What happens to the psyche when a person practises Transgressive Focusing

“Things feel lighter. The past has let go of me. My appetite for life is back. I have a clearer sense of what to do next.”

This is how our students have described the practice for years — from the inside, in their own words. The accounts are numerous, detailed and sincere. But every account of this kind has a weak point: it is easy to call into question. Too subjective, too dependent on the mood a person happens to be in when they talk about themselves. And there will almost always be someone who shrugs: who knows what the person imagined they felt.

This is where it pays to be precise. A testimonial is what a person feels and says about themselves. A measurable indicator is something that can be recorded with the same instrument in different people and compared. And a testimonial is not yet evidence.

We had seen the subjective effect for a long time — our task was to check whether it is visible through the lens of standard psychological tests. Not to persuade or please ourselves, but to test whether it holds. So that the result, if it did confirm the method's effect on the psyche, could be shown to a sceptic.

So in the autumn of 2022, Guidance School decided to look at what the practice gives people through standard psychological scales — the same ones clinical psychologists use in their work — rather than through the eyes of grateful students. From September 2022 to January 2023, together with an independent group of researchers led by Natalia Ptashnik, MSc (Psychology), we ran the first measurement of this kind.

The question we posed was simple and direct: does the method have a measurable effect on a person's psychological state — and if so, what exactly is it, what does it consist of, and how stable is it.

What we measured

A few words about the method itself. Its full name is Transgressive Focusing (TF) — transgressive focusing of consciousness. Its essence is a guided, gradual movement of attention between layers of perception — gently, without abrupt jumps, keeping clarity and control. A person learns to move the focus of consciousness into territory that is hard to reach in an ordinary state, and to stay collected while doing so. Perception expands, with an element of trance — but the person keeps steering their own immersion.

What mattered to us here was to test whether regular practice of this kind changes a person's overall psychological state — whether they become calmer, steadier, more content with their life. That is precisely what psychological questionnaires know how to measure. Whether the method “works magic” was never the question.

How we measured

In total, 203 people took part in the study. The main group were students of the method's foundation course — 162 people. The course runs for about a month and a half, and for these students it was their first encounter with the method — so we were looking at the effect literally “before” and “after”. Almost all participants were women (about 93%), mostly aged 26 to 55.

There was also a second group, for comparison — students of the next stage of training, where practitioners are prepared (41 people). Some of them had been practising for over a year by the time of the study. This group answered a different question: what happens to a person over long, regular practice rather than a couple of months.

Each participant answered 86 questions across three different instruments — and the main group did so three times: at the start, the midpoint and the end of the course. The instruments were not chosen at random: together they cover three different sides of a person's inner state — mood, satisfaction, and their relationship with the time of their own life.

• The Burns Depression Checklist. One of the tools clinical psychologists use to assess how pronounced a person's low mood, anxiety and inner tension are. A score above 50 indicates severe depression, 26 and above — moderate, 11 to 25 — mild. For reference: population averages at the time of the study hovered around 40–45.
• The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) by E. Diener. Cited thousands of times in the psychological literature. It measures something deeper than momentary mood — how content a person is, overall, with how their life has taken shape and is unfolding.
• The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI). The most comprehensive of the three. It describes how a person relates to the time of their life, broken into five factors: Past Negative, Past Positive, Present Hedonistic, Present Fatalistic, and Future orientation.

The answers were then converted into scores and averaged. Two caveats straight away. First, scores are not percentages; in these instruments even a small shift of the mean is meaningful. Second, we are talking about overall tendencies across the group — for any individual person, things could of course unfold differently.

What the numbers showed

The main result: the relationship with the past changes

The most visible and most reliable result did not appear where one might expect it — in “mood”, the obvious first impression of an unusual practice. It appeared in how people relate to the time of their life. The factor that moved most was Past Negative.

To make sure this was no accident and no artefact of averaging, we took the strict route: we selected only those who had completed the questionnaire both at the start and at the end, and looked at what changed for each of them personally. In 73% of them, Past Negative went down. Not “on average across the ward” — in nearly three out of every four individual people.

This is arguably the most interesting observation in the whole study. The practice does not rewrite a person's biography: hard events remain hard, unfair ones remain unfair. What changes is the relationship with those facts, and the weight becomes lighter — the person stops waging a continuous war with their own past. In psychology this is close to what is called acceptance: to accept what happened does not mean to approve of it; it means to stop spending strength fighting what has already taken place.

Satisfaction with life rises

Satisfaction with life climbs by the end of the course. But there is a trap here: a newcomer who has just discovered something inspiring will happily tick high scores on sheer emotional lift — and a month later everything may settle back. This “discovery effect” proves nothing by itself.

So once again we checked the changes within each person rather than across the group. In 69% of participants who completed both measurements, satisfaction with life rose. And in the long-practice group the score had not slipped back — it held at the same high level, clearly above the newcomers' starting point. If it had been euphoria, it would long since have worn off. Which means the rise consolidates.

Anxiety and low mood: the reduction is real

Looking at the group averages, the depression score falls strikingly: 24 “before” → 18 “after”. A handsome result — and precisely for that reason we grew suspicious.

The final survey was voluntary, and 86 questions take real time, so not everyone completed it. Some simply did not feel like taking the test again — and we were not going to force anyone. Which means the starting and final samples are partly different people, and comparing their averages is close to comparing two different groups. The handsome drop could simply reflect that the calmer people were the ones who made it to the final survey.

So we returned, again, to the same individuals — those with both a starting and a final measurement. And here the suspicion did not hold: the reduction stood firm. In these people the distress score fell by almost 6 points on average (from 22.9 to 16.8), and 64% of them improved. The shift is visible at the level of clinical categories too: the number of people in the severe zone dropped from five to one, and the group with minimal scores doubled.

The caveat stands: this is self-report, and we are talking about clear softening rather than “healing”. But unlike our first fears, the reduction in distress did not dissolve under strict checking. It turned out to be real.

The time of one's life: the full picture

The Zimbardo inventory deserves to be shown in full — it told us the most. Here is what happened to each of the five factors over the course (start → end):

Past Positive and the capacity to enjoy the present are high in our students to begin with, and they stay high. That is a good baseline — and precisely because it barely moves, we do not claim it as our achievement.

Future orientation decreases slightly in long-term practitioners. At first glance that sounds worrying, but on a closer look it is rather natural. The person lives less in a mode of waiting and postponed life, is less “projected” into tomorrow — and is more present in today. The goals are not lost; the focus of attention shifts into the present.

The fatalistic attitude is a separate and instructive story. It is lower in long-term practitioners, and it is very tempting to say: there we are, the practice teaches people to rely on themselves instead of blaming fate. Perhaps so. But there is a second possibility. Within a single six-week course this indicator barely moves. The substantial difference is visible only between the groups (newcomers versus long-term practitioners). And it may be explained by self-selection rather than the method: perhaps those who continue to the practitioner stage are exactly the people who were already inclined to rely on themselves. So we keep this observation as a hypothesis, not as a proven effect. A tempting conclusion is not always a correct one, and we prefer accuracy.

Why these conclusions can be trusted

The strongest argument in our study is the way we obtained the numbers, more than the numbers themselves. We tracked the same people from start to finish.

The difference is fundamental. One can compute the average score of “newcomers” and the average score of “graduates” and compare two numbers — easy, but deceptive: behind the movement of a chart may hide the simple fact that different people answered at the start and at the end. Or one can take a specific person and see what changed in them. When an indicator shifts in the same direction inside dozens of individual people, it becomes hard to attribute to chance or to the composition of the group.

That is why we state three effects with confidence — all three were confirmed at the level of individual people rather than group averages alone, and all three are statistically significant:

The remaining effects — those concerning the present and the future — are either weaker or require caution in interpretation.

The whole picture in one scheme

What else the data suggested

When we looked at the numbers more closely, three things emerged that the overall charts do not show.

The past pulls everything else along. Those whose Past Negative released more strongly also showed a larger rise in satisfaction with life and a larger drop in distress — the changes move hand in hand. This turns our main result from “one indicator among others” into a possible mechanism: the relationship with the past changes, and overall well-being follows. It is a hypothesis, but an elegant and testable one.

Those who had it hardest at the start change the most. The higher a person's initial score for distress or rejection of the past, the more it had dropped by the end. The practice appears to reach first the people who need it most. One could suspect a statistical illusion here — the highest scores drift down by themselves on a repeat measurement. But the data do not look like that: were it so, the lowest scores should have drifted up in return — and they stayed where they were. The whole group moved down, and not just its most burdened edge. Only a full control group, which we did not have, would close the question completely — but simple arithmetic this is not.

The changes do not come at once. Splitting the course into halves shows that almost nothing moves in the first weeks, and the main shift in mood and satisfaction happens in the second half of training. This, incidentally, is the best answer to the “newcomer's euphoria” suspicion: if euphoria were the cause, the spike would come at the beginning. Instead it comes closer to the end — when the skill is already in active use.

What we do not claim

Talking about “science” without naming the limits makes no sense. So let us state the boundaries of our conclusions directly.

• This is correlation, not proven causation. The comparison group is not a strict control: these are different people who themselves chose to continue studying. We see a link between the practice and the state, but we cannot surgically separate the effect of the method itself from the effects of motivation, expectations and self-selection.
• All three instruments are self-report. They describe well how a person feels and evaluates themselves, but it remains a view from within, however standardised. The person answers about themselves.
• The final survey was voluntary, and not everyone completed it. These are not “drop-outs” — each had their own reason, unknown to us. But the finishers are a self-selected subgroup, and the averages at different stages are therefore computed over partly different people. The paired analysis exists precisely to get around this.
• The sample is narrow: almost entirely women aged 26–55. It is too early to extend the conclusions to men, adolescents or older people.
• The effects are small in absolute size. Their value lies in their consistency across different scales and in the fact that they repeat at the level of individual people.

None of this cancels the result — but it keeps us from the temptation to claim more than the data show.

What comes next

Questionnaires do their job faithfully, but they have a ceiling: they always ask a person about themselves. The next logical step is to look past the answers, at the body directly. We have already launched a series of studies recording EEG during the practice: what happens to brain activity, in real time, at the moment of Transgressive Focusing. That is a different level of evidence — the person evaluates nothing; the instrument simply records. We will report the first results separately.

For now, the conclusion is a restrained one. The method leaves a measurable positive trace in the psyche of the practitioner: the relationship with the past becomes calmer, satisfaction with life higher, distress lower. The effect is modest. But it stood firm at the level of the individual living person, tracked from the beginning — before the practice — to the end, after the method had been learned.