Passionate About Focussing

Focusing with Children can be used to maintain good mental health and emotional wellbeing on a daily basis, as well as for an intervention in schools for mild-moderate mental health conditions, improving low mood and self-esteem, reducing anxiety and increasing resilience.

As one of very few certified Children’s Focusing Trainers in the UK (having completed my training in the Netherlands), I am passionate about this approach and would like to see it being adopted in schools as a whole school approach to mental health.

It can so easily be incorporated into the school day.

Inner Focus Ltd provides;

• Focusing Training - the BFA’s Focusing Skills Course (60 hours) for therapists/ counsellors/ mental health practitioners
• Children’s Focusing Training (60 hours) - for parents, school staff, therapists/counsellors
• One day and weekend workshops on Focusing with Children for organisations, academic institutions, counselling training programs, schools, any other group interested in personal development and/or the emotional wellbeing of children (foster parents/ parent groups/ Focusing groups, etc)
• Individual Counselling/ Focusing-Oriented Therapy for children

Working In A Primary School

My passion for teaching Focusing with Children comes from an experience I had many years ago, before I was a counsellor.

I was working in a primary school as a learning support assistant with children who had social and behavioural issues, and I’d recently graduated top of my department at Kings College with a Religious Studies degree, mainly studying Eastern religions.

I was very interested in meditation and mindfulness having studied it at university and asked the headteacher if I could do meditation and mindfulness with the children I helped.

It was agreed that I could and so I started a meditation group. I designed some outcome measures to see how effective the program was.

Calmer And More Focused Children

After a while, teachers started commenting that the children were calmer, more able to concentrate in class, not so disruptive, and were getting on better socially in the playground.

This was encouraging news, and corroborated what I was observing for myself, and also the outcome measures.

What I didn’t understand at the time though, were the children’s drawings. After a meditation we always drew our experience, and I’d expected to see drawings of happy, smiling children. Instead we discovered they’d often draw themselves upset, or angry.

I didn’t understand this, and consequently didn’t feel confident to continue the sessions after the program ended.

The "Eureka" Moment

Many years later, whilst on my counselling training course at the University of East Anglia, I had a ‘Eureka’ moment.

I was in the middle of a Focusing lesson when I realised the way I had been facilitating meditation with the children all those years ago was essentially Focusing!

The reason they’d drawn themselves sad and angry was because I was enabling them to get in touch with those feelings and emotions, and to express them and have them heard - hence why the children were making improvements in their wellbeing which was having a knock-on effect in all areas of their lives.

Focusing Programmes For Children

After this realisation, I determined to bring Focusing to children.

I began with my MA research study on Focusing with Children in Schools, and I now use Focusing in therapeutic work with children and young people, and teach it to organisations and schools.

My passion also led me to design, develop and produce practical, hands on resources that can be used when Focusing with children. These complement my training workshops and can be purchased on the website.

To learn more about the training programmes Inner Focus provide, call 07979 180 170 or email sara@inner-focus.co.uk.