SELF THERAPY

This keeping of our attention on the problem as a whole, while allowing new details to emerge, requires serious concentration, as Rodin noted in connection with artistic creation. What we are trying to attend to is what lies beyond the things we already feel and think. To use Gendlin’s picture-language, it is as if there are unclear ‘edges’ surrounding the things we can say and think clearly. There is always more to a situation than we can think or say, and we usually don’t know where exactly in this haziness lies the way forward in our difficulty. Focusing is essentially about giving attention to the hazy edges of what we already know. It involves noticing where something feels just a bit awry, or incomplete, where something ‘niggles’ us, or we have a hunch, or an inkling about something, but can’t yet put it into words.

(Campbell Purton, Self-Therapy: A focusing guide, pp. 37-8)