The Changes Book
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The Changes Book A Handbook for Empathic Listening, Experiential Focusing, and Therapeutic Community Edited by Kathleen McGuire, Ph.D. The Changes Book: A Handbook for Empathic Listening, Experiential Focusing, and Therapeutic Community Written by many members of the original Changes Listening/Focusing Community including Eugene Gendlin, Mary Hendricks, Jim Iberg, Ann Weiser Cornell, Kristin Glaser, Ferdinand van der Veen and Linda Olsen Chicago, IL, May, 1970-1978 With a new Foreword by Kathleen McGuire-Bouwman, July 2017 Cover image via visualhunt.com (c)Kathleen McGuire-Bouwman, 2016 Director, Creative Edge Focusing (TM) www.cefocusing.com, [email protected] Table of Contents Kathleen McGuire-Bouwman, New Foreword, August 2017 .....................................1 Part One: The book and the Changes community ................................................5 Ferdinand van der Veen, Why Changes and a book about Changes are important to me ..5 Kristin Glaser and Eugene Gendlin, Main themes in Changes, a therapeutic community ..7 Part Two: About listening ...........................................................................14 Ferdinand van der Veen, Some thoughts about what listening is .............................14 Ferdinand van der Veen, How to do listening: an explanation for people new to Changes . 19 Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Absolute listening .......................................23 Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Further steps toward better listening and focusing: centering and checking .............................................................................27 Linda Olsen, A beginning listening/focusing group ..............................................31 Ann Weiser, Common problems in a beginning listening group ...............................41 Kristin Glaser, Some more thoughts about beginning listening groups, including what you might do if there is no leader ......................................................................45 Part Three: About Focusing .........................................................................47 Kristin Glaser, Introduction .........................................................................47 Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Focusing issues: guidelines, steps, additional aids, problems, feelings and felt sense, alternate instructions, self-attitudes, and when to stop .....................................................................................................49 Jim Iberg, Why focus? Or, What happens differently due to focusing? .......................72 Mary Hendricks, A focusing group ..................................................................77 Part Four: Doing more - advanced listening and focusing methods .........................84 Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Doing more ...............................................84 Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, How to use your feelings and thoughts of the other person without laying trips on him/her........................................................... 90 Betty Lou Beck, Self-healing meditation .........................................................96 Part Five: Relationships and group interactions ...............................................100 Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Interactions ............................................100 Ferdinand van der Veen, Dialoguing: a way of learning to relate constructively in close relationships .........................................................................................108 Kristin Glaser, Suggestions for working with heavy strangers and friends .................115 Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, In your own group .....................................121 G. Daniel Massad, Learning together: the way we do it ......................................124 Kathleen N. Boukydis (a.k.a McGuire), Rules for listening in task-oriented groups ......130 Judy Henderson, The politics of group process ................................................134 Part Six: The history of Changes ..................................................................141 Kathy McGuire, History of Changes 1970- 2016 ................................................141 Rough draft of the History of Changes, First Year by K.G.: Crisis Hotline .................152 Jean A. Rickert, History of Changes in the past year .........................................161 Ann Weiser Cornell, A rough History of Focusing ...............................................164 Part Seven: Beyond roles ..........................................................................166 Eugene Gendlin, Beyond roles ....................................................................166 Kathleen McGuire-Bouwman, New Foreword, August 2017 “Changes” Empathy Focusing Groups: a model for bringing people together Overcoming prejudice and stereotyping through simple skills of empathic listening and self-empathy focusing In May 1970, National Guard troops shot to kill at students of Kent State University who were protesting the Vietnam War. Several students died, and the USA convulsed. The 1960’s and 1970’s were a time of social upheaval in the US. Customs and norms were breaking down, lines were being crossed and, in reaction, rigidified. The civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and the rising feminist movement were all pushing the boundaries of mutual understanding and cooperation. This book offers the wisdom and particular skills of empathy and self-empathy which grew up as one community’s response to the violent divides of the 1960’s – 1970’s. The 2000’s are a similar time of social upheaval. Shocking shootings of innocent people convulse communities. We are confronting and questioning old lines between rich and poor, black and white, women and men, “insiders” and “outsiders.” Once again, especially at the interface between “the establishment” and marginalized people, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, refugees, the criminalized, women, there are huge gaps in understanding, leading to violence of many kinds. Well-known journalist Dan Rather, President Barack Obama and many others have pointed to the “empathy deficit” in today’s United States of America. And, as different from the 1970s, the existence of cable news, the internet, and social media allows us to be aware that this convulsion, this clashing, violence, and misunderstanding are happening on a global scale. It is even possible that lack of empathy for the natural world is endangering the very existence of our planet. The Changes group model for support groups teaching skills of empathy and self-empathy is a relevant solution to the issues of “empathy deficit” throughout our world. In response to the Kent State Massacre, a group of graduate students in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at the University of Chicago began meeting, with their mentor Dr. Eugene Gendlin, to find their own way of taking positive action in this cultural situation. After trying established political practices, like getting 1 petitions signed, they decided to turn their particular skills to the needs of their local community, the Hyde Park area on the south side of Chicago. They turned their attention to drug use and suicide; homeless and runaway youths; mental illness in the community; integration of ex-convicts into the community; interactions with the police and established agencies in meeting these needs. Crisis phone hotlines were springing up as the culture’s response to this crisis. The graduate students decided to start an alternative model of response. They had a crisis phone line, but they also invited all who called to their Sunday night Changes group meeting at a local church. They invited everyone to become equal members of their supportive, therapeutic community. At the meeting, they taught everyone Carl Rogers’ Empathic Listening skill and mentor Eugene Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing skill. Rogers’ Empathic Listening, setting aside your own prejudices and stereotypes, advice, opinions, and judgments, and simply trying to “reflect,” or to “say back” the words of another person, had already been widely researched and practiced as a necessary component of psychotherapy. Rogers had invented Client-Centered Therapy, based upon “empathy,” “congruence,” and “unconditional positive regard,” as an alternative to the more authoritarian practices of Freudian psychoanalysis. Already in the 1950s, Rogers had extended the use of Empathic Listening to conflict resolution among blacks and whites in the USA, and warring parties in places like Northern Ireland. But the people in the original Changes group discovered the self-empathy Experiential Focusing skill as a needed partner as a way of healing our “empathy deficit” and bridging gaps between us. Gendlin’s Focusing (www.focusing.org; Focusing, Bantam, 1981) and its extension into the Inner Relationship Focusing method of Ann Weiser Cornell (www.focusingresources.com) teach the “radical acceptance” of everything INSIDE of ourself. This is self-empathy: being able to turn toward and kindly receive all of the lost and disowned and devalued parts of your own self. Freud knew a century ago that, if people could not accept some part of themselves, they PROJECTED that unacknowledged part of themselves out onto other people in the world, often with a strength of hatred and disowning which Freud called “reaction formation.” If I am afraid of any homosexual feelings inside of myself, then I may passionately hate homosexuals out in the world. In order to develop true empathy for