In Focusing, we tap into the subtle currents of our experience, helping what is stuck free itself, learning how to help our lives flow. Focusing is a powerful somatic practice that drops below surface-level thoughts and emotions. It taps into deeper knowing that lives closer to the roots of raw experience. Learning to listen to our unfiltered experience brings to light hidden needs and fresh answers, clear decisions and directions. It’s a way of accessing greater clarity, aliveness, and trust in ourselves.

A common phrase now in counseling and meditation, “felt sense” was coined by Eugene Gendlin (1978), discoverer of Focusing, who called it “a bodily awareness of a situation or person or event.” He noted that  “A felt sense is not an emotion. A felt sense is something you do not at first recognize—it is vague and murky. It feels meaningful but not known. It is a body sense of meaning. When you learn how to focus you will discover that the body finding its own way provides its own answers to many of your problems.”

An everyday example of working with a felt sense is how we feel ‘“butterflies” when think about an exciting new project or how we feel a falling sensation in our stomach when we get bad news. Felt senses are not emotions, they are the wisdom that lives below emotion that moves us in life-giving directions. When we listen to what seems like frozen anger or paralyzing fear it finds its way forward.

This inner listening to felt senses unfolds in the context of compassionate companioning that befriends uncomfortable surface level emotions, felt senses, and all that unfolds from them. Focusing cultivates a rare openhearted warmth that is especially healing for people with harsh inner critics and habits of judgement.

This welcoming “Focusing attitude” as Gendlin called it, develops an intelligent, compassionate responsiveness to inner “parts” and outer relationships. Gendlin thought of parts as “stopped process,” events in which our life energy got blocked by circumstances inside or out. Listening to those stuck places helps them find their way to flow again.

Felt senses are intricate. Dense with meaning. They begin as sensations and often offer up vivid images that mirror the whole feel of specific situations. It is a holistic knowing in the way that dreams or poems, metaphor or music washes over us and effortlessly changes us.

While Focusing is a way of doing inner child and partswork, it doesn’t emphasize parts, as much as it cultivates a deep practice of presence that invites discovery and integration. Focusing is consummate listening, subtle loving listening. We learn to sit beside and hear/see our lifeforce express itself through felt senses in various forms and voices as it responds to the world. In Focusing (contrasted with IFS in the next section), partswork is more like waves emerging in the river and folding back into the water, waves that reenergize the water, moving life forward, and offering up treasure from the depths.

Focusing-Oriented Therapy often doesn’t mean we are always Focusing. We can dip into it and out of it. Or not; it can just mean the therapist is rooted in Focusing principles and skills in listening.

Focusing taps into the lifeforce, which leads to natural, lasting changes. Like IFS partswork, it is a powerful method for: Tapping into the wisdom that lives below surface-level ideas and emotions; Hearing what life’s true needs are right now; Making lasting, enlivening changes; Transforming limiting habits of mind/life; Resolving inner/outer conflict; Navigating times of transition; Arriving at certainty in decisions; Tapping into creativity; Overcoming procrastination or creative blocks; Releasing tension; Disentangling from addicted/depressed/anxious parts/patterns; Getting free of the “inner critic” and habit of harsh self-judgment; Living more lightly, with less fear and resistance to life and with more trust and flow.

While Focusing offers a powerful organic approach to somatic partswork, Internal Family Systems (IFS) provides a potent framework that identifies types of parts that embody reactive habits: “managers” (control/busyness) and “firefighters” (chaos/distraction) that attempt to protect “exiles” (hurt/vulnerability).

As its name attests, IFS stems from “family systems” therapy that works with parts’ habits of deflecting, collapsing, attacking, hiding—slipping into whatever reactive patterns we have used to cope with hurt. A great strength of IFS is in how it maps recurring parts to identify systemic tangles, and resolve the often paralyzing and constricting conflicts between them.

In IFS, parts are more like frozen forms that emerge in the river when triggered by conditions. They don’t tend to completely melt back into the river but are freed to shift their energy into healthy and helpful functions.

Synonymous with the “Focusing attitude,” or “therapeutic presence” in EMDR (and counseling more broadly), IFS relies on what it calls “Self/Self energy”—compassionate, curious, calming connectedness that is big enough to hold, hear, and help the parts release their pain and contracted ways of being. 

