Session 2: Therapists’ Circle: Inviting Experiential Process—When it’s a Challenge: Working with “Low Experiencing” Clients

Wednesday, July 8, 2020  from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm Eastern Time

Live attendance required - no recording.

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

Please note limited registration: Current and former therapists are welcome, including psychotherapists, counselors, coaches, somatic practitioners, spiritual directors, occupational or physical therapists, nurses and the like.

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 classic work, Focusing, Gendlin describes a felt sense as “a kind of bodily awareness that profoundly influences our lives and can help us reach personal goals.” The felt sense is critical to the process of personal change. Gene wrote, “A felt sense will shift if you approach it in the right way. It will change even as you are making contact with it. When your felt sense of a situation changes, you change—and, therefore, so does your life.”

This capacity to contact the felt sense has been deemed so important to successful therapy outcomes that Focusing researchers created the “Experiencing Scale” to try to measure how well a client is able to do so (Klein, Mathieu, Gendlin, & Kiesler, 1970). In her important article, Marion Hendricks explained the differences between high, middle and low experiencers and how therapists can facilitate higher experiencing levels in her article “Experiencing Level as a Therapeutic Variable”, available at http://previous.focusing.org/experiencing.htm#LOW_EXP_LEVEL

As Focusing-oriented therapists, we seek to offer our clients the benefits of contacting and exploring their felt sense of the issues in their lives. But what happens when we encounter a client who seems unable to find their felt sense, a client who might be termed a “low experiencer”?

During this Therapist Circle we will explore the challenges we have faced and the insights we have gained from working with clients who find it difficult to contact their felt senses. Questions we might explore together include:

• How do we, as therapists, recognize and respond to clients who have difficulty contacting their felt sense?
• What comes up inside for us, as therapists, as we face the challenge of working with these clients?
• What approaches have we used to help such clients to reap the benefits of Focusing?

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

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 TIFI’s membership community who use or have used therapeutic modalities deepened by Focusing. 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:

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.

Julie Ramsey, LICSW, FOT, is a psychotherapist in private practice in Wellesley, MA. She works with adolescents and adults in individual and couples therapy. She also teaches Focusing in small groups and enjoys bringing Focusing to all aspects of her work and life. She is a Coordinator-in-Training.

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.