Interest Area: Experiential Focusing Therapy

Focusing and Helping Professionals

In their clinical work,  Helping Professionals can use Intuitive Focusing to pay attention to and articulate The Creative Edge of their own clinical “intuitions” about patients. They can use Focused Listening skills to make better diagnoses by drawing out a thorough description of symptoms and past history from patients. They can ask patients to use Intuitive Focusing to “get in touch with” more accurate descriptions of their symptoms.

They can use the Listening/Focusing process, as described in the Instant “Ahah!” Five-minute grieving to help patients work through emotions which arise during clinical consultations.

Dentists, nurses, doctors, and medical technicians who need to expose patients to painful or scary procedures can use Focused Listening to sooth patients through emotional support. They can also help patients to use Intuitive Focusing to explore and to work internally to diffuse emotional responses and to relax their fearful responses.    

The Listening/Focusing method can also be combined with other treatments  specifically in attempts to alter or to cure medical conditions, such as cancer, high blood pressure, smoking, obesity.

Hands-on body workers can use Intuitive Focusing to articulate the Creative Edge of their own intuitive, bodily felt responses to their client’s physical and energetic bodies. They can guide clients in using Intuitive Focusing to “sense into” and to articulate present felt experiences arising during the body work. They can use Focused Listening skills to aid in the client’s articulation through Focusing, leading to “felt shifts,” or paradigm shifts at the level of perceptual schemata. When the Listening/Focusing process is integrated into body work, this gentle, self-help method of personal growth can be used to strengthen structural changes by helping to process past experiences which may have been “held” through muscular tightness.

Helping professionals can use the Intuitive Focusing skills outside of the clinical interview situation to process emotions arising from their work and for creative problem solving. They can use the Interpersonal Focusing skills to resolve conflicts in their personal and work-place relationships. They can use the Collaborative Edge Focusing Decision Making(CEDM) methods for Creative Edge Problem Solving, Collaborative Thinking and Shared Leadership,  among their office teams and in collegial organizations.

Lastly but not leastly, Helping Professionals can form Focusing Partnerships and Focusing Groups/Teams or Focusing Communities as support groups for their own anti-burn out prevention, meeting for the exchange of turns just as patients might meet in support groups. But, here, the focus is upon supporting the Helping Professionals, helping them to work through the emotional aspects of their work and personal lives so that they are not just care-givers, but care-receivers, thus preventing burnout.

See Experiential Focusing Professional Training Program  for a full description of Dr. McGuire’s Certification Program, which is based upon starting your own local support and training Focusing Group.

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These materials are offered purely as self-help skills. In providing them, Dr. McGuire is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.