What’s Bothering You?

Focusing

I can’t say I’m an expert in therapy. I’ve had some experience with it over the years. But, not much in a group setting. What I have come to see in reading articles on Medium is the writers here are very generous with how they have coped with emotional problems in their lives.

I am by no means 100% emotionally well-balanced. I plug away at it all the time. Sometimes I find myself in ruts, other times I am good to go. But one thing I did learn many years ago was that there will never really be a day when I am completely “cured”. At the time I had hoped to be able to go through my therapy and come out whole at the end of it.

It turns out that for me anyway, the deal is that I will address whatever hurts most at the time, learn some new skills to cope, heal a little bit and get on with life.

The good part is that, yes, things are good. For a while. The bad thing, I thought, was to say the therapy had not worked which turned out to not be the case at all.

What I was finally able to realize was my journey toward balanced emotional health was actually a life-long journey. It was not over once I was through with one course of therapy.

The therapy got me to a place where I was happy again and most importantly, where I had learned some tools to use to cope.

When it got overwhelming again, then, I could revisit my arsenal of coping tools to see if they would once again help to get me back on track.

Sometimes they did and other times they did not.

So, rather than being dismayed that my therapy had not worked, I now know that it worked until I was stronger because of the skills I had learned and better able to address the next thing that hurt emotionally.

Each of us has skills to share and one I’d like to share is my own personal trigger.

I didn’t realize I had a trigger until a friend of mine who was a psychotherapist, now since passed on, pointed out to me that magically attracting every bad driver in the city was my trigger. As I complained to him that everywhere I went that morning on my way to work I encountered people who just could not drive; they tailgated, they ran red lights, they didn’t stop at stop signs, they didn’t signal properly, and God knows what else they did that morning in the 20 minutes it took me to get to work.

Thayer, my friend, said to me, “Those drivers have always been bad drivers. Why did you suddenly notice them this morning? What is really bothering you?”

I was surprised, to say the least. But I realized he had something. At my next opportunity, I found a quiet place and reached deep down inside of me. Sort of a meditative state with the question being, “Why am I upset?” The answer is supposed to come to you and to know you have the right answer you will experience a noticeable physical relief. Like your headache goes away or you feel like 10 pounds have been lifted from your shoulders. Maybe you can breathe deeply again.

This technique is called focusing and was first written about by Eugene T. Gendlin in his book called, “Focusing”.

It’s a small exercise to help us. I’m grateful to be able to share it with others.