Focusing Oriented Therapy

Focusing Oriented Therapy + Focusing Oriented Art Therapy

Are you interested in a somatic therapy that provides answers through the body?

Do you have “unexplainable” somatic symptoms or pains that you are looking for relief from?

Have you experienced trauma in your past that requires a “body based” outlook and approach?

Can you be mindful and follow your inner awareness?

Then perhaps Focusing Oriented Therapy is the right fit for you!

Focusing Oriented Therapy was developed by Dr. Eugene Gendlin as a means of connecting to what he called a “felt sense”, a powerful means of experiencing a body shift or sense of meaning that can be used to illuminate our problems and find answers within ourselves. Focusing leads the way to our latent and unspoken knowledge within.

It opens and offers a felt vision of healing that can identify its own steps towards change. As Gendlin wrote “Your body ‘knows’ the whole of each of your situations – vastly more aspects of it than you can think. Here you find an intricate bodily knowledge and new steps that want to come”.

This revolutionary technique and theoretical basis evolved out a series of thousands of research studies of therapy clients – what he found was that, regardless of the type of therapy or approach, the successful clients were those whose process involved a sort of inner exploration.

A journey Within the Soul

Focusing Oriented Therapy is a new way of looking at your problems. It provides deeper insight into life’s challenges from the perspective of your body. Have you ever asked your body what it needs to resolve a mid-life crisis? Or the best way to satisfy a constant urge to eat donuts? Focusing oriented therapy offers innate solutions from a very reliable source – yourself!!!

This is a gentle process of slowly and gradually uncovering the wisdom of the body and it can be particularly eye opening for those who seek to discover what lies hidden within our minds and unconscious.

This bodily awareness can also be extremely valuable in helping us to reach our personal objectives. What the body reveals can be highly transformational and insightful and directly applicable to life’s challenges. Bring your dilemmas to the table and with guidance, watch them resolve in an instant. Because it truly can be that simple to attain a solution to something that has troubled you…

As a client, you may literally feel the shift taking place within your body and you may find yourself able to release old patterns of hurt or trauma. This powerful approach is most effective when under the guidance of a therapist trained in Focusing Oriented Therapy.

With a patient and avid listener on your team to facilitate the process, our presence in the therapeutic relationship provides the safe and trusting environment for healing to occur.

Benefits include a reduction in stress, greater self-authenticity, facilitation of the connection between body, mind and spirit, accessing creativity and connecting with the body’s innate wisdom.

The Wisdom of the Body

As a Focusing Oriented Therapist, I myself have traveled the path of learning to listen to my body and its wisdom. It has a been a heart-warming and loving experience, as I developed greater trust and faith in my physical being, simply by attending to it with warmth and friendly attention.

This psychosomatic approach provides definitive opportunities for growth and development, getting in touch with feelings and sensations that lie dormant under the surface until they are met with curiosity and receptivity.

It is not a matter of reworking the past and experiencing the same feelings; instead, we are looking for the unknown. In this sense, focusing oriented therapy sessions differ from other theoretical approaches as the felt sense focuses less on strictly talking and more on coming into the body. Change can occur through shifts in realizations as they are experienced through physiological tension reduction.

I’m a big fan of Focusing Oriented Therapy because it leads beautifully into Expressive Arts and Art Therapy. We express the felt sense through the arts, looking for the image or words/phrases that come from our natural creative intelligence.

As we work with artistic reflection and mirroring, we come to understand that this innate intelligence has something to say. It speaks of our fears, our secrets, our desires, our needs, our wants. And it seeks its expression through the art form in an integrative way that allows for us to see where the felt sense begins and ends in the session.

The beauty of this is that you are left with a sense of completion as you move from the felt sense to an art(s) product that serves as a take-away that you can use to move forward into solutions, seeing tangible areas of growth and change.

Approaching our problems with a friendly attitude, we can either begin with the art or incorporate Focusing as a preliminary step. Art therapy may symbolize a felt sense and help the felt sense to open up. The art product then serves as a point of review so we can see growth through the resulting felt shifts.

Alternatively, you can begin with focusing and watch as the felt sense grounds images within the body and guides art choices. Ultimately, art therapy and Focusing Oriented Therapy work very well together and form the cornerstone of my work.

I love Focusing Oriented Therapy and would like to share my experiences and knowledge with you. Please contact me at (778)389-9234 for more information.