To Discharge Well
Tim Jackins, at a teachers’ and leaders’ workshop in Connecticut, USA, May 2000
For anyone to be able to discharge well, there has to be some way of not getting lost in the distress. This is why we set up Co-Counseling sessions. The best thing to remind us about the real world and the present being different from the way we got hurt is to have somebody there who cares about us, who is committed to listening to us, who is not giving us advice but is actually being as we need them, whose attention is on us, for us to use.
Our young ones pick up on [notice] our attempts to not discharge, to suppress it. So what do you do when that control pattern has been installed on them? Well, it’s what you do with any client who can’t quite figure out if it’s safe enough to discharge. You try to change the situation enough that he or she can notice the outside resource of your attention.
People walk around in a cocoon of their own distresses, muffled from the world. What it often takes is someone—you, the counselor—reaching in through that cocoon to make contact, because they can’t quite figure out how to get out of it themselves. They live in it all the time. Just your saying, “This is a session and I’m going to pay attention,” often isn’t enough for them to break out of it.
As we get more experience and gain some command of the discharge process for ourselves as client, we’re not so dependent on counselors being able to do that. But it’s always useful, as a counselor, to figure out how to do it.
(Present Time 185, October 2016)