A PROCESS-SKIPPING STORY by Peter A. Campbell, Ph.D. 1. The Story 2. The Emerging World of "Felt Sensing" 1. The Story Rather than trying to describe process-skipping in a technical fashion, let me share one of my own process-skipping experiences as an easier way to illustrate this addictive psychological behavior. Many years ago it became clear that my mother needed to be moved from her apartment into some sort of care facility. I was, fortunately, able to find one that fit our budget and mother was certainly well cared for. However the personal inner struggle triggered by that experience led me on a journey through unowned aspects of my experience that, at the time, I scarcely knew existed. After I moved her and walked out of the care facility, I felt uneasy. But this was nothing compared to the guilt that surfaced two or three weeks later. Finally, I couldn't take it any more and drove the long distance back to visit her. The guilt ceased for a time. But soon would come a phone call or anniversary and the familiar pattern repeated itself. Guilt inevitably returned. Fairly soon a predictible sequence became evident, not to me, but to those who knew me. Something would trigger feelings of guilt about my mother being alone in the center and my response, in order to alleviate the guilt, would be to drive the 300 mile round-trip for a visit. I never took time to sit with my guilt, to wonder about or listen to it. I simply "reacted." GUILT--go visit mother. In fact, I soon became addicted to visiting mother as a way to "handle" my guilt. Some people use work, alcohol, or drugs to deaden such feelings. Others have such an overpowering "need to please" that they fall into all kinds of addictive behaviors as a way to ease inner pain, insecurity, and confusion. It is clear that the direction toward a felt sense is always into and through the feeling, never away from it. Yet, for me, every time I felt guilt, I moved in the opposite direction, trying to "deal with it" by visiting my mother. I skipped right past the point of entry into my own process. I quite literally became addicted to visiting my mother as a way of controlling the feeling of guilt. I substituted this activity in place of entering through the emotion into the felt sense of it all and allowing my untold story to unfold. Right at the threshold of guilt I took a direction that made some form of addiction inevitable. I substituted visiting my mother in place of being in touch with how my body carried the uncomfortable feelings that no one had ever taught me to be with when I was a child. Psychological addiction involves a "substitution" of one behavior, feeling, or attitude in place of another, rather than becoming congruent with and "processing" what is real, thereby allowing it to unfold and tell its story so the body-feel of it can be carried in a different way. People make this same tragic choice every day of their lives in situations far more complex than the simple example I am sharing. But the psychological process remains the same. We seek to control the "bad feeling," to make it go away, or substitute something better in its place. In the course of doing this, however, we fall prey to the very psychological mechanism of escape that we have stumbled into or perhaps deliberately chosen. It soon becomes our jailer, locking an addictive pattern in place. We become its slave. We can now put a label on that pattern. It is "a Process-Skipping Structure." The label, of course, can never help us to change. But the understanding it brings can alert us about where to look in experience for our own process-skipping structures. Process-skipping structures are not just obvious things like drugs and alcohol, sex, work, or pleasing other people. Prayer, meditation, volunteer work, anything that can be substituted for a congruent owning of what is real inside me contains the negative potential for contributing to a process-skipping pattern of addiction. Developing the habit of noticing and nurturing our important feelings teaches us a special way to be "in" our guilt, or whatever other feelings need to be heard, without trying to fix any of them. It allows time just to be quiet in how something actually feels in my body, right now---how it is carried within the sensations, emotions and body felt sense that lie beneath every aspect of awareness. If we remain with this non-verbal resonance in our bodies long enough, without trying to force the mind's meaning upon it, sooner or later it will speak and symbolize itself--often in surprising ways. A word will come, an image, a memory will bubble to the surface, perhaps tears or a delighted giggle at some felt humor in the seriousness of it all. And when the connection is made, when the symbol fits, something inside says, "Yes," and lets go in our body. From that point forward, your felt carrying of that issue is never again the same. You may still need to take further steps. Other aspects of the issue may yet remain to be heard. But your body has been gifted with some kind of loosening. The ice has thawed and cracked a little. The floes break up and begin to float once more. Movement starts to happen, meaning begins to unfold. What becomes so painful for each of us is when the feeling of being blocked always remains the same. That is where burnout and breakdown occur. But if there is some sense in your body that movement, any movement in the feeling of an issue has happened, then hope rises anew. It's amazing how much "unfinished stuff" we can live with when we sense it is "on the way." I certainly know I felt this in my own guilt. When I finally took time to create a caring presence around this negative feeling and not just react in an addictive way, my incomplete story began to unfold. There was deep anger and resentment over unfinished issues in childhood--separation because of war and illness over which my parents had no control. But I still felt these absences and the pain of them. The resentments were deep inside, still carried in my body. My mind had arrived at its own adult explanation. But my body's unlistened to story was still seven years old. The process described in this website teaches how to be with your important feelings and felt senses in a way that allows them to grow, to change, and to unfold so your body may carry these experiences in a different way. I was taught a vivid lesson about this one evening when I went for a quiet stroll and noticed a small, stuffed ball lying next to the road. Picking it up, I continued my walk, idly tossing and catching the ball. I was struck by how rarely I had taken time for this simple pleasure since boyhood. Frequently, my toss was off and I'd need to run a bit to catch the ball. It was then that I became very aware of something--a consistent pattern. As I tossed the ball and it fell back toward me, I would follow until it was about a foot from my hand when, suddenly, my eyes would veer away in the last split second before the