ABSTRACT
In a rich description of the author's firsts in focusing – the first session, the first time meeting Gendlin and witnessing his process guiding – there is a sense of a new way of opening to inner experiencing that leads to a lifetime of further study. Gendlin's history includes escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, and his own boyhood witnessing of his father's felt knowing guiding the choices that lead to safety. All of Gendlin's writings and deep philosophical works, touched on in this chapter, may have sprung from this moment. There is a dialectic throughout between empirical, “unit-model” based ways of knowing and more interactional and holistic approaches. All are valuable, according to Gendlin, but in many ways, current approaches to psychology and treatment of addiction leave the subjective and the body out of the equation. In this chapter, the argument for including experiencing in our understanding and treatment of addiction is brought home with relevant snippets of Gendlin's philosophy, personal examples, and invitations for the reader to experience first-person process for themselves.
