Focusing
At a glance
Developed by Eugene Gendlin, Focusing is a gentle, structured practice of attending to the “felt sense” — a vague, pre-verbal bodily sense of a situation or problem — and slowly finding language that resonates with it, trusting that the body holds a kind of implicit knowing worth listening to.
What it’s asking the therapist to do
Mostly to accompany, asking open questions (“what’s that like in your body?”) and helping a person check candidate words or images against their own felt sense, rather than supplying interpretation.
The disability question
Focusing is entirely client-led and doesn’t require any specific physical capacity, which makes it one of the more naturally accessible approaches here. The one real caution: this practice assumes a reasonably reliable felt sense is available to locate and describe. For someone with altered interoception, chronic pain that dominates all bodily attention, or a different relationship to internal sensation generally, “I don’t have a felt sense right now” or “I can’t locate one” is a complete and valid answer — not a sign the practice isn’t working.