MacroShiftingDF Resources Archives

Making Psychotherapy More Effective and Affordable

Listening in focusing partnership involves cultivating the habit of wanting to understand without judgment just what someone is saying in their own terms, with good will. Learning to have an open accepting space for whatever focuser, is a lifelong project. It never ends. How much you bring there, always will affect the rest. Starting with a basic good will and being able to sustain that through the specific content and way of the focuser are so important. You cannot just do that in a general way. “From the white light I can be with anyone” is nice but not what I’m advocating. We want to be engaged with the specifics and with the person of the focuser while freshly generating an openness to that particular person.

As a listener you need to know that that being with a person in their terms is already a great thing to be doing. Otherwise you’ll be looking for something more to do instead of putting your heart into just that.

Introduction to Macroshifting

So macros are things which change with difficulty. It’s that simple, things that change with difficulty. And I’ve been defining micros as things that change more easily. So they’re both defined very simply and they are defined in a way that you could make something a micro because you think of it that way even though it took you five years of concerted effort it actually unfolded fairly systematically and so you think of that as a micro. Whereas a macro typically you work on it and you think you’re in it and you might not get anywhere and then you work further and you start to feel like you’re getting somewhere and you’re back at the beginning or you think you’ve solved it and then you haven’t and it’s just that kind of thing.

Guard Dogs

“Guard dogs” is my name of a phenomenon that sometimes arises when a person is trying to change at a deep level, and she/he is getting somewhere and there is a sudden backlash or setback. The guard dog is protecting the status quo; it is protecting the structure bound process from opening to life. Also implicit is the notion that the guard dog may be protecting you from a premature change in a deep structure, the new supports may not yet be in place so that the “bearing wall” (another key piece of my approach) can be dismantled.