The Focusing Training Program with Healing Professionals Track

Learn an experiential, body-oriented process of self-awareness and emotional healing that immediately benefits your work with 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.

“For over 30 years I’ve been searching for effective ways to help myself and others maximize their unique potential and alleviate the distinctive suffering that manifests from living with a tricky and highly complex human mind and nervous system or more simply stated, from being human. Inner Relationship Focusing is THE most powerful, effective, and elegant human technology for individual and community well-being I’ve ever encountered. In the relatively short period of time I’ve been engaged in Focusing, both personally and in my work with clients, the shifts and openings that have occurred are astounding. My life is opening up, the well-being of my clients is expanding, and all in the context of a global pandemic. Amazing!”

~ Cathryn Campbell

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

Focusing can help…

Focusing is a process of bringing compassionate, curious attention to embodied feelings in the present moment. As research shows, that kind of attention is the doorway to real and lasting change.

What You’ll Receive with The Focusing Training Program with Healing Professionals Track:

The ability to bring a Focusing presence to your work with clients — a strong, steady center that helps you stay present no matter what they bring into sessions.
Facilitative language you can incorporate into sessions, like the phrase, “Something in you…” and an understanding of why that’s so powerful.
The ability to tune in to your clients’ “experiential track” — that level of meaning and discovery that is below the words.

How it Works

Register for our online Focusing Training Program: Your Path to Lasting Change. You’ll be learning Focusing for yourself — and that alone can bring benefits to your work with clients.

When you register, add the Healing Professionals Track, which provides additional content to support you in bringing a Focusing perspective to your clients.

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.

Find Out How To Sign Up Here

“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.

Our Online Program: Your Path to Lasting Change + The Healing Professionals Track

In the Focusing Training Program, a blended course with both Healing Professionals (HPs) and non-HPs, you’ll learn the Focusing process for yourself, including partnership exchange. You’ll build skills in accompanying a Focusing process, from the art of reflecting to the facilitative language of skilled guiding.

The Healing Professionals Track provides additional content specifically tailored for HPs who want to bring Focusing into their work with clients.

You’ll learn 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.

Wondering if you 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.

In the Healing Professionals Track you’ll also receive:

Special Audio & Video Content to help you bring Focusing into your client sessions, provided via a private web platform.
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 three times a year.
Discussion Group Meetings to help you integrate what you’re learning in class and explore how it can be used in a client-practitioner setting. These live, small-group discussions with the course instructors happen after the third, sixth, and ninth meetings of your course. The exact dates and times of meetings are provided upon registration.
Email Support in addressing the special issues of healing professionals throughout the program.

CE Credits

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.

What’s Included

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Jinevra Howard

“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, register for our online Focusing Training Program Your Path to Lasting Change and choose the option with the Healing Professionals Track.

Screenshot:

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 Inner Relationship 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.

Words from more Healing Professionals…

“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.”

Roy Gould

“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.”

Carol Ivan

“Focusing is exquisite listening to that small still voice inside each of us. … Focusing integrates beautifully with psychotherapy — it has accelerated my therapy greatly. It’s like I can do homework in my therapy by using Focusing. I also know right away in therapy when something is unsaid but needs saying. Focusing has brought me much more present with myself — In some situations in my life, I have always been ruled by my head — Now I let my heart speak, too.”

Michael Hagerty

“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

Recommended Resources for Therapists

Focusing in Clinical Practice by Ann Weiser Cornell

Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change

by Ann Weiser Cornell, PhD
(W. W. Norton & Company, 2013)
288 Pages, Hardcover

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.

$38.00

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.