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The Changes Book. A Handbook for. Empathic Listening, Experiential Focusing,. and Therapeutic Community. Kathy McGuire-Bouwman, New Foreword, August 2017
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The Changes Book
A Handbook for
Empathic Listening, Experiential Focusing,
and Therapeutic Community
Edited by Kathy McGuire, Ph. D.
The Changes Book:
A Handbook for Empathic Listening, Experiential Focusing, and Therapeutic Community
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Written by many members of the original Changes Listening/Focusing Community
including
Eugene Gendlin, Mary Hendricks, Jim Iberg, Ann Weiser Cornell, Kristin Glaser, Ferdinand van der Veen and Linda Olsen
Chicago, IL, May, 1970-1978
With a new Foreword by Kathy McGuire-Bouwman, July 2017
Cover image via visualhunt. com
(c) Kathy McGuire-Bouwman, 2016 Director, Creative Edge Focusing (TM) www. cefocusing. com, kathy@cefocusing. com
Table of Contents
Kathy McGuire-Bouwman, New Foreword, August 2017 1
Part One: The book and the Changes community 5
Ferdinand van der Veen, Why Changes and a book about Changes are important to me 5
Kristin Glaser and Eugene Gendlin, Main themes in Changes, a therapeutic community 7
Part Two: About listening 14
Ferdinand van der Veen, Some thoughts about what listening is 14
Ferdinand van der Veen, How to do listening: an explanation for people new to Changes 19
Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Absolute listening 23
Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Further steps toward better listening and focusing: centering and checking 27
Linda Olsen, A beginning listening/focusing group 31
Ann Weiser, Common problems in a beginning listening group 42
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Kristin Glaser, Some more thoughts about beginning listening groups, including what you might do if there is no leader 46
Part Three: About Focusing 48
Kristin Glaser, Introduction 48
Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Focusing issues: guidelines, steps, additional aids, problems, feelings and felt sense, alternate instructions, self-attitudes, and when to stop 50
Jim Iberg, Why focus? Or, What happens differently due to focusing? 73
Mary Hendricks, A focusing group 78
Part Four: Doing more - advanced listening and focusing methods 85
Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Doing more 85
Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, How to use your feelings and thoughts of the other person without laying trips on him/her 91
Betty Lou Beck, Self-healing meditation 97
Part Five: Relationships and group interactions 101
Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Interactions 101
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Ferdinand van der Veen, Dialoguing: a way of learning to relate constructively in close relationships 109
Kristin Glaser, Suggestions for working with heavy strangers and friends 116
Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, In your own group 122
G. Daniel Massad, Learning together: the way we do it 125
Kathy N. Boukydis (a. k. a McGuire), Rules for listening in task-oriented groups 132
Judy Henderson, The politics of group process 136
Part Six: The history of Changes 143
Kathy McGuire, History of Changes 1970- 2016 143
Rough draft of the History of Changes, First Year by K. G.: Crisis Hotline 154
Jean A. Rickert, History of Changes in the past year 163
Ann Weiser Cornell, A rough History of Focusing 166
Part Seven: Beyond roles 168
Eugene Gendlin, Beyond roles 168
Kathy McGuire-Bouwman, New Foreword, August 2017
“Changes” Empathy Focusing Groups: a model for bringing people together
Overcoming prejudice and stereotyping through simple skills of empathic listening and self-empathy focusing
In May 1970, National Guard troops shot to kill at students of Kent State University who were protesting the Vietnam War. Several students died, and the USA convulsed.
The 1960’s and 1970’s were a time of social upheaval in the US. Customs and norms were breaking down, lines were being crossed and, in reaction, rigidified. The civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and the rising feminist movement were all pushing the boundaries of mutual understanding and cooperation.
This book offers the wisdom and particular skills of empathy and self-empathy which grew up as one community’s response to the violent divides of the 1960’s – 1970’s.
The 2000’s are a similar time of social upheaval. Shocking shootings of innocent people convulse communities. We are confronting and questioning old lines between rich and poor, black and white, women and men, “insiders” and “outsiders. ”
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Once again, especially at the interface between “the establishment” and marginalized people, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, refugees, the criminalized, women, there are huge gaps in understanding, leading to violence of many kinds.
Well-known journalist Dan Rather, President Barack Obama and many others have pointed to the “empathy deficit” in today’s United States of America.
And, as different from the 1970s, the existence of cable news, the internet, and social media allows us to be aware that this convulsion, this clashing, violence, and misunderstanding are happening on a global scale. It is even possible that lack of empathy for the natural world is endangering the very existence of our planet.
The Changes group model for support groups teaching skills of empathy and self-empathy is a relevant solution to the issues of “empathy deficit” throughout our world.
In response to the Kent State Massacre, a group of graduate students in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at the University of Chicago began meeting, with their mentor Dr. Eugene Gendlin, to find their own way of taking positive action in this cultural situation. After trying established political practices, like getting petitions signed, they decided to turn their particular skills to the needs of their local community, the Hyde Park area on the south side of Chicago.
