For much of my life, negative emotions were a thing to push past and ignore. In my family, it wasn’t a common practice to surface sadness and anger. Emotional displays were unwelcome, so I learned to avoid them.
But I was (and still am) a sensitive person, and the powerful emotions rolling about inside me couldn’t be suppressed for long. Often they’d erupt in an overwhelming despair, triggering a depressive episode that would leave me fatigued and miserable for days.
Throughout these episodes, I would fight to “get a grip” on these emotions, to talk myself out of them or push them back where they came from. Eventually, I’d succeed… at least until the next episode of depression.
Eventually, I learned that this cycle wasn’t healthy or useful. My work of the last few years had been to make space for what I’m feeling as I’m feeling it, to give these emotions a chance to emerge and be heard. Where before I’d recoil from sadness and anger, now I try to welcome them.
I try to meet them with curiosity. I want to understand myself, and what causes these strong emotions to emerge. But I’m careful not to do so from an analytical frame of mind, from the point of trying to “solve” these emotions. That’s just a codeword for repression, in my experience.
This process of meeting my emotions where they are has been successful, but also messy. There’s a fine balance here: welcoming pain without letting it rule my life, indulging in what I feel without ruminating on it, trying to understand it without overanalyzing it.
About six months ago, I came across a book called Focusing by Gendlin. It’s an older book, written in the DATE, and the vague title led me to believe it was actually about mental focus. I was surprised to discover it was in fact a guide to emotional processing, and one that would provide me exactly what I needed: a step-by-step guide for learning from my emotions without judgement.
The goal of Focusing
Emotions do not exist solely in the mind. They are part of the body’s intricate system of self-regulation. Your mind experiences an event, interprets it, and then dispatches that interpretation throughout the body, which in turn amplifies that emotion and triggers a cascade of responses.
There are more connections rising to the brain from the gut than from the brain to the gut. That means that thinking our way out of our emotions is an uphill battle. Your conscious mind is not well equipped to override emotional responses.
So our work must be in the body. The technique of Focusing centers on the body. It is a process of dialoguing with the body, in order to induce what Gendlin calls a felt shift.
A felt shift is when your body changes its response to a particular emotional problem. You know when you’re worried about something—perhaps anxious about something you said or did—and someone says something that relieves the tension all at once? Remember that feeling, that sudden relaxation and relief? That’s one kind of felt shift.
A felt shift does not solve the problem, but it changes our response to it. On any particular day, in any particular Focusing session, that change might be tiny. We are able to feel just a little bit better about a problem. The next day, the next session, we feel a tiny bit better again.
Over time, these shifts accumulate, and we’re able to make permanent changes to how our body responds to a given problem. Often, these changes are about a release of tension—a sense of relief.
Often, Focusing is about allowing yourself to let go.
How to focus
Getting ready
Though the core of the exercise is quite different, Focusing can feel a lot like meditation. The first steps are very similar. You’ll want to find a quiet place where you can sit comfortably. You’ll want to make sure you won’t be disturbed, and that you have enough time to conduct the whole process—roughly 15 to 20 minutes, though it can be longer or shorter.
Start by taking a few deep breaths, and centering yourself in your body. Pay attention to where you feel tension in our mind and body. Allow yourself to relax as much as you can.
It’s important to start from a place of calm. I wouldn’t recommend Focusing when you’re in the grips of a strong emotional reaction, unless you can find a way back to tranquility first. But once you feel peace and connection to your body, you’re ready to begin.
Creating space from your problems
The next step of the exercise might sound a little depressing, but I’ve found it quite relaxing in practice. What you want to do is think about every single problem in your life. We’re going to list out everything that might be troubling us.
Imagine an empty room—your living room, perhaps. Next, think of something that’s bothering you. It can be small or big. It can be sorrow related to your relationship with your parents, or annoyance at the fact it’s raining. Take that problem, and imagine it as a box. Place that box in the empty room, wherever you like.
Next, think of another problem. Imagine it as another box. Stack it on top of the first box, or place it next to it. Repeat, over and over. Try not to think too hard, but just allow what’s bothering you to rise to the surface. When a problem emerges, stack it with the others. Don’t judge it—just put it in the heap.
This might take a few minutes. Keep asking yourself: what’s on my mind? What’s bothering me? What do I find frustrating, worrying, irritating, terrifying? Get a full manifest of your life’s troubles. Stack them up.
Then, take a look around the room in your mind’s eyes. See all your problems. Then imagine creating a bit of distance between the boxes and you, just some space to breathe. They’re all there, and you’re here. Create some separation.
