THE GIRL WHO WAS SCARED OF COLLEGE

When I first saw Evelyn, she had come to Changes, a group of people in Chicago who welcome anyone. They practice focusing. They listen to each other, help each other in various ways. Evelyn felt no purpose in life and had no goals. Nothing interested her. She had a part-time job but no idea of any work that would fit her.

She felt sexually exploited, without real sexual satis­faction in such relations as she had had. She was over­weight, dull-eyed, and sad. She was also extremely quiet.

Some of the people from whom I have focusing reports, or with whom I have done focusing, may seem to be quite hopeless when I first describe them. But focusing moves into the inside of a person. It discovers richness there. Focusing will show you this in yourself and in others. Once you see it, nobody will seem hope­less. In fact, nobody will seem to be "a type," either, for these are only superficial and temporary aspects of people.

People coming to Changes show me this over and over. Someone who first strikes me as a certain kind of person—destroyed, hopeless, listless, boring—may later turn out to be different, rich, fascinating.

And so I remember my first impression of Evelyn. A woman named Lori had been listening to her regu­larly as she tried to focus, but Evelyn was hard to listen to. She never had any feelings at all. Evelyn could only talk about externals, situations, other people. It made her anxious that she had no feelings inside herself.

Several school and community therapists had tried to help Evelyn before without producing any notable results. In effect, without saying it in so many words, they had given up on her as hopeless.

Lori wasn't going to give up on Evelyn, and she sought help from another woman, Nancy. Between them they helped Evelyn realize that being anxious about having no feelings was itself a feeling.

They and others listened to Evelyn, and helped her to focus, fairly regularly for some months. For the sake of this book, I asked the Changes people to tape-record some of their sessions; Evelyn's was one. Evelyn gave me permission to reproduce a particular focusing ses­sion that made a major difference.

By the time this session took place, there was already a different Evelyn. It had turned out, for instance, that she was bright, that she could differentiate her feelings with the precision of a thinker. There were all sorts of things in her that were the opposite of the woman she at first appeared to be. In that key focusing session she was concerned about her education.

"I guess I ought to go on to college," she said. "Everybody says I should, and I guess it's good advice. I mean, I know I have to if I want to do interesting work. But I just don't want to."

A pause, then: "The thing is, I'd have to give up everything else, and get a full-time job to pay for it, and -- like, I'd never have just time to live. Everything would be tense, and -- "

She interrupts herself. She knows she is just talking around the problem, repeating familiar reasons that have long been in her head. It is time to be silent to focus, and wait quietly to see what comes.

She sighs, and there is a long silence. Finally she says, "Well, all that about making a living and not having time, that isn't what it's about, not really." She starts to cry. "It's that it takes such a lot of faith, or something, to believe I could take that part of me seriously—I mean the thinking part, you know? The brain part, the creative... I want to be with thinking people, and I love reading and discussing and wondering about things, but to take this thinking part of me seri­ously. ..."

She has achieved her first shift. Some tight place within her has come unstuck, and her crying is a tangible symptom of that release.

There is another pause, and then a second shift. As often happens in focusing, it is a change in direction, an adding-on of a new dimension. Verbally it can contra­dict what was said before.

"Well, it isn't exactly that. I mean, about taking this thinking part seriously. I could do it, but the thing is, school is just what's in the way of doing it. School would prevent me from doing it. That's why school was always so painful for me. Like I'm so unsure I can take me seriously, I need teachers to tell me my ideas are okay, I need thinking people to tell me, ‘Yes, you're okay, you can think’. But teachers never do that. Nobody ever wanted this part of me at all. They always sent me off to do chores and other stuff they thought of, non-thinking stuff. So I had to force myself back inside myself, kind of. My thinking part had to stay hidden away because nobody wanted it. It was like I shouldn't come out. That's what going back to school feels like. It's that feeling of -- you know, not letting myself out."

Between each cycle and the next there is a silence on the tape, in which she focuses. When there is a shift in the body's way of having the problem, then she speaks again. What she now says about the problem is different. She is silent again, focusing. But she doesn't work only on the problem as she just stated it. Instead, she focuses on the whole sense of discomfort, the new murky body-sense of what still feels unresolved. In this way she is not imprisoned within the thoughts and feelings of the problem as just stated.

Notice that what the problem seems to be about changes with each bodily shift. That is why it doesn't help much to try to solve a problem by working only on the thoughts and feelings one has about it at first.

She is crying again.

Then she has yet another shift. "It's not really what the teachers think. It's -- well, this unsureness in me, this keeping myself from coming out. That's me. I mean, I'll go to college expecting a lot, and it will be the same as school always was, and I’ll be disappointed and hurt all over again. I'll always be the same. Yeah, that's what the feeling is now. It's this feeling of... that’s not going to change." She sighs. She is silent for a time. Then another shift occurs.

"Ah, yeah, it's -- it's not just that. This thing about not coming out—it isn't school. It's all the time. I've felt that way about me in almost everything. It's been there so long"

Another pause. She is listening inside again. Finally she says, "Yeah, it's like I keep myself inside because -- because there is something I have to not see. If I come out, I’ll see it. Yes, that's right." She cries for a long time. "I don't know what it is, but there is something I mustn't see, and if I come out I'll see it. No ... peo­ple will see it, and I will see it. So I have to not see anything or hear anything. And I've always been, well, confused."

She cries again.

