We Are at a Crossroads
From a talk given by “Jeanne D’Arc,” International Liberation Reference Person for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer People, at the Raised-Female LGBTQ+ Workshop she led in January 2022
It’s been a great privilege to lead you all these years. I’ve learned a ton [a lot] from listening to you and counseling you and from my own sessions.
We are Co-Counselors. We use this process. We want to get our minds back from where we got frozen early in our lives because we didn’t get to have certain important sessions at the time. It would have been good to have had them.
FOLLOWING THE RESULTS OF DISCHARGE AND RE-EVALUATION
I always followed Harvey Jackins’s guidance. When he asked me, “Can you follow the results of discharge and re-evaluation and not impose what you think?” I said, “Sure. That’s the whole point of Re-evaluation Counseling, right?” And that’s when he said, “Okay, you’ve got the ILRP [International Liberation Reference Person] job!” And I said, “Okay.”
That was an important conversation. I asked him, “Can I take this job if I don’t agree with you?” And he said, “Well, what do you think?” And I said, “Given that the discharge process removes distress and rigidity, it seems logical to me that people would end up more flexible in both directions. That you would have more people identifying as Bisexual.” He looked at me thoughtfully and said, “You know, that’s a fine idea, and a lot of people think that.” What he said then was crucial. He said, “If that were true, that would be just fine.” Boy oh boy [wow], did my ears open up when I heard “If that were true.” So, I shut up [stopped talking] because I was clearly in listening mode at that point. I knew he was going to say something important. And what he said was, “That’s not what happens.” He said, “It’s a fine idea; it would be fine if it were true, but that isn’t what happens.”
Suddenly, I got this rush of realization that there was a difference between opinions and facts. Just because I think something, that doesn’t make it right. He said, “What happens isn’t that. And you have to follow what happens as a result of discharge and re-evaluation. Not lead it but follow it.”
We’re at a point in Co-Counseling that I think of as a crossroads. Are we going to do what we say we can do and follow the results of discharge and re-evaluation? Or not?
CONCLUSIONS BASED ON EARLY DISTRESS
We are “for” each other. We stand up against oppression We counsel each other to undo the hurts that didn’t get discharged when we were little and that formed part of the basis of what we think and why we think it. Without discharge, pieces that were based in distress were included into our picture of reality. Everybody’s done that. It’s not just some people. That means that for all of us there are foundational places in what we think, and in what we think we know, that are wrong. And they get put in as building blocks. Then later on, more things happen, and we draw more conclusions, continuing to build on those wrong things that we’ve already put into place.
Sometimes when we have a bunch of sessions, or sometimes even one session, something shifts, and we re-evaluate one or more of those early conclusions. All kinds of things in our minds rearrange and change because that early conclusion (that we’re partly basing our picture of reality on) turns out not to have been correct. The discharge and re-evaluation process is profound and will change you. I can’t tell you where it will change you, but you will lose ideas, thoughts, and conclusions that were based in distress. But you won’t lose ones that are not based in distress.
Why is that important? It seems to me that in our cultures most people adopt a set of values that they then impose upon the world. These may be political, religious, moral, or philosophical viewpoints. People develop their picture of what’s real, true, and good and how they should operate. Of course, some of it doesn’t accurately reflect reality. Your picture of reality is partly wrong. Mine is, too. Everybody’s is, because it’s built, in part, upon the conclusions based on early distress—because we didn’t get to discharge and clean things up. So our picture of reality isn’t as accurate as we think.
NOT TELLING PEOPLE WHAT TO THINK
In Co-Counseling we have a one-point program. We agree to help each other re-emerge. We agree to think about and listen to each other and assist with the discharge and re-evaluation process. Do we do that? Do we believe that? If we do, that means we have room for people who think differently than we do. If we believe and stick to the one-point program, it’s not about telling people what to think. I want us to look carefully at this because I think we are at this crossroads in RC.
We have policies, we have goals, and we have guidelines. All of them are important. Some of our guidelines need to operate like rules. Some of our policies need to operate similarly to rules. But that doesn’t mean we have to agree to think a certain way.
We are all Co-Counselors, but our opinions about controversial issues often differ. For example, people have been expressing a variety of thoughts and feelings about vaccination on our e-mail discussion lists. Some people might be surprised that there’s so much difference of opinion, but there is. Our leaders can tell us not to have any in-person meetings at this point. That’s different than “You must think a particular thing.” That’s one of the crucial things about Co-Counseling—we don’t tell people what to think.
IDENTITIES AND OUR HUMANNESS
We know a lot of things. We know that all identities are at least partially based in distress. This includes LGBTQ+ identities—we’re not an exception. For many years there was a dialogue between Gay liberation inside RC and Gay liberation outside of RC. People would come into RC with their ideas from outside RC, and they would expect Co-Counseling to agree with and follow those ideas. However, we don’t take anything from outside RC and automatically assume that it is true. We follow the results of discharge and re-evaluation.
When the Gay liberation movement began, it had a simple perspective: “We are everywhere already. We’re here. We’re there. We’re your mothers, your fathers, your brothers, your bosses, your twins, and so on. We’re everywhere. We’re a part of a ‘normal distribution.’ Therefore, you must say in Co-Counseling that ‘it is rational to be LGBTQ+.’”
If you are an experienced Co-Counselor, you know what the problem is with that. Harvey redefined many words because there were no words for what he needed. In Co-Counseling, “rational” means “distress free.” It doesn’t mean what it means elsewhere. So there was no way Harvey could take the outside-of-RC perspective. It wasn’t accurate based on what he’d seen from his counseling of people.
So we’ve had this dialogue between Gay liberation inside and outside of RC—back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth.
The message of the oppression is that LGBTQ+ folks are bad, wrong, dirty, and disgusting. In RC we treat people with respect, as good people. We do not dismiss people because of their identities. All of us are completely human and completely good. We don’t belong hidden away in corners, operating somewhere away from everybody. We belong with everyone else.
The world had not reached that conclusion. Therefore, over the last fifty-some years, our goal has been to move the world to an understanding that we are not bad, not wrong, not dirty, not disgusting. We should not be considered immoral or illegal. So outside of RC, the Gay liberation campaign has included changing laws, changing definitions of “mental illness,” and being visible in our churches. It’s meant spreading throughout society the understanding that we’re good and that we’re fully human.
A MISTAKEN FOCUS ON GAY PEOPLE
In Co-Counseling the question was asked, “Is homosexuality based in distress?” There’s a problem with that. It’s similar to what happens with Israel. Everybody focuses on what’s going on [happening] in Israel as if Israel is the big problem. There are conflicts all over the world, dozens and dozens and dozens of them. But people focus on Israel. This is anti-Jewish oppression.
Gay identity operates similarly. When we ask, “Is homosexuality based in distress?” we’re singling out, highlighting, and scapegoating Gay people as “the issue.” It became clear that if we focused the attention on “Gay,” we were being oppressive. It took years of discharging and thinking to figure that out.
It’s obvious today that the question isn’t, “Is homosexuality based in distress?” The question is, “Are all identities based in distress?” Of course, the answer is yes. Are they based only in distress? No. Of course not. There are human and good qualities that are part of all identities. But all identities have at least a partial origin in distress, and that includes LGBTQ+ identities.” Again, we can’t separate out LGBTQ