My RC Story
I was twenty-nine years old before I heard that it was good to be working class—that it is our strength and intelligence that makes every other person’s life possible. (This was decades before the concept of “essential workers” came to the forefront.) At that moment, at my first Re-evaluation Counseling workshop, I felt, for the first time, pride in the generations of poor and working-class people that had come before me.
Before that I had never been listened to for even five minutes. Now another person—one of my peers—could listen to me without judgment, with confidence in my ability to think my way through the challenges that had faced me and my forebears. And then I could do the same for them.
It was good to understand that there was nothing wrong with us and that we could systematically help each other break out of old patterns of self-denigration and powerlessness. For the first time, I understood that we could help each other get out from under the patterns of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and other oppressions that society had heaped upon us and that had kept us from uniting and moving forward with other people throughout the world. I heard for the first time that I could be a leader, and that we need leaders from groups that have a keen understanding of the realities of the world.
I have shared the theory and practice of RC with others as best I could. I see my role as helping to save lives—and I can confidently say that I have saved a few. There is nothing to do that is better than that.
Freeport, Maine, USA
(Present Time 205, October 2021)