The Role of Edge-Sensing in Experiential Psychotherapy

The experiential psychotherapies, including client-centered/person-centered therapy, gestalt therapy, focusing-oriented psychotherapy, process-experiential psychotherapy (also known as emotion-focused therapy), accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), and others (http://www.experiential-researchers.org; http://www.pce-world.org) focus on present experiencing within the immediacy of the therapeutic relationship. In experiential psychotherapy, the therapist uses him- or her-self in empathic attunement with the client to work directly with implicit relational, emotional, and felt sensing processes. Attention given to the present experience differentiates the experiential therapies from insight-oriented or cognitive-behavioral therapies, which are directed to the analysis of explicit patterns of thought, beliefs, and behaviors. The experiential therapies work more with implicit, fringe experiencing (Mangan, 2001). According to Friedman (1976),

Experiential therapy aims to “stay in touch at all times with the person’s directly felt concrete experiential datum … and help the person also to stay in touch with that, and get into it” (Gendlin, CC & ET, 13). In experiential therapy the touchstone of therapeutic intervention is the feeling process in the client. The goal is for therapist and client to achieve a deep resonance with the client’s felt experiencing at the moment, going with it, getting deeper into it, moving with it, keeping it company, co-existing with it … helping the client to open himself to his experience, embrace it, take a friendly stance towards it, beckon it to teach him. (p. 236)

Experiential psychotherapies originated in the work of Rogers and his collaborators (Kirschenbaum, 2009). Two of Rogers’ collaborators, Gendlin and Rice, independently elaborated on the theory from particular aspects of Rogers’ work. In addition to Rogers’ development of client-centered/person-centered therapy, Gendlin (1961, 1990, 1996, 2009) developed the psychology, philosophy, and focusing-oriented psychotherapy of inner experiencing with his method of focusing on the bodily felt sense. Rice and her student, Greenberg, (Kirschenbaum, 2009), developed process-experiential psychotherapy, which devotes in-depth attention to the details of the therapeutic process in the client-therapist relationship. More recently these three approaches, along with other ancillary therapies, such as accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP, Fosha, 2000, 2004, 2006), are increasingly collaborating under the umbrella of experiential psychotherapy.

Within this larger framework there is general agreement that there are two types of knowing and experiencing. These types have been given various labels. Greenberg (2004) refers to these two systems in process language, as “essentially two important streams of experience and knowing, an embodied experiential stream and a more social, conceptual linguistic stream” (p. 5). Greenberg (2004b) calls them “two important meaning systems, one based on a symbolic conceptual language and the other based on a sensory motor affective language,” referring to the latter as “body talk” about “feeling knowledge” (p. 73). Clyman (1991) explores them in terms of the cognitive science distinction between declarative and procedural memory systems. Gendlin (1996) argued that therapy is a “process that centrally involves experience before it becomes one of [a set of] defined ‘packages’ and again afterword when it dips back into the prepackaged zone at the edge of experiencing” (p. 4). The prepackaged zone is the realm of implicit knowing, while the packaged zone contains explicit knowing and languaging. Parallel language includes the distinction between bottom-up and top-down processes, or the difference between the limbic brain and the cortex. However named, and while each set of terms has its own unique connotations, across all of these related distinctions, the core concept is that there are two distinctive modalities of conscious experience, grounded in differentiated, foundational mind/brain structures and processes. In this paper (following the Boston Change Process Study Group, 2008; Gendlin, 1996; Lyons-Ruth, 1999) we are calling them implicit and explicit knowing, and in referring to the subjective experience of these two systems, implicit and explicit experiencing.

