The following topics are entry points in our collective exploration of how we can use Focusing to embrace complexity in group process.
Beyond Dyads
What makes the standard dyadic structure work so well is that it provides the safety needed to explore sensitive material and fresh ideas. This includes clear Focuser and Listener roles, protected turn-taking, and nonjudgmental listening. In groups, especially when there is conflict, these protections weaken by the very nature of involving more than 2 people and 2 structured roles. Participants are more likely to be triggered, and not to have room for processing the activation. Hence, we need to explore ways to adapt the Focusing model to groups so that we can create the safe and stimulating holding environment that makes Focusing possible in those situations.
Bruce Nayowith
Facing Our Blind Spots
My introduction to TIFI was the wonderful 2021 Embodied Liberation Conference. Much of what happened there, I’ve found, is rare in other Focusing spaces. I have been on the excluded side of a harmful dynamic the “in crowd” seems oblivious to. Yet other movements thrive on intersectional sensibilities. I’ve experienced DEI training skillfully facilitated with Mindell’s Process Oriented tools, and seen young climate activists and LGBTQ+ facilitators create dynamically inclusive spaces. I long for Focusing groups to listen for whoever or whatever is excluded, exiled, or in the blind spot at any moment. Inclusion can be learned. Its skills build authenticity and offer the thrill of belonging to a fullness with room for everything but denial. Such a group ripples deep and wide.
Contributed by “L”
Focusing AND
Focusing is brilliantly effective for getting along with myself, but solitary practice does not automatically teach us how to handle interpersonal friction or complex group dynamics. Gene Gendlin recognized this limitation, repeatedly speaking of “Focusing and…” to point toward what else is needed. As has often been said, “Under stress, we do not rise to the occasion; we fall to our level of preparedness”.
My exploration centers on the concrete relational containers that must be prepared when groups gather. How can we draw on practices like Interactive Focusing and Thinking at the Edge (TAE/TAME) to repair ruptures, navigate differences, and welcome the implicit “more” without sacrificing safety or falling into artificial harmony?
Barbara J. Dickinson
Implicit Intricacy in Group Process: Philosophy and Practice
We want to follow Gene Gendlin’s footsteps as we explore Focusing-Oriented Group Process. So, we will be paying attention to both experiential and philosophical perspectives in such a way that they reinforce each other. The notion of complexity, more specifically the notion of Implicit Intricacy, is developed in Gene Gendlin’s essay “Thinking Beyond Patterns” (1991), where his project is framed as thinking with what exceeds pattern, and “The Responsive Order” (1997), which refers to an implicit order that is more than our concepts. It is also part of “In having more than one shape, the truth is more, but it isn’t a shape.”
Living Process in a Group
In a group, our attention is pulled toward what is happening in the process of the group. So, in the impulse to understand, there is a pull toward concepts, taking sides, or importing ready-made approaches that might contradict our own Focusing sensitivities. We may also be pulled into ‘performing’ Focusing instead of bringing a Bodily-felt quality, uncertainty and complexity, to each moment of interaction and thinking. We want to explore how we can make staying present to our living process part of the group work.
Dr. Greg Madison
Our nervous system in a group process
As Focusers, we are familiar with the notion of “Interaction First.” We may sometimes forget that interaction is not just a philosophical concept, it is an embodied experience mediated by our Autonomous Nervous System. There is a lot to be learned in tracking activation as part of our group process.
Tension of the Opposites
To draw out what is implicit in individuals’ felt experience and felt knowing in a group, it can be more productive to have a debate between opposing sides than try to create a feel-good group uniformity. This reflects our left and right hemispheres which complement each other and which can compete and co-operate at the same time (for example: in an organization, having a chief executive and a chairperson who can work together and challenge each other).
Peter Afford
What Do We Mean by Community
Sometimes I have been told that I am part of a community, yet I do not feel like a member. In other instances, I have felt like a member without any explicit recognition. This leads me to wonder: how is a community formed? What characteristics distinguish it from an association, a society, a group, or a club?
I suppose that family members, friends, professional or work colleagues, neighbors in a shared territory, and so on, may—or may not—form a community. But what characteristics do we expect to find in them to justify calling them a community?
Dr Salvador Moreno Lopez
What Do We Mean by Safety in a Group?
Safety is often treated as a given in groups, but we rarely look closely at what we mean by it. This area of exploration invites us to dig deeper, with questions such as: What does safety mean for each participant? How much responsibility do we each have for our own safety, and how much should the group look after it? Is feeling unsafe the same as being unsafe? What happens when a claim of feeling unsafe starts to steer the group? Is it OK to be with ‘feeling unsafe’ and learn from it?
Dr. Greg Madison
See: Group Focusing | Various Approaches