How to Be a Really Helpful Focusing Partner


Keeping someone company in their Focusing process is a gentle act of attunement, filled with surprises, awe about the wisdom and creativity of the human psyche, and ever-growing respect for the focuser's sense of whatever is uniquely right for them in that moment in time. Since the knowing of what is meant to unfold lies within the focuser, the Focusing partner needs to attend to this knowing and a wish to facilitate, not get in the way by well-meaning attempts to help a poor lost soul by directing or leading. This requires a certain stance of humility and wonder at the other's process.

Which is not to say that skill is not important in partnering. It is not a passive act of admiration. Rather, it requires knowing when to be quiet and when to come in with a suggestion to get things unstuck. It is important to develop a rapport over time with your partner so that you can signal to one another when you want help. It is important, too, to develop a repertoire of suggestions and ways of assisting when the process gets stuck.

Being the partner who is facilitating the other's process is somewhat like being the midwife. Midwives sometimes refer to their work as "catching the baby." In other words, it is not your baby. You've no idea what the baby wil look like or how it will come out. As long as everything goes well, you don't interfere with the process. If things get stuck, you use one of your skilled responses to ease the stuckness. But you know there is no way you can make this baby be born. You just keep company with the mother, thereby assisting her in bringing forth what emerges from her body.

We all encounter many difficulties when we begin keeping someone else company in Focusing. It can be difficult, for example, not to give advice or ask questions you think might be helpful, instead of trusting that the person will eventually come to their own right knowing. (Of course, if you have a piece of useful, practical information, you can always offer it seperately, then let it go, after the Focusing process is finished.) And what do you do, when you think your view of life or your spiritual approach would help this person the way it has proved very meaningful to you? Well, if you're doing something together and calling it Focusing, your contract is that you respectfully keep the other person company in finding their own connectedness. Focusing has to be value free.

You see, we're basing this approach on the understanding that each individual organism is unique and still knows, no matter how confused and layered over with wounds, what is uniquely right for it, if only it is given the space to move forward toward its sense of rightness. (E.T. Gendlin, Focusing, p. 76). It is the partner's task to support the organism's knowing, trusting that it is moving in the direction of its own solutions and growth edge.

So easy to say and so hard to do!

"How to Be a Really Helpful Focusing Partner", The Focusing Connection, July 1993.