Thirteen. Experience Beyond Roles.

In our time an advance in the nature of the human individual is occurring.

Throughout history people expressed themselves in routine patterns of language, and understood themselves that way, too. Types of emotional experiences were labeled: if someone cheated you, you were angry; if someone gave you something, grateful. No doubt peo­ple suspected that there was more to it all than that -- more than one could say or understand -- but nobody knew quite what that "more" was.

To express ourselves (even to ourselves) and to han­dle our situations, we need to get into this "more" of our own experience. At first this "more" revealed cer­tain causes and contents that seemed to be the same for every person. Of course, there was no agreement on just what these universal contents were, and several systems arose to say what they are. Then, more deeply, it was discovered that beyond systems the unique indi­vidual emerges.

In the most recent years there has been a great de­velopment: millions of people have "gotten in touch with their feelings." If one has not been accustomed to turn inward to one's feelings very often, it is a big life-step to do so. Many methods and movements exist that have this as their essence.

Focusing is a different, further step. Beyond contacting feelings there is a different inward "place." A holis­ tic body sense, at first unclear, can form. It is a sense of the whole meaning of a particular concern. It is from this "place" that a series of inward shifts, a road of many steps, can arise. An inward texture of detail re­veals itself and changes.

We found focusing by studying patients who already did it. We didn't invent it. We only made it specific and teachable.

Human experience, we now understand, does not really consist of pieces or contents that have a static shape. As one senses the exact, finely complex shape at a given moment, it also changes in this very sensing.

A person's experience cannot be figured out by others, or even by the person experiencing it. It cannot be expressed in common labels. It has to be met, found, felt, attended to, and allowed to show itself.

A vignette will help show what I mean.

I had been asked to teach listening and focusing to a group of psychotherapists and student therapists. One woman, a therapist-in-training, didn't feel like an equal in this group. It contained only one other woman. It included her supervisor, several co-workers, a man who was her therapist, and me, the visiting teacher.

When it was her turn to say a little about a problem (so we could practice listening), she said her husband insisted that she talk when she came home. He had aided her long struggle for professional training, and now he wanted her to share her experiences with him. It was only fair. Yet when she came home she wanted to rest, to be in herself. She wanted to be able to refuse.

I obeyed the rules of good listening and said just that: "You long to be in yourself, to rest, to be able to refuse. Is that right?"

Something inside her suddenly seemed to uncramp. She looked up and her eyes glistened. "Yes, to be able to refuse! To be able to go by my own needing and feeling! To let that count for something even in relation to another person! Yes, yes!"

The others had some questions. Was she not being selfish, hostile? Was she not avoiding contact with another human? Wasn't she showing some lack of mature development by her need to withdraw in order to find herself? Whole chains of deductions could be made from the little she had said, and many routine labels could be applied to it.

No one seemed to want to take what she had said as she had said it. Everyone seemed to want something else, something she didn't say, to be what was "really" there. I had "only" listened.

She braved the supervisor, the therapist, and the others. Now she could feel that she knew exactly what she was experiencing. It resonated in her. The words touched the experience, and the experience supported the words.

She had discovered, through being heard accurately, that her feeling had its own personal shape and being.

But couldn't one argue that this woman's experience fits a common pattern? The woman who asserts the reality of her own experience: isn't this pattern 17B, so to speak?

No, a person's experience is not a pattern. It might seem to fit a pattern just now, but moments later it will -fit another or none. In any case, the seeming fit will never be exact, for experience is richer than patterns. Moreover, it is changing.

Experience is unique when focusing has unfolded it. As someone told me once, in regard to a room in which we did a lot of focusing and listening: "In there, v/hat goes on has never happened before in the history of the world." He meant that each person's unique ex­perience, as it went through steps of focusing, had never been encountered before. But he also meant to point to the fact that in history, until now, ordinary people have not generally done this.

It is a new step in human development when people can not only get in touch with their feelings but then also move through steps of unfolding and change. We are moving beyond conformity patterns.

Nonconformity has always been possible, of course. But those who rejected traditional patterns often found themselves adrift, lost, without values and standards.

Focusing replaces those patterns with a way of making new patterns.

If we are busily discarding old forms and patterns, what will replace them? New forms that are equally fixed and painful? New forms can come from inside each person instead of being imposed from outside. A world in which this happens won't be a world in which people get forced into forms that cramp and hurt. It will be a world in which forms are used in a new way.

Let's examine this possibility in a little more detail.

Many people today are struggling with a baffling fact: The old patterns that are supposed to make life work -- and once did -- no longer serve. Being a parent today, for example, doesn't work if we try to do it as our parents did, yet no other form is established for us to follow. We have to make it up as we go along -- often learning that what we just did was wrong.

Similarly, some women find the housewife role empty and intolerable, but are often unprepared for anything else even if they know what it might be. The pattern of being a woman is changing, but people argue whether it is changing into this or that new pattern, as if even­tually, somehow, a fixed form must be imposed.

And what are the proper roles for sons and daugh­ters? Can you become your own person yet still care for your parents? This is a question each young person con­fronts.

These old patterns once were useful. The mass of people (always with odd exceptions) fitted themselves into the roles and routines they were assigned and which gave them an inner life of emotions. Only a small num­ber of educated and thinking people created roles and patterns.

But today this dependence on routines and roles has changed. A large part of the mass of people is edu­cated and literate. The creativity and creative needs of people have expanded, and now the routines are too confining. People find that they have feelings that are far more complex than accepted roles either demand or offer.

