Roundtable on Listening: Let’s talk about Interactive Focusing

Thursday, April 27, 2023 

6am-8am New York Time   12pm-2pm CET   7pm-9pm Tokyo   

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

Live attendance required - no recording.

The TIFI Membership Committee is pleased to offer this series of Focusing Roundtables, designed especially for members of the Institute. If you are not a member, please join at this link and then return to this page to register. This program will afford members a valuable opportunity to engage in casual peer-to-peer conversation with other members who share Focusing-related interests.

Roundtable Topic:

This Roundtable is one in a series on Focusing and Listening. This first one features Interactive Focusing. Interactive Focusing has a good reputation as a very effective method in building healthy relationship between people. What may be less known is that it is a most powerful way to develop empathic listening skills with its unique step-by-step procedures.

Just to give you an example, a number of Japanese universities and graduate schools offer Interactive Focusing classes for students who want to become counsellors, psychotherapists and various kinds of other professional care-givers in order for them to become empathic and compassionate listeners and to be able to build good connection with the clients.

Masumi Maeda and Tine Swyngedouw know the power of Interactive Focusing very well because they have learned Interactive Focusing directly from its developers, Janet Klein, Psy.D and Mary McGuire Psy.D who used to teach it at TIFI Certification Weeklongs for many years. After Janet Klein’s sudden death, however, we regrettably lost track of people who had connection with her and those who have learned Interactive Focusing are now scattered around the world but we don't know where they are now.

This is an opportunity to people to get together and perhaps reconnect with this way of listening. We are eager to learn from and share with people who have various experiences of teaching and/or doing anything related to Interactive Focusing including application of it in their personal lives.

Of course we also welcome anybody who is unfamiliar with this wonderful method but is curious about it.

What to expect at the event

We will outline some of the basics of the method and the thinking behind it, as developed by Janet and Mary. We will use demos and working in small groups to bring it alive so that you will experientially experience the power of Interactive Focusing.  There will be an opportunity to have a conversation together on how this form of interaction/listening might be useful in different ways. Our hope is that, through our conversation and time together, you will become eager to learn more about Interactive Focusing. We hope too that this will be an opportunity for people who may already know it to reconnect with people who share this interest and maybe find ways to cooperate together to make Interactive Focusing better known in the world.

Who might be particularly interested in attending this Roundtable?

This Roundtable is intended to invite anyone who is interested in Interactive Focusing, including those who want to know more about it.

This will be of interest to people who are interested in topics such as:

• building healthy and healing relationships 
• acquiring empathic listening skills
• leading an empathic and compassionate life
• wanting to feel connected with others more closely and with deeper understanding
• wanting ways to resolve their conflicts or difficult relationships

CONNECTION>CONVERSATION>COMMUNITY

What to expect from Focusing Rountables:  Each Focusing Roundtable is designed to promote informal peer-to-peer conversation. Rather than acting as expert presenters, the Hosts will serve as conversation moderators to encourage sharing and exploration of the topics from the participants’ own perspectives. All participants’ sharings are welcome and valuable, no matter what level of experience or knowledge you have on the topic. To preserve the nature of informal conversation, the program will be offered live only and no recordings will be available. Registration is limited and on a first-come, first served basis. Participants are encouraged to create follow up opportunities for connection among themselves after the Roundtable.

About your hosts:

Masumi Maeda

Masumi Maeda is a certified Clinical Psychologist, a Certified Focusing Trainer and a Master Teacher of Interactive Focusing certified by Janet Klein. She has given Interactive Focusing workshops since 2006 in various parts of Japan as well as in China (5 times), Belgium and USA. She has acted as one of the presenters of Morning classes at 2017 FOT International Conference. She has translated Janet Klein’s “Interactive Focusing Therapy” into Japanese in 2005 and wrote a handbook about Interactive Focusing with Mieko Ito in Japanese in 2016. In 2021 she published her Japanese “Interactive Focusing Seminar” book.

Tine Swyngedouw

Tine Swyngedouw is a psychologist and experiential psychotherapist. She is a Focusing Trainer and FOT since 1995 and Certifying Coordinator from Belgium.  She is a Teacher of Interactive Focusing certified by Masumi Maeda and Mary McGuire. She offers focusing workshops and training to become a Focusing Trainer and/or Focusing-Oriented Therapist. She has a special interest in Inner Relationship Focusing, Interactive Focusing, Experiential Creative Work and TAE. She wrote the book ‘Focusing. Leven in verbinding met je innerlijk kompas.’