Mistakes and Attacks
From a talk by Tim Jackins at the Pre-World Conference for Aotearoa and Australia, February 2022
When distresses confuse us enough, we mishandle situations in any one of ten million ways.
Most of the mistakes we make in the RC Communities are small, but we do make them. And people get restimulated by them, sometimes deeply. If we make a mistake and it is brought to our attention, we usually get restimulated, sometimes badly. These are places where our early hurts get in our way.
We have been somewhat tolerant of mistakes. It is rational to be thoughtfully tolerant of each other’s difficulties. However, we sometimes respond in ways that can look like thoughtfulness but aren’t rational. We give up on each other. We feel something will never change, so we keep quiet about it and leave the person trapped in their material [distress]. We can’t bear to tell them that they have a difficulty. And we can’t bear for someone to tell us that we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve been oppressive in some way—anti-Semitic, sexist, dominating, racist.
We’ve been scared to help people look at their difficulties, and to have someone help us look at where we have stumbled.
HANDLING MISTAKES
How do we help someone look at a mistake? Well, first we need to look at and discharge on the times when we were criticized for our mistakes. Otherwise, we are going to sound like what was done to us.
We have made mistakes. We’ve made lots of mistakes. But often people haven’t been able to tell [perceive] if something we did was actually a mistake. They’ve just known that it upset them and that they had to talk to us. They may have told us that we were wrong, incorrect, stupid, destructive, mean. But that wasn’t about the reality; it was about their restimulation. Their message was garbled and maybe entirely irrelevant to the reality of the situation.
Hurts from experiences like that can get in our way when we try to talk to someone about how they may have malfunctioned. How do we do it? We cannot have any tone of blame. Any blaming of someone is never helpful. They tried their best to do something good. In RC we can see the effort people make to stay human despite the ways they got hurt. (Out in the world the effort doesn’t always show so well, so it can be easier to blame people for their mistakes.)
If someone points out a mistake we may have made, it can feel like an attack, no matter how careful they are. But we can decide to listen despite being restimulated from how our mistakes were badly handled in the past. We can keep from trying to justify what we did, explaining it, and defending ourselves. Later we can have a Co-Counseling session on our feelings.
It doesn’t matter if it was all their material. It doesn’t matter if they were right or wrong. It doesn’t matter if we intended to do something helpful. What we need to do is listen and then work on our feelings about a mistake being pointed out to us. That can be hard, because in the past we were seldom supported to look at our difficulties. We were simply criticized or attacked for them. Some people feel like they’ve been attacked all their lives, and any mention that they’ve made a mistake can throw them back into feeling that everything is their fault and they’re being attacked. We need to get the distress recordings out of our way so we can clean up our mistakes.
Any pull to blame, others or ourselves, comes out of distress. To acknowledge a mistake is not to accept blame. It is useful to apologize for our mistakes, but that doesn’t mean blaming ourselves. It means acknowledging the reality of what happened. It means not keeping it hidden because of distressed feelings.
Let’s say we want to help someone in our Community who has material from being blamed in the past. We mention to them something they did, and up come their feelings of being blamed and guilty. They may even have restimulations about punishing themselves. What do we do? One tendency is to smooth things out and be reassuring. We may feel too unsure and scared to help them face the feelings. However, their material shouldn’t be left there to torment them forever and keep them misfunctioning in the ways they do. We instead could say what happened and then stay with them and openly treasure them. We could tell them that we know they are not to blame for what happened, that we will stand with them, that they can feel and discharge those old recorded feelings.
PREPARING FOR ATTACKS
Attacks are not attempts to correct mistakes—they are different, in their intent and in their effects. And they are very effective at restimulating people.
There will continue to be attacks, and they will confuse us wherever we are vulnerable. So we have this interesting job to do that we are not yet good at.
We’ve been learning how to stand with someone against an attack—to say, “That noise coming at you, that restimulated noise, is choosing you as a target. It’s not about you.” At the same time we need to be able to say, “You may have made mistakes, and you need to look there.” But these are separate issues.
People are often attacked in the places where they are the most easily restimulated. If someone isn’t restimulated by an attack, the attack usually doesn’t go on. It’s over quickly, because there is no echo to keep it going.
One place we’re vulnerable is where we have made mistakes in the past and been mistreated for them. We need to look at these places before some opportunistic attack lands on them.
I want us to be able to listen, without getting confused, to someone blame us for what they feel are the horrible things we’ve done. And I don’t think we‘ll be able to do it unless we work on where we may have made mistakes in the past.
We can face and discharge on the hard things that happened to us in our childhoods. Then we can use our recovered strength to look at where we are vulnerable to making mistakes, to hiding mistakes, to defending mistakes, and to being unable to help other people look at mistakes that were caused by their distresses.
Let’s do another mini-session: What’s something you hope you will never be criticized for? What’s the mistake you’ve hidden that you hope nobody ever finds out about? (For the second one, you may need to change the names or circumstances a little.)
I would like us to work in this area before we are forced to as society crumbles. Let’s get a little bit ahead.
(Present Time 207, April 2022)