But embodied in this there is a third type of experiencing. Experiential therapies work in the space of encounter between explicit and implicit experiencing, always beginning with the richness and emotional generativity of implicit experience. In Gendlin’s (1996) terms, this encounter happens at the “edge,” and experiencing at/of the “edge” he calls the “felt sense” (p. 15). The edge is the meeting between what is known explicitly and what is known implicitly, in a bodied way. To clearly differentiate and highlight action in the space of encounter between implicit and explicit experiencing we will (for lack of a better term) call it edge-sensing—a unique, intersubjective phenomena critical in the change process in therapy. Implicit knowing can be languaged or imaged, thereby influencing explicit thought. In turn, the languaged and interpreted experience can be returned, with the meanings generated in the now, to the implicit for validation. Awareness can enter the space between the implicit and explicit, providing a way station for encounter. At this way station, edge sensing can actively facilitate the play between the implicit and explicit. A “coming into conversation” emerges within edge sensing—something comes that can be heard and spoken to.

In the therapeutic relationship, edge sensing is possible not only within the client and within the therapist (whose edge sensing includes empathic attunement and personal components) but also within the dyadic process itself. Client and therapist connect at an implicit level, and the skilled experiential therapist reads and directly interacts with the client at an implicit level, where only some of the process of connecting will become explicitly conscious. In the implicit flow, in the mirroring and responsiveness within this “I-Thou” (Buber, 1958) relationship, there is also an edge that can support its own felt sensing of the dynamics and meanings in the relationship; it is something alive only in the mutually implicit now. Experience in experiential psychotherapy has focused on the now of the individual I, but experience can also be the direct edge sensing of the now of the we in the encounter. The intrapsychic and interpsychic edge sensing processes are parallel.

The therapeutic relationship functions in part to externalize the client’s internal implicit/explicit interchange. This externalization is most often hidden to the client, and it becomes visible only in the felt, heightened, and examined process between client and therapist. But in this present encounter, more important than the externalization of pre-existing dynamic patterns, is a possibility of the emergence of something completely new that has the potential for significant components of it to be implicitly internalized and made consciously explicit in the client’s self-awareness. Two forms of resonance emerge in this active encounter: the resonance between the client’s explicit and implicit processes and the resonance between client and therapist. The most important of these, within a therapeutic change context, is the resonance between the therapist and client’s implicit experiencing within their co-created intersubjective space, thus enabling co-created change.

Experiential therapies have focused on the experience of the implicit as foundational to change. Indeed, according to Fosha, Siegel, and Solomon (2009), in psychotherapy as a whole “the locus of therapeutic action has begun to shift in emphasis … to models that assert the primacy of bodily rooted affect. Such experiential or ‘bottom-up’ therapies consider insight to be the result, rather than the agent, of therapeutic change” (pp. vii - viii). Bodily rooted affect is itself the bearer of “in-sight” and the agent in change.

Just learning to attend to implicit processes normally unattended or avoided through mindfulness meditation training (Kabat-Zinn, 1994) or focusing (Cornell, 1996; Cornell & McGavin, 2002; Gendlin, Beebe, Cassens, Klein, & Oberlander, 1968), for example, can be very helpful to people as they learn to notice the particulars of their personal embodiment in the world. The bodily felt sense, implicit experiencing, is a holistic awareness and response to the whole situation of the now, and learning to attend to the “present moment” has multiple benefits (Stern, 2004).

Being in the “whole sense of the ‘now’ with its implicit richness” (Friedman, 1976, p. 236) is a way of being, a way of being conscious, “underneath,” and supportive of the specific activity in the moment. Experiencing, as used here, means being in a state of mind that supports a particular kind of awareness. For example, when riding a bicycle one is aware of one’s body in relationship to the bike and the terrain in a particular way. Moment by moment the precise qualities of that awareness shift, but underneath all of that is the unique sense of what “bike-riding” is like.

The explicit feels like “being in your head” and there is a visceral sensation of change in conscious location when dropping down from explicit experiencing into implicit experiencing, or perhaps more precisely, experiencing in the implicit. The experience of “dropping down” does not mean that the realm of explicit experiencing is suddenly gone: it’s still present, but not dominant, and in the presence of another, co-existent, somehow more “emotional” or “feeling” way of experiencing. There is now a new relational sense, a stage for potential dialog between the head and belly. There’s a new space for edge sensing between implicit and explicit experiencing.

