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Jim Iberg, Why focus? Or, What happens differently due to focusing?
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There is something of an answer to these questions in my last interaction with my mother and father. I want to feel my whole sense of that interaction in relation to these questions, and see if I can say the main things that are true about this experience for me that relate to focusing. Then I'd like to describe my experience to show more specifically what I mean.
The words that come to me now from that whole sense are the following: time with Mom and Dad is really scarce. We never have enough time to do all the things we would like to do or talk about together, so it feels crucial to me to do the things that are most important for me to do with them rather than
spend the time on less important things.
My part of my interactions with Mom and Dad is controlled to a large extent by past patterns and feelings, so that there is a tremendous force working to keep things going just the way that they have always gone. Often the way things have always gone is doing things that are not what is most important for me to do with them. But if I want to do something differently, just wanting to do it is not enough. Something special has to happen which allows me to be aware of my feelings out of which I want to do something differently. If that something special does not happen, then I don't feel these feelings out of which I want to do something new; all I feel are the feelings that keep me doing it the way that I have always done it with them.
Focusing is a thing to do which promotes that something special happening. It allows me to have closer to my awareness my feelings out of which I want to do something new. It gives me some words that express those feelings just right, so that I am not doing something new and faced with how that changes everything and also trying to find the right words for myself all at the same time. Through focusing, I can have one part of this already done ahead of time, before meeting that situation I want to change, which is making the right words for myself. Then I am a little less likely to confuse the way that doing something new necessarily feels hard with my fear that I really don't have anything that is right for me to say there. If I get confused like that, I am likely to give up trying to do something different and to do it the old familiar way. Having focused makes it a little more possible for me to feel the fragile, subtle new feelings in the midst of all those familiar and compelling old feelings. By having made words that really
say them accurately, I can feel these new feelings more strongly and clearly, and this helps me to keep my sense that these feelings really are something that is right for me.
Now I want to describe more specifically my personal experience from which I am deriving these ideas about Why focus?
I have a sense of urgency to see Mom and Dad that comes from caring for them and some way that my interaction with them isn't complete or as full as I want it. Out of this urgency I have been going to see them more frequently than I used to.
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Because of limited time together and the way past patterns and feelings are so compelling, many times I go to see them and come away with no change in that sense of urgency.
But my last visit was different; something happened in our interaction that made it more complete and fulfilling for me, so the urgency lessened somewhat. I see this as having been facilitated or made possible by two focusing experiences that I had before this last visit with my parents. At this point, l would like to describe the focusing experiences as they happened and later try to indicate their relevance to my relationship with Mom and Dad.
The first focusing experience came about after an earlier talk with my parents. They told me about a lifelong friend of theirs, who's about their age, who I know pretty well. She had a frightening experience at a wedding which they all attended. When they described her experience, I had several immediate reactions inside of me which at the time I labeled " judgmental, " " unjustified, " and " threatening, " so I said nothing. A few days later, back in my apartment, I noticed that I was thinking about this friend of my parents, and recalling those reactions that I had had to her experience. But here at my apartment, I didn't have the judgments that had kept me from saying anything to my parents. So, I became curious why I had such a different response to my same thoughts here and there, and decided to focus on how I felt there such that I stopped myself from saying my true reactions. The focusing went like this, with me asking these question to my feelings:
" How was l feeling at home when they told me about this? "
(I ask this question and then sit quietly and just feel how I was there. After 15 or 20 seconds of feeling this, the answer comes. )
“I was scared and a little smug. "
(Now I have something more to focus on. So, I ask a question to one of these feelings and sit quietly with that. )
" What is that smugness? "
" I know something about things like that. I feel a little proud of myself for my knowledge here. "
" What is this ‘proud’ feeling? ”
" This has a little defiance in it; that is something I know more about than Dad. Oh, yes. This is connected to a way that I always feel a little intimidated and inferior in comparison with Dad. He has always known how to do it better. I feel scared here. ”
" What is scary here? "
" I won't make sense! Maybe I can’t say what I think in a way that will make sense. Maybe it will sound ridiculous. Also, it might strike them as a challenge. "
" Can I say my reaction to their friend's experience so that it makes sense to me? ”
" I felt sad. I remember the way she looked and sounded to me the last time I saw her. (At this point the words that I had for my reaction changed. Where I previously only had one sentence that sounded like a judgment of her, I could now say specific things I had observed and own my feelings about and
interpretations of those observations. That changed my sense of how I could say it to Mom and Dad. )
" How do I want to say this to them? "
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" l want to say it simply as my perception, which may be inaccurate in terms of what was happening to their friend. I don't have a stake in being right, but they might not see it as a possibility unless I said it, and might miss what to do about it if they hadn't seen it as a possibility. "
The second focusing experience occurred in response to a painful interaction I had with a policeman acquaintance to whom I speak occasionally when I am walking my dog. He is probably about 60 years old, and struck me always as a really nice man. But in this interaction, he was expressing angrily and hatefully what I consider to be a very racist way of thinking. I was shocked by this kind of thinking coming from this person I had seen as a " nice man, " and at the time felt paralyzed to be able to say any more than, " I have a really different feeling about that. ” So, the focusing began with the painful feeling about this interaction.
