Before Words: Focusing and the Body In Dialogue

Banu Ibaoglu Vaughn, PhD, is a psychologist and seasoned psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience specializing in dialogical and experiential approaches to individual and couples work. She earned her MA in Psychology with a clinical concentration and her PhD with a focus on Consciousness and Society, both from the University of West Georgia — a continuous thread of inquiry that brought her into close collaboration with philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin in the final years of his life. Her doctoral research examined moments of change within dialogue, exploring the conditions under which something genuinely new emerges in the space between two people. She serves as faculty in Imago Relationship Therapy and integrates dialogical, experiential, somatic, and creative practices into both her teaching and her clinical work across the U.S., Turkey, and parts of Europe.

Banu’s practice is rooted in existential and humanistic psychology, with over 20 years as a Focusing practitioner and teacher. Her work attends closely to the quiet, process-oriented dimensions of human experience — the implicit, the unspoken, and the felt — and how these dimensions move and change when they are genuinely met. She has brought this orientation into community contexts, including disaster response work in Turkey’s earthquake-affected regions, where she has been involved in psychosocial support and Psychological First Aid with communities navigating acute and ongoing loss. Across all of her work, whether in the clinical room, the training institute, or the field, her commitment remains the same: to co-create spaces in which people can reconnect to their own resources, and to trust that when meaning is truly heard and held, something shifts.