"Felt Sense" and "felt Shift"
Much of what a person knows has never been consciously thought or verbalized. Felt sense is the name Gendlin gave to the unclear, pre-verbal sense of 'something', as that something is experienced in the body. It is not the same as an emotion. This bodily felt 'something' may be an awareness of a situation or an old hurt, or of something that is 'coming' — perhaps an idea, or the next line of a poem, or the right line to draw next in completing a drawing. Crucial to the concept, as defined by Gendlin, is that it is unclear and vague; and it is always more than any attempt to express it verbally.
The Focusing process makes a felt sense more tangible and easier to work with. In order to help the felt sense form, the focuser may try out words that might express it. These words can be tested against the felt sense: the felt sense will not resonate with a word or phrase that does not adequately 'say' it. When the felt sense does form, it is always tangible, something the focuser can feel in his/her body and to which s/he will have an emotional reaction.
Gendlin observed clients, writers, and people in ordinary life ("Focusers") turning their attention to this not-yet-articulated knowing. As a felt sense formed, there would be long pauses together with sounds like 'uh....' Once the person had accurately identified this felt sense, new words would come, and new insights into the situation. There would be a sense of felt movement (a "felt shift"), and the person would begin to be able to move beyond the "stuck" place, having fresh insights, and also sometimes indications of steps to take.
Read more about this topic: Focusing
Famous quotes containing the words felt, sense and/or shift:
“It was not death he feared—it was the disgrace of death, and the misery of the ignominious preparations. He knew in his heart that heaven could not call it murder that he had done; but he felt equally sure that man would do so.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity—not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)