To get a sense of the distinction between experiencing explicit and implicit meaning systems and felt edge-sensing experiencing, imagine walking into a room and seeing a picture hanged slightly crookedly (example from Diana Fosha’s Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy Externship). Place yourself in the space—imagine the frame is tipping down slightly to the right. Can you feel the sense of “dis-ease?” Some part of you knows that something is not quite right—the picture needs to be righted. Imagine that every morning on your way into your office you walk past the picture and straighten it. Now one particular morning you are preoccupied as you walk past it, but as you walk by the picture it is (once again!) crooked; you straighten it without explicit conscious attention. Let’s stop and explore that moment. As I follow you into your office, I ask, “What did you just do?” At that moment, you do several things:

You become explicitly conscious of the last minute, and now remember straightening the picture.

At the same time you have the thought awareness that you must have straightened the picture, because you do it every morning.

And in that moment you also become aware of a whole complex of associations, thoughts and felt sense with respect to “being caught.”

Your explicit experiencing at this moment is full of this event. But step back to when you straightened the picture, to that moment when you were perceiving and acting from a different sort of experiencing—we will refer to this as the implicit awareness of crookedness, the feeling of wrongness in the picture’s crookedness, and when the picture is fixed, the feeling of the small tinge of satisfied rightness in your straightening (along with a tinge of irritation at the daily frustration of your need for straightness). This implicit experiencing is more intimately connected with feeling and emotion, than is the explicit report, “I just straightened the picture.”

And there a third kind of experiencing in that moment when you are aware of both the felt sense of the implicit enactment, the bodily sensed satisfaction of straightening, and the explicit cognitive recognition and naming of the enactment—it emerges most vividly in the sense of “being caught”. In that brief moment there is (among other possibilities) a sense of slight confusion in being present to both implicit and explicit experiencing at the same time, which, if explored more deeply, reveals the experiencing of the “You” who is experiencing this disorientation in the encounter of “straightening” and “knowing that you’re straightening”, or even “knowing that you’re a straightener.” Perhaps there is a slight confusion of “being seen” in a private action that had not been vetted by the explicit scripted planning of your executive self. This normally fleeting edge-sensing moment, even when noticed, is, for most people, rarely attended to, but it can be. This encounter between the embodied, emotioned, implicit body-brain and the potentially languaged, explicit cognitive-brain can become a conversation, a potentially significant conversation in a therapeutic context: a conversation between a languaging sense-maker and a bodied, emotional senser. A conversation between, variously named, the primitive brain and the neo-cortex, or between the left and right brain hemispheres, or between the scripted expectations of the whole memory system and the immediate affordances of the environment right now—or all of these together. What happens on the stage of this encounter is held by edge sensing.

Edge sensing is an encounter moment and a place within which something new may be birthed. The metaphor and language of the edge encounter, with its felt sense at an intrapersonal edge between implicit and explicit experience, extends naturally to the edge of encounter between persons, especially between their mutually constructed implicit and explicit dialog. Edge sensing is always dyadic—either a communication between two places meeting within the individual or within the dyadic encounter of two people. The quality of this encounter is pointed to in such terms as “moments of meeting” (Lyons-Ruth, 1999), the process of dyadic regulation (Fosha, 2000), felt sensing in general (Gendlin, 1996), and the co-created intersubjective process (Stolorow, Brandchaft & Attwood, 1995). As Lyons-Ruth et.al. (1998) put it, “During a transactional event that we term a moment of meeting, a new dyadic possibility crystallizes when the two partners achieve the dual goals of complementary fitted actions and joint intersubjective recognition in a new form … [creating] new forms of agency” (p. 282). Edge sensing is a process, an action, that encounters, and from which something new emerges. All of these terms reach for the language of the emergent we, the intrinsic agency in the relationships, both intra and interpsychically.

