{"id":11894,"date":"2012-03-13T12:55:10","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T19:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/?p=11894"},"modified":"2013-11-15T10:58:34","modified_gmt":"2013-11-15T17:58:34","slug":"experiential-theory-is-psychotherapys-well-kept-secret-0307125","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/experiential-theory-is-psychotherapys-well-kept-secret-0307125\/","title":{"rendered":"Experiential Theory: Psychotherapy’s Well-Kept Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Silhouette\u201cThis is a healing. I haven\u2019t allowed myself to heal. I didn\u2019t understand it. I mean I heard what people said when they said this, but I didn\u2019t understand it – until now.\u201d
\n<\/em>– Independent filmmaker<\/p>\n

At significant moments in sessions, we pay attention to the nuances of our client\u2019s experiential process as it is conveyed through their verbal and nonverbal communication; and we rely on our own experiential process for our vital clinical intuition. We listen through<\/em> these levels to grasp what our client is experiencing. It is inconceivable to consider the practice of psychotherapy without paying careful attention to experiential process.<\/p>\n

But what is meant by experiential process<\/a>?<\/em> Are there different levels of experiential process? What does it mean when we say that someone is \u201ctoo much in their head\u201d or, for that matter, too much in their feelings? What makes one type of psychotherapy really <\/em>experiential and another less so? Does experiential process have its own natural properties? If such properties exist, how can we know them? These are philosophical and theoretical questions of great value to clinicians.<\/p>\n

This article is the first of a series introducing you to Eugene Gendlin\u2019s<\/a> philosophy of experiencing, its theoretical principles, and its clinical applications. As a philosopher and phenomenologist, Gendlin makes a rare contribution to our work because he addresses ontological questions about the nature of experiencing itself. While a growing number of clinicians, from different schools of psychotherapy, know the clinical value of his experiential focusing method, the philosophy itself is less well known. Ahead of its time, it can now be seen as providing an intellectual holding environment for some of the latest developments in intersubjectivity theory, self-psychology, trauma work, and what is now called the philosophy of the implicit.<\/p>\n

My plan in this introduction is to give a brief background to Gendlin\u2019s thought and then to show you how his conceptualization of the natural \u201claws\u201d of experiential process have direct application to our work with clients.<\/p>\n

Gendlin is a philosopher who collaborated with Carl Rogers when they met in 1952 at the University of Chicago. Gendlin\u2019s first major work, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning<\/em> (1962), introduced the experiential dimension, and he went on to say that, based on his research (see below, re: The Experiencing Scale<\/em>), client-centered therapy was not enough. Rogers acknowledged this, citing Gendlin\u2019s contributions to his own article called \u201cOn a process conception of psychotherapy\u201d (Rogers, 1958, p. 142). Gendlin went beyond the person-centered approach to describe his view of experiencing in what now is called the implicit dimension of meaning and \u201cimplicit knowing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gendlin and his collaborators discovered that clients who showed no progress in therapy didn\u2019t seem to have a capacity to \u201crefer inward\u201d in a particular way. Gendlin designed a way to capture and teach this natural process to anyone interested in working with their inner experiencing. \u00a0In order to test the validity of the focusing method, Gendlin and Hendricks developed The Experiencing Scale, a statistically reliable method of measuring levels of experiencing. In the last 20 years, experiential focusing has been cited as an excellent example of a microunit of naturally occurring human change process (Patterns of Change), that can be worked with across most approaches to psychotherapy.<\/p>\n

Consider this: You have within you\u2014\u201cbeneath\u201d your everyday practical use of language\u2014another dimension, an inner language, that is an imagistic dialogue between you and your immediate experiencing. It is you speaking to yourself (and listening to yourself) in your own code. Gendlin calls it the \u201czigzag\u201d between the everyday use of language and the way we may actually hold our experiencing in a \u201cbodily felt\u201d way.<\/p>\n

We start the process when some situation in our lives\u2014something we \u201cfind ourselves in\u201d\u2014feels stuck or painful. The problem beckons to us in a bodily way. We want to move into the place where meanings can reconstellate. To touch into this realm, we sit quietly, eyes lowered, with attention inside. We let form how exactly the situation touches us, how it is meaningful to us, but in an implicit way, not in words. You might say that It<\/em> finds a way to let itself<\/em> develop explicitly.<\/p>\n

By staying still yet alert, our inner sensing seems to order itself; bodily felt senses (to be defined in the next article) carry within them a palpable sense of significance. As we let them come to us (we cannot in fact go after them!) they prioritize themselves. In a way, they tell us what we need to be attending to. As we hold them in our awareness, we let our words speak directly from our immediate sense of them. And, as this happens, something starts to happen, however subtle. Something starts to dawn on us. Our usual way of holding a situation starts to open\u2014but it\u2019s not only the situation. It is the way we \u201chold\u201d the situation. We notice a palpable change. This was a good moment in a good therapy session.<\/p>\n

If the above description seems familiar to you, that is probably because you have access to your own creative process; you refer to it without needing to know how it might work. The process has its own palpable efficacy. If you are taken by the process, Gendlin\u2019s philosophy in action, you might over time find yourself \u201cliving the practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gendlin\u2019s worldview has helped me to sit with the pauses, stuck places, and moments of uncertainty that are intrinsic to life, including to my life\u2019s work as a psychotherapist. His view of the human universe lends a beauty to the process of meaning making, helping our clients and ourselves stay alive to the creative process that makes good therapy.<\/p>\n

This first attempt to describe the microprocess of experiencing will be refined in further articles. In my next article, I will use clinical examples to demonstrate Gendlin\u2019s principles so that you can see them in action.<\/p>\n

References:<\/strong>
\n1. Depestle, F. (2007). The Primary bibliography of Eugene T. Gendlin.\u00a0<\/em> Retrieved March 3, 2012, from http:\/\/www.focusing.org\/gendlin\/gol_primary_bibliography.htm
\n2. Gendlin, E. T. (1962).\u00a0 Experiencing and the creation of meaning:\u00a0 A philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective.<\/em> New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Second Edition, Evanston IL: Northwestern University, 1997.
\n3. Rice, L. N., & Greenberg, L. S. (1984). Patterns of change, intensive analysis of psychotherapy process. New York: Guilford Press, 213-248.
\n4. Rogers, C. R. (1958). A process conception of psychotherapy. The American Psychologist, 13,<\/em> 142-149. Also in: Rogers, C. R. (1961). On\u00a0 Becoming a person: A psychotherapist’s view of psychotherapy<\/em>. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 125-159.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joan Lavender, Psy. D., Clinical Psychologist – Focusing is a type of therapy that is based on Eugene Gendlin\u2019s philosophy of experiencing. Experiential focusing is a part of the human change process, which occurs naturally, and can be measured using the The Experiencing Scale. Through focusing we begin to see the implicit ways experiences affect us, which can lead to explicit understanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2540,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[31,300,27,57],"class_list":["post-11894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-psychotherapy-practice","tag-focusing","tag-psychotherapy-models","tag-the-human-being-of-therapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2540"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goodtherapy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}