Charlotte Howorth, LCSW, has spent more than three decades helping people come into fuller contact with their own lived experience. She has done this first as a psychotherapist, then as one of the most experienced teachers of Focusing-Oriented Therapy, and increasingly as a coach and consultant to leaders and organizations. Her work grows out of the philosophy of Eugene Gendlin. Gendlin held that real change comes less from technique than from a particular quality of attention to what is felt but not yet said. Charlotte’s distinctive contribution has been to show how that attention lives in the relationship itself: the practitioner becoming, in Gendlin’s phrase, “the interaction that makes it better.”

For twelve years she led The International Focusing Institute’s two-year certification program in Focusing-Oriented Therapy. Mary Hendricks, Gendlin’s wife and the Institute’s former director, personally entrusted her with the role. Charlotte has since trained therapists, coaches, and helping professionals privately and in workshops around the world. She has lectured in social work at Columbia University and served as Clinical Director of the Center for Human Development and Family Services in New York City. She is based in Brooklyn. Across all of her roles, the through-line is the same: a trust that something in each person already knows its way forward, and a rare skill in helping it be heard.

current class:

THE SIX STEPS OF THERAPEUTIC TRANSFORMATION

 

What creates change in therapy?
 
6 class introductory series in Focusing-Oriented Conversations
with Charlotte Howorth LCSW
 
For therapists, counsellors, coaches, focusing practitioners and helping professionals who want to deepen their understanding of therapeutic change and the one interaction.
Biweekly - now starting October 4th · 135 minutes each
10 Social Works CEUs · $500

About the Course
A therapy session is a kind of dance - between therapist and client, between the client and their own inner process, between what is known and what is only beginning to stir. Several tracks are often alive at once: the relational field, the emerging felt sense, the forward movement, the therapist's own resonance.

These workshops help you become more at home in that complexity - not by simplifying it, but by developing a richer feel for each of its dimensions - raising awareness, sensitivity and the skills to move in each.

Eugene Gendlin's six steps of focusing have long served as resonant handles into the subtle border between words and the larger dimension of the wordless. Inspired by them, I've developed a parallel set of six steps for Focusing Oriented Therapy - not a rigid protocol, but a map of the essential movements that make a session come alive. They're offered in Gendlin's spirit - not as technique, but as doorways into a process that is experiential, relational, and always unfolding.

We miss the essence of therapy when we reduce it to instructions. These workshops are about something else - the heart of Focusing Oriented Therapy - as a way of thinking and being. Not only what we do, but how, why, and from what place.

The Six Sessions

  • 1. The Focusing Attitude as Relational Ground  Every session begins before any technique: with an open, receptive, non-demanding presence. This isn't one step among others - it's the ground everything grows from. We explore how this quality is communicated, how to sense when it's missing, and how to return to it.
  • 2. Entering the Field of Lived Experience How do we help a client move from talking about their life to being in it? This session is about the movement into experiential process - pointing beneath the narrative and helping a felt sense begin to form. The art of making a "something" from what is still vague.
  • 3. Building a Relational Home Finding the right distance: between the client and the issue they carry, and between client and therapist. The right distance makes genuine contact possible without flooding or withdrawal - a home where the most vulnerable material can be welcomed and digested.
  • 4. Trusting the Forward Movement  Something opens. New meaning forms. The felt sense, held in the right presence, begins to carry forward. We explore that moment of genuine movement - what enables it, and how to support it without foreclosing it. This life-forward force isn't manufactured; it's recognized and met.
  • 5. Being on Its Side  At the center of FOT is the recognition that something in the client knows its own way - an implicit, directional movement wiser than any interpretation. This session is about trusting and aligning with that emergent process while staying present to both the client and the relationship.
  • 6. Taking in the Whole  Integration isn't an endpoint but an ongoing opening. The closing movement: stepping back to sense the whole - of the session, the issue, the arc of a person's struggle and growth. How does what happened here now live in me? And where does this session sit in the longer journey?

    • Each session includes:
  • Didactic teaching - grounded in Gendlin's process philosophy, extended through relational and neurobiological understanding
  • Clinical video - short excerpts from real sessions illustrating each step
  • Live Demonstrations
  • Discussion - space to bring your own clinical experience into dialogue
  • Experiential practice - because understanding lives in the body, not only the mind

    •  

    October 4, October 18, November 1,
    November 15, December 6, December 20
    10:00am-12:15pm Eastern

     

    Registration & Enquiries
    Contact Charlotte directly: charlottehoworth@gmail.com
    +1 (347) 489 9587 · www.charlottehoworth.com