Focusing-Oriented Therapy

Focusing-oriented therapy is a client-centered form of psychotherapy that's based on the "felt sense," which we perceive in our bodies. It's a message, an internal communication, with identifiable features — images, metaphors, sounds, or physical feelings — at our experience's core.

Often this felt sense starts blurry. It appears at the tip of our unconscious, neither clear nor easily understood: out of focus. For example, we feel a pressure in the chest or a churning of the gut, or we see a bright light or hear a loud "ugh" of frustration coming from within.

When we are curious and non-judgmental with this felt sense, more layers can unfold for us. The chest pressure might be accompanied by an inner voice telling us we're "bad." But when we remain open to what is there, we then connect more deeply to understand this critic's many facets — such as its age or resemblance to a parent's voice — and we allow ourselves to foster a new felt sense of compassion and self-acceptance that ultimately becomes our vehicle for healing.

Many therapy models do not reach the crux of our felt sense or value this as key to the process. Instead, they can pathologize the symptoms one might reference experiencing and shut down the exploration of the many layers of feeling held in the body. FOT offers a more supportive, mindful approach to being with our behaviors, experiences, and choices, producing a broader understanding of ourselves and ultimately better outcomes.

In the late 1950s, American philosopher Eugene Gendlin began collaborating with psychologist Carl Rogers, setting out to answer the question: why does therapy work, and how do clients make lasting, positive change? Through extensive research, Gendlin created the concept of Focusing as the client accessing the nonverbal, bodily felt sense and bringing it into clearer focus, thus creating positive change.

Rogers developed humanistic person-centered psychotherapy. He believed in the inherent value and potential of all human beings to find solutions to their suffering, and that this belief held by the therapist would create the safest possible therapeutic environment for clients to process. Focusing-oriented therapy is an adaptation of Focusing and person-centered therapy.

Focusing became one of the first somatic approaches to counseling, and Gendlin's work informs many of the newer somatic models, such as Somatic Experiencing and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). Focusing-oriented therapy is considered a mindfulness-based experiential therapy because it cultivates present-moment awareness on a physical and emotional level.

The way we sit with our experiences in sessions distinguishes Focusing-oriented therapy from other models. Intellectualization often happens in "talk therapy" and is a defense mechanism. As Gendlin analyzed, when we talk without recognizing what it is we are feeling in our body, change cannot occur. Change happens when we notice what we feel in our body and interact with that feeling in a more supportive and compassionate way than how we had been doing previously.

In other forms of therapy, the therapist is seen as "the expert" in the client's experience — to empathize, then explain and guide the client on how to behave, how to be happier. In FOT, as a person-centered therapy, it is the client's felt sense that becomes the expert. When we slow down and hold space for the felt sense, it will show us the pathway forward for our unique circumstances. The Focusing-oriented therapist is there with you, side by side and non-judgmental, figuring out how best you can lead yourself for lasting growth.

I'm not the therapist who sits back and nods for the whole session — I'm direct, and I want to get into the weeds with you. But directness here doesn't mean interpreting your experience at you. It means slowing down enough to check.

Separation and divorce produce a particular kind of grief, and most people going through it are unprepared for how disorienting it is.

Part of what makes it disorienting is that almost no one treats it as grief. When someone dies, there's a funeral. People bring food. There's a shared script, however imperfect, for what you're supposed to feel and for roughly how long. When a marriage ends, none of that exists. Friends take sides, or get uncomfortable and go quiet. You're congratulated on your fresh start. And if you were the one who decided to leave, many people treat that as forfeiting your right to mourn at all.

Clinicians call this disenfranchised grief: real loss that isn't socially recognized as loss, so it has nowhere to go. It doesn't resolve on its own. It goes underground and comes out sideways — as irritability, as a fog you can't think through, as a strange flatness in the middle of something that's supposed to be a relief.

