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1974-1978: Changes International
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1974-1978: Changes International
Around 1974, Gendlin got a sabbatical to go to New York city as a visiting professor. I think it was Mary Hendricks, his partner, who really wanted to live in New York. Kristin Glaser had moved to Vermont. And I moved to Toronto (with that husband my team had helped me find! ) A lot of the main people were moving away. So, others still in town kept Changes Chicago alive. Maybe Dave Young and Ann Weiser Cornell can speak to this, or maybe it was Elfie Hinterkopf and Les Brunswick.
At this time, a group of people also got together to write this book about Changes, The Changes Book: A Handbook for Empathic Listening, Experiential Focusing, and Therapeutic Community, latest version dated 1978. Gendlin and Kristin Glaser and Mary Hendricks wrote various things including the " rap manual. " Many others wrote about various other aspects of the Changes experience as well as the basic philosophy underlying it. As one of the last assigned editors, I have decided to offer that book online now, in 2016, so that people can experience Listening and Focusing in supportive community as it was being developed, freshly, by founders who were impassioned about these ideas. Changes had also gotten some national recognition and had been included in books on radical approaches to social support. Various of us had published papers about Changes in The Radical Therapist, Communities magazine, Voices, and other journals of the times.
The Changes Book never got picked up by a mainstream publisher. Everybody moved to different parts of the country, we had some conflict about editing issues, and it remained circulated only within our community. In part, I think Mary Hendricks and Gene Gendlin had decided to put their energy, and revisions of their chapters, into Gendlin's Focusing book (Bantam books, 1981, since reprinted and translated throughout the world).
We did form Changes International at this point, in 1974. Tom Brouillette started a newsletter called InterChanges, and we had a number of yearly conferences. Joan Klagsbrun hosted one in New Hampshire. There was one in New York. There was another outside of Boston. Kristin Glaser hosted one in Vermont. I hosted one in State College Pennsylvania around 1976.
1976-1978: From Changes International to The Focusing Institute
To my mind, this conference that Zack Boukydis and I hosted in State College, Pennsylvania was a turning point in the history of Changes Listening/Focusing Communities vs. The Focusing Institute emphasizing Gendlin's Focusing. Because of my great interest in decision-making and conflict resolution as part of the original Changes model, I included times for decision-making and conflict resolution, using our Listening/Focusing skills, as basic parts of the structure of our gathering. And, saying it in short form, some people rebelled, especially Gendlin.
To my mind, although The Focusing Institute might have existed in some way at that point, Gendlin more formally split away from Changes International and started The Focusing Institute as a separate entity. Ruth Arkiss and Doralee Grindler played roles in directing the beginnings of The Focusing Institute (TFI) while Gene and Mary were still in Chicago.
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Gendlin and Mary Hendricks-Gendlin came back to Chicago for a time, starting The Focusing Institute with the help of Doralee Grindler-Katonah as the first Director around 1978(? ). Ruth Arkiss helped get out the word about Gendlin's Focusing book, marshalling forces to get it into bookstores throughout the nation. Bebe Simon helped with early workshops and training, especially for the first visitors from Japan and Germany.
Bebe also started a Changes Group in her own apartment on the North side of Chicago, a group which has met once a week ever since then! Elfie Hinterkopf went to Germany and Japan to teach workshops. And the international Focusing movement had begun. But it was a number of years before The Focusing Institute moved to New York and became a formal non-profit with Gendlin and Mary Hendricks and Mary McGuire as the Directors.
At that time, they also set up a method by which all of us were now to apply to become Certified Focusing Trainers and Focusing Coordinators and Certifying Coordinators and to sign contracts and pay dues.
And some of us did not like this transition from being equals in a peer counseling community to having to pay dues and sign allegiance to The Focusing Institute in order to continue teaching Listening and Focusing. In my case, it took a good 10 years before I became willing to go to The Focusing Institute in Chicago and get formally certified and become a Certifying Coordinator.
And during that time, I continued to start Changes groups wherever I lived. In 1981, I had published my manual, now called Focusing in Community: How To Start A Listening/Focusing Support Group (also available in Spanish translation for $5 as a computer download from the store at my website, www. cefocusing. com, or in paperback from the Focusing Institute store).
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