The Mind

Most of our character is created in early childhood and is often influenced by the early trauma or attachment raptures in parent/child relationships. Unconscious patterns of behavior are created at that time and they “rule” our lives from that point on. We tend to recreate those patterns unconsciously in our relationships and in the ways we deal with the world.

We come to therapy because we began experiencing certain symptoms, such as depression, sleeplessness, apathy, anxiety, etc. We need to understand that any given symptom is created because it was necessary for the psyche to have it at the time, that it corresponds to some unconscious emotional material and it has a purpose.  This is called the emotional truth of a symptom.

The necessity of the symptom's creation lies in the recognition that suffering from the symptom feels more tolerable than the suffering unconsciously expected by the psyche from not having the symptom. In other words the initial pain was so unbearable that brain needed to compartmentalize the initial pain and create a symptom to cover it.

The Heart

Most of our character is created in early childhood and is often influenced by the early trauma or attachment raptures in parent/child relationships. Unconscious patterns of behavior are created at that time and they “rule” our lives from that point on. We tend to recreate those patterns unconsciously in our relationships and in the ways we deal with the world.We come to therapy because we began experiencing certain symptoms, such as depression, sleeplessness, apathy, anxiety, etc. We need to understand that any given symptom is created because it was necessary for the psyche to have it at the time, that it corresponds to some unconscious emotional material and it has a purpose.  This is called the emotional truth of a symptom. The necessity of the symptoms creation lies in the recognition that suffering from the symptom feels more tolerable than the suffering unconsciously expected by the psyche from not having the symptom. In other words the initial pain was so unbearable that brain needed to compartmentalize the initial pain and create a symptom to cover it.

The creator of focusing, Gendlin (1984) believed that when people develop the ability to “sense their body from the inside” and experience a felt shift as “a flood of physical relief,” they go through change and transformation. He described such awareness as a felt sense; “the bodily sense of the situation.” Through research he discovered that clients who had success in therapy had what he called “the inner act” and experienced what he called the “felt sense”– a special kind of internal bodily awareness or bodily knowing. Change and transformation happens in the body. 

The body is our emotional container and when trauma happens to us we disconnect from the body, compartmentalizing and separating mind from the body, emotions from images. By bringing our awareness to our emotional and bodily feelings, we get a clear connection with the source of traumatic experiences and also access primary emotions that were overwhelming  in the original situation.