This is my favorite piece of writing of Gendlin*, and the only one I know in which he explicitly writes about my passion – Focusing and close relationship.
In fact, it deals with the same question I’ve been focusing on by creating HomeFocusing:
Why is it so difficult for Focusers to be as attentive and open in close relationships as they are in a focusing session or partnership?
Or in Gendlin’s words: “Why do we dump poisonous stuff just in those places where we are most welcomed, and where we most want to do our real living?”
And the following question: How is Relating possible in close relationships? Can we be and communicate in close relationships in a Focusing way?
The old thing
These are two separate questions, but first I want to establish a point where I humbly see things differently than Gendlin.
It seems as if Gendlin is concerned mainly with our tendency to “pour out” our emotions, raw and blind, upon our loved ones.
He suggests that this is our way of refusing and avoiding going back to “the old thing” – fitting in.
Perhaps it’s because of the decades passed since this article was written, a generation gap or a different habitat than mine. Where I come from – the family I grew up with, the country I grew up in – we definitely pour out A LOT. Very loudly and aggressively, since forever.
So, I worry about both our tendencies: to fit in and to pour out.
For me they are equally old, equally damaging, and they both are very much alive here and now when it comes to close relationships.
As a matter of fact, they mostly come together or follow each other rapidly: with some couples, for instance, we can find the party that often pours out, and the other party who tries to minimize the damage (to the relationship, to the children) by fitting in; Sometimes they both lash out at each other. I have even met couples in which both partners were somehow trying to fit in with what they imagined were the other’s needs.
But I think the most common phenomenon I’ve come across in my work with couples and families is a process in which someone is fitting in as long as they can, suppressing emotions and needs until it’s no longer possible, until it explodes and pours out.
We recognize this pattern in many forms of suppression.
Gndlin refers to pouring out as an outcome of not being able (or not willing) to see the other person:
“Of course we know how to be considerate, how to check the other person out first, postpone ourselves – and all that, but that feels like what we do everywhere else. In close relationships we fight, rather than accepting it here too”.
I would like to claim that when we pour out, we are first and foremost unable, at that point, to see ourselves, to listen inwardly, the way we do when we are in a focusing mode.
The most common phenomenon is a process in which someone is fitting in as long as they can, suppressing emotions and needs until it’s no longer possible, until it explodes and pours out.
We recognize this pattern in many forms of suppression.
Why do we do that at home?
This is Gendlin’s first question: Why do experienced Focusers—people with wonderful listening skills and gentle ways of expressing themselves—often act differently when they’re at home?
Many Focusers, along with other skilled listeners and communicators, would sadly admit that they are often kinder to strangers, friends, or colleagues than they are to their own loved ones.
When a mother says that her child is well behaved, nice and friendly in kindergarten, but when he comes home he becomes either “a little aggressive monster” or “whiny and clingy”, people often say to her – this is where he feels safe to express himself, to be himself.
On the one hand – this is true, we allow ourselves to be more “ourselves” where we know we are loved. But on the other hand, it is also risky: we might lose the only safe and loving place we have. Even as children: when a child hits a parent or stretches the parent’s nerves – it feels dangerous.
When we are no longer children, this is even more true: we know for a fact that we might lose the relationship if things carry on that way. This is a huge risk, but we still find ourselves reverting to the same behaviors time and time again.
Again, curiously – why do we do that at home?
I would like to make two suggestions as to why we keep entering the same vicious circles in our personal relationship while wishing deeply it would have been different.
To begin with – we were taught differently: we were never taught to pause and sense in, to give acknowledgment and care to our feelings, emotions and needs while being in a relationship.
Attending-in was even considered an egoistic move, according to the way most of us had been brought up. Our parents have often scolded us for not considering first the other person, looking at them, attending to them – first.
You may say – hey, but this is what we learned in focusing – attending in! We should know better!
But unfortunately for most of us our focusing skills remain irrelevant to our close interaction. We are conditioned from an early age and through our culture to attending outside rather than inside.
We got used to look outside without looking in, talking about the other person, instead of talking about ourselves.
The outcome of this attending-out could be us trying to fit in with the other person, as Gendlin says, but sometimes, when something there feels wrong or threatening, it would be poured out in Criticism.
The main reason for our inability to pause and attend in in close relationship is this: close relationship is a field of trauma and criticism.
I’ve written about the connection between these two in other places, how they resemble and how they inflame each other, creating a powerful vortex that sucks up everything and everyone.
We are unable to pause when we get triggered; We get triggered often by being in a conflict with our closest kin, the people we care about most, the people we depend on. Sometimes we get triggered just by thinking, feeling or believing we are in a conflict with them.
And when we get triggered, we react instinctively, abandoning our sensible parts and our knowledge of what should be “positive” relating.
We fight (criticize, “pour out”) or flee, fawn or freeze (all can be experienced as “fitting in”).
This is a crucial point: relationship, especially close relationship, is a field of trauma. Regular focusing “rules” don’t necessarily apply there.
We can practice focusing for a long time with our focusing partners, in groups, accompany other people’s processes with tender care. But when we come home, we enter a minefield.
We can practice focusing for a long time with our focusing partners, in groups, accompany other people’s processes with tender care. But when we come home, we enter a minefield.
Relating – Hope
There is hope in Gendlin’s words, and I share this hope, “that we could live in relation, really from ourselves and really with the other person“.
My hope had built HomeFocusing – my deep desire, my life force that instructed me to find an alternative to what I had known to be a family.
When I met Focusing, years before I read this secret piece of Gendlin’s, it started to happen, it became bodily knowledge. When I met Children Focusing it became practical. When I met Systemic Constellation it got a structure. When I met Trauma it became a whole.
HomeFocusing continues to give me hope and to reassure me every day that “we can sense ourselves in the fresh air of actually living with and bumping into that real other person”.
“We need training for relationships”
Gendlin acknowledges that. This is so true, but we also need to first acknowledge the Trauma. We have to create a safe space, an allowing environment for both sides to be the experiential intricacy they are, and to communicate – express themselves and listen – with respect to that.
We need this space to allow us to pause and go in. Explore our position in relation to the other person, acknowledge our worries, and fears, our helplessness – they are always there, in the delicate, complexed and traumatic field of close relationship.
We don’t want to act or to react from there, to listen or speak from there, but from our wide self-in-presence.
And we need this space to be safe for us to then go back out toward the other person in Relating.
We start building our Skills for Relating, carefully, slowly, and practice them, throughout our lives and relationships.
It is not easy. As Gendlin says, “It takes much more poise and energy to learn to do this in continuous close relationships”.
We are going to fail from time to time, go back to the old fitting in and pouring out survival modes.
But the good news is that close relationships are indeed continuous; they are long-term relationships. We can always come back to ourselves, and then go back to our loved-ones and Relate to them.
It is an ongoing process. It will always carry the risk of being hurt, and we are always attentive to it, but it’s also so worthwhile, so healing and soothing just where our oldest, deepest wounds lie.
How can both of us be present and live from ourselves, rather than neither, or only one or the other? … It’s new territory. We are the ones who are working it out. Instead of feeling defeated by all the pitfalls, we can feel like pioneers.
Thank you, Gene, for the privilege to carry this forward!
We are going to fail from time to time, go back to the old fitting in and pouring out survival modes.
But the good news is that close relationships are long-term relationships. We can always come back to ourselves, and then go back to our loved-ones and Relate.
* Gendlin, Eugene T., Fitting In, Pouring Out, and Relating [Unpublished manuscript]. Quotes in italics..