They turned their attention to drug use and suicide; homeless and runaway youths; mental illness in the community; integration of ex-convicts into the community; interactions with the police and established agencies in meeting these needs.
Crisis phone hotlines were springing up as the culture’s response to this crisis. The graduate students decided to start an alternative model of response. They had a crisis phone line, but they also invited all who called to their Sunday night Changes group meeting at a local church. They invited everyone to become equal members of their supportive, therapeutic community.
At the meeting, they taught everyone Carl Rogers’ Empathic Listening skill and mentor Eugene Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing skill.
Rogers’ Empathic Listening, setting aside your own prejudices and stereotypes, advice, opinions, and judgments, and simply trying to “reflect, ” or to “say back” the words of another person, had already been widely researched and practiced as a necessary component of psychotherapy.
Rogers had invented Client-Centered Therapy, based upon “empathy, ” “congruence, ” and “unconditional positive regard, ” as an alternative to the more authoritarian practices of Freudian psychoanalysis. Already in the 1950s, Rogers had extended the use of Empathic Listening to conflict resolution among blacks and whites in the USA, and warring parties in places like Northern Ireland.
But the people in the original Changes group discovered the self-empathy Experiential Focusing skill as a needed partner as a way of healing our “empathy deficit” and bridging gaps between us.
Gendlin’s Focusing (www. focusing. org; Focusing, Bantam, 1981) and its extension into the Inner Relationship Focusing method of Ann Weiser Cornell (www. focusingresources. com) teach the “radical acceptance” of everything INSIDE of ourself. This is self-empathy: being able to turn toward and kindly receive all of the lost and disowned and devalued parts of your own self.
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Freud knew a century ago that, if people could not accept some part of themselves, they PROJECTED that unacknowledged part of themselves out onto other people in the world, often with a strength of hatred and disowning which Freud called “reaction formation. ” If I am afraid of any homosexual feelings inside of myself, then I may passionately hate homosexuals out in the world.
In order to develop true empathy for those different from ourselves, we also have to be able to love ourselves whole-heartedly, unconditionally. Then we will have energy and compassion available for those outside of ourselves.
The Changes group model, teaching Empathic Listening and self-empathy Experiential Focusing skills hand-in-hand, provides the best supportive milieu for growing the capacity for empathy throughout our world as we strengthen our own individual self-awareness and capacity for self-acceptance.
The graduate students taught both Listening and Focusing skills to the mentally ill, to ex-convicts and other marginalized people, to whoever showed up at their Sunday evening meeting, as well as to a wide variety of college students and helping professionals.
They applied the Listening and Focusing skills to personal growth and community building through mutual understanding. They applied them to conflict resolution between individuals, and to collaborative decision making in groups. They developed “teams” to meet the multiple needs of some community members.
This book chapters collected in 1978 tell how this alternative model for community building came about and how it worked. There are also many chapters giving specific instructions on how to do Empathic Listening and Experiential Focusing, how to start practice groups for learning the skills, how to build teams for “heavy” situations, how to resolve interpersonal conflicts and make group decisions using empathy and self-empathy.
Mentor Eugene Gendlin went on to develop Experiential Focusing and The Philosophy of The Implicit underlying it into The International Focusing Institute (www. focusing. org). His book Focusing (Bantam, 1981) has been translated into many languages, and there is a network of Certified Focusing Trainers throughout the world. Changes groups have also sprung up as people going through training classes in Focusing and Listening have continued on after training in their own egalitarian, self-help Empathy Focusing groups.
This book offers you the fresh energy of those early formative days, when the Empathic Listening and Experiential Focusing skills were being developed as a way of bridging gaps and building empathic community, in the context of a proven model which has been amplified world-wide over the past 50 years.
Using this book, along with my manual, Focusing in Community: How To Start Listening/Focusing Support Groups As A First Step In Empathy Activism, a group of concerned individuals can come together to start their own Listening/Focusing practice group. As they learn the skills, this group will also become their supportive community, their source of support as they go out into the larger community.
They can start with just two people and build as they find others with common interest. And they can reach out to Certified Focusing Trainers for additional training and support.
Then they can go out as disciples of empathy, bringing these skills to other audiences: schools, prisons, police forces, crisis clinics, churches, mosques, synagogues, inter-faith alliances, youth ministries, African American and Native American, Hispanic and refugee communities, Democrats and Republicans and people of conflicting political persuasions throughout the world.
Having learned to apply the Listening and Focusing skills to conflict resolution and group decision making, they can begin to bring together people from radically conflicting perspectives to hear each other empathically. They can grow in their own self-empathy, bringing that level of self-awareness into building a more peaceful and compassionate world.
Not a total solution? We have to start somewhere, and Empathy Focusing groups have the potential to provide a backbone of support for “empathy activists”. They could be similar to the world-changing influence of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-Step groups in providing support for overcoming addictions. We provide the possibility that everyone could learn Empathic Listening and Experiential Focusing as basic tools, like reading and writing, available to everyone, for overcoming conflict and building caring community.
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Kathy McGuire-Bouwman, Ph. D.
Creative Edge Focusing
www. cefocusing. com
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