Accessing the "felt sense" by the Focusing process

A client was thrown, unmanned and regressed, into an inner room of panicky despair by his mother’s three words: “Are you sure?” Twenty-eight years old, he had lived in the family-of-origin home his whole life, as had his several siblings. This, by cultural impera­tive and years of his parents’ mental and physical abuse. Now therapy had helped him know and touch his feelings, some deeply. It had encour­aged him to care for himself. He made a decision and conceived plans to move out and live with his girlfriend. Two months passed – work, therapy, silence at home. The day came when he informed his mother of his intention. She replied with that simple question. At our next session, we looked for what unearthly content inhabited those words that had so trans­formed him into an egg without a shell, sent him to a zone of terrible lostness. We saw that had she said the expected: “I don’t think you should leave,” or “We don’t want you to leave,” he would have stood tall. Some long-dormant defiance – real-plus-therapy push-back – would have activated, and he would have said “I’m going to” or “I need to.” Had she cried, he might have felt outrage, or sadness, or dazed, or even some unkind victory after all the abuse. Had she been angry, it would have fed his mettle. But she said “Are you sure?”

How did that unravel him?

It took some time and a confused searchlight, but we saw that she was setting him free. By her question she was assuming what she had absolutely no right to assume: that he was an indepen­dent person who could deliberate on his own, whom she hadn’t neurotically bonded to herself his entire life.

What she had done was to summon the impossible paradox of a child who needed the parents he had never had, and now had to leave. What she had done was abandon him by respecting him. Why was he now in indecision? Where was the strength of the past four months up to a few minutes prior? Where most of our strength is, in our tragedy, in our adult knowledge, need and resolve. I believe that most strength, after most childhoods, is girded by our head. Who we were in the past, what we needed, cannot really change.

He is moving out. Over time the umbilical cord will weaken further, the adult mind will grow more accustomed. There may be a time, after reaching his higher plateau but still on the journey, when he returns to the Empty Chair, his father sitting in it. It was too much, the last time.