Interaction and the Music of Speech in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship: Let the Voices’ Music Guide Your Interaction in Psychotherapy

Wednesday, December 9, 2020  from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm Eastern Time

Live attendance required - no recording.

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

The TIFI Membership Committee is pleased to introduce Therapists’ Circles, a new Roundtable series, designed especially for members who work with clients in therapeutic settings. If you are not a member, please join at http://focusing.org/membership and then return to this page to register.

Regardless of modality, we therapists hold in common the ethical and professional accountability and responsibility for our clients’ welfare and growth. It is with this understanding that we come together to explore both the challenges of our work and the opportunities that arise through bringing a Focusing orientation to our practices. These conversations are not intended to be professional supervision sessions, but rather an opportunity to share ideas and experiences with like-minded professionals.

In his seminal work, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (1962), Gendlin says that “Some feelings are expressed along with intellectual content, others by silence or gesture or voice quality. They are not ‘conscious’ most of the time, but they are not unconscious either.” (p. 81, emphasis ours). As a Focusing-Oriented Therapist, how do you register in your experiencing the client’s tone or what might be called the “music” of his/her speech? How do you express your experiencing in the psychotherapeutic interaction through the music of your own speech?

Since the precise symbolization of the felt sense is critical to the process of personal change, how do you know when that kind of symbolization comes through the therapist’s and client’s tone of voice? How does your own felt sense come into play during the therapeutic work through the music of the speech and how does it enable you to work more effectively with your clients?

During this Therapists’ Circle we will share our experiences and what we have learned in our practices about the many ways in which we use our own felt sense regarding the music of the speech to more fully understand what is happening in the therapy and what the client needs in our moment-to-moment client interactions and over the longer arc of the therapy.

We will practice a couple exercises to enhance our awareness of this capacity and discuss its role in our therapy work. Together we will explore the ways in which the therapist’s felt sense can inform and enhance many aspects of the therapeutic relationship and process through the music of the speech.

Questions we might explore together are:

• How do I attend to the experiencing that I feel when I listen to the voice, the music of the speech, of a client?
• If I let myself feel in my body the music of the speech of my client, how does that help me to understand him/her better?
• How does my own speech music affect the way the other person resonates with what I say to him/her?
• How does my own speech music as a psychotherapist come into play for the precise symbolization that a client makes of their experience?

Other issues and ideas may emerge from our mutual exploration during the Circle.

Through this exploration and sharing of experiences from our own professional practices, we hope that participants will glean insights and practical strategies for increasing their therapeutic efficacy by looking at the music of the speech in a more “conscious” way.  

Who might be particularly interested in attending this Circle?

These Therapists’ Circles are intended to serve the needs and interests of a specialized subset of our membership community who use or have used therapeutic modalities deepened by Focusing and the Philosophy of the Implicit. Current and former therapists are welcome, including psychotherapists, counselors, coaches, somatic practitioners, spiritual directors, occupational or physical therapists, nurses and the like. If you have an area of interest, curiosity or passion that you would like to explore in a future Circle, please let us know.

CONNECTION>CONVERSATION>COMMUNITY

What to expect from Therapist Circles:  Each Therapist Circle 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:

Salvador Moreno-López is a psychotherapist and professor at Universidad Iberoamericana-León, México, in the Clinical Psychotherapy Masters program, where he promotes the learning of modes of interaction based on the Philosophy of the Implicit. He also is a Certifying Coordinator in Mexico. His interests include relating the Philosophy of the Implicit and Focusing to everyday life and health care and crossing Focusing with Mindfulness and neurosciences.

Mary Anne Schleinich, MPS, BScOT is a counselling body psychotherapist in private practice in Calgary and online. She is certified with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association and The International Focusing Institute as a Focusing Oriented Therapist. She teaches Focusing and has worked with pain, anxiety and trauma for 20 years.

Steve Moscovitch MSW Is a therapist in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He has been a Certified Focusing Trainer since 2002 He has integrated Focusing and a Focusing orientation into his work in Individual, couple and family therapy for 20 years of his 38-year career. Other significant recent trainings are Emotion Focused Couple Therapy and Internal Family Systems.