As with other modalities, such as Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Therapy and Family Constellations, that work with awareness of epigenetics and interpersonal neurobiology, IFS includes formalized steps for unburdening from intergenerational traumas that confine and contract our lives. (And it should be said that these recent approaches for releasing inherited pain are long preceded by venerable indigenous traditions.)

Somatic IFS, like Focusing and somatic EMDR, includes practices of embodied awareness and resonance, breath, movement and touch that make the work transformative.

“Stopped process” describes how parts form in Focusing, how the rivers that we are can become frozen or dammed up in places. Trauma—whether from a major event or repeated harm over time—can constrict into limited vision that hinders living.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a potent tool for processing trauma and providing corrective life experiences, including developmental repair. EMDR calls upon memory and imagination while using bilateral stimulation (BLS) to rewire our neural pathways. BLS soothes the limbic system (amygdala and hippocampus), where shock and fear gets caught during overwhelming traumatic events, and engages our more adaptive brain regions to release long-held hurt and integrate fresh, transformative perspectives. 

EMDR relies on dual awareness, which is the ability to rest in the safety of the present moment and a compassionate witnessing presence, while recalling painful scenes from the past. Memory reconsolidation, the malleability of memory, is central to EMDR. In the process, we can vividly invoke a memory and can bring to it imaginal supports that transform the tone and weight and shape of the experience. To be clear, EMDR does not change what happened, but changes how the memory lives in us. 

A quote on Focusing-Oriented Therapy by Gendlin (1984) fits well here: 

“In therapy we change not into something else, but into more truly ourselves. Therapeutic change is into what that person really ‘was’ all along… It is a new ‘was’ made from now.”

EMDR can release heavy, charged states of trauma and leave in its wake empowerment, connection, clarity, and compassion. 

Dreams immerse us in what matters. They are like dowsing rods to good water. Even when they construct themselves from unremarkable, seemingly nonsensical residue from our daytimes, our dreams are always in service of living a fuller life. They are wise guides working to free us from the ways we are contracted, conflicted, kept caught and small. They see our lives from surprising angles and offer new vision.

Gendlin (1986) called “a dream a code for hidden life energy that leads to solving life problems,” noting that they open up fresh directions we would never arrive at through our usual daytime logic. 

This “code for hidden life energy” needs to unfurl into the fullness of conscious lived experience. And so, we work not analytically but experientially. The decoding process of somatic dreamwork is not saddling our dreams with our already-known ideas or dream-symbol labels from a book. Dreams are too big for those boxes; they are alive and on the move. 

A Focusing-oriented approach to dreamwork, which Gendlin calls a “method of modesty,” does not impose interpretations on a dream, but invites participation in and with the dream. Gendlin (1986) sums it up: “Dreaming is a living process, not just frozen pictures. When we let the pictures bring their bodily quality, dreamwork continues the living process.”

This embodied way of participating invites the dream to unfold further. This may be touching into the mood of the dream or its setting or characters and allowing the dream to continue. This might be making space for a single dream image to unfold. Dream images are dense with layers of insight. Even the most mundane objects in dreams can be vessels filled with new understanding of our past and present patterns that are seeds of our future.

Gendlin’s (1978) description of a felt sense fits a dream image too: “An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about a given subject at a given time—encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once, rather than detail by detail…like a taste or…a musical chord.”

The extension of a dream can happen naturally when facilitated by Focusing’s felt sensing. Focusing opens up embodied imagination—which is the same mercurial substance as dreams: the image-rich, protean, surprising-and-precise associative intelligence that expands our vision and deepens our days.

Acceptance Commitment Therapy provides more of a directive yet fluid framework towards action than the previous modalities. ACT is a third wave cognitive behavioral therapy that is rooted in mindfulness approaches.

Playful and practical, ACT techniques help us redirect our attention from getting hooked into habits of anxiety, anger, addiction, rumination, etc so that we can move into meaningful actions that align with how we want to be and what we want to do.

ACT includes handy metaphors we can embody and apply in moments when we get caught in the undertow of depression and anxiety. ACT tools foster cognitive flexibility and a wider, kinder witnessing awareness.

In short, ACT cultivates grounded skillfulness in living and sets us firmly on a path for discovering joy and peace in what is, while flowing with what changes.