Summary Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: The Experiential Method addresses specific ways in which a therapist can engender the therapeutic process, especially with clients with whom nothing effective is happening. Working with transcripts of actual sessions, the author examines each client statement to show where therapeutic movement has taken place and then each therapist response to show how it did or did not help bring about a kind of direct bodily experiencing called "focusing." What the author shows can be used in any orientation of therapy. Individual chapters address bodily energy, action, habits, behavior, traumatic memories, imagery, catharsis, emotions, cognitive assumptions, values, super-ego messages, dreams, role-play, interpretation, and client-therapist interaction. The author shows how the therapist's responses can turn difficulties into moments of relational therapy. Most importantly, he shows how whatever arises inwardly in the client is respected and pursued. Table of Contents 1. Introduction I. Focusing and Listening 2. Dead Ends 3. Eight Characteristics of an Experiential Process Step 4. What the Client Does to Enable an Experiential Step to Come 5. What a Therapist Can Do to Engender an Experiential Step 6. The Crucial Bodily Attention 7. Focusing 8. Excerpts from Teaching Focusing 9. Problems of Teaching Focusing during Therapy 10. Excerpts from One Client's Psychotherapy II. Integrating Other Therapeutic Methods 11. A Unified View of the Field through Focusing and the Experiential Method 12. Working with the Body: A New and Freeing Energy 13. Role Play 14. Experiential Dream Interpretation 15. Imagery 16. Emotional Catharsis, Reliving 17. Action Steps 18. Cognitive Therapy 19. A Process View of the Superego 20. The Life-Forward Direction 21. Values 22. It Fills Itself In 23. The Client Therapist Relationship 24. Should We Call It "Therapy"? |