Focusing

How it connects to Circling

None of the three practitioners’ histories that set out Circling’s roots mentions Focusing or Eugene Gendlin. The link in print runs through an offshoot: Bendell and Carr (Bendell & Carr (2021)) describe Deep Relating, which they use with groups, as grown from Authentic Relating, Circling and Focusing. The Circling Guide, for its part, lists Focusing among practices that grew up separately from Circling. So Focusing is a relative by method rather than a recorded ancestor. It comes from the same humanistic line, though: Gendlin worked with Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago (Eugene T. Gendlin), and the histories do name Rogers’s encounter groups.

Setting and contract

Focusing is taught both ways. It is a method inside psychotherapy, with its own Focusing-oriented therapists, and it is practised by lay people with no therapist present: in pairs, where one person focuses and the other keeps them company, and in peer-led groups. The first Changes group, which Gendlin started in Chicago, was open to anyone who walked in, whether to be heard, to practise listening or to pick up Focusing, and it came before one-to-one Focusing as it is taught today (Adam). That peer form is the nearest precedent for where Circling stands: a practice that grew up beside therapy and is done without it.

Aim

Focusing works on a change inside one person: an unclear, bodily sense of a whole situation is allowed to come into words that fit, and more precise meaning grows from it (Focusing). Circling sets no such goal for anyone; its attention is on the connection. The attitude is shared, though: Gendlin asks the focuser to meet whatever comes with friendliness, much as Authentic Relating asks people to welcome everything.

Where attention goes

Inward. The person focusing attends to their own felt sense, and the companion attends to them. In a circle, attention goes to what is happening between people, the facilitator’s own reactions included.

Rules for how people speak

Gendlin’s method is to let words come from the felt sense and check whether they fit (Focusing). That is close to Circling Europe’s principle of staying with the level of sensation, and to the careful noticing a circle asks for. What Focusing doesn’t ask is the other half of Circling’s speech: telling the person in front of you how they affect you.

Does the leader speak from their own experience?

Not as the method. Gendlin’s instruction to a listener is to give the other person’s points back to them one at a time, and Ann Weiser Cornell’s manual adds that the listener asks no questions; the focuser’s process is the point. In a circle, the facilitator’s and the other participants’ reactions are part of the material.

Evidence, and what it doesn’t show about Circling

The strongest evidence near Focusing is about experiencing, the process it trains. A meta-analysis of 10 studies with 406 clients (Pascual-Leone and Yeryomenko, 2017) found that clients who worked more deeply with their experience in sessions improved more: a small to medium link (r ≈ .19 with self-reported outcomes, .25 when observers rated outcome too), the same across kinds of therapy, which the authors take as a probable common factor. That is a link inside therapy. It doesn’t show that learning Focusing causes improvement, and it says nothing about circles.

Known risks

We found no study of harm in Focusing. That is not evidence that there is none.

What research could borrow

• The Experiencing Scale. An established measure of how deeply a person works with their experience in a session. Applied to recordings of circles, it could test whether circles deepen experiencing, and whether experienced participants speak from deeper levels than newcomers (Authenticity as a social script, What being met is like).
• The Changes group. A walk-in peer format with a long history, which could serve as a comparison condition in a study of circles (Active ingredients).