Where We Are, and How We Got Here
From a talk by Tim Jackins at the Eastern and Central European Pre-World Conference, May 2022
I am very pleased that we could get together (online) for this Pre-World Conference. I am pleased that we get to see each other. One of the most important purposes of these conferences is simply for us to get together. We are a group committed to undoing the distress recordings that have been put on us, and one of the most common and heaviest is isolation. We also have work to do together, because this is a Pre-World Conference, but we will keep providing session, mini-session, and support group times so that we can keep thinking and working together throughout these days.
THE BEGINNINGS OF RC
Re-evaluation Counseling started in the early 1950s. It started by accident. Someone unintentionally showed the discharge process to my father. In my father’s society at the time, people would have said that the person had “broken down.” That was (and is) the big confusion between the healing process and being “out of control.” And because my father had been raised in the society, he tried to stop the person from discharging. He told the guy to “get ahold of himself.” And the guy tried but for some reason couldn’t stop discharging. He was in a crisis, and I guess my father’s friendliness was enough for him to keep going even when my father told him to stop. It was a lucky accident that he kept discharging for days and that people saw him reappear out of distress.
My father could listen well enough to get interested in what was happening. Clearly, the discharge process was making a big difference in this person’s thinking. And no one understood it. No one had seen it before. (Of course everyone had seen it before, but no one had been able to tolerate their own restimulations enough to let somebody discharge enough.)
Still, some people, in addition to my father, saw what was happening and wanted to pursue it. None of them were trained in therapy, psychology, or anything related. That allowed them to not have preconceived notions about what was happening—so they could watch what was real, not somebody’s theory about it.
This one person went on discharging for a couple of weeks, and by the end of that time he was in better shape [condition] than anyone had ever seen him be. My father and the small group of people around him were curious enough to pursue what had happened, so they started listening to each other. The results weren’t nearly as impressive as what had happened with the first person. None of them was in a crisis or would burst into tears, so they stayed unsure and skeptical as they experimented. However, after they’d had a few sessions, things did change for them—not in big, wonderful ways but in ways they noticed. So they pursued the project. They made a lot of mistakes. They also met, and tried to discuss what they were doing, with lots of other people, some of whom were curious. But eventually they went on by themselves. They went on by themselves mainly because they wouldn’t accept any preexisting theories without proving them.
After a couple of years, a little company was formed to continue the experiments. The people in it did one-way counseling and counseled each other, and only a few people came to them. But some of those who came had seen what had happened with the original person and understood there was something real. Then other people heard about it. The people who heard about it mostly didn’t come themselves, but they brought their relatives whom everyone else had given up on. One couple brought their adult son for counseling. He had been committed to a mental hospital, and once a week they got him out of the hospital and brought him in for a session.
The ideas growing out of the practice were tried on a big array of people. Those people had often been badly hurt; some were addicted to alcohol and other things. My father and his colleagues gained a lot of information about working with people in all sorts of difficult situations. Re-evaluation Counseling came out of that experience—was built on that experience with reality. And we continue to prove our ideas, over and over, in session after session after session.
You prove these ideas in every session you have. You use RC because you have proved it to yourself. We supply these ideas to people who are learning RC, and then they prove them to themselves. You might try something because your teacher said or I said it works, but you don’t keep doing it unless it does work.
THE FIRST CLASS AND WORKSHOP
My father and his colleagues continued doing the one-way counseling until 1958. Then they thought two things: that they understood the counseling well enough to communicate it to others to use, and that everyone was capable of using it. So the first Co-Counseling class happened in 1958.
For another ten years, Co-Counseling was only in Seattle (Washington, USA). More and more people became part of it, and we learned more and more about the human mind and the discharge process.
In about 1968, RC leaked out of Seattle. People wanted classes in different parts of the United States. A few of them came to Seattle to get an intensive dose. The first workshop was held in 1970, to help people learn the theory and practice all at once.
That first workshop was two weeks long. It consisted of a couple of classes and two or three Co-Counseling sessions every day. The intent was that people would learn enough RC to go back home and teach it.
The workshop was both wonderful and difficult. People knew very little RC at the beginning and had not discharged at all. So there was lots of restimulation. But it worked well enough that people spread out from Seattle and started teaching RC. That was wonderful—and it created all sorts of difficulties as well.
At that point we didn’t understand fully what we were trying to do. We hadn’t had to think about who should teach and who was not ready. We hadn’t thought about how to help people who live far away persist with Co-Counseling. There was no Internet and no cell phones for easy communication. We had lots of things to figure out.
