Center for Integrative Counseling

TRAINING PROGRAMS IN GENDLIN FOCUSING

There are 3 levels in the training program: an introductory weekend, a year of Focusing Fundamentals and an advanced training for psychotherapists wanting to integrate Focusing into their clinical psychotherapy practices. Although it is possible to take the first weekend as an introduction, it is recommended that you consider making the commitment for the first full year in order to allow yourself time to integrate the learning. (Please click on this link if you would like more in depth information about "What is Focusing?")

Introductory Weekend: Discovering Your Inner Compass

Learn the basics of Focusing: how to sense when your body is trying to tell you something, and how to be with yourself in a way that is both safe and productive. The workshop is largely experiential.

Psychotherapists interested in studying Focusing are invited to attend a seminar developed specifically for them: Introduction to Gendlin Focusing for Psychotherapists. Norman P. Richey, LCSW will be co-teaching with Beverly.

 For information regarding date, time and tuition for the above two seminars, please see:Tuition, Scheduling and Registration

First Year: Focusing Fundamentals

The Focusing Fundamentals program provides you with the opportunity to explore Focusing in a safe and supportive environment.  You can gain confidence in the process and begin to explore its depth of possibilities for you. You will have the opportunity to learn skillful means for handling any difficulties that might come up for you, such as feeling self-critical , pressured, blank or flooded with too much emotion.

Emphasis is on developing your embodied understanding of your own Focusing process and the underlying principles of listening and responding in a way that facilitates another's focusing. Through dyad work, you deepen your ability to be present with yourself and another at the same time, strengthening your boundaries and developing your access to your body's wisdom. This gives you a firm foundation for integrating Focusing into your personal and professional life. See below for date, time and tuition. Tuition, Scheduling and Registration

Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy (Year Two) - for Psychotherapists

You will now bring your knowledge of the Focusing process directly to the clinical setting. We learn to recognize the windows when a client is on the edge of Focusing naturally, and a number of ways to help them drop under their stories, repetitive emotions, or intellectualizing into deeper experiential process. We learn ways to use Focusing with the inner critic, with relationships and with dreamwork.

Through the study of transcripts and a unique Focusing-based form of peer supervision, we delve into the deeper texture of interweaving Focusing with whatever therapy approach we currently use.

Focusing is not itself another "method" of therapy. As Ann Weiser Cornell, author of The Power of Focusing and The Radical Acceptance of Absolutely Everything, has said "Focusing gives you a way of integrating the body with whatever clinical approach you already use. It is a powerful and effective way to help your clients access deep levels of process, bypass intellectualization, avoid being flood with overwhelming emotion and go directly to the bodily source of change." Gendlin has said that Focusing is "the motor that drives all the therapies."

Therapists with backgrounds as diverse as Cognitive Therapy, Jungian Analysis, Solution-Focused Therapy and Gestalt Therapy have all found Focusing to be a powerful way of deepening the work. Jeffrey Mishlove, therapist, host of TV's Thinking Allowed, and author of The Roots of Consciousness, calls Focusing "one of the most powerful therapeutic techniques of which I am aware, and may even be said to be the basis of all good therapy. Tuition, Scheduling and Registration