One consequence of encounters in the “unseparated multiplicity” (Gendlin, 1997, p. 16) is that categories of personal experience become more interpersonally inclusive as shifts occur in the conceptualizations and the phenomenal experience of what differentiates I (as independent self) from (the intersubjective) we. How states of body and mind are shared has become an active new field of inquiry in phenomenological psychology and philosophy, an “intersubjectivity, which couples human brains in joint affect and cognition, and mediates all cultural learning” (Trevarthen, 2009, p. 70). Where therapeutic process was once conceptualized as being between two autonomous persons, making even the concept of “deep empathy” (Rogers, 1980) seem problematically mystical, current research in neurobiology, attachment research, and philosophy of mind increasingly support a radically new (to the post-enlightenment Western worldview) view of persons as innately coconstructed in an “intersubjective matrix” (Stern, 2004, 2009). Whether in the conversation within a person or the relationship between persons, “the ideas of a one-person psychology or of purely intrapsychic phenomena are no longer tenable” (Stern, 2004, p. 77). According to Buck and Ginsburg (1997), who have researched implicit communication, “the individuals involved in spontaneous communication literally constitute a biological unit” (p. 28). Trevarthen (2001) uses the language of shared experiencing. Philosophers like Clark and Chalmers (1998) posit an extended mind, an “active externalism” congruent with Gendlin’s (1996) argument that the body and its bodily felt sense includes, beyond the boundaries of skin, all that a person/body is attached to in the sensory-motor world and in the intersubjective cultural world. Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood (1995) describe the counseling relationship in terms of co-created dynamics—the therapeutic relationship is more than two individuals engaging in dialogue. The emergent of the relationship is a dynamic process that is created, in the moment. Similarly, Stern (2004) posits that the “alive” in treatment comes out of moments of meeting that transcend, or put more accurately, move deeper within the experience.

The absolutely essential grounding and opening stance for experiential therapists begins with respecting and valuing the presence and work of implicit experiencing from the very first moment of meeting. These qualities of knowing are active whether articulated or not and in experiential therapies become an explicit part of the realm of encounter. As in the imagined example, crooked and rightening senses are evoked and welcomed. Content is always localized in the emergent here and now. The co-created nature of engagement is assumed.

When the therapist’s edge meets our client’s edge we create a dyadic edge sense that is either resonant or dissonant. A sense of safety may be created within/from this space where language is not necessary for some-thing to be known—though the therapist may choose to explicitly name what is felt in the space between. Or, conversely, a sense of dangerousness or “crookedness” in relationship may color the interpersonal sphere and influence what is able to be experienced intrapersonally.

Resistance emerges when “crookedness” is present and consequently fosters self-protection. Though often unarticulated, or seen as material requiring interpretation, resistance is simply a response to dangerousness. When something does not feel right, what was absent in explicit experiencing but implicitly known rises to the surface for attention. We begin to attend to cues in a different way to make sense of that which makes us uneasy.

When this dyadic edge is attended to by therapist and client and is brought into the exchange through reflection or language, it allows them to work with what is implicitly known. Rupture becomes repair and adds something more (Tronick, 2003). When, however, the dynamics at the dyadic edge are ignored, the implicit known nevertheless continues to communicate, only it creates distance and “dis-ease” that colors the explicit work of therapy.

Much of the communication of safety and dangerousness is shared through the implicit and does not become part of the explicit therapeutic space. At times, when something happens that grabs our attention we become aware of the relationship in an explicit way—we begin to think about what we feel. When the therapist and client feel in sync, the moments that arise in the here and now and can be described as “now” moments (Stern, 2004) have an aliveness about them. The whole relationship (or particular interactions or moments) can come to have “fittedness” or a “match” sense to it (Stern, 2004). The now delimits our stage of mutual attention.

