[stub]Re-evaluation co-counselling (Harvey Jackins)
Re-Evaluation Co-Counselling is not therapy in a therapist-client sense, but a peer network of people mutually sharing techniques for healing.
Re-Evaluation Co-Counselling
Re-Evaluation Co-Counselling (“RC”) is not therapy in a therapist-client sense, but a peer network of people mutually sharing techniques for healing.
Note: RC centrally emphasises emotional expression. I do not do this. My clients are no more and no less tearful than with any therapy. Emotional release is not a goal.
In a certain way RC was a kind of first love for me. I really loved doing it at the time; but then moved on to deeper things; and looking back more and more realised RC’s serious faults and failings as it was at that time. It’s worth saying that those failings never had any bad effect on me personally (almost entirely I had no contact with these. What I got was positive.
I don’t want to put anyone off exploring this beautiful method! Many criticisms are historical and most are now well-addressed. RC continues to contain valuable understandings and methods. It’s perhaps the only school of healing to realise that the pain we carry as individuals is the framework of social oppression, and to address that oppression directly.
I should say that all peer healing networks, not just RC, have challenges (i) with transference/countertransference ie with peer-counselling relationships dissolving into social relationships (ii) with leadership as there are in-built problems equally with autocracy and with democracy and (iii) are inevitably going to be much weaker than proper therapist-client therapy.
But as I said, I wasn’t aware of these negatives and they never gave me trouble.
OK, the good bits. A foundational practice in RC is this. Two people sit opposite each other, commonly holding hands. One is the explorer, one is the listener. Let’s assume this is a good and safe situation, as in my own experience it always was – a lot of effort goes into ensuring this so. The explorer is helped to feel and know and register that right here, right now, they are safe and whatever bad happened in the past is in the past. The human mind is such that we carry the past with us. Cognitively we know we are safe and the past is gone, but emotionally we don’t feel that; in our unconscious mind trauma loops over and over perpetually. So there’s going to be a newness to the experience of safety and now-ness.
Once the explorer feels the safety, then keeping hold of the safety, they begin to explore the past – for example recounting childhood pain. This is called keeping one foot in the past, one foot in the present: feeling and knowing you are safe and feeling the pain – but feeling it in such a way that you experience that it is a memory, and is unrelated to present time here and now reality.
Typically when feeling both these things at once, some kind of emotional discharge happens – maybe tears of grief, maybe laughter of relief, or stretching out of old tensions, relief of tensions via repeated yawning, or shaking as fear is released. Expressing anger by beating a pillow can also happen, though only does any good if immediately followed by extended meditation. Pillow beating is not emotional release.
This is different from the common experience where feeling emotions from past events carries us back into the past and makes the grip of the pain on our lives no less. Doing it one foot in the past, one foot in the present then more and more the grip of the past is dissolved, more and more the feeling of being safe and free in the here and now is deepened. It’s very healing.
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
– Buddha