CONTENTS
Acknowledgements and Note on the Notes
Introduction
1 Therapy and self-therapy
Can a self-help approach to one's problems be an effective alternative to seeking counselling?
2 Focusing basics
We often respond to situations without doing anything like Focusing, as when we get angry at what we take to be an insult, or become sad at the loss of something we valued, or spontaneously help someone without reflecting on whether it is a good thing to do. But there are other times when we don't quite know how to respond to a situation, or we respond while also feeling that our response is not really appropriate, or we can't respond in the way we would like to respond.
3 The Focusing process
You may find that you can Focus simply by using the brief instructions in the previous Chapter, but for most people it may help to go through the steps involved in a bit more detail.
4 Elaborations and difficulties
This Chapter deals with a range of issues that can come up in connection with Focusing. It elaborates on what has already been explained, and looks at some difficulties that commonly arise.
5 Trauma
In the previous Chapter we considered how to deal with the 'narrowing' effects of strong emotion, and looked at various imaginative possibilities such as 'setting the difficulty out', 'sitting down with it', 'projecting it onto a wall'. But sometimes these don't lead anywhere, either because you get caught up in the emotion, or you detach from it, or you don't have any sense of the issue as a whole. You might for example simply have recurring intrusive thoughts, or 'flashback' images of a disturbing event, or sudden inexplicable attacks of anxiety.
6 Moods and medication
In the context of therapy the distinction between moods and emotions is of some importance. Examples of moods are: feeling anxious, depressed, suspicious, happy, irritable, morose, contented, bored, cheerful. Moods are different from emotions in that they don't have to be about anything; they don't have to have a specific object.
7 Action steps
A successful Focusing process brings not just a change in how we think about our situation, but also in how we see it and feel it. However, as we discussed in Chapter 2, it is sometimes one thing to see and feel what we need to do, but another to be able actually to do it... When we have reached a point such as this, one option is to Focus further on what exactly it is that prevents us from doing what we really want to do. We may then discover more general aspects of our behaviour, of which the present difficulty is just one manifestation.
8 How does it work?
some people are naturally curious about how attending to one's difficulty in a Focusing way can be helpful, and how exactly this 'Focusing approach' to one's difficulties is different from other approaches. This Chapter is addressed to such readers. It is also addressed to readers who already have some familiarity with Focusing.
Notes
References
Index