" What is this pain? "
" You participated!
I participated in this active expression of racism by failing to express my feelings. "
" Why didn't I express my feelings? "
" I felt scared, and my feelings just withered away. ”
" What is scary for me here? "
" It's a fight.
It feels inside me like verbal disagreement is the first step toward physical violence. I have had some experiences that leave me associating physical violence with hurt and humiliation. Also, it is terrible to argue with others. "
" What is terrible about that? "
" Keep a happy face.
This is my impression of my whole extended family speaking to me. There was a strongly adhered to, but never said explicitly, avoidance of verbal expression of disagreement. There were some specific experiences where disagreements were ignored until they were so powerfully felt that the expression was explosive and near physical violence. Disagreement was a matter of somebody being right and somebody being wrong. And whoever was wrong was a bad person. "
Saying all this to myself let me see that I believe the violence I feel in disagreement results not so much from the differences as from trying to ignore them. Also, I want to test saying my different experience, to act on trusting my feelings and experience and the belief that I am an OK person. I see in retrospect that I was trying to avoid the pain of violence, but in doing that incurring the pain of participation. And in reality, the pain of violence isn't avoided, just postponed until a blow-up.
Sometime after these focusing experiences, I decided to go to visit my parents, partly to get a check-up for my car, since I can get that done cheaper and more reliably there than here in the city. I had been putting this off and was finally feeling pressured to have it taken care of, so I decided to go out on a Wednesday morning and come back on Thursday morning, a typical brief visit, necessarily happening during the week when my dad was working, because the band I was in had jobs for several consecutive weekends. So, I went out there with a lot of things to do in the short time; I also wanted to change the oil and wash the car, which I often do out there (some of the deeply ingrained patterns of behavior), and I took my guitar along, hoping to get in some practice time. Mom and Dad also have their routines, of course, so the relaxed time to sit and talk is at a premium. In addition, I got away late, and was an hour behind schedule on arriving to have the work done on my car.
After finally having talked to the car people, I was home for lunch, and letting the oil drain out of the crankcase of my car, and just remembered some of my feelings about the friend of my parents, and I asked how she was. They reported that a doctor had seen her and found nothing wrong, which was consistent with some of my interpretation of what her experience had been about, so l found myself saying my thing about that. (In the absence of the blocking-my-true-reaction feelings that had changed as a result of focusing, my reaction just came out very naturally. ) It was a little hard for them to hear, but it felt good to me to be saying it, and I didn't get into feeling threatened by their having a hard time hearing it. Part of what I said in my reaction was about how important I think it is
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for a person to talk to somebody who is able to listen, without taking sides, to all the feelings the person is having. Well, a few minutes later, my dad went back to work, and it seems that this talk about feelings led my mother to telling
me some of the hard feelings that she was having in relation to one of my brothers. As I listened to her (with some difficulty) about her feelings in relation to my brother, I started to get the impression that she wasn't seeing my brother as a whole person, but just seeing him as the struggling part of a person that she was worried for. This made me think of how when I feel a lot of concern or worry about another person and how they are, it almost always turns out to be something about me that I am having those feelings about. Then I realized that I was feeling quite concerned for my brother, and in a way making a plea for Mom to perceive more of him than l thought she was. I asked myself how this concern was concern for me, and realized that part of what was happening for me was that I had something going on inside of me that I hadn't told my parents, that I knew they would have feelings about. I felt scared of that, but then remembered my focusing on that scared feeling that had come up in my pain about that interaction with the policeman. I could feel that I wanted to do this differently, so I told Mom that 1 was thinking about living with Sally, to which she had the reactions that I expected, of judging that harshly as long as we weren't married.
The ensuing conversation with my mom, later resumed with her and my dad when he came home was a very special experience for me, in which I was able to stay connected to feeling OK about me, and confident in my own experience and feelings even in the face of the negative judgments expressed by my parents about what I was thinking of doing. It turned out to be a sharing that I really valued. It did not feel like an argument, but like something about which we differed, and about which I wanted the benefit of their thinking and experience to make sure for myself that I would do what was right for me. I noticed very distinctly that I was more fully present and visible with my parents in this conversation than I can remember being. Whole parts of me and my values and ways of thinking came into that conversation, and my dad shared some of his personal experience that I had never heard before, and we shared some notions that apply to our very different experience which felt very validating of those notions. Another effect of this conversation was a shift in my feeling of legitimacy about Sally. I noticed later that night I referred to her and had a really good warm prizing feeling about her, where before I had been mostly reluctant to even refer to her in their presence.
I don't know if the effects of the focusing are apparent in this example, but to me they are very salient; having focused on my feelings about saying my thoughts about my parents’ friend, got me to a place to be able to say some of that, and that experience shifted a whole balance in our interaction, which led to more sharing of feelings. In the midst of this, I came to the scared-about-differences place where before I would likely have chosen to just drop it, or talk about my brother, but not about what I was scared to say about me. But having focused on that earlier gave me the awareness to be able to choose to do something different here, which resulted in a quantum leap in my ability to share differences, and now feels crucial in the way that it was confirming of my trust in my own feelings and experience, and also my loving feelings for my parents and my respect for them as whole human beings.
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