Enough with the Process Skipping: Using Focusing to Shift Something Big

Moving from avoiding with our bad habits, to processing and living

This eight-week course creates a container to unpack a big issue in your life. Using Focusing, you’ll shift a bad habit or addiction that keeps you away from something you long to be or do. And in so doing, tell your untold story.

Process skipping is doing something to keep us 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. For example, the BioSpiritual Focusing teachings of Fathers Peter Campbell and Ed McMahon.

This course expands on the works of Gendlin, Campbell, and McMahon, to present a new model of process skipping. This model crosses in other models, such as the absencing cycle in Theory U, as well as insights from Polyvagal Theory, and models of habits and addictions, including Doug Silsbee and Jan Winhall. The new LARVA process skipping model complements my PUP2A model of Focusing and change.

The course uses the LARVA process skipping model as a framework to unpack one thing that is getting in the way of living a more authentic life. This could be a bad habit or an addiction. Some way of acting out that while helpful in the short term, is causing us harm in the long term. As Winhall says, in the case of addictions one “can’t stop doing it” or for bad habits, it might just be really hard.

The course uses Focusing each week as we unpack something you process skip and then find a new way of living our life forward. In short, the two models are:

LARVA Process Skipping Model:

• Leverage: something happens that 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 (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 (or memories) 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 this way now

The course is ten weeks long, and we do one LARVA and one PUP2A. We do the LARVA in reverse order (Acting out, Vindication, Rejection, Activation, Leverage), as we are often consciously aware of our acting out, and less so of some of the intermediate phases or even the initial event that leveraged the rest of the process skipping. So, the acting out is a place to start.

Each week we use Focusing to be with our experience, to listen to our felt sense knowing of what happens in us and give it space to be seen and heard. To really get to know how our process skipping works.

The final five weeks, we use Focusing to be with what our system was trying to avoid with the process skipping. Often the leveraged event is connected to other events, memories from earlier times in our lives. By going back to those memories, we get to process what was needed. To hear our untold story. And then as we round the course out, we find new ways of being in the world, ones that no longer hurts us.  

The group will use the following format:

• each week we will begin with a centering and check-in

• next, we will learn about that week’s LARVA or PUP2A component

• we will then have a guided experience to be with that material with Focusing

• followed by a demonstration, which will include possible prompts for further processing in breakout rooms

• we will then have some breakout room practice. There will be multiple options each week, including groups of two for traditional exchanges, groups of three or four for round-robin practice or Empathy Circles (for those who have done the course Deepening your Focusing and Listening with Empathy and Compassion), or even the option for a second demonstration.

  • We will also have some PUPA Focusing Trainees co-teaching the course. When not leading an empathy circle or second demonstration, you’ll have the option to have us come to your breakout room to provide co-listening (coaching on your listening).

• finally, we will have a closing and final sharing

To further your practice, it is encouraged to also form a Focusing partnership with another participant. This involves meeting between classes to practice, in an exchange of Focusing and listening. You can also opt to be assessed for the Proficiency in Focusing Partnership Award provided through TIFI.

Timing and other details

Teachers: This group will be led by Coordinator Annette Dubreuil and PUPA Trainees TBD.

Next Groups:

• Mondays, November 17 to February 2, 1:30-3:30 pm Eastern (break weeks December 22 and 29, 2025)

• TBD – please email me at annette@pupa.ca if you are interested in this course and cannot make the above times/dates

Group size: each group is capped at 24 people.

Who is this course for? The course is designed for Focusers of all levels. However, some previous Focusing training is required (the steps will not be taught and some listening experience is required). This experience can be gained through the 8-week beginner course or the 4-week intensive beginner course.

Course location: Zoom

Sliding scale pricing: This course has sliding scale pricing, offering multiple price points to make the course more accessible and reduce financial barriers for people with different levels of income. Please view the sliding scale fees page for details and codes.

• Full fee: US$320

• 25% off: US$240

• 50% off: US$160

• 70% off: US$96

• 80% off: US$64

• 90% off: US$32