THE FIRST WORLD CONFERENCE
In 1972 we held the first RC World Conference. I think it included all of the RC teachers who existed at that time—forty to fifty people. It tried to figure out how we could keep RC spreading.
The position of International Reference Person also came into existence at that conference. My father was the only person with enough understanding of RC to be in the position, so it was him.
The first Guidelines came into existence, too, as we began to think about how to expand RC ideas out to everyone. And we developed a teacher-approval process.
We figured out that we needed outreach funds to help spread RC and decided that a certain percentage of people’s class and workshop payments would go into those funds.
OUR CONTINUING DEVELOPMENT
Later, we figured out to have local Areas and Area Reference Persons.
Still later, we created Regional Reference Persons, International Liberation Reference Persons, and International Commonality Reference Persons. We did this as RC grew in theory and practice.
Initially RC had been aimed at what had happened to us in our individual circumstances. As we did more work, we saw that many of the things that happen to us come from our societies.
Distresses get embedded in our societies. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and other oppressions are acted out as part of our societies. And many of our distresses come from that. It became clear that if we are going to remove distresses from everyone’s minds, we need to have a goal of changing society—so the distresses don’t keep getting installed. Thus our perspective and work continued to grow.
I think the first big push to take RC out to the public was on women’s issues in 1985 at the United Nations Women’s Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, and in 1995 at the U.N. Women’s Conference in Beijing, China. The next was at the United Nations Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. We brought our ideas and tools to people who were fighting oppression. Our goal was not to tell them how they should think. We wanted to give them what we give each other—the tools and attention to remove distress from interfering with one’s thinking.
We have great faith in the human mind. Our experience has been that there is no inherent conflict among humans, that when people share information and discharge on the restimulations, they can always find solutions that work for everyone.
Re-evaluation Counseling has continued to develop, and we continue to have World Conferences. We held them every two years for a while. Now for a long time it’s been every four years. We have them to share the developments in RC, to give us all a better picture of the RC Community, and to see if there are ways to improve our Guidelines and Goals. Because our understanding is always developing, and RC is always reaching new people in new situations, we have found it useful to rethink and improve our Guidelines and Goals.
THIS YEAR’S WORLD CONFERENCE
This particular year of the World Conference is quite unusual. We couldn’t have the conference last year, when it was scheduled, because of COVID. So we delayed it until this year, hoping we could have an in-person conference. When it became clear we could not, I decided that we needed to go ahead and have the conference online, as this is an important time for us to get together.
It is important because of the conditions in the world. You know these conditions as well as I do. My description would include a pandemic that’s gone on for two years and doesn’t go away, and the destruction of the climate. (I don’t think anyone can still argue with the evidence that our mistakes as humans have led us to endanger us all.) And although people have been smart enough to think of good solutions to these conditions, the minds of the people who make decisions about such things have had too many distresses to use those solutions.
Our societies are beginning to crumble. None of them are rational enough to not be in trouble. The trouble has been growing for a long time, but now it’s more out in the open. Wars and other conflicts have been ongoing, but now they are more out in the open. Clearly none of our leaders are thinking well enough to figure out the solutions, so they’re trying more and more irrational and destructive things.
I know you feel small, unimportant, maybe ignorant, but you know how to think better than those leaders. I would like someone who can think better every day to be running our countries. Can I suggest this be one of your goals? We need people who can think to be the people deciding things on that scale. We are the ones who have learned how to think better every day. And we are who can get what we’ve learned to others.
The need is very large. So this World Conference has that importance. We also have to consider our Guidelines in the context of collapsing societies. We haven’t really had to do that before.
THE RC COMMUNITY GUIDELINES
In the early days when RC was only in Seattle, we did not have Guidelines. There were four people teaching RC, and when things were not clear, they could talk to each other.
In 1968 people started teaching RC far away from Seattle, and we saw that this was going to be a complex situation. We needed to find ways to guide ourselves. So at the first World Conference, in 1972, we began setting up our structure. The first set of Guidelines was a very thin pamphlet.
As the years went on and RC spread, an important part of every World Conference was thinking more about how to make our growing project go well. We kept reassessing, “What do we understand better now than we did before? What has changed since the last Guidelines?”
There are always modifications that need to be made. There are always improvements to be figured out. I think this will go on forever. Re-evaluation Counseling continues to grow and include more people in more places. Our Communities exist in very different conditions, and it’s an interesting challenge to write something that can be useful for all of us.
