Incongruencing. A Focusing-Oriented Approach

Abstract

Shortly after Carl Rogers formulated his client-centered theory in 1959, Eugene Gendlin reformulated a key aspect: congruence. According to Rogers, congruence was a person’s openness to and integration of their experiences of self, values, and the world. Gendlin said that Rogers’s theory implied a dynamic process which he called “experiencing.” The author continues Gendlin’s project with incongruence. From Gendlin’s more recent conceptions of experiencing and from his practice of Focusing, the author takes four essential qualities of experiencing. Step-by-step, the author reformulates Rogers’s blocking-incongruencing with its blocking, walling-off and distorting (1) experiencing from self and values, and (2) experiencing from the world. From Gendlin’s Focusing in 1981, the author also introduces a new and clinically necessary concept of incongruencing: – opening-incongruencing – which is ongoingly striving toward more-right integration and development. At each step, the author shows how this new grasp of Rogerian blocking-incongruencing and Gendlinian opening-incongruencing clarifies clinical practice and has implications for research. The paper concludes with next steps for further developing more clinically powerful understandings and practices of incongruencing.