The Six Steps of a Focusing-Oriented-Therapy

Every approach to therapy has an implicit answer to the question: what do we actually do? In Focusing-Oriented Therapy, this question is both essential and delicate - because the answer is never simply a procedure. What we do in FOT is not only a set of actions but a way of being, a quality of presence, and an openness to what is trying to emerge.

Many practitioners have found Eugene Gendlin’s six steps of focusing to be an invaluable guide.  They are the resonant handles into the subtle, border between words and the larger dimension of wordlessness. Inspired by the usefulness of concretizing the complex process of focusing into 6 steps I have developed a parallel set of 6 steps for FOT.  This not a rigid protocol, but a map of the essential movements that make a Focusing-Oriented Therapy session come alive.

These steps are offered in the same spirit as Gendlin’s - not as a technique to be applied, but as doorways, as entry points into a world that is experiential, relational, and always in process. They are meant to give therapists and practitioners a felt sense of the territory, and a scaffold that can be embodied rather than merely followed.

We are missing the essence of FOT if we simplify it into a set of instructions. What I want to convey in these workshops is something different: the heart of FOT, which is a way of thinking and being - not only what we do but how and why we do it, and from what place.

About the Course

FOT is a focusing conversation which is like a dance between therapist and client, between client and their own inner process, and between what is known and what is only beginning to stir. There are often several tracks alive at once - the relational field, the emerging felt sense, the forward movement of the process, the therapist’s own resonance. These workshops are designed to help practitioners become more at home in this complexity - not by simplifying it, but by developing a richer feel for each of its essential dimensions.

Over six biweekly sessions, we will explore each step in turn - its underlying rationale, its characteristic quality, and the skills it calls for.

Each session includes:

•  Didactic teaching - grounded in Gendlin’s process philosophy and extended through relational and neurobiological understanding

•  Clinical video material - short excerpts from actual sessions illustrating each step in practice

•  Discussion and questions - space to bring your own clinical experience and responses into dialogue

•  Experiential practice - an opportunity to directly sense and work with the essential quality of each step, so that understanding is carried in the body as well as the mind

The Six Sessions

Session 1:  The Focusing Attitude as the Relational Ground

Every session begins before any technique is introduced. The focusing attitude - a quality of open, receptive, non-demanding presence.  This is not one step among others, but it is the ground from which everything else grows. This session explores the vitalizing and the fertile ground out of which the therapy grows nature of this quality and how it is communicated.  We also learn how to sense when it is missing and then return to it and how the focusing attitude shapes the entire environment in which the therapy will unfold. This ground is not just the attitude of the therapist it is the substrate and the culture that you are building together. 

Session 2:  Entering the Field of Lived Experience

How do we help a client move from talking about their life to being in it? This session focuses on the movement into lived, experiential process - how the therapist can point toward something beneath the narrative, begin to sense what is stirring, and help a felt sense begin to form. The art of making a ‘something’ - giving form to what is as yet vague which is at the heart of this step.

Session 3:  Building a Relational Home

For the emerging felt sense of the client and of the therapy process. This session explores the finding of the right distance between the client and the issue they are carrying, and between therapist and client.  This allows genuine contact becomes possible without flooding or withdrawal. How does the therapist and client create a relational home in which the most vulnerable and complex material can be welcomed and digested.

Session 4:  Being on Its Side

At the center of FOT is the recognition that there is something in the client that knows its own way - an implicit, directional movement that is wiser than any interpretation we could offer. This session explores what it means to trust and align with this emergent process: to be on the side of the ‘something’ that is trying to find its next step, while remaining equally present to the client and to the dyad.

Session 5:  Trusting and Harnessing the Forward Movement

Something opens. New meaning begins to form. The felt sense, held in the right quality of presence, begins to carry forward. This session explores the moment of genuine movement - what it looks like, what enables it, and how the therapist can support the emergence of new experiential formation without foreclosing it. We learn how the therapist can rely on the felt sense of this inherent life forward movement to guide the therapy. This life force that carries forward is not manufactured - it is recognized and met.

Session 6:  Taking in the Whole

Integration is not an endpoint but an ongoing opening. This final session explores the closing movement of a session - how the client and therapist can step back and sense the whole of what has happened.  The whole can be the session, of the issue and the arc of the person’s whole struggle and development. How does what happened here now live in me? And how does this session take its place within the longer journey of the therapy?

Who This Course Is For

This course is designed for therapists, counsellors, coaches, and focusing professionals who are new to Focusing-Oriented Therapy as well as those who are familiar with focusing but want a clinically grounded, relationally rich account of how it works in the therapy room. No prior training in FOT is required - only genuine curiosity about what makes therapy change things.

It is also a natural starting point for those who wish to go further. Participants completing this series will be well placed for subsequent advanced study, including an in-depth clinical course - for more experienced FOT practitioners - in which we will spend extended time with clinical video material, pausing and exploring together what is actually happening in the room.

About Charlotte Howorth

Charlotte Howorth is a Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapist and trainer with eighteen years of teaching experience in FOT, having led the TIFI two-year FOT certification course for twelve years and continued teaching it privately for a further six. She has also taught advanced FOT and coaching courses and has led international workshops across many countries.

Her work is grounded in Gendlin’s process philosophy and is particularly informed by the relational dimension of FOT - the understanding that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is not the container for the work but its primary medium. She is interested in how to bring focusing seamlessly into therapeutic conversations, and in helping practitioners develop a felt sense of FOT as a way of being, not only a way of doing.