Ann Weiser Cornell

Dr. Cornell has played a pivotal role in making Focusing accessible to a broader audience through her books, workshops, and online courses. Her work encourages a gentle, accepting attitude toward one’s inner experience, guiding individuals to connect with their emotions and bodily sensations for deeper self-awareness and emotional healing.

With thousands of people trained in her methods, she is widely regarded as a leading figure in personal development and therapeutic practice. She has authored several influential books, including The Power of Focusing, Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change, and her latest work, Untangling: How You Can Transform What’s Impossibly Stuck, co-authored with Barbara McGavin.

Dr. Cornell currently serves as the President and CEO of Focusing Resources, Inc., an organization dedicated to enhancing emotional health on personal, community, and global levels. She is also a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology.

Don't miss out on these sessions

Sessions featuring Ann Weiser Cornell

Dr. Cornell will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Emotion Revolution conference, where she will lead two sessions:

Empowering clients who tend to become emotionally overwhelmed

45 minutes

For effective therapeutic change, clients need to be in contact with their emotions. The question is: What kind of contact? If clients tend to get overwhelmed by their emotions, they may experience fragility and fear of emotional states, possibly resulting in therapeutic failure. This presentation will demonstrate a way to foster the client's strong, calm, witnessing self by using gentle empathic prompts, even in a first session. Clients who are enabled to be present with their emotional states, rather than being tossed about by their feelings, can reflect on their experiences and offer needed emotional repair to their wounded younger selves.

Felt-Sensing: How to help clients who are stuck in repetitive emotions or in avoiding emotion

90 minutes

Often clients' emotional states tend to repeat without resolution, and there can seem to be no way forward. Clients who find emotional states unfruitful and burdensome can tend to shut them down, and escape into intellectualization and fruitless self-analysis. Yet in every emotional state there is forward life movement, which can be tapped into and experienced by getting a felt sense. Felt senses are embodied, wholistic summaries of everything connected with a particular life situation, and they contain a knowing of fresh forward steps of life. This presentation will show how to support clients in getting felt senses even when the client resists or avoids bodily-felt experience.

Panel Wednesday:

Join an engaging panel discussion featuring some of the most prominent figures in psychotherapy—Leslie Greenberg, Nancy McWilliams, Ann Weisser Cornell, Allan Abbass, and Mark Solms—as they unravel the complex challenges of working with emotions in therapy. This session will address how clinicians can effectively navigate and resolve key therapeutic roadblocks, such as interruptions in emotional processing and self-directed anger. The panelists will share cutting-edge insights and practical approaches for fostering deeper emotional connections, increasing emotional resilience, and breaking through entrenched patterns of avoidance. Expect a dynamic exchange of ideas that will provide attendees with actionable strategies to overcome the therapeutic barriers highlighted by each keynote speaker, making this a must-attend event for those looking to elevate their practice and deepen their understanding of emotional work in therapy.

Panel Friday:

As we conclude three days of enriching presentations and discussions, our final panel debate will bring together our keynote speakers to reflect on the key takeaways from the conference. This session will focus on synthesizing the insights gained and exploring future directions for the field of psychotherapy. Our panelists will discuss the implications of their work for ongoing clinical practice and research and share their visions for the future of their respective approaches. This is an opportunity to gain a comprehensive understanding of where the field is headed and how we can continue to evolve and improve our work with clients.

See the full program