The Recovery of Will in Persons with AIDS

Abstract

This article is based on a treatment intervention study teaching Focusing (Gendlin, 1981), a mind-body awareness technique, to four men with AIDS. Philosophical and therapeutic questions regarding the lifeworlds (lebenswelt) of persons with HIV spectrum illness are raised. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis are presented with an emphasis on the phenomenological method suggested by Giorgi (1975) and others. The analysis uses material from the tape recordings of each session addressing the aspects of change reported by each participant. Borrowed from the words of one of the participants, the shift in capacity to listen to oneself over time is called the "recovery of will." This process has three movements, which are characterized by the reduction of judgmental self-beliefs, fresh dialogue with significant processes within the self, and the integration of new knowledge derived from the process of listening and being heard. It is as though he listened, and such listening as his enfolds us in a silence in which at last we begin to hear what we are meant to be. Lao-Tse

Focusing-oriented–experiential psychotherapy: From research to practice.

“…Results from Katonah's (1999) initial study-as well as two others, one using CAS with AIDS patients (Krycka, 1997) and the other with weight loss (Holstein, 1990)-showed promise for CAS use in health-related populations. In addition, the CAS protocol has been used as a therapeutic tool in case studies that looked at borderline personality disorder (Katonah, 1984) and suicidal ideation (McGuire, 1984).…”

“…Several published in psychological journals have either shown a successful psychotherapy outcome with FOT or demonstrated particular focusing-oriented ways of approaching the client's condition. These studies have covered a wide range of disorders, difficulties, and modalities, including writer's cramp (Harada, 1994), somatoform disorders (Ikemi, 1997), chronic pain (Geiser, 2010), depression (Hikasa, 1998;Ikemi, 2010;Kurose, 2008), borderline personality disorder (Hoshika, 2007), dissociation (Coffeng, 2005;Krycka, 2010), depersonalization (Hoshika, 2012), trauma (Coffeng, 2004;Rappaport, 2010), anxiety disorder (Koizumi, 2010), panic disorder (Ikemi, 1997;Uchida, 2011), eating disorder (Hikasa, 2011), HIV/AIDS (Krycka, 1997), couples (Amodeo, 2007), parent interview of a child with adjustment difficulties (Doi, 2006), family therapy (Arimura & Kameguchi, 1990), and art therapy (Rappaport, 2009). These case studies and applications of FOT open up a wide variety of conditions to which FOT has been applied.…”