It's also grief that resists being talked about. Ask most people what they've lost and they'll produce a competent summary: the house, the routines, the version of the future they'd assumed. All true, and none of it touches the thing that actually aches. That gap between the accurate account and the unreached feeling is exactly what the felt sense is for.

So we go slower than the summary. We find where the loss actually lives in you, and we let it be as contradictory as it is — because it usually is. Relief and devastation at once. Anger at someone you still love. Grief for a marriage you know shouldn't have continued. None of that needs to be resolved into a single coherent feeling before it's allowed to exist. It needs somewhere to be felt without being argued with.

Focusing-oriented therapy can help anyone who wants to identify the root of their challenges within a mindful and deeply self-compassionate framework.

Whatever the experience and however it came to be, the purpose of Focusing-oriented therapy is to hold space openly and curiously. We work to process those experiences so you find a forward path instead of feeling stuck, ashamed, and hopeless — which is when unhelpful coping ways arise.

People who have difficulty expressing or getting their needs met find this type of therapy beneficial. Even before developing greater awareness, holding space for oneself is therapeutic, because it places value on their own experience — something often lacking in their life. Then, when they gain a greater understanding of their own experiences instead of prioritizing those of others, FOT clarifies their life goals, direction, and meaning.

Focusing-oriented psychotherapists do not typically diagnose or label, since it can be reductive and fail to encapsulate a person's whole experience. Rather, our specialty is getting to the root of the experience and helping clients keep company with it until they gain clarity and resolution.

I began my FOT training at the Focusing Institute in 2015, and I'm a certified Focusing-Oriented Therapist. Focusing has had a profound influence on both my practice and my approach to healing. I've maintained multiple Focusing partnerships — a practice that trains me to stay in closer contact with my own felt sense, so that in our session I'm better able to attune to your experience. Focusing has been the most accepting, least pathologizing process I've learned in my career, and I know that for me it creates a space devoid of shame and judgment through which I've been able to grow.

Focusing has taught me to be with what is in the moment. I, like many, have a way of thinking several steps ahead. Focusing is a tool I use to be with what is right here, allowing me to take my process one step at a time. When we are present and aware of our deeper emotions and the felt senses, we are in alignment with our true selves and inevitably create a more peaceful internal — and subsequently external — environment.

Focusing is the ground the individual work stands on. But attachment doesn't only live inside one person — it lives between people, and much of what I do happens in that space: between partners, and between parents and their children. The conviction stays the same wherever I'm working — that underneath the conflict there's an attachment system trying to find its footing — but the method shifts depending on who's in the room.

Emotionally Focused Therapy has been at the center of my couples work for more than a decade. It's the model I've trained in most extensively, and the one I keep returning to because it goes where the real trouble actually is. Most couples don't have a communication problem in the way they think they do — they have the same fight on a loop, and underneath it are two people who've lost the ability to reach each other.

EFT works on that underlying bond rather than handing you techniques for arguing more politely. We slow the cycle down enough to see what each of you is protecting and what each of you is missing from the other, and then do the harder, more vulnerable work of letting those needs be spoken and answered. It tends to reach the thing that a decade of surface-level advice never quite touches.

It's also the method underneath my co-parenting work. Two people who are no longer partners still have to function as one reliable attachment system for their child — and EFT is how I help them rebuild the specific trust and coordination that takes, even when the romantic relationship is fully and finally over.

Emotionally Focused Family Therapy extends the same attachment lens to the bond between a parent and a child. Where a lot of approaches aim at managing a child's behavior, EFFT works on repairing and strengthening the connection itself, on the understanding that a secure bond is what most of that behavior was reaching for in the first place.

This work draws on my earlier clinical experience with children and their families. I've completed the EFFT Essentials training, and the same attachment lens extends in two directions: to reconnecting a parent and an adult child who've grown distant — a bond that doesn't expire just because the child is grown — and to family work with younger children, which that early experience prepared me for.

Across all three — individual, couple, family — it's the same conviction doing the work: the relationships we're built for don't stop mattering just because they've turned painful, and they can almost always be reached for again.