The Power of Self-Focusing

by Patricia Lefave

Originally published in 2008

It is easier to talk to the psychiatrized about using self-focus as a tool of healing than it is to talk to the presumably ‘sane’ ones.

Do you know why? I do.

It is because self-focus allows the psychiatrized person to break their psychological ties with those who can’t really hear them and who are relating to them as superiors to inferiors.

Using self-focus the psychiatrized can begin to regain what they have had taken away from them: power over their OWN minds and the right to self define with good personal boundaries.

With ‘others’, especially all those ‘blameless others,’ self focus is fought against. Do you know why?

It is because the ‘blameless’ make themselves FEEL better by using external focus, not internal, and by projecting all their own dysfunctional problems and feelings onto ‘defectives’ whom they can then get together and ‘fix’ as a group effort. That group effort, still focused externally, also allows them to maintain the same state of dysfunction. To this group, self-focus is threatening since doing so means LOSING what they have gained that makes them feel better. That loss is the power over others and what they now consider to be their ‘right’- the right to define others, FOR others, and to impose their own beliefs on them, against the others will if necessary. They do this while telling themselves it is for the others 'own good.' Of course it is really for the good of the imposer, not the imposed upon, but we are not ‘allowed’ to notice that.

So, self focus has the opposite effect to the psychiatrized since it is about taking their OWN power back and just their own power.

To the psychiatrists and many other dysfunctional group members, it is about LOSING power and control over others. This second group then fights hard to keep what it has gained, power, while the second group, rendered virtually powerless, fights to regain what is rightfully theirs.

This difference in the judgements of human value causes the widely held acceptance of the differences seen regarding the right to personal power, which keeps the imbalance going to infinity.  It is human fear that is preventing the resolution of this problem by means of egalitarian relating. That means condemning dysfunctional ways of relating and starting fresh from a new premise. The majority, can’t, or won’t, face this. They are still trying to get that elusive approval from those ‘authorities’ who are supposed to love them. As long as we continue to look backwards for this ‘approval’ we don’t really need, we are not going to see the disaster which is coming because we are refusing to look ahead at the predictable results of what we are doing and what we are failing to do now.