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Reddit mentions of Focusing
Sentiment score: 4
Reddit mentions: 8
We found 8 Reddit mentions of Focusing. Here are the top ones.
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Color | Multicolor |
Height | 6.8 Inches |
Length | 4.1 Inches |
Number of items | 1 |
Release date | August 1982 |
Weight | 0.23809924296 Pounds |
Width | 0.6 Inches |
It's common for previous negative memories to come up for processing. The most straight-forward treatment I've found on this is in a book with a strange title, called "Focusing". It's cheap and I recommend it: http://www.amazon.com/Focusing-Eugene-T-Gendlin/dp/0553278339/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425837262&sr=8-1&keywords=focusing
Jesus, I feel this.
I was so traumatized by a my first, extended friendzoning that I started sleeping with girls who were interested in me as soon as possible--out of the fear of becoming their friend. That doesn't result in enjoyable relationships and it's a template I'm still unlearning.
Most importantly: having sex and being in relationships has never improved my confidence. It did silence my inner critic for long stretches of time, but if you have a problem with that, therapy is a vastly better option (it was for me).
What has improved my confidence and made me comfortable talking to women for the first time in my life is learning to better feel, express, and work with my own emotions. I think some kind of daily emotional work is critical for men, because we can go days or weeks feeling totally normal, while something traumatic is brewing below the surface. I use Eugene Gendlin's Focusing technique, but somatic therapy or heart-centered meditation or anything else that lets you pop the hood open on your emotions once a day can make a huge difference.
I found that when I had the feelings of worthlessness you describe, setting time aside to feel them, concentrate on them, and try to figure out what to do with them made a huge difference over time, even if it made me feel powerless while I was doing it. Additionally, my negative emotions stopped building up and becoming so extreme because I dealt with them a little bit at a time. It feels counter-productive when you're having a great day to check-in and find out that you're actually horribly sad, or furiously angry, but it gives you chance to deal with those emotions before they become overwhelming.
Additionally, being more aware of my own emotions has made me vastly more aware of women's emotions, which makes talking to them far less scary and more intuitive. It's also let me feel what they feel more, which makes it much easier to give a woman an orgasm.
To me, real confidence doesn't come from any kind of positive self-image, it comes from competence. I've always been confident when speaking about the subjects I'm well versed in (it's one reason I'm such a nerd). When you make a habit of learning your own emotions, you become an expert in yourself, which means you don't have to be so afraid when you open up to a woman, because you actually know what's going to be revealed.
You just had an instance of what the late psychologist Gene Gendlin called the “felt-sense.” You tuned into your bodily feeling of a situation and discovered an insight about it! This is actually a really crucial part of healing from trauma. (In fact, Gendlin discovered the phenomenon by studying why some people in therapy recovered and others did not. He found that the people who recovered were tuning into their bodies and using that information to create insight.) Pretty much all good therapies for PTSD involve this process.
If you’re interesting in a formal process for having more of the sort of epiphanies you’ve jus had, definitely look into Gendlin’s work. He has a small little book called Focusing that I’ve found helpful. (Here are the six steps of focusing as described in the book.) You can also just search “Gendlin focusing” on Google and YouTube for more info.
Sorry for any confusion. If what you're doing seems beneficial, then please don't let me get you off track. I think you can answer your first question better than anyone else.
Let me offer another exercise. I don't think of it as traditional meditation, but it's related:
I find this exercise really helpful when dealing with strong emotions. If you don't have a well-established meditation practice, then I think this can serve as emergency treatment. Establishing a long-term meditation practice can then serve as preventative medicine (and so much more).
Note: this technique is my encapsulation of the techniques described in Eugene Gendlin's book Focussing, which to my mind is a western psychology adaptation of ancient meditation practices such as vipassana.
All the best to ya :)
Two that have been particularly helpful in working with more complex cases are Psychoanalytic Diagnosis by Nancy McWilliams, and Schema Therapy by Jeffrey Young et al. I have several other recommendations for emotion-focused therapy, but I'll limit myself to two I've been coming back to recently, Case Studies in Emotion-Focused Treatment of Depression by Jeanne Watson et al. and Working with Emotions in Psychotherapy by Les Greenberg and Sandra Paivio. And of course, Focusing by Eugene Gendlin.
Try reading the book Focusing.
The author seems to have identified the (learnable) skill that makes therapy effective.
I've found value in a form of meditation invented by Eugene Gendlin called (what else) Focusing. Actually it does not have anything to do with focusing as AR defined it. Its a specific method to set aside or turn down all the self-talk and analysis and let you just feel what's going on in your body and subconscious. Below is a link to the book which is still available through Amazon.
Focusing
> I have spent over a decade trying to describe these feelings and I still haven't got there. They feel very intense for a brief moment, like a second or two or sometimes less, and then they fleet away and I can't catch them in time to describe them.
Sounds like a job for Focusing! ( website, self-help book. ) The whole point is to get a handle on nebulous, negative emotions. Read the book, put a good faith effort into its methods, and you might gain the agency you need in your life.