This attention to that which emerges from implicit experiencing facilitates a quality in the relationship where we attune to the whole as we engage, not just to their spoken word, but more to the presence of the person and how we are together. The therapist notices the face, breathing, how someone is sitting—not to point these out, but to sense them as communication about what is actually going on for the person, how he is experiencing his surroundings. And we want to communicate on that level, whether it’s ever spoken or not, a kind of connection or regulation with the person in that state. Using the “therapist self” on this edge sensing stage helps the client feel safe to go inside, so that we use edge sensing experiencing to attend to those dynamics, to engage, and to know with what level to engage. The therapist uses dyadic regulation to create a holding space that’s safe for the client, and to give him a jumping-off point so that he is able to experience some of the affect. The therapist realizes that what we see on his face tells us a lot. The edge sensing relationship is used to the process forward, and the therapist always keeps it, enacts it, in the here and now, because this is what is alive—therapists don’t want to talk about the there and then.

Edge sensing work requires a way of being present that honors the wisdom of the implicit alive in each and any moment in therapy. As the therapist attends to the emerging edge of experience, the here and now is allowed to unfold without overriding its powerful expressiveness with words. Content, though important, is understood within its implicit context and is brought into the alive moment of the treatment encounter. The first therapeutic task is to create an environment that aids the client in attending inward and moving out of explicit categorical content into the emerging experience that is coming into awareness in any given moment. This is marked by therapeutic statements such as,

“Can we stay here for a moment?”

“I notice a look that crosses your face as you say .. .”, or,

“Can we slow this down, breathe together? What comes up for you?”

Emotion guides us in these moments, helping us to attend to what the body speaks even without the conscious recognition by the person.

For example, in a clinical demonstration, Fosha (American Psychological Association, 2007) described the first minutes of a first session with a client who offers a statement about her life from her explicit “meet-the-therapist” script, and simultaneously brings her deep sigh into the inter personal space. Fosha might have ignored her own felt sensing and gone with the content of the client’s speech, but she did not. She stayed in the implicit and instantly said, “That was a very big breath. Can we stay there for a minute?” And so she communicated to the client “this is the realm we’re working in. And this is what we’re going to do together.” But for many therapists, that’s the place where the explicit hijacks any edge sensing process, because the explicit content is comfortable and it is categorized. When we stop and attend to the dyadic edge sense, something comes alive and present in a way that it could not otherwise, outside the relationship. The therapeutic task is to work in the dyadic edge.

As therapist and client “bump up against” each other in moments of connection or in moments of awkwardness, the experience is noticed. Something alive happens when the moment is recognized in that encounter, so “something about that didn’t feel right to me”, or “boy, that …” creates or opens the space for something new. There is a bumping up against each other, which allows something to show up, to come to the here and now, and to be present together, in a way different from interpretation or analysis. It is not about the relationship as a “thing” but as the gift of being in and of enacting the relationship; it is not talking about the relationship, but living in it. Mutual edge sensing embodies a living efficacy that works within this intersubjective matrix. The therapist knows she is standing on the dyadic stage filled with all of the tentativeness, energy, and messiness birthed in the improvisational moment.

When the therapist steps on the stage of encounter she becomes filled with hesitance, a not yet knowingness—this questioning denotes a coming aliveness in the space at this edge. Markers to attend to include body cues that vary from breath to facial markers, “thinking” that emerges in the here and now, or the presence of an unexpected, often unnoticed emotion. One might witness tears or deep breathing that slows speech. The therapist allows space for something to come, even if one does not know what that might be. Direct attention to the body, to what is inside, stopping to notice what comes. Practitioners of experiential therapies trust this unfolding process, confident an “alive moment” will emerge that needs no interpretation to have meaning but requires only space within which the dyad may act.

