Discharging on Health-Related Issues
In this article I suggest ways to discharge on health-related issues. I’ve found that most RCers wait until they are ill or injured to discharge on them. My fervent wish is that every workshop put some attention on our health!
The following are my suggestions:
- Appreciate your health and your body! If you are breathing, you have some “health.” And our bodies are miraculous and complex. They deserve daily appreciation.
- We don’t need an academic degree in “RC health knowledge” to discharge about our health! Bring your health struggles to Co-Counseling sessions. Counsel your counselors so they can listen well and think about you and themselves.
- Read the RC journal Well-Being.
- Tell the story of your body. It’s helpful to have a picture of our health over time. You can begin by reviewing your birth and then all that followed—childhood injuries, serious and minor; ordinary illnesses; big illnesses; family members’ illnesses; and so on. These events can install recordings of fear and powerlessness that need to be discharged.
- Counsel on early sexual memories. It can be helpful to read the RC pamphlet Counseling on Early Sexual Memories and consider how early sexual hurts may have impacted your body and health.
- Much that happens in the world is hard on our bodies. We can counsel on the effects of colonialism, white supremacy, genocide, enslavement, and forced labor. Oppression affects us physically. For example, how does sexism affect women’s bodies (with high heels, hair dyes, plastic surgery), and men’s oppression affect men’s bodies (with war, overwork, “tough guy” recordings, conditioning that leads to resisting medical care)? Working-class people’s exploitation? The oppression of Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)* people? [* The peoples of Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, and South, Central, and Caribbean America, and Indigenous people, are over eighty percent of the global population. These people also occupy most of the global land mass. Using the term “Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)” for these people acknowledges their majority status in the world and interrupts how the dominant (U.S. and European) culture assigns them a minority status. Many Global Majority and Indigenous people living in dominant-culture countries have been assimilated into the dominant culture—by force, in order to survive, in seeking a better life for themselves and their families, or in pursuing the economic, political, or other inclusion of their communities. Calling these people “Global Majority and Indigenous” contradicts the assimilation.]
People who have experienced war and forced migration have the highest rates of chronic illness. And of course, people from privileged groups also have experiences that affect their bodies.
- Our health care providers are doing their best to think about us. They care and want to help, even though their brutal training, and dysfunctional health care systems, can confuse them. We need to be powerful in our relationships with them. We can ask questions, insist on good explanations, bring friends along to support us, and take notes. Remember to appreciate your providers. (A few of mine have become teary [have cried a little] when I praised them.)
- Self-care can be a re-emergent project. I’ve rarely seen shifts in people’s major health challenges unless they address their lifestyle—getting good nutrition, getting enough sleep, and so on.
- Discharge groups can support us to persist in prioritizing our health. Note that there’s sometimes a glitch [problem] with “chronic illness support groups.” Listening to people’s suffering can restimulate the group and make it less effective. So make it a party! Lighten up! Make bad jokes about illness. Spend half the time on the hard feelings and the other half on finding ways to laugh. Be creative and silly.
- Sessions are not opportunities to “treat” our health. We are Co-Counselors, not doctors or nurses. Our work is as counselors, not in curing or “fixing.” Sometimes we want to “help” a bit too much. We should not be giving each other advice. We can look at and discharge any feeling that we need to “help” and rescue—most of us have that distress. We also need to keep discharging on being effective counselors.
- Nearly all of us are confused about pain. We are told that it is bad and should be covered up or stopped with drugs or distractions. My directions are “Hi there, pain!” “Yay, pain!” “Bring it on!” Pain gives us information. Love your pain. Make a big fuss over it. Touch and massage it. And discharge, discharge, discharge! A Co-Counselor, when giving birth, told her doula (midwife) these directions, and the midwife used them with her other (non-RC) clients.
Overwhelmed? You can start by focusing on just one or two of the above points for a few months and then move on to others.
El Cerrito, California, USA
(Present Time 206, January 2022)
Last modified: 2022-12-25 10:17:04+00