THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO THOUGHT DEATH WOULD BE PEACEFUL

Fay phoned me in the middle of the afternoon. She had been walking through city streets all morning, with thoughts about suicide. "Life is too much trouble," she said, and she really felt the limits of weariness and despair. "What's the use of going on with it? Where does it get me?"

Fay had talked to me before and I knew about some of her life. She is an attractive woman of about twenty-eight. A few years ago she had broken up with a man for whom she had felt a lot of love -- call him Ted. She had not loved a man before or since. Since Ted had left, she had spent time with a succession of other men, searching for another Ted but not finding one.

"What feels so bad?" I said. "Give yourself a peace­ful minute and see what feels so bad."

Quicker than I would have liked, but after at least some time of silence, she said: "I didn't get my period. I'm scared I'm pregnant."

The last time she had talked to me she had told of being with a man whom she found dull, stuffy, insensi­tive, not interested in her as a person but only as a sex partner. She had spent a weekend with this man.

"I miss Ted so much!" she cried over the phone. "And now my period is late. What if I'm pregnant? Oh God, what's going to happen to me?"

I could sense that her agitated feelings were running off again. She was finding it hard to stay more peace­fully with her attention lower down inside, as focusing requires. She was obsessed with painful emotions in­stead of trying to find that deeper place, the felt sense.

I asked her to begin with what I call the "first move­ment" of focusing. This is the act of pushing problems to one side temporarily, stacking them, stepping back and looking at them. In a way, this is something like coming into a room so cluttered with furniture and packing crates and bric-a-brac that there is nowhere to sit down. You push things around so as to clear a little space for yourself in one corner. Of course, you haven't emptied the room. The things that were in your way before, the problems, are still there. But at least, now, there is a space for you to be.

"Just stand back, now, and take each thing that's bad, and stash it in front of you. One by one. See what each thing is that feels bad."

She cleared her space. The two major problems she found herself looking at were that she wanted Ted back, and she feared she might be pregnant.

"Which one is the worst?" I said.

"It's missing Ted that hurts the most," she said, beginning to weep again. "The loneliness, not having anyone to turn to ... it's no use...."

Another agitated, self-destructive emotional spiral was beginning and I interrupted her. (In much the same way, when you learn to focus, you will learn to interrupt yourself.) "Why don't you go down inside there," I said, "and see what the worst of that is? Just stay quiet for a little while. Get to the unclear body sense of all of it."

She knew what to do. She had focused before. If you ask why, in that case, she needed me on the phone at all -- why she hadn't simply sat down and focused her­self -- the answer is simply that it can help to have an­other person present, even if that other person is only a friendly voice on the phone. This is particularly true if, as in her case, you are caught in a trap of emotions and can't seem to get out. Often, when that happens, all that is needed is a friend's voice saying, "All right, let's just sit and be quiet for a while...." A friend can interrupt an emotional spiral when you feel powerless to interrupt it yourself.

I listened to the silence on the phone as Fay went into the second movement of focusing. She was making contact with the feeling of "all that about Ted being gone." With her, as with most practicing focusers, these movements tended to flow into each other and become one, just as a practicing golfer or pole vaulter puts many separate body movements together into one fluid motion. Having gotten the felt sense, she sensed the quality of it and got a "handle" on it -- a word that fitted the quality exactly. (Third movement.) Finally, she checked the words against the feeling and found them right.

"It's all about anger, or something," she said. "I don't know. It's like I'm angry -- at -- Why would I be angry?"

She was asking herself or me for an intellectual analysis. I didn't offer one. Focusing avoids analyzing. I also tried to help her not go off on an analysis. I said, "Go back to the felt sense and ask it, see what the anger is." Asking is the fifth movement of focusing. She asked the felt sense, directly, what the anger was about.

I heard her sigh as this happened. I knew something had shifted inside. To the focuser, a shift is a definite, physical feeling of something changing or moving with­in, a tight place loosening.

After another silence, she said, "I’m angry at myself. That's what it is. For sleeping with all those men I didn't love, didn't feel anything for." Analysis would not have produced this answer. Instead of being figured out, it had to come from the felt sense.

Back through the focusing movements again, waiting for another shift toward resolving the problem. It is a shift whenever the felt sense changes, even if just a little. Then more silence and another step: "And part of it is, I'm angry with myself for sleeping with Ralph, maybe getting myself in trouble -- an abortion, maybe. And I call myself bad, also, sleeping with a man I don't care for." Another deep breath.

Sometimes a shift will seem to clarify what emerged from a previous shift, or to elaborate it. This is what happened just now, when she had found "And I call myself bad...," which continued from what came before. But then her next step changed the previous series. In focusing, one must take what comes. Often what is next for the body is not what would logically come next. This happens frequently in focusing. It is unpredictable and fascinating.

She said, "There's a kind of heavy discouraged feel­ing." And after a while this heavy discouraged feeling opened and the details came out. "It's about all these men I don't care for. I have no sexual feelings with them".

She was silent for a while. I heard her say that word "discouraged" to herself, as though she were trying it out. Apparently it didn't quite match the feeling, for she sounded dissatisfied with it. She checked with the feeling again to see whether a more exact word would come up from it. She was trying to match a specific physical sensation.

This experience of Fay's is a common one in focus­ing. A change begins but seems oddly, mysteriously in­complete. It gives you the start of a shift, but you know (your body knows) a more complete shift is possible. You stay tuned to your bodily feeling and wait for it to happen.

Suddenly she said, "Weary!" The relief in her voice was clearly audible. The complete shift had taken place. "That's it. I'm weary. I feel like I'll spend the rest of my life going from one dull man to another, never feeling sexual but never letting myself stop trying. I can see all those men lined up ahead of me, all those blank faces, rows and rows of them from here to the end of my life. I'm condemned not to have sexual feel­ings, that's what."

I waited for her to say more. Evidently she felt that this focusing session had accomplished what she needed for the moment, for she suddenly said, "I feel better now. What a load to get rid of!"

Get rid of? To a rational observer, she had rid her­self of nothing. The problems that had existed when she first phoned me, the problems that had driven her close to suicide, still existed. What had she really accom­plished by focusing?

She had changed inside.

It had seemed a problem of loneliness. With the first shift it was her anger at herself, and with the next shift it was her calling herself bad. Then the heavy discouragement came up, and with a bodily release it turned out to be a conviction that she would never again have sexual feelings. Even as she sensed this last, it changed in her body.

At such a time one cannot yet know just how much change has happened. Many more cycles of focusing would be needed later. But a change happens in a body shift. Some change happens even in the mere bodily relief of sensing and touching the trouble in just one definite deep place.

When she first phoned me, her bad feelings were diffused throughout her body. Her whole body hurt.

But now she had localized the problem and it had shifted. The rest of her body was released.

Focusing helped her in a time of desperation. In the following months she continued to focus and to change inside. Eventually her sexual life and some other painful aspects of her life became rewarding. By that time she had woven focusing into her way of living. It became more than a therapeutic tool to be used in times of crisis. It became something to be used every day, a comforting and familiar part of daily existence.

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