An Introduction to Focusing — Part 3: Acknowledging What Is There
This is the third post in the series An Introduction to Focusing. Each post includes a short video practice and a written companion piece. You can start at the beginning with Part 1: Clearing a Space or pick up from Part 2: A Part of Me.
There’s a particular kind of relief that comes from being truly acknowledged.
Not fixed. Not advised. Not reassured that everything is going to be fine. Just — seen. Someone recognising that what you’re experiencing is real, and that it makes sense that you’re feeling it.
Most of us have experienced this with another person at some point. What’s less common is experiencing it from ourselves.
Acknowledging What Is There is a Focusing practice that does exactly that — but turned inward. It’s the practice of offering your own inner experience the same quality of recognition you’d offer a friend who was struggling. Not to change it. Just to let it know it’s been noticed.
Why acknowledgement matters
A lot of the time, without quite realising it, we relate to our own difficult feelings as problems to be solved.
The anxiety shows up and we try to reason our way out of it. The sadness arrives and we look for something to do. The sense of dread settles in and we either push it away or get pulled into it entirely.
Both of those moves — pushing away and being consumed — skip over something important. They skip over the simple act of turning toward what’s there and acknowledging it.
I notice there’s something heavy here.
I can feel a tightness in my chest that’s been there all day.
There’s a part of me that’s really scared about this.
These aren’t solutions. They’re recognitions. And recognition, it turns out, is often what’s needed before anything else can happen.
The felt sense
In Focusing, Eugene Gendlin used the term felt sense to describe the way the body holds something — the whole, complex, not-quite-articulated sense of a situation or a feeling that lives in the body before it has words.
It’s not an emotion exactly. It’s more like the physical texture of something — the way a particular worry lives in the stomach, or the way grief sits in the chest, or the way anxiety hums at a particular frequency in the throat or shoulders.
Most of us are not very practiced at noticing this. We’re much more practiced at noticing our thoughts — the content of what we’re thinking about a situation — than at noticing the felt quality of it in the body.
Acknowledging What Is There is partly about slowing down enough to notice the felt sense of whatever is present. Not to analyse it or interpret it. Just to notice it. To let it be there, and to let it know you’ve noticed.
What acknowledgement actually sounds like
In practice this is gentler and quieter than it might sound in description.
It’s not a formal process or a script. It’s more like a quality of attention — a turning toward rather than away. An internal posture of: I see you. I know you’re there. You don’t have to fight to be noticed.
Some phrases that can help:
I’m noticing something here.
Yes — I can feel that.
That’s there. I acknowledge that.
Of course that’s there — that makes sense.
That last one is worth sitting with. Because often what difficult feelings need more than anything else is to be told that their presence makes sense. Not that they’re right. Not that the situation is as bad as they think. Just that given everything — given your history, given what’s happened, given what you’re carrying — it makes complete sense that this is what’s showing up.
The difference between acknowledging and dwelling
This is a question that comes up a lot: won’t paying attention to difficult feelings just make them stronger?
The research, and the experience of most people who work with Focusing, suggests the opposite.
What tends to make difficult feelings more intense and persistent is not paying attention to them — or paying attention in a way that’s either dismissive or catastrophising. The anxiety that gets pushed away tends to push back harder. The worry that gets avoided tends to grow in the avoidance.
What tends to create movement is exactly this: a gentle, non-judgemental acknowledgement of what’s there. Not dwelling in it — not amplifying it or feeding it with more worry — but simply turning toward it with recognition and a quality of care.
Often, when a feeling gets genuinely acknowledged, something shifts. Not disappears — shifts. It doesn’t need to fight so hard to be noticed. There’s a subtle softening. A sense of something releasing just slightly.
That’s what this practice is working toward.
How to use this practice
The video above guides you through an Acknowledging What Is There practice in real time.
As you work with it, a few things worth noticing:
What does acknowledgement feel like in your body? Even a small shift — a slight loosening, a sense of something settling — is worth paying attention to.
Notice if there’s a tendency to immediately try to fix or understand what you’re acknowledging. See if you can stay with the acknowledgement itself for a little longer before moving anywhere else.
And notice how the feeling responds to being acknowledged. Not always — sometimes nothing obvious happens. But sometimes there’s a quality of: yes. That. Thank you for noticing.
What’s next in the series
In Part 4 we’ll look at Giving Some Comfort — what it means to offer warmth and care to the parts of you that are struggling, and why that’s so much harder than it sounds for most people.
An Introduction to Focusing is a series of short video practices and written companion pieces exploring the basics of Focusing-Oriented Therapy. Each post stands alone but builds on what came before.
If you’re finding that turning toward your own inner experience — rather than pushing it away or being overwhelmed by it — is something you’d like to explore more deeply, individual counselling is available in Squamish and online across BC. Focusing-Oriented Therapy is one of the approaches I draw on most in my work. You can read more about it on the about page.