Alive moments born on the stage of encounter rarely come in neat packages. Working on the edge sensing stage in relationship with aliveness is an inherently messy process. The emergence of aliveness in body awakening is sometimes frustratingly slow, sometimes overwhelmingly sudden, felt and known with clarity one moment and totally gone the next. Once the alive moment is stable enough to be referred to and then directly spoken to, the process of bringing it to explicit experiencing is at first hesitant, searching, getting it not quite right, getting it wrong; being heard exactly by the other and being missed, feeling hurt and repairing. But this is good process. “Messiness is the wellspring of change and the stuff out of which new meanings emerge. Systems that are fixed, static, and tightly controlled do not change” (Tronick, 2009, p .98). Neatness is the hallmark of organized meanings in dictionaries, the marker of the “packaged.” Implicit content is disorganized, the process unpredictable. These dyadic processes may also be messier than self-organized emotional meanings because both client and therapist bring their own meanings into a meaning-making exchange, enabling a possible co-creation of new emotional meaning between the two. The experiential therapist is aware of and values the intrinsic messiness of both process and content. And she values the opportunity in secure attachment to repair mismatches, the very ground from which secure attachment is birthed (Tronick, 2009).

When messiness is present it often requires affect regulation. Greenberg (2004) states that in order to change emotion one must evoke emotion. It isn’t enough to talk about what one feels. Affect emerges intrinsic to the implicit in felt sensing. The strategy is to look for and heighten even the smallest affect energies that do come. Or, if the person is overwhelmed with everything that comes—too much comes, all at once—a strategy to carefully distinguish “I” from “something in me” can facilitate regulation to enable focused presence. Messiness generates affect, and affect in turn can be regulated to create the optimal arousal to perturb the prepackaged out of local minima, while maintaining the whole system secure enough to contain this new aliveness. The failure of dysfunctional procedural memory (Clyman, 1991) must be experienced in a context where the building blocks for new systemic organization are present and supported by the holding presence of an empathic other.

What is alive will show up first in the “aha” moments of meeting (Stern, 2004) in dyadic space (cognitive, explicitly conscious, “aha” insights may come later). What shows up is welcomed and is expanded upon in a visceral (implicit) way, by using the body itself. The “aha” has power directly in the body. These are the micro-dynamics of edge-sensing experience.

Even more than the aliveness potential existent within the individual, there is an emergent potential aliveness only possible in a relationship. A particular configuration of body implicitness and felt sensing is only possible in the relationally extended body. Within the therapeutic encounter, only that mutual implicitness is what is alive, a new life, just now. In the slowing down and meeting is where the client can be somewhere new with the therapist, together in self-extended space.

This natural unfolding is dyadic in nature and allows for change potentials to be activated. Fosha (2009) describes this as:

This organismic recognition process occurs in experiential therapy when moments of fittedness occur between the individual and some process in a dyadically co-constructed environment of safety. Recognition is always “dyadic” in that it involves two things fitting together, but it is not necessarily relational or interpersonal; the fit can be between self and other, but it can also be between self and self, or self and process, or self and experience. The “click” occurs between what is felt as “me” and “not me”, in a way that feels right and allows what is felt as “not me” to eventually become integrated (p. 179).

These moments of “fittedness,” which connect together, lead to transformation.

The felt sensing of this all together is “experienced as an intricate whole” (Gendlin, 1996, p. 20) and involves pieces that have varied meanings, and which cannot categorized or pulled apart. It is like a rich tapestry that still has a focus or direction (Gendlin, 1996). Although the rightness of direction or purpose is there, beyond that, the edge sense experiencing implicitly carries the yet to be known. Within this bidirectional process, moderated through edge-sense experiencing, comes a sense of “rightness,” a sense of the “next step” (Gendlin, 1996) required to right something “crooked”. The edge sensing, edge listening, edge conversation, carries the process forward, creating movement in the system. This moving forward can be trusted to open the way for a next step, not necessarily the “right” step, but a step nonetheless. A step is more trustworthy than reason alone, because “more factors can be sensed in it than reason can manage” (Gendlin, 1996, p. 58).

