Focusing

Chapter 1 The Inner Act At the University of Chicago and elsewhere in the past fifteen years, a group of colleagues and I have been studying some questions that most psychotherapists don't like to ask out loud. Why doesn't therapy succeed more often? Why does it so often fail to make a real difference in people's lives? In the rarer cases when it does succeed, what is it that those patients and therapists do? What is it that the majorityfailto do? Seeking answers, we studied many forms of therapy from classical approaches to recent ones. We analyzed literally thousands of therapist-patient sessions recorded on tape. Our series of studies had led to several findings, some very different from what we and most other professional therapists expected. First, we found that the successful patientthe one who shows real and tangible change on psychological tests and in lifecan be picked out fairly easily from recorded therapy sessions. What these rare patients do in their therapy hours is different from the others. The difference is so easy to spot that, once we had defined it, we were able to explain it to inexperienced young undergraduates, and they too were able to sort out the successful patients from the others. What is this crucial difference? We found that it is not the therapist's techniquedifferences in methods of therapy seem to mean surprisingly little. Nor does the difference lie in what the patients talk about. The difference is inhowthey talk. And that is only an outward sign of the real difference:what the successful patients do inside themselves. The purpose of this book is to tell you what they do and how you can do it. For this uncommon skill, this internal act, not only is useful in a psychotherapist's office, it is a way of approaching any problem or situation. We have taught this skill to large numbers of people not in therapy in subsequent years. Now that it seems anyone can learn it, I also want this book to be readable by anyone. The book is addressed to professionals, but not only to them. Therefore I am writing it simply and not in the technical manner of my philosophical and scientific publications. The skill we have observed and defined is not only for problems. Among those who know it, it becomes an internal source that is consulted many times every day. I am using it right now, in the process of writing this book. The skill I am about to teach you is calledfocusing. It will enable you to findand changewhere your life is stuck, cramped, hemmed in, slowed down. And it will enableyouto changeto live from a deeper place than just your thoughts and feelings. One fact that disturbed us the most in those research studies was that patients who did the crucial thing inside themselves could be picked out in the first two therapy sessions. We found we could predict success or failure right from the start just by analyzing the early interviews. According to a careful statistical analysis, there was less than a thousand-to-one chance of getting the same finding accidentally. Today we know how to teach focusing. So this finding doesnotmean that some people cannot learn it. But at the time this was a shocking discovery. Here we had therapists and patients embarking on a year or more of hard effort. Much human need, hope, devotion, and money would be involved, and we already knew they would fail. The finding means that psychotherapy as usually practiced doesn't show patients how to do psychotherapy. In other words, patients did not improve with practice. If they did not somehow know right from the start how to approach themselves inside in that special way, they did not achieve major changes, no matter what they or their therapists did or how earnestly or for how long. This finding was contrary to my predictions, andGendlin, Eugene T. is the author of 'Focusing ', published 2008 under ISBN 9780553384475 and ISBN 0553384473.