Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

Comparing Bio-Emotive and Focusing

created 2020-02-12 · edited 2020-02-13 · open in Roam
  • This writing basically assumes any reader is familiar with at least one of Bio-Emotive & Focusing; if you aren't, go read Kaj Sotala's summary of Unlocking the Emotional Brain and then you can maybe come read this at least knowing that these two techniques are both systems for doing the process described in that book.
  • Bio-Emotive evolved from Doug Tataryn doing Focusing with his therapy clients, with an intuitive aim towards increasing emotional activation that doesn't seem common among people doing Focusing.
  • Simple table comparing:
        • BioEmotive/NEDERA
          • Focusing
      • What are you contacting?
        • Emotional brain
          • Right hemisphere and/or emotional brain
      • What are you aiming for?
        • Emotional release & clarity
          • Better handle & felt shift
      • Blending
        • 99%
          • Not much
  • Much of this page is adapted from various sources, including some comments I made on a private slack, when people were raving about Focusing and I reflected that I thought Bio-Emotive was a way more powerful, though perhaps narrower tool.
    • Someone asked if my exposure to Focusing was just from Eugene Gendlin (the original inventor, now deceased) or Ann Weiser Cornell, who has taken over the lineage and pivoted somewhat.
      • Went to Ann Weiser Cornell's intro workshop Oct 2017... found it mildly interesting but it still felt fake compared to when I learned BioEmotive. I don't think it's actually fake, I just think Focusing is confused about whether it wants to be tapping the right brain unconsciousness or the limbic unconsciousness, and Bio-Emotive benefits from being very very explicit about its limbic focus.
      • Oh and also the mode of facilitating is reversed!
        • In Focusing (as AWC teaches) the person holding space sometimes reflects what the Focuser says.
          • I often found this annoying & dissonant like "no, I feel what I mean when I say jittery, not what you mean when you say jittery".
        • Whereas in Bio-Emotive's NEDERA process, the facilitator offers ideas for what the nederer might say, and then the nederer repeats them even if they don't think they're right, and gets to hear it in their own voice.
          • And so a skilled facilitator can do wild magic, and even a novice facilitator can notice things the nederer is systematically avoiding noticing because inside/outside & different blindspots, and point them out.
      • I've also described how the emotional energy released by Bio-Emotive makes it feel really easy to do a lot. The thought of a 20minute Focusing session is kinda like "wow that'd be a lot of work" whereas the thought of a 20min Bio-Emotive session is like "aww man I'll have a lot of momentum by minute 20 and want to keep riding that wave!"
      • Also Bio-Emotive includes focusing on specific words that prior to learning them I would both never have thought of and would have rejected if I had (eg "I feel worthless", "I feel insignificant")
      • And emphasizes trying them multiple times and noticing that you may have both resonance and something blocking the resonance. Whereas in Focusing I might have been inclined to shrug or move on, in BioEmotive I learned to recognize the resistance/block and work with it, such as by shifting from trying to say "I feel worthless" to saying "it feels scary to say I feel worthless" or "I don't want to feel worthless"
      • I suspect that after another the BioEmotive I've done and will do, I could develop a new steelman of what I'd want Focusing to be for me that BioEmotive doesn't quite cover.
    • Also
      • Someone said
        • > I’d put a lot of money that teaching focusing + listening is literally all you need and everyone can self guide and unknot using just those two
      • Maybe in theory but I have experienced gentle pointing at my blindspots has accelerated things for me by like 100×? I tried Focusing but didn't get anywhere with it. With Bio-Emotive, just having a facilitator offer me phrases that I could then test for resonance, caused me to discover I resonated with words that I swear if I'd been asked to just come up with words on my own I just never would have thought of those, because I had blocks to the idea of feeling those ways, and I had blocks to the idea of having blocks about feeling those ways, etc etc.
  • Related tweets

2 linked references

February 14th, 2020

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