When You Let the Body Lead: Embodied Healing and Change with Contemporary Focusing-Oriented Therapy

There is a place in us that talk therapy often can't reach and bodywork alone can't unlock — a place where feelings begin, before they become words. In this wordless space lives the body's innate wisdom: a felt sense that holds the key to deep and lasting transformation.

When You Let the Body Lead introduces Contemporary Focusing-Oriented Therapy — a fully updated re-visioning of Eugene Gendlin's foundational work, grounded in current neuroscience and responsive to today's clinical realities. Through vivid case stories and moment-to-moment guidance, Letich and Brenner show how to help clients contact the "unclear edge" of experience, stay with it safely, and follow the body's natural movement toward resolution.

The book offers therapists a reliable method for working with trauma, complex PTSD, dissociation, attachment wounds, stuckness, and overwhelming affect — while deepening therapeutic presence and attunement. It speaks to clinicians across modalities — including those trained in Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, AEDP, EFT, IFS, and EMDR — offering a unifying framework grounded in the body's own intelligence.

Drawing on decades of clinical experience and direct training with Gendlin and Ann Weiser Cornell, and written in a warm, jargon-free voice, When You Let the Body Lead offers clinicians and thoughtful lay readers a path to healing rooted in presence, compassion, and embodied truth.

When we stop trying to fix ourselves and instead learn to listen, the body knows the way forward.

Laurence Letich, LCSW, has fifty years of experience exploring the human emotional landscape and relationships. A licensed clinical social worker for twenty-five years, he is a Certifying Coordinator for The International Focusing Institute (TIFI), and is Certified in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT). His specialties include men's issues, anxiety, relationships, Adult ADHD, and trauma. A longtime freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Utne Reader, and Attention Magazine, and was the former editor of the research colum for Psychotherapy Networker. He co-authors the Psychology Today blog "The Art of Feeling" with Helene G. Brenner.

Helene G. Brenner, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with over 35 years of experience and a Certifying Coordinator in Focusing-Oriented Therapy through The International Focusing Institute. She is the author of I Know I'm In There Somewhere: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner Voice and Living a Life of Authenticity (Penguin/Avery, 2003). She trained directly with Eugene Gendlin and Ann Weiser Cornell, and her work integrates Focusing with AEDP, EMDR, and attachment-based approaches. She has taught at Omega Institute and Kripalu Center, and was a featured presenter at the 3rd Annual International Focusing-Oriented Therapy Conference. Her writing appears on Psychology Today's blog "The Art of Feeling". She co-directs the Center for Contemporary Focusing-Oriented Therapy with Laurence Letich.