Why do we need guidelines? We need them because we get confused. We have distresses that interfere with us, so sometimes it’s useful to refer to something written by people who were trying to be thoughtful.
The Guidelines are now very broad and contain the good thinking of thousands of people. This year alone, hundreds of people are thinking about how to improve them. Groups around the world are trying to find ways to make them better.
This is the ninth out of ten Pre-World Conferences. The Pre-World Conferences are the main vehicle with which to collect thinking about the Guidelines. We want to ensure that we have thinking from our Communities across the world. Well over a thousand people will have attended the Pre-World Conferences, giving us a fairly large sample of the thinking from all around the world.
We want your thinking about the Guidelines. We are going to have Guidelines groups, so you can think and share and have input. Then all your input will be combined with the input from the other nine Pre-World Conferences. More groups of people will go over all that input and think about all the ideas and refine them.
Out of all that work will come a recommended set of modifications, and the people attending the World Conference will consider those proposals. There will be group discussions, and finally the whole conference will decide whether or not to accept the proposals. Then we will have a newly approved set of Guidelines.
This will be the first time we will do it on Zoom. When we did it in person, we would stay up all night together, discussing. I don’t know how we will do it on Zoom, but we will do the best we can and come up with something useful. We don’t need it to be perfect. We just need to keep thinking.
The Guidelines aren’t a set of rules. There aren’t many things we require in RC. The Guidelines, like a lot of things in RC, are supposed to help us think. It’s like what I said about our theory—we prove it to ourselves. The Guidelines help us think about things. They don’t tell us what to do. It is a little like the job of the RC Reference Persons—part of their work is to make sure that things are thought about. They try to help people think so the people themselves can find the answers.
The Guidelines are there to show us the best thinking people have had so far on different issues and to help us think clearly about things we have to handle. I know of few documents that have as much work put into them as our Guidelines.
Part of the reason we modify the Guidelines is that the world changes. The world is changing rapidly now. As I mentioned before, there is COVID, the climate, the collapse of our societies. All this changes how we need to operate. As the conditions around us change, we have to change, too.
One thing we need to change is the way the Guidelines are written. Until recently, we have mostly been talking to each other. Our Guidelines, and many of our other documents, are written in our RC language, our vocabulary. It is useful to have our vocabulary; it helps us communicate quickly. But it would be good if the Guidelines were written so that people not in RC could understand them, and if they were written in words that did not restimulate people. We are used to our RC language—so we communicate in it, in shorthand. I think it makes sense to stop doing this in the Guidelines.
As our societies collapse, we in RC are going to be looked at more and more. Societies as they collapse try to distract their members. One way they do this is by pointing at certain groups and saying they are dangerous. We know we are not dangerous to any human, and it would be good if the language of our Guidelines could show this more fully.
As societies collapse, they try to hold themselves together. They try to use the oppressions on which they’re based ever more forcefully. They try to point out groups of people and say they are causing the trouble in society. Of course, the main cause of the trouble is the irrationalities of our societies—how people are economically exploited, and how oppressions are used to accomplish that. There is a long history of society trying to find someone to blame other than the society itself.
THE RC COMMUNITY GOALS
A goal is a decision we make about how we want our future to be. It can function like a lighthouse, a bright spot above restimulations. My father wrote goals for himself—some simple ones. He wrote them on little pieces of paper and put them on his bathroom mirror, so every morning he was reminded of what he had decided.
It´s useful to make thoughtful goals for ourselves. We can make them against the places where distresses have stopped us. They can be tiny places, or large ones where we need to stand against incorrect policies. Simply making a goal goes against the recording of helplessness.
We also have goals in the RC Community. We have tried in the last couple of decades to have very specific goals. Our Goal 1, to end racism, was adopted in 2001.
A goal works for us if we all agree upon it. It becomes something we are all committed to. There are thousands of goals we could probably agree would be good. But having too many goals would keep us from accomplishing things. So we try to stay focused on the most important ones. And of course all the things in this world are interconnected. The distresses from society are all interconnected. So, for example, ending racism requires us to improve the connections among us all.
There are lots of possible areas for goals. One of the most important is the climate. We may have small disagreements about what’s happening with the climate, but it’s clear that the changes are endangering almost all species and that they’ve come from humans who haven’t taken responsibility for their actions. Our past goals on the environment have helped us change things, but almost all of us realize that more needs to be done.
(Present Time 208, July 2022)