Choose a problem
Once you return to a state of relaxation, choose a problem to work with. Choose whatever feels most compelling in your current state. It doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to choose the biggest, thorniest problem. Just choose whatever seems to be drawing your attention.
Now the real work of Focusing begins. We want to begin a dialogue with ourselves, with our bodies. We want to find out exactly how we feel about this problem.
You might say: well, I know how I feel about this. It’s shit. It sucks. It’s awful. I simply don’t like it.
That’s how your mind feels about it. We want to know how your body feels. The answer may surprise you. Your subconscious mind (which extends throughout the body) likes to keep things hidden from you. That's its job. Let’s see what it really believes.
Locate the sensation
Problems invoke emotional reactions, which percolate through the body. Every problem will have a felt sense associated with it.
For example, you might be worried about getting fired from your job, and that worry might invoke a tightness in your stomach, a sort of internal clenching.
Focus on the problem and try to locate that felt sense. Don’t let it overwhelm you, but remember exactly what it feels like to be experiencing this problem.
Maybe you’re facing the problem right now, and locating it is easy. Maybe the problem emerged in a conversation a few days ago, and you need to remember what your body was experiencing that moment.
Once you have located the sense of the problem in your body, we can begin the dialogue.
The dialogue
Now we want to try to understand our reaction to the problem at a deeper level. We want to investigate the felt sense.
Focus on the feeling, and ask yourself: what does this feel like? And then listen for a response. Or rather, feel for a response.
Try not to think of an answer. Within the first minute of this practice, I’m sure some answers will appear. A voice will say, it feels terrible. It feels irritating. It feels stupid. Let those answers trickle past. Keep asking the same question: what does this feel like?
Give yourself a minute or so for the obvious answers to go past. Again, try not to think. Don’t force an answer. Let it arise.
After a minute or so, begin to pay closer attention to what answers you’re receiving. An answer might be simple: this feels heavy. It might be more complicated: this feels like I’m losing control of my life. It might be an image: this feels like I’m sinking down into a vast ocean, trying to claw my way back to the surface. It might be strange: this feels sticky.
When an answer emerges, we want to check it against the felt sense. Compare the description/image (e.g. “this feels sticky”) with the sensation in your body (e.g. the tightness in your stomach). Does something change?
When you’ve stumbled upon a “true” answer, the sensation in your body will shift. It might not disappear, it might not be totally relieved, but it should change. Maybe just a bit, maybe just a little. But there should be a change in sensation.
If there’s no change in sensation, keep searching for another answer. Stay focused on that felt sense of the problem, and wait for the right words or the right image to arise.
Asking why
If you’ve experienced that shift in the felt sense in the problem, you can move on to the next half of the exercise. Now we repeat the dialogue, but we change the question to the following: why does it feel like __?
Why does this problem feel sticky? Why does this problem invoke an image of you wandering alone in the dark? Why does this problem feel like carrying a stack of bricks on your back?
Again, we stay focused on the felt sense of the problem, and compare each answer to it, waiting for another shift.
If the answer that came to me at first was this feel heavy, I now ask why does this feel heavy? An answer might arise: because it’s too much for me. I compare that to the sinking feel in my stomach; there’s no change in the sensation. I wait. Another answer emerges: because it’s holding me back from who I want it to be. I check that sinking feel again; now there’s a slight shift, a slight sense of relaxation. The weight is still there, but it’s lifted just a bit.
Staying with it
Now we’ve completed the exercise. You may not feel that different, at the end of it. But you’ve changed the way your body feels about the problem, in some small way. Hopefully, you’ve also gained some insight into why it’s bothering you. I’ve often found that the answers I receive are surprising to me.
Don’t rush to get up and move on. Sit for a few more minutes, staying in a state of relaxation. Slowly, get up and return to the world.
The practice
Focusing is a practice, which means you get better at it over time. It also means that the changes begin to accumulate. Try to do it every day for a couple of weeks, and see how it changes you. See how it changes how your body reacts to difficult emotions.
While the process of “dialoguing with yourself” and “letting answers arise” may seem spiritual, there’s nothing metaphysical about it. Your conscious mind is but one part of a complex system of that interprets and processes the world around you. Much of that happens at a subconscious level, and emotions are a key part of that system.
By allowing difficult emotions to rise up to the conscious level, in a way that feels safe, we can retrain our emotional responses. We can allow our body to complete its stress cycle, and thus relax.
Focusing is a path to letting go. I hope you’ll give it a try.