ball actually came into my grasp. "Keep your eye on the ball." The words came back from grammar school baseball experiences--but this time I really heard them. For the next several moments I was very conscious of disciplining myself to watch the ball all the way into my hand. I could sense a different body feel in the experience. When my eyes veered away, there was a feel of flinching--an avoidance. But when I followed the ball all the way into my hand, I noticed a kind of newness, something fresh, like I had never done this before. Then I fell into one of those precious moments of reverie where things began falling together and my experience took on a meaning far more significant than what appeared in this idle pastime. Not only did it reveal a great deal about myself, it offered a fresh perspective on my life's work. Most people know they have feelings. What they don't know is how to follow those feelings all the way into their body whenever they need to change. Like my eyes following the ball, most of us veer off at the last moment, rarely experiencing the newness of what it is like when such feelings can change and unfold from the inside. Noticing and nurturing your important feelings is a simple, easily learned process that can help you follow a feeling all the way into your body. The difference this made for me was striking. When compulsively visiting the care center, I was invariably there to get the monkey of guilt off my back. I fulfilled a duty. But I was rarely present to my mother with that deeper communication and sharing wherein there is true companionship. I'm sure mother felt this in some way. However, as I took time and began allowing guilt to unfold, I found that mother and I were becoming friends. We shared a great deal, had much in common, and were both blessed with a similar sense of humor. For me, it was a wonderful gift, finally, to discover my own parent as a friend, and I looked forward to visiting her from a more healthy place inside myself! 2. The Emerging World of "Felt Sensing" Back to Top Many years ago people routinely died of something called "consumption." It was an ominous word covering what we now know could have been anything from cancer to tuberculosis. Given the limited knowledge at that time, one word was used to cover a multitude of maladies. We face much the same situation today with our very limited traditional distinction between "thinking" and "emotion." "Emotion" is a word much like "consumption." It is a generic title for the teeming world of body-knowing which we have only recently begun to understand. The average person can differentiate physical sensations like sweaty palms, dizziness, and palpitations from emotions like anger, loneliness and love. But that's about as far as our everyday ability to differentiate goes. At least it was until Eugene Gendlin came along to open for us the world of "felt sensing." "A felt sense is not just an emotion. Fear, anger, joy, sadness--these are emotions. A felt sense is different, it is global and fuzzy. It includes more than the emotion--many things, most of them not clearly known. It is a bodily quality, like heavy, sticky, jumpy, fluttery, tight. At first it has no fitting label... "Let me show the difference between an emotion and a felt sense. Anger is an emotion. When you are angry, you recognize that. No puzzle, nothing vague, you're mad. But if you relax a little, you can sense: 'There is more involved in the whole thing.' For example, you may sense a breathless, hurried quality, a sense that you'd like to stay mad--you don't want to stop and see that you're a little wrong. That uneasy quality has no name of its own. Where would you find that? Under the anger, in it, around it, at the edge of the anger. But words like 'edge' do not describe it literally... "You can sense that it has a life of its own if you try to talk yourself out of it. It will resist. If you say something about it, and then attend back to the felt sense, you can sense that what you said is wrong. Yet you don't know what would be right to say. You cannot control when it opens. Something comes directly from it when it opens. Or perhaps you accidentally thought something right, and it opens in response. "A felt sense is unmistakably meaningful, and yet we don't know what it is. In contrast we know the emotions when we have them." (Eugene Gendlin, Focusing) Gendlin has probed further into the world of body-knowing and helped us realize that within every emotion lies a broader kind of body-sense which he named the felt sense. We generally don't have easily available words or concepts to describe this little recognized aspect of body knowing. It's more like your body sense of "all about this relationship" without going into specifics and details. If you stop for a moment to reflect upon the experience of someone you love, you may notice that your body-sense of them can be both warm and cuddly as well as irritated and annoyed. Your body knowing of someone you love is quite complex. Attention may be focused on the current emotion of the moment. But at the same time, your body simultaneously holds all your other dimensions of "feltness" about this relationship. Why is this important? Well, just as it's useful to know whether someone has tuberculosis or cancer so, too, it helps to locate and understand what is going on inside our body knowing. Gendlin discovered that feelings are able to change inside the person to the extent that he or she can be in touch with something more than an emotion--namely, their felt sensing. The potential for change and growth lies in the felt sense, not in the emotion! If all you do is feel and re-feel your emotions, you just go in circles or wallow in them. Merely feeling a painful emotion over and over again provides absolutely no assurance that it will ever change into something better. Being able to be in touch with a felt sense in a way that allows it to unfold and tell its story is the key to any lasting forward movement in the emotions connected with it. Noticing and nurturing your important feelings is the starting point for this inner process. Gendlin deserves great credit for uncovering the felt sense. But, equally important, he also found that we have our own unique and highly developed ways of remaining out of touch with this vital aspect of our body knowing--our own process-skipping stories! *** *** *** (To close this window and return to the process-skipping page, click the little box in the upper left corner of this page.) *** *** *** Back to Top Institute for BioSpiritual Research P.O. Box 741137, Arvada, CO 80006-1137; Tel/Fax: 303-427-5311; email: <LFLOM@mho.net> or visit our website at: www.biospiritual.org. The Institute and its members do not teach the habit of noticing and nurturing important feelings as a substitute for professional psychotherapeutic or psychiatric care for those who need it, nor as a substitute for training and licensing in the above health fields.