Focusing at the Confidence Clinic

One of the things that I believe helped me get my job at the Confidence Clinic eighteen years ago was the fact that I was a certified Focusing Trainer. Not that any of the hiring team really knew what that meant, but rather because it sounded like a “Clinic” kind of thing. (For those of you readers who do not know what “focusing” is, it is a way of tapping into your body’s wisdom – or in the language of our women, it is a way of reminding yourself to “trust your gut” sense of a situation. If this sort of thing interests you, you can learn a great deal more about it than this very rough definition by checking it out at www.focusing.org.)

As a Program Coordinator and then later as the Director of the Program, I introduced focusing in the classroom as part of the “life skills” curriculum and then offered to guide those interested through the process on an individual basis. Some women liked it very much and took advantage of the individual sessions. One woman told me, ”All my life I have been told to ‘take care of myself’. Now for the first time, I know how to do that!” Others told me that they found it relaxing and healing. One woman who had had trouble sleeping for years, used the early steps of focusing (called “clearing a space”) to put herself to sleep. Some of the women used it regularly to process their issues deeply. Some used it, but only occasionally, for example when they had a decision to make and were unsure what path was a good fit for them, or in a crisis when they were flooded with emotions and needed the support of a focusing session with me to help them find a way forward. Some of them took parts of focusing only, such as finding a “safe place” inside to help them when their world got too overwhelming or scary.

A few women found focusing itself scary. Occasionally I met a woman who was extremely uncomfortable with the whole concept of looking inward (usually this was because her pastor had told her she risked the possibility of encountering evil spirits there). More often, the problem was with doing anything that had to do with body sensations, which was often the case for those who had been subjected to physical and sexual abuse as children.

Focusing is a gentle practice which can only happen voluntarily, so while I encouraged the women to listen and support each other in all of our classroom activities, no one was required to participate in the focusing process itself. In fact any attempt to do that would have been a dismal failure as well as a major violation of the focusing ethic.

Sometimes, five or more years after graduating from the Clinic, a formerly reluctant woman might call me and say, “You know that focusing thing you used to do? I think I might be ready to try it now.” And I would invite her to come and have a focusing session or two with me.

In any case, in one way or another, focusing became an integral part of the Clinic experience for some women and was at least a part of the general atmosphere for others.

What I have gradually discovered doing this oral history, is that the whole process of focusing can be seen as a kind of metaphor for the whole of what takes place at the Confidence Clinic.

Focusing is a deep listening to yourself - a kind of “paying attention” to what your body wants to tell you, by sitting quietly with whatever you encounter there with a nonjudgmental, compassionate attention, and letting whatever needs to unfold do so. At the Confidence Clinic, we pay this kind of attention to the women and the women quickly learn to pay attention to each other (and to the staff) with this same kind of compassion and acceptance. We all encounter each other with what in the focusing world is called “the focusing attitude”.

Time and again as I have interviewed participants and staff, I have heard people speak of the experience of being allowed to be whoever and whatever they are without judgment or pressure to become something they are not. I have heard the words “compassion” and “listening” and “nonjudgmental” and “caring” to describe the staff and the whole Clinic process. Paradoxically, personal change and growth occurred precisely because no one pressured them to change. What we did was listen and care.

And because they were in a place where listening was the main mode of operation, the women listened to each other and cared. The rigidly religious women genuinely loved and cared for and accepted the nonbelievers just as they were. The “class clowns” gave and received quiet compassion to and from the sad or serious women. The “high talkers” listened to the introverts. The introverts spoke out in defense of the “high talkers”. They accepted each other, loved each other, and cheered each other on, to be and to become whatever they wanted to become, even when that was not at all what they might choose for themselves.

I can’t take credit for creating this focusing world, because that is what I found when I arrived. I do think my background in focusing is why Clinic always has felt like such a good fit for me. Even those who were not comfortable with the specific inward looking process of focusing, were in fact creating focusing kinds of relationships with one another. And if they were hesitant to listen to themselves deeply, they found themselves surrounded by others willing to listen to them wholeheartedly.

There is no way that that cannot be wonderfully healing.