"I have to stay confused and not see... something. And I have to not come out so people won't see it."

There is a long silence as she focuses on the felt sense of that something. For a long time there is only silence on the tape. Some unknown something that she mustn't show people has made her keep herself locked inside. Some unknown thing that is wrong with her, something she has always tried not to see, not to run into. Trying not to run into that, she has kept herself from seeing or hearing anything at all too clearly. I know, although the tape is silent, that she is focusing on the unclear felt sense of all that—the whole felt sense of "some­thing about me that I mustn't run into, that people mustn't see."

Then she cries again.

"Something is wrong with me! That's it -- and people will see it if I come out." There has been still another shift.

"That's what it's all about," she goes on after a while. "It's an old feeling way down there, that something's terribly wrong with me. I don't know what it is... some terrible thing. So I have to be careful and not come out, because then people will see it, and I'll see it too."

So that was what her body really felt about going to college.

Suppose she hadn't focused and hadn't made contact with that place inside her. Suppose she had lectured herself, clenched her teeth, and forced herself to college despite all those inner doubts. With her body feeling that way, the college experience would have been awful. More likely, she would have continued to feel a barrier in her way, and now would have said that this was the way school always was. And, of course, that was true, but only part of a larger truth.

But now she was all right. The heavy, hurting place was localized. The rest of her body was released. And just because her body felt different, she (like Fred) was now able to take practical steps that would have been hard or impossible before, and to take them in a new way. The old felt sense would not have let her go to college and "come out," as she put it -- would not have let her bring out that "thinking part" in a forceful, cheerful, confident way. But the old felt sense had changed. The changed sense not only let her go to col­lege with hope and anticipation but enabled her to be­come interested in what she was doing once she was there. She had to work harder than other students be­cause the coming-out issue was not resolved in one step. There were periods when she could not allow her love of thinking to show. But more and more her creative thinking ability came out, and she got to know and rely on it.

This could happen only through changes in the way her whole organism felt. Evelyn's story illustrates an important characteristic of focusing: You feel better, oddly, even when what emerges doesn't sound encourag­ing to anybody trying to analyze the situation rationally.

One effect of the focusing process is to bring hidden bits of personal knowledge up to the level of conscious awareness. This isn't the most important effect. The body shift, the change in a felt sense, is the heart of the process. But the bringing-up of bodily sensed knowl­edge -- the "transfer" of this knowledge, in effect, from body to mind -- is something that every focuser experi­ences. Often this transferred knowledge seems to be part of a tough problem, and it might be expected that this would make you feel worse. After all, you now know something bad that you didn't know before. Logically, you should feel worse. Yet you don't. You feel better.

You feel better mainly because your body feels better, more free, released. The whole body is alive in a less constricted way. You have localized a problem that had previously made your whole body feel bad. An im­mediate freeing feeling lets you know there is a body shift. It is the body having moved toward a solution.

There is also another reason. No matter how frighten­ing or intractable a problem looks when it first comes to light, a focuser becomes used to the fact that at the very next shift it may be quite different. Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step.

For both reasons Evelyn felt better when she made contact with a feeling that "some terrible thing" had always been wrong with her. To an analytic observer, this might seem like a nightmare: to stumble on the truth that you have kept yourself hidden for fear that some mysterious wrongness will come to light. But Evelyn felt better. She cried, certainly, but out of relief, and because the shut-in part of her was at last being heard. Crying is often the first stirring of a part of one's self that has been long held in. The body shift had felt good when she made contact with that feeling. Moreover, she was sure that further focusing would move that heavy place, just like others in the past.

When you are focusing well, you are glad about the coming of any feeling. You might hear an inner feeling say, "You're doomed!" You would consider this gently and understandingly. You would say, "Oh, that's inter­esting. A feeling of doom. No wonder I felt locked up -- if there's been a feeling like that in there. Glad it came up. Let's find out where that feeling comes from." You can take this attitude because, many times before, you have experienced feelings like that changing and resolving themselves physically in a very few minutes. Some months after Evelyn's taping session, at a large group meeting of Changes, there were some eighty people in the room. Sweeping my glance across the room, I saw a beautiful woman with bright, intensely alert eyes sitting somewhere in the middle. "Who is that?" I asked myself. "Someone new in the group?" Then I realized it was Evelyn! It had been only a few weeks since I had last seen her, but perhaps I had not looked closely at her for some time. I had been very aware of her intellectual sharpness. She had even helped me with a piece of writing. But I had never seen this!

When people change, they show it physically. At first this may not be outwardly noticeable, except in the momentary relaxation and easing of a body shift, the better circulation and deeper breathing. But over a longer period, with many shifts on different problems, it is definitely noticeable in the face, the carriage, the whole body. And it can be a startling change.

Later on, Evelyn traced the feeling of something wrong with her. It had come to her from her mother. She could then sense her mother's basic and constant attitude toward her: "Something's wrong with Evelyn. She isn't like anyone else." Evelyn discovered this with much relief and much crying, as her crowded-into-herself part at last became uncramped, and the big "felt block" shifted.

A postscript: Evelyn recently visited her parents. One evening her mother went out to attend one of a series of lectures on children. It turned out to be a lecture on exceptionally gifted children. Evelyn's mother came home excited, saying that the lecturer had de­scribed precisely what Evelyn was like as a little child. Her mother felt that -- at last -- she had discovered what had always been so odd about Evelyn.

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