The Ongoing Class in the Philippines
Here is some background to the ongoing Co-Counseling class I’ve been teaching in the Philippines:
It began with my wanting to teach Co-Counseling to my brother who was living in the Philippines. I would visit him every one or two years and give him pieces of RC information. He never showed much interest in learning more. However, if we spent an evening together, he would often have a long cry while I listened to him.
These short teachings and one-way counseling sessions continued for ten years, and then he decided he wanted to learn more. I spent the next two years trying to find him a class in the Philippines. Nothing worked out. Eventually he and I had a week together in the United States and I taught him a crash course [a short, intense course]. It seemed to go well. When he returned to Manila, I tried teaching him online via FaceTime. That, too, seemed to work.
Next my brother wanted to include a cousin of ours, which would give him an in-person Co-Counselor. When that cousin also found Co-Counseling useful, he wanted to invite his brother—a cousin I had grown up with during high school but had not had much contact with in the past twenty years. I contacted this cousin and described the class. To my surprise, he immediately agreed to join. Much later he explained that he hadn’t been sure what he had agreed to but had remembered that I’d always tried to think about him. He trusted me.
The poor Internet connection to the Philippines was a big challenge. For example, we would sometimes spend a lot of class time trying different communication applications (Skype, Viber, Google Hangouts) or hold the class in a car parked in a location with better Internet access. The time difference was also challenging; I taught the class from 4:30 to 7:00 a.m., each Sunday.
I found out that one of the class members had been on psychotropic medications for the previous eight years. Under normal circumstances I don’t bring students who need extra resource into a new RC Community. But this was my family, and I couldn’t think of not including him. I decided to keep trying, even if it took ten years to teach him and build the Community. To my surprise, within a year he decided to get off of his medications. This brought up a lot of feelings for him and impacted many people around him. When his wife, whom I barely knew, asked me why he’d stopped his medications, I realized that I needed to teach her Co-Counseling as well, so that she could understand, support him, and also get support for herself during this challenging period. It was a scary time for all of us, and I spent a lot of time (I got up daily at 5:00 a.m.) counseling them individually and in relationship sessions.
Being the only female in a class would be hard for her, so we invited all the other partners, as well as the sister of my two cousins. This gave us four men and four women. Prior to including the women, the men had spent many classes working on male domination, sexism, and male oppression. So we were able to start each of the mixed-gender classes with separated sessions on sexism and male domination. The women enjoyed getting to counsel together about sexism and deepened their relationships. They often said that reclaiming their relationships with their “sisters” was their class highlight.
I said that as family members we may have witnessed the early hurts that our client is working on and explained that rather than assume that we know what happened, we need to focus on how the experience has affected our client—that being counselor requires seeing the experience through the client’s eyes and mind.
After teaching the class for eighteen months, I wanted some in-person contact with the participants. So on a work trip, I passed by Manila and led a two-day workshop for them. The class had in it three families with children, so we spent the last hours of each workshop day in a short family workshop. I wanted people to get a bigger picture of how RC could be used in their lives. They enjoyed the workshops, learned new ideas, and discharged well. Six months later during another work trip, I led another workshop for the class.
With this base of Co-Counselors in the Philippines, Teresa Enrico and I started talking about travelling there to do workshops. Then it took a while to put together a small delegation. For seven months the delegation had regular conference calls during which we planned, discharged, and built our relationships and attention for the project. We hoped to eventually have many classes like mine.
San Francisco, California, USA
(Present Time 192, July 2018)