Akira Ikemi | Focusing-Alpha: The Natural Process Behind Therapeutic Change

Over the decades, though, ‘focusing’ stopped meaning that inner process and started meaning something else entirely: a step-by-step technique, taught in workshops and self-help books, for tuning into bodily sensations.

A new paper by Akira Ikemi at Kansai University argues that this shift can obscure an important part of what is actually happening in therapy: the client’s own process of working out what they are experiencing. Ikemi calls the natural, spontaneous process ‘focusing-alpha’, and the taught technique ‘focusing-beta’.

To show focusing-alpha in action, Ikemi points to therapy transcripts. In one, a therapist suggests some words to describe what a client is trying to express. The client falls silent for ten seconds before responding: ‘It’s like, can you take time to have fun.’ Rather than simply accepting the therapist’s words, she checks them against her own sense of what she means, then adjusts them until they feel right.

This searching process, focusing-alpha, is what actually matters in therapy, not whether a therapist has taught the technique. A Gestalt therapist, a person-centred therapist, or an art therapist can all support a client’s focusing-alpha, without ever mentioning the word ‘focusing’. What matters is noticing when it happens and giving it room.

This distinction also makes focusing easier to combine with other approaches to therapy. If focusing is treated simply as a set of instructions, therapists may feel they have to follow a particular method or find a way to ‘add’ it to their existing practice.

But if focusing-alpha is understood as something that happens naturally within a client’s experience, it can be supported through many different therapeutic approaches.