Focusing-Oriented Therapy with Disconnected Process
Disconnected process refers to a structure-bound state of blockage in which at least one or more aspects of oneself are kept out of awareness. Most often, there is a pronounced difficulty in recognizing and relating with the felt quality of experiencing, at times manifest as a distancing from immediate feelings and bodily sensations.
In one sense, most everyone manifests some level of disconnection, even when we say “Fine,” to the question of “How are you doing today?” when there is clearly more happening inwardly that is either not experienced or not verbalized.
At more severe levels, there can be a chronic lack of awareness of what one is experiencing or feeling, to the point of not recognizing emotional or physical reactions. Sometimes, certain parts of experiencing are kept out of awareness as when there is an unconscious, automatic pattern of blocking out aggressive, sexual or anxious feelings.
When extreme, people may not be aware of any feeling or sensory experiencing, and when their consciousness can detach from bodily reactions so that there is a reporting of being “numb” or “blank” or “feeling nothing”, or, at its most extreme, “deadness.” The basic pattern involves some type of splitting of awareness: between the person and the body, or parts of the body, or some aspects of experiencing, or between “parts‟ of the personality.
A man comes to see me to overcome social anxiety, especially with public speaking and with women. In the midst of describing his fears, he states, “I don’t know what to do to eliminate these anxious feelings… It’s not clear…” While he is stating this, I observe his hands making this distinct movement: both hands are facing each other, fingers curled, making a sphere-like shape, with hands rotating back and forth in opposite directions around this sphere. I point out the movement and invite him to observe and sense the feel of the gesture, what it might be conveying to him. He first observes the gestural motion, then closes his eyes. “What it feels like is something in me crawling into a shell, closing off from the world… It feels safe in there, like I’m protected and sheltered.” He says his whole body feels calmer, and that something about the gestural motion feels right to him. He describes how his hands are showing a spherical shape, something that could comfort a scared, insecure part of him by holding it safely inside this shell. “Yeah [sigh], if I could protect that part of me in this shell, it feels more comfortable, and my anxiety goes down. I feel much more relaxed.” What a great illustration of something Eugene Gendlin writes: “More powerful than letting words come from a felt sense may be letting body movement come.”