Process Skipping: LARVA model of what we do when we don’t want to feel
Process skipping is a way to keep us away from feeling something. The term process skipping has been taken up by the Focusing community to label what we do when we don’t welcome something with Focusing, most notably by the the BioSpiritual Focusing teachings of Fathers Peter Campbell and Ed McMahon. In today’s blog, I expand on this work and present a new model for it: The LARVA Process Skipping model.
History of “Process Skipping”
Process skipping: moving away from feelings instead of into and through them by noticing and nurturing them.
A “process-skipping structure” is a term coined by Gendlin in his important 1964 paper on personality change. In that paper he says:
“Experiencing is always in process and always functions implicitly. The respects in which it is structure bound are not experiencing. The conceptual content in an abstract way can appear to be the same with different manners of experiencing. However, in the structure-bound manner the experiencing process is, in given respects, missing. By "missing" we mean that from an external viewpoint we may notice that the implicit functioning of experiencing ought to be there, but there is only the process-skipping structure, and the experiencing surrounding it and leading up to it. Thus we say that structure-bound aspects are not in process.”
The term structure bound captures how our bad habits and addiction can feel: they remain the same. And when we use them, what is missing is being with whatever is there underneath with Focusing.
Fathers Peter Campbell and Ed McMahon took up part of this term, making it into a verb: process-skipping. They wrote about the concept in at least a few of their books, including Beyond the Myth of Dominance and Rediscovering the Lost Body-Connection Within Christian Spirituality. In the second book, they share how when we use process skipping, “we seek to control the so-called bad feeling, to make it go away or substitute something better in its place.” They offer this visual as a way to illustrate the process, versus the one of Focusing, which would go down into the felt sense.
Other Similar Concepts
Before diving deeper into process skipping, here are a few other terms that are used that point to a similar phenomenon:
Spiritual bypassing: the use of spiritual ideas, practices, or platitudes to avoid dealing with unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, or unfinished developmental tasks. Instead of confronting difficult feelings like anger, grief, or fear, a person might use spiritual concepts to bypass or over-spiritualize these struggles, essentially masking them with an excessive amount of positivity or an overly spiritualized explanation. This pattern can be harmful because it prevents genuine healing.
Toxic positivity: the excessive and unrealistic pressure to be positive, which dismisses or invalidates negative emotions and experiences. Instead of acknowledging difficult feelings, it insists on a happy or optimistic outlook at all times, even when the circumstances don't warrant it. This can prevent people from processing their emotions, leading to potential feelings of isolation and an inability to cope.
Other phrases that are used: emotional bypassing, “good vibes only” and even magical thinking.
The LARVA Process Skipping Model
Since 2020, I have used something I call the PUPA process, to help explain Focusing and the carrying forward energy the practice brings. That model was a crossing of Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing practice, Otto Sharmer’s Theory U and the 8Cs of Self-Leadership named by Richard Schwartz in his Internal Family Systems.
More recently, I was reflecting on the fact that the Theory U model includes an absencing cycle. And similarly Doug Silsbee’s adaptation of Presence-Based Coaching’s model includes two loops: one for habits and one for resilience. I sat with these, and insights from Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory and models of habits and addictions, including Jan Winhall’s Felt Sense Polyvagal Model.
The result was my new LARVA process skipping model. The model helps us understand all that goes into our acting out. In short, here are the two models:
LARVA Process Skipping Model:
Leverage: something happens that somehow reminds us of our past
Activation: our autonomic nervous system reacts
Rejection: something in us doesn’t want to feel that way
Vindication: we justify doing something to stop the feeling, or find a reason why we should feel that way
Acting out: we take the substance or do the behaviour that results in some relief
PUP2A Processing Model (of Focusing/Experiencing):
Pause: we pause, to prepare for Focusing on the deeper point of our issue
Understanding: our felt sense shares with us the memory that needs attention
Permutation: the felt shift with a paradigm shift… a new carrying forward way starts to emerge
Practice: sensing into how we can grow that new way of responding and living
Action: finding our just right next step for how we can be with this now
A LARVA example: Father Pete’s story
Father Pete often explains process skipping by using his story of compulsively going to visit his mother at her retirement home to get rid of a feeling of guilt. Here is a video of him telling that story, or you can read his story here.
Leverage: Father Pete receives a phone call from his mother and she wants him to visit
Activation: Father Pete shares how he would feel guilty
Rejection: at some point the guilt would built to a point where it would be too much and he would want to get the monkey off his back
Vindication: he would justify making the long, 300 mile return drive to visit his mother in San Francisco, as a way of numbing and therefore controlling the feeling of guilt
Acting out: drives to visit mother to get rid of the guilt
One day, when he had just come back from a visit with his mother, he again got the feeling of guilt. So he took Father Ed’s advice and sat with his feelings, with Focusing. What came were feelings of his seven year old self, from a time when his parents marriage was having difficulty and he was sent to boarding school for 4-5 years which he hated. He was able to hold the anger from that time.
After hearing his untold story, when Father Pete would visit his mother, he was genuinely there to be with her. His experience had carried forward.
Using Focusing to get to know your LARVA
The use of process skipping, while helpful in the short term, causes us harm in the long term. As Winhall says, in the case of addictions one “can’t stop doing it.” And for bad habits, it might just be really hard. That’s why working on issues like these with Focusing partnerships can be so helpful, you don’t have to be with them alone.
If you have a bad habit or addiction that you can’t seem to shift, the LARVA process skipping model can help you learn in more detail what your systems does as you interact with someone or a situation that brings the so-called bad feelings. With Focusing, we can notice the pieces we do unconsciously, so that we can more readily notice the signs that we are process skipping. And of course, we can create that space to for your “body’s as yet unheard story” to be heard, seen and felt.
I have a new ten-week course that provides a container to do this work by spending a week on each of the components of the LARVA and PUP2A models. Join us for Enough with the Process Skipping: Using Focusing to Shift Something Big to be in a heart-felt community space where we can do this deep work in partnership.