Inner Relationship Focusing Therapy
A powerful, emotion-focused approach for achieving transformative change
What Is Inner Relationship Focusing Therapy (IRFT)?
Have you ever felt frustrated that no matter how much work you’ve done on yourself, you still find yourself doing things you know you really don’t want to do, and not doing the things you believe you want to do?
Probably everyone has had this feeling. We keep trying harder and harder to change our “negative behavior patterns” and our “negative” thoughts and feelings. We deride ourselves for our lack of “discipline,” “willpower” or “self-control.” In the end we may throw up our hands and decide we have a “saboteur” inside us that we can’t get rid of.
What if you could get below all that? What if you could get to your subconscious feelings and the subconscious reasons for the emotions and behaviors that “don’t make sense” to you?
And what if understanding these reasons and feelings, and giving them a specific kind of attention, made it a whole lot easier to change in the ways you want?
It does.
Gene Gendlin and the Discovery of Focusing
Focusing therapy, also known as Focusing-Oriented Therapy or FOT, is based on the pioneering work of psychologist Dr. Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago. Learn more
Inner Relationship Focusing (IRF)
Dr. Gendlin trained many people to take Focusing into the world. Probably no one has taken it further, or developed the theory and practice of Focusing more, than Ann Weiser Cornell. Ann calls her refinement of Gendlin’s method Inner Relationship Focusing or IRF. My way of practicing Focusing therapy has been greatly influenced by her brilliant work.
IRF involves a very special way of listening to all the different aspects of your inner self. Learn more
An Emotion-Focused Individual Therapy
Inner Relationship Focusing Therapy, or IRFT, focuses on emotions to achieve deep inner change, but not in the way we normally think of emotions.
Below our surface-level thoughts and emotions are the deep bodily-felt feelings and sensations with meaning that Gendlin called “the felt sense.” Many leading-edge therapy approaches, like Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) and Somatic Experiencing (SE), have appropriated the term “felt sense,” but don’t use it in the way Gendlin truly intended.
Inner Relationship Focusing Therapy takes you below what you normally think and feel and connects you to the deeper feelings held in your body and your subconscious mind.Learn more
Can Self-Acceptance Lead to Change?
But Inner Relationship Focusing Therapy is not only a way to work on problems; it’s a way but to reach an almost unimaginable level of self-acceptance. In IRFT, you experience, palpably and viscerally, the fact that there is nothing inside you that you need to reject or fear. Learn more
Focusing Therapy Supervision
Inner Relationship Focusing supervision and training can deepen and enrich your work in whatever other therapeutic modalities you have training, including Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. As a Focusing-Oriented Therapist and clinical supervisor for more than 30 years, it would be my honor and pleasure to help you help your clients develop greater access to and trust in the transformative power of their own inner experience – and to help you in all ways to help your clients live better, happier and more fulfilling lives.
About Teletherapy
At this time, my practice is completely virtual, seeing clients through Zoom.
I am a licensed psychologist in Maryland, and also hold the PSYPACT license, which grants me the ability to practice Teletherapy in Washington DC, Virginia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Washington state, Minnesota and 26 other states.