How can more developed individuals make a better social structure? It is a large, unsolved problem. We know a lot about how social patterns form individuals, but if one begins with individuals... there is a gap. We don't know how individual development can ever reach the level of social structure. That is why there has been so little progress in the character of social and political units.

Focusing is only a piece of an answer. It lets people find their own inner source of direction. It can be a source of new patterns, devised freshly by each indi­vidual.

Instead of static structures we need structure-making. This would not be unstructured. Without structure noth­ing happens. It would be an expected and understood constant restructuring. Social situations could be struc­tured so that they could be restructured by the partici­pants.

Instead of having only the predictable, expected emotions the roles call for, we often have unclear feel­ings. They are unclear because "clear" feelings are those that are already patterned. We must make new phrases to express these unclear feelings, and new forms of action to carry the feelings into daily life. This -is the process of form-making.

To an extent, we are all engaged increasingly in the form-making process.

This is where the big change can come from. If we accept ourselves and each other as form-makers, we will no longer need to force forms on ourselves or each other.

Today most people still assume that a new set of forms will eventually be agreed upon. The implication is that, as before, we will have to force those new forms on ourselves and each other.

It is true that a lot of this old-style form-forcing is still going on. For example, people now think the new role pattern is not to be jealous or possessive. If their spouse or lover is having a sexual relationship with someone else, they feel they should accept it. But they don't. Then they go through vast struggles with themselves to force the new role pattern on themselves.

Free sex is the new form; and while they are ready to change the old, the new one forced on them may not fit either. Endless hurt goes on, along with feelings of guilt and self-blame, because the new form doesn't fit. "What's wrong with me?" the question goes. "If this form fits everybody else who is brave and new, why doesn't it fit me?" Only the form is new. This is the usual way of conforming to forms, old and new.

Some couples who know focusing are developing unique and differentiated ways of opening their rela­tionships. Others say they have a new respect for jealousy as they can feel it in their bodies. What is clear is that adopting general patterns, old or new, is not the way. Our bodies constantly absorb new learn­ings, additions to their already gigantic store of wisdom. Real learning can occur only in dialogue with one's body. A sensitive focusing approach can eventuate in really livable patterns suited uniquely to each of us and our close people.

The feelings seem like inner things, strong and often unchanging. To reveal that a feeling is not a thing, one must sense beyond it. It is different to sense the whole of a situation as a not yet clear body-sense.

Feelings often conflict with reason. Many feelings are less wise than reason, yet reason alone is rarely enough to change us, or to rely on.

The holistic felt sense is more inclusive than reason. It includes the reasons of reason as well as what made the feeling, and much more. That holistic sense can be lived further, and has its own directionality. It is your sense of the whole thing, including what you know, have thought, have learned. It includes both what you think you "ought" and what is not yet resolved. Thought and feeling, ought and want, are not now split in it.

Said one person: "More and more I want that inner sense of knowing that I get now sometimes. I wish I had it all the time."

What is at first sensed unclearly and holistically is more basic than the thoughts, feelings, and ways of acting that are already formed, already cut out into existing patterns.

A society of pattern-makers is coming. It cannot help but be a society in which people are also more sensitive to, and intolerant of, social brutalities and oppressions, and more able to act to change them.

 

APPENDIX

 

A. Philosophical Note

Focusing is part of a wider philosophy (Gendlin 1962, 1973). In focusing one pays attention to a "felt sense." This is felt in the body, yet it has meanings. It has all the meanings one is already living with because one lives in situations with one's body. A felt sense is body and mind before they are split apart.

What is the relation between this un-split body-mind and our more usual logical thinking? I have dealt with this question systematically in my philosophical works.

Focusing is not an invitation to drop thinking and just feel. That would leave our feelings unchanged. Focusing begins with that odd and little known "felt sense," and then we think verbally, logically, or with image forms -- but in such a way that the felt sense shifts. When there is a body shift, we sense that our usual kind of thinking has come together with body-mind, and has succeeded in letting body-mind move a step.

What we can trust is not just body-mind, not just thought, not even such a step. We trust the series of steps.

Thinking in the usual way, alone, can be objectively true and powerful. But, when put in touch with what the body already knows and lives, it becomes vastly more powerful.

There is a new method here, not only for personal concerns but also for theory and science. Logical think­ing stays within whatever "conceptual boxes" it starts with. It has only the different, competing interpreta­tions, assumptions, viewpoints -- and one must stay within one of these. When felt sense is the touchstone, one can try out all kinds of different concepts without being locked into any one set. This is what scientists (now rarely) do when they come up with something new after living with a problem for a long time. Rather than using concepts only, one can return to one's un-split felt sense of whatever one is working on.

One can keep whatever each set of concepts or as­sumptions shows, and yet also go free of them and go directly to the felt sense. In that way one can emerge with something else that those concepts could never ar­rive at, and make new concepts.

A new basic model, a new way of understanding experience and nature, is involved. Experience and nature are not like our concepts. Our concepts are each just so, and not otherwise. Truth does not lie in thought alone. It lies in how various thoughts relate to experi­ence, whether they bring something into focus from experience or not.

Experience can never be equated with concepts. But experience is not "undefined" either. It is more organized, more finely faceted by far, than any con­cepts can be. And yet it is always again able to be lived further in a new creation of meaning that takes account of, and also shifts, all the earlier meanings.

How this relation between concepts and experience changes logic and conceptual structure has been pre­sented elsewhere (see references 5 and 10).

This philosophy leads to a new method of human thinking.

 

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