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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Focusing, published by CFAR!Duncan on July 29, 2022 on LessWrong. Epistemic status: Firm The Focusing technique was developed by Eugene Gendlin as an attempt to answer the question of why some therapeutic patients make significant progress while others do not. Gendlin studied a large number of cases while teasing out the dynamics that became Focusing, and then spent a significant amount of time investigating whether his technique-ified version was functional and efficacious. While the CFAR version is not the complete Focusing technique, we have seen it be useful for a majority of our alumni. If you’ve ever felt your throat go suddenly dry when a conversation turned south, or broken out into a sweat when you considered doing something scary, or noticed yourself tensing up when someone walked into the room, or felt a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as you thought about your upcoming schedule and obligations, or experienced a lightness in your chest as you thought about your best friend’s upcoming visit, or or or or ... If you’ve ever had those or similar experiences, then you’re already well on your way to understanding the Focusing technique. The central claim of Focusing (at least from the CFAR perspective) is that parts of your subconscious System 1 are storing up massive amounts of accurate, useful information that your conscious System 2 isn’t really able to access. There are things that you’re aware of “on some level,” data that you perceived but didn’t consciously process, competing goalsets that you’ve never explicitly articulated, and so on and so forth. Focusing is a technique for bringing some of that data up into conscious awareness, where you can roll it around and evaluate it and learn from it and—sometimes—do something about it. Half of the value comes from just discovering that the information exists at all (e.g. noticing feelings that were always there and strong enough to influence your thoughts and behavior, but which were somewhat “under the radar” and subtle enough that they’d never actually caught your attention), and the other half comes from having new threads to pull on, new models to work with, and new theories to test. The way this process works is by interfacing with your felt senses. The idea is that your brain doesn’t know how to drop all of its information directly into your verbal loop, so it instead falls back on influencing your physiology, and hoping that you notice (or simply respond). Butterflies in the stomach, the heat of embarrassment in your cheeks, a heavy sense of doom that makes your arms feel leaden and numb—each of these is a felt sense, and by doing a sort of gentle dialogue with your felt senses, you can uncover information and make progress that would be difficult or impossible if you tried to do it all “in your head.” On the tip of your tongue We’ll get more into the actual nuts and bolts of the technique in a minute, but first it’s worth emphasizing that Focusing is a receptive technique. When Eugene Gendlin was first developing Focusing, he noticed that the patients who tended to make progress were making lots of uncertain noises during their sessions. They would hem and haw and hesitate and correct themselves and slowly iterate toward a statement they could actually endorse: “I had a fight with my mother last week. Or—well—it wasn’t exactly a fight, I guess? I mean—ehhhhhhh—well, we were definitely shouting at the end, and I’m pretty sure she’s mad at me. It was about the dishes—or at least—well, it started about the dishes, but then it turned into—I think she feels like I don’t respect her, or something? Ugh, that’s not quite right, I’m pretty sure she knows I respect her. It’s like—hmmmmm—more like there are things she wants—she expects—she thinks I should do, just because—because of, I dunno, like tradi...