At the edge, at the encounter of implicit and explicit experiencing, comes a sense of what is needed to bring all the knowing of the (extended) body into greater resonance with all of “extended mind” (Clark, 2008), with all of explicit experiencing’s access to scripts, beliefs, and memories. Sometimes the righting movement may come in a sudden knowing in explicit experiencing, an “aha” insight, shifting the whole imagination. Sometimes the righting movement is a literal act of body movement in the now—an enactment of emotion (crying or laughing), an act of the hands or face, such as jitteryness or calming in the legs, hands, and fingers, an internal act of the “feelinged” sense in the throat, chest, or stomach. Aliveness may then take many forms, express itself in many ways, always enacting itself in “movement,” in “doing.”

Once attention is given to these processes, they become more recognizable, and the individual develops a gut sense knowing. Merely attending to content no longer satisfies. Instead, the wordless knowing of implicit experiencing speaks to the coming to know of edge sense experiencing, thus allowing space for all forms of knowing to communicate. “Dis-ease” because of lack of words is replaced by a deepening appreciation for the conversation between the known of the explicit and the wordless known of the implicit. Edge-sensing experiencing foregrounds, slowing movement, and a wiser space is created. In this moment, stop and attend—what do I know, what wordless known speaks in me, and what dialogue between can be voiced? Stop and notice the next meaningful encounter, and allow this to be experienced in a new way—“He is telling me this with his words and the content of that is something” (explicit). “I have a sense inside of something not quite right—the pieces don’t fit together (implicit), so I stop and notice.” “My mind tells me the puzzle pieces should fit, but my gut is telling me there is something not quite right.” To stop and attend, allowing the implicit to inform the knowing of the explicit through resonant conversation, is to be working within edge-sensing experiencing. This dialogue can then become part of the unfolding relationship between the two “characters,” whether intrapsychic or interpsychic, as they tease out their own felt knowing in the space between. It is in this space that the alive appears and transformation becomes possible.

It is after one has an experience that reflection and cognitive processing anchor the change experience. Fosha (2000, 2004, 2006, 2009) describes the power of metaprocessing following a change experience. Her research suggested that clients lose the sense of change or the experienced shift without languaging. But, that does not mean that one “languages” his way to change. The clinician leaves a lot of space for emerging emotion, and once emotion is worked through to completion, it is dyadically processed between clinician and client, thus allowing the client to hold onto the experience. In this way, language plays an organizing function after the experience.

We have identified intersubjective experiencing at the edge as a unique phenomena. Further development of the processes involved is necessary. We need to develop shared metaphors, and a common language, of “we-ness” that captures more fully the phenomena of the extended mind occurring in the intersubjective space of encounter. Edge sensing, the dyadic edge sense, and metaphors, such as the stage with emergent actors improvising and new conversation and movement, are all concepts and terms that need to be given back for consensual validation. They must be named to our experiences of what it is like in intrapersonal and interpersonal encounter that changes things. It seems that experiential therapists are reaching for something shared with neuropsychologists and philosophers. Are we at the point of sufficient consensus that we are ready to “focus” mutually on a shared language that fits?

We would challenge the focusing-oriented psychotherapy community (Gendlin, 1996), and more broadly. the experiential therapy community, to explore the process of focusing more inclusively, especially with application to interpersonal felt sense in the unseparated multiplicity of our mutually intersecting bodies. Focusing as a method requires a relationship with the bodily felt sense of the implicit. Can we generalize the methods and perspectives of focusing to the generative edge in the space between us? Let us apply our strategies of relating to the inner bodily felt sense to our ways of relating to the felt sensing at the edge of our interpersonal encounters.

Better understanding the phenomena of dyadic edge sensing will allow clinicians to engage the three modes of experiencing more intentionally by recognizing and harnessing the power of the encounter that moves the process of therapy forward. This movement begins with an acceptance of our interconnectedness as beings and is followed by increased awareness of the edge sensing both within and between. As we feel and clearly “language” this emergent process, the therapist may intentionally open change potentials rather have them occur without understanding why. For it is from this place that the transformative power of relationship to self and other is birthed.