FOT Certification Program for Therapists Who Are Experienced Focusers

As a Focuser, you know how transformative Focusing is.

But as a therapist, you've probably struggled with how to bring this profound awareness into your clinical work. We certainly did.

Many if not most people seeking therapy simply aren't prepared to do deep Focusing work when they begin—and many may never do so. What's more, as a clinician you know that there is so much more to good therapy than facilitating Focusing sessions. 

You may wonder then: what does it mean to be a Focusing-oriented therapist? How do you take this remarkable and radically different way of working with our inner selves and integrate it into all the work you do to help your clients grow? 

We are writing to invite you to join a selective Focusing-Oriented Therapy (FOT) Certification Program, co-led by Helene Brenner, Ph.D., and Larry Letich, LCSW-C, designed specifically to answer these questions.

We are limiting this group to no more than ten participant-therapists. Our goal is to create a close-knit learning community where we can do deep, nuanced work together.

The Vision: A Unified, Neuroscience-backed Phenomenological and Relational Approach This program is designed for therapists who want to go beyond using Focusing as a mere tool. We present FOT as a powerful, philosophically cohesive therapeutic modality—one that is grounded in current neuroscience and offers a rigorous framework for facilitating deep change.

Our goal is to equip you with a unified set of techniques and micro-skills that can be applied across a wide range of clients. This approach allows you to deepen every client's felt experience, facilitate radical self-acceptance, and generate life-forward movement—including for those clients who may never learn to Focus or for whom formal Focusing is not the correct intervention.

The Curriculum: Core Micro-Skills & Techniques Over the course of nine months, we will explore the neuroscience of why FOT works and master the specific skills required to apply this modality effectively. Among the topics we will cover will be:

"Setting the Stage": Assessing clients from an FOT perspective and establishing the necessary conditions for deep inner work to occur.

Deepening the Session: Mastering a broad repertoire of skills to help clients pause, slow down, and move from talking about their experience to sensing into it, allowing the subtle, bodily-felt meaning of their issues to emerge.

Psychoeducational Skills and Tools: Simple, effective tools you can give clients to demystify Focusing concepts and processes, enabling them to use these skills more easily both in session and on their own.

Focusing As a Part of Structured Therapy: For clients who are able to fully Focus and wish to use it as the major portion of their therapy, we will cover how to deepen sessions and maintain a clear therapeutic progression in service of their healing and goals.

Using the Inner Relationship in Therapy: Using Inner Relationship Focusing processes and techniques to deepen your clients’ experiential work. 

Metaprocessing: How to process new insights and felt shifts received during a session to ensure they are reinforced in the client's psyche and nervous system.

Balancing the Internal with the Relational: Learning when and how to shift focus between the client’s deep intrapsychic processing and the immediate therapeutic relationship to foster connection and safety.

Integrating Insight with Action: How we, as Focusing-oriented therapists, support clients in translating their inner discoveries into concrete steps that move their actual lives forward.

Non-Counteraction: A principled approach to welcoming and accepting defenses and resistance rather than fighting them, allowing the client's process to unfold organically.

Non-Vivisection: Helping clients sense into the "whole" of their experience rather than analyzing it into parts, preventing cognitive short-circuiting.

Specialized Applications: Adapting this modality for trauma, anxiety, adults with ADHD, and people with low emotional awareness.

Structure & Logistics

Format: We will meet once a month on Saturday mornings (2 hours) for nine sessions over the next 11–12 months.

Start Date: We are aiming to begin Saturday, January 24, 2026.

Tuition: $1,000 for the nine training sessions (18 contact hours).

Certification: To be eligible for FOT certification, participants will submit three session recordings (video preferred) for live supervision. These sessions will include facilitating focusing within therapy, but do not need to show clients going through a full Focusing process. In fact, your submissions should not consist solely of clients who Focus easily. Rather, to be awarded certification, the recordings need to demonstrate proficiency  in most of the stances and micro-skills taught in the program, showing your ability to deepen the client's experiential work from their starting point and facilitate their life-forward growth. The fee for the personalized review and feedback of these sessions is $200 per session.

We have developed this curriculum based on our combined 30+ years of experience and our upcoming book, Focusing-Oriented Therapy for the 21st Century.