Mary Hendricks, A focusing group

Mary Hendricks, A focusing group

Introduction

A focusing group is an interpersonal structure which enables an inward focus and articulation of experience for each member. We are in a time when our cultural tradition is not working for many people. The socially expected behavioral and emotional patterns do not stand in a facilitative relationship to experience. Our interpersonal structures, or routines, often seem to hinder felt life. For example, marriage is supposed to enable intimacy, but for some people it is only when they terminate the marriage structure that along with the pain is a new freedom to explore relating and intimacy. When one can spend time alone ending interaction requirements for large blocks of time, the sense of self may deepen and form in a new way. When a degree is granted ending 15 or 20 years of school structure, some people become freer to read and think for themselves; education begins. When intimacy and interaction and thinking are required by outside structures, people, more or less well, cope, produce and seem to have the experiences the structures are designed to enable and support. Yet on a deeper level the structures can oppress the experience they exist to enable. As I. Illich says, " … when cities are built around vehicles, they devalue human feet; when schools pre-empt learning, they devalue the autodidact; when hospitals draft all those who are in critical condition, they impose on society a new way of dying. "

Some people are able to use extant social structures developmentally and self-expressively. Others participate in the expected routines because they don't know what else to do. As expected routines, they are the way one has a place in community. To eschew them leaves one alone without access to money, intimacy, colleagues, recognition. In such isolation, we violate our interactive nature. Yet to occupy our " expected" place is a violence to our complexity, richness and differentiation capacity.

To read a book because of a felt need to know something, to call a friend because you'd like to talk to her, to sense with another how to express life-time loving in terms of a community are different actions than when performed as part of a pre-extant demand structure. When we try to fit ourselves to social patterns, do the things we're supposed to do, feel the feelings we're supposed to feel, there can be distress, self-estrangement, and internal deadening. (Sometimes it is helpful to “try on" an existing structure. By putting oneself in a particular kind of situation one sometimes can experience the feelings and living that are typically involved in it, for instance: mistress, wife, teacher. )

Some people, seeing no alternatives, go through the motions of the expected routines, but take their " self" out of them. They operate on automatic control. But the self remains experientially undeveloped. Nothing really touches them.

When an individual can make touch with his or her own structuring process, then the social patterns that emerge facilitate one's felt experience. The power to directly refer to and differentiate one's own experience, is a structure­creating process. When I select my readings as I need to from within, it turns out they form a pattern. That pattern expresses me, enables me to go further with my evolving intellectual process in a way not possible if I'm only following someone else's curriculum. When I reach out to a friend because I want to share this particular experience with this particular person, a friendship develops whose structure (frequency of contact, kind and content of contact, etc. ) fits the two of us. It is likely to be unique to us. For example, with one friend I dance and meditate. That's where our centrally felt needs overlap. With another, we read together and go to movies; that's where our interests draw us together. A third friend I talk with every day, we share how we're each feeling. It's not that with each friend I've agreed to only do a certain activity. We sometimes do others too. But we've allowed where we are in fact really drawn together to shape our relating. Each relationship is created differently by each of us sensing what it is we wish to share. This contrasts with a more stereotypic social form for friendship.

Often people live deadened inside routines not knowing how to differentiate their own experience and how to make structure with others that expresses their rich actual feelings or interests. I call " transition structures" those forms which teach people how to move from being caught in imposed social patterns to being makers of new forms and also help people choose existing structures that better fit their living.

Focusing (Gendlin, 1968) is such a transition structure. It is a series of internal questions in response to which one's own articulations (structures) arise. One silently attends to one's experience and waits for a symbolization to emerge from it which carries it forward. Focusing is usually done alone or with one other. Knowing focusing I focused on my wanting to be with others (a group) in a way that wasn't a tense imposition on myself. Usual ways of being in a group include maintaining proper social conversation, not showing too much feeling (or nowadays showing enough feeling and self-exposing material), working on a joint content project. We needed a transition structure that would help us move from fulfilling formal group norms to becoming a structure-creating group. Out of this need for a communal transition structure grew the focusing group.