program participants and be part of a dynamic learning community. And you get lifetime access to all of it. Go through it once and come back anytime you need some extra support to handle life!
Can my friend and I share the course?
Thanks for asking. Each course is licensed to a single user – you! While we can’t authorize you to share the materials, we’d love to have your friend participate too. Please feel free to invite them to sign up too!
Are CE Credits available?
Continuing Education Credit & Course Completion Certificate
This course meets the qualifications for 4 hours of 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.
There is a $25 administrative fee for CE Credits. Course completion certificates are awarded at the end of the course upon completion of all requirements and the course evaluation. (If you don’t want CE Credits but would like a completion certificate, the $25 fee does still apply.)
Eligibility for CE Credits requires 100% completion of the course and all assignments.
When something doesn't go as you'd hoped...
When Something Doesn't Go As You'd Hoped...
We are always open to discussing experiences with our courses that didn’t work for you or didn’t go the way you expected. Depending on the circumstances, you may want to email your course instructor, the staff member in charge of your course, or Ann Weiser Cornell. Email addresses for all these people will be supplied on registration. We will work with you to find a way to meet your needs.