Therapists’ Circle: Bringing Our Experiencing Self into the Therapy Room - The Contribution of the Therapist’s Own Felt Sensing to the Client’s Life Forward Process

Thursday, September 24, 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 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.” Since the felt sense is critical to the process of personal change we as Focusing-oriented therapists seek to offer our clients the benefits of contacting and exploring their felt sense of the issues in their lives. But how does our own felt sense come into play during our therapeutic work and how does it enable us to work more effectively with our clients?

During this Therapist Circle we will share our experiences and what we have learned in our own practices about the many ways in which we use our own felt senses 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.

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.

Questions we might explore together are:

• What role does our own felt sense play in helping us prepare for upcoming client sessions?
• How does our own felt sense inform our understanding of what is happening or what needs to happen during the course of a session?
• How does our own felt sense enhance our client relationship and/or the client’s change process?

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

Through this exploration and sharing of experiences from own professional practices, we hope that participants will glean insights and practical strategies for increasing their therapeutic efficacy.  

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. 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.