A deep sense of honour and a distinct feeling of humility and shyness come to me when I share this interview. I can feel clearly the responsibility of talking about the work I do about “Focusing and how to work experientially with violence”, as the title of the conversation says. It is an important subject for me (I work a lot about it through Spiral Consulting Children, the international consulting firm specializing in Child Protection I co-founded), and trying to convey all its nuances is always a challenge.

The International Focusing Institute (the organization that coordinates internationally Focusing activities related to training and diffusion) fosters bimonthly “Conversations” with Focusing professionals all over the world. Serge Prengel, a Focusing Trainer and Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapist that I met at the International Focusing Conference 2016 in Cambridge (UK), acts as the host, and he does so in a very Focusing way –reflecting, with pauses, letting new ideas appear and develop in their own time.

In this “Conversation” you will find discussed issues like the following ones:

• Violence as a stopped process (“Something should have happened to carry forward a situation, and it did not occur, so the process gets stuck”).
• Harm defines violence, and harm is lived from the body.
• Finding a handle for violence (identifying it) is the first step out of it: becoming aware of our cultural patterns that normalize violence.
• The role of power in violence.
• Affection linked to care as a way to avoid violence –and the bodily dimension that can be reached through Focusing.
• Violence detection and intervention in Child Protection.
• A message of hope about healing and transforming violence, and Focusing as a wonderful tool to do it.

I hope that you will find an idea or two that might inspire your own experiential work about violence, and I will love to hear from you about it.

F. Javier Romeo-Biedma

Read this entry in Spanish (although the interview itself is in English).