HOW GETTING IN TOUCH WITH FEELINGS HAPPENS: THE PROCESS OF REFERENCINGAKIKO DOI, M.A., is a doctoral student in the clini cal psychology program at Kobe College. Prior to entering the graduate course in psychology, she worked as a translator after finishing her undergrad uate course in American literature and linguistics. Her current interests include the process of explicat ing verbal symbolizations.AKIRA IKEMI, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and a professor of counseling psychology at Kobe College. He has worked as a clinical psychologist in depart ments of psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine. He is currently working in corporate medical centers from a focusing oriented perspective that he studied with Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago. He is a certifying coordinator of the Focusing Institute and an executive director of the Japan Focusing Association.International NetworkSummaryIn psychotherapy, the client constantly checks or tries to explicate his or her feelings, which produces different words for feelings. The process of explicating feelings may also result in changes in the feel ings themselves. This checking out of feelings is called referring to the feelings. Referring to the feeling and explicating the feeling are essential for feelings to embark on the change process. In this article, we discuss the process of referring to feelings in psychother apy. Using Carl Rogerss and Eugene Gendlins theories, we propose a process of referencing. The referencing process involves not only the clients referring to feelings but also the happening together of the client and therapist in explication. The exploration of the refer encing process will, hopefully, contribute to the sophistication of how the feeling process occurs in interaction, which is a central issue in humanistic psychology.Keywords: feeling process; referring to feelings; congruence; interaction; referencing processWhat is called feelings or the feeling process is crucial for humanistic psychology. Instead of intellectual analysis, humanis tic psychology relies on the feeling process as a source of knowledge about the person. Personal growth and self actualizationissues that characterize humanistic psychology are also directed by the feeling process. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers agreed that what is self actualizing or growth promoting for a person feels right for that person. There is felt rightness to certain ways of liv ing and being for a person, even though the felt rightness may involve hardships and obstacles. Resolutions in humanistic psychotherapies accompany relevant felt changes, not just intel lectual interpretations or behavioral modifications.Humanistic psychologists, moreover, rely on the person as a source of knowledge on how the person gets in touch with, and how the person articulates the feeling process. For example, humanistic psychologists would not rely solely on measures of certain bio chemical substances in the blood and then determine whether the person has high anger or low anger. Although such measures can be valuable in humanistic research, the humanistic researcher would also ask the person whether he or she feels the anger and how. How the person feels is best described by that person, rather than by an outside measure.In psychotherapy, clients get in touch with and describe their own feeling processes. In such explications, the words