Siobhan Wilcox teaches Dr. Eugene Gendlin's focusing method to help autistic kids manage anxiety by tuning into their body's felt sense. She walks through the technique with her son, showing how to locate anger in the body and breathe through it. Gendlin's research found clients who accessed this bodily awareness transformed faster.
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Hey everybody. Siobhan Wilcox here, founder and creator of Autism Experts alliance. It's day 17 of parenting autism real and Raw. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I really wanted to talk about a very simple technique today that I was using with my son this morning. Excuse me, I have a little tickle in my throat. You know, my son has been, he's got high functioning autism, but he's a huge amount of anxiety and that is unfortunately creating a huge amount of overwhelm, dysregulation and aggression right now for him. And it's been very, very challenging as a family, as a mother manage that. It's been very challenging for his school. It's been very challenging for everybody who's dealing with him. And so we have been working with a lot of different people to try and help him and move him through that. But one of the things I was reminded of last night was very powerful work. I trained in, my gosh, probably 15 years ago, long before he was born. Called focusing by a Dr. Eugene Gendlin. G E N D L I N. And I'll put a link to Dr. Eugene's work under this video so you can check it out too and find out more. It's a very, very simple technique. Basically. Dr. Eugene discovered that when he looked at his psychology private practice, he saw that some clients were with him for very short periods of time and moved through and had a huge transformation. He noticed that some clients didn't really transform at all and they were there repeating the same things over and over again for long periods of time for up to six, seven years. And he wondered why was this? What was the difference in some clients transforming and others not so? He was a professor at the time at a university, I believe it was in Chicago. So he got a team to do research on this. He taped all of his sessions with his private clients, so he got them listened to by the team to figure out where were the moments of transformation occurring. He knew which clients had transformed and which hadn't. Well, what was the difference? What he found was that those that were aware of a felt sense, like that gut feeling or a sense in their body of where they were holding the motion within it, like they put their hand on their belly and said, oh, I really felt that when I was in that situation. And that person said that to me, it was horrendous. And they'd hold their chest here and then he'd bring their awareness to that. He'd bring their awareness to that. Well, you're holding your chest? What's the reason for holding your chest? Is there a sensation there? Is there a felt feeling there? Or you call it felt sense? And what is that? I need to have the person bring their awareness to this part where their hand was, to the awareness of what was going on within the physical body. And people transformed very fast and very quickly because our physical body, when we're in a stress response, goes into that flight or fight response. If we continue to run all of our processing of trying to de stress ourselves and relax ourselves up here in our mental body, it just is words. It just keeps wording itself around and around. And it doesn't shift the physical, the emotional piece. It's only when it gets down into the physical body that we can start to really shift things, because this is where all of the stuff gets trapped. So when I work with my yoga clients or my private clients for the, the last number of years, I will say to them, okay, when you are in a yoga pose or when you're in an awareness of even, you know, in a situation, after a situation has occurred with somebody, what are you aware of in your physical body? Not what thoughts you're running right now, but what are you aware of in your physical body? Where is the resistance? Where is the energy being held? Bring your attention to that, bring your focus to that part of your body. Breathe into that part of your body. See if you can just get a sense of what's going on in there. And words come into your mind when you do this. I was trying to work. I was working with my son and he was finding it really helpful this morning, talking about his anger. And I was giving him situations. I said to him, so when I say to you, we're going to wash your hair, because that's a huge, huge trigger for him, what do you feel? I get really angry. I get really angry. Where do you hold that anger in your body? And I got him and I said, just take a deep breath. I'm not asking you right now to do that. I'm just asking you to bring awareness to it. And he started to kind of think about it, ponder it. And he went, I feel it all over my whole body. So what does it feel like? He starts to describe the feeling within it. Okay, where else do you feel it? I said, imagine you're going into it now because I'm talking about it. I can see your body's responding, you're getting tense. You stop breathing deeply. So breathe deeply. Let's go back into it. And so we had this Great conversation for around 30, 40 minutes about when he gets into different situations, how his body reacts in that situation where he holds the stress in his body and how it feel, feels to him. And I got him to the point where I said, you know, some of this is a learnt response. You are responding in a way that your body has somehow learned to respond to, make you feel safe in some way. I said, and we can work through this together, we can figure this out so we can shift that response in your body. But the first thing we need to do is help your body understand, help your mind understand exactly what you're feeling. So, of course, being on the autism spectrum, getting that body awareness can be very challenging. Getting that felt sense can be very challenging because that can be one of the challenges. He sometimes doesn't even know where. He doesn't have one shoe on. You know, say to him, you know, you only have one shoe on right now. And he look at his and go, oh, I didn't realize. So this is what I've been working with him for years now, is developing his body awareness, his, his place in time space. But I wanted to share that technique with you today because I think it's very helpful to help work you through stress relief really fast. Where are you holding the response? What does it feel like? What is it feeling? And that felt sense within it. Sit with it. Just breathe, close your eyes. Go. Oh, yeah, look. Oh, my shoulder. It's feeling overstretched, but I haven't physically lifted anything, so I'm feeling overstretched. Okay. I'm feeling overstretched and it wants me to help relax it. Okay. And so if I breathe into that. Yeah, and there it goes, it automatically starts to release and relax because I have brought attention to it and it gets its focus, it gets the support it needs and it lets go. So I hope that serves you for today. Again, I'll put the details below so you can do some more research on Dr. Eugene's work. It has been transformational with many of my clients and of great service to myself, which is most important. So have a wonderful day. This is a Memorial Day weekend, so enjoy the long weekend and wishing you blessings and peace in your weekend with your family. And as always, you can register with me at Siobhan or register with me at Autism Experts alliance for our upcoming tele series. And siobhantismexpertsalliance.com is my email and I look forward to connecting with you soon. Thank you.
