Challenging Isolation
From a talk by Tim Jackins* at the September 2019 Teachers’ and Leaders’ Workshop for Fryslân and the Netherlands
We feel isolated. We are isolated. We don’t know how to be connected with anyone as much as we’d like. Often we try to have a connection with someone, then both of us get restimulated and we give up. Then we go on and maybe try again.
How many times have you tried and given up? Have you given up enough times that you don’t try anymore? A lot of us sit and wait for someone to find us. That doesn’t work very often. Everyone is waiting for us to find them.
The isolation interferes with everything we do, including our counseling of each other. When I am client, I don’t really tell you, my counselor, everything. I tell you a little, but there’s much more going on [happening] in my mind that I don’t tell you. I make some use of you. I wouldn’t try to discharge if you weren’t there. But I don’t use your mind very much. That’s true for others of you, too. Your counselor gives you a phrase that they think will help you discharge, and you say it. But sometimes you think your own phrase as you’re saying theirs. (laughter) Even here we can’t really connect and use each other fully.
I don’t actually know how to tell you everything. There’s never been anyone I could do that with. Unless we challenge this kind of isolation, we stay separate. I sometimes look at my counselor and see the worry on their face. It’s not reassuring. And if I don’t think carefully, I pull away a little in my mind. Then I counsel myself more than I let them counsel me. But if I stop and think, I realize that what matters is not that they have a pattern of worry—that’s merely restimulating—what matters is that they want to be with me and try for me. They have decided to be on my side, and that I can always use.
You can look at your counselor and ask them, “Are you really on my side?” You may have to ask them three or four times before you can hear their answer. Then it’s your job as client to try to believe them—to not let your mind go with your feelings that say that nobody ever wants to be with you. You can decide to believe them. You can decide that what they’re saying is true. You get to decide that. Don’t wait for your counselor to make you believe it. They have decided to be there with you. Use that fact.
Let’s do a mini-session. Ask your counselor, “Are you really on my side?” and try to understand what that could mean.
(mini-session)
You could hear in the room how unsure we are of each other. Don’t take it personally. It isn’t about any individual. The person who doesn’t trust you doesn’t trust anybody. That’s the way patterns are. But unless we challenge the isolation, it’s hard to work deeply on it.
At the beginning of a session in which you’ll be working on early hurts, ask your counselor, “Are you on my side?” Discharge a little on that, on what stops you from using them well. Then you can take more of them with you into the fight against the early distress.
We all have similar battles. We all got hurt very early with isolation. Then we got hurt by all the oppressions of society—the racism, sexism, men’s oppression, anti-Semitism, and so on. But the early hurts happened first, and discharging on them will make all the other struggles much clearer.
We need someone to be on our side, and by our side, in these early battles. What we really need is everyone. This is not an individual struggle. Our society has hurt all of us. The struggle is really a collective battle against what happened to everyone. We get to fight for everyone. That’s what we get to learn how to do.
First we have to decide that we are going to do it. Then we have to decide that other people are going to decide to do it, that we are not alone. Then we can go back and take on [confront] the early struggles that confused us.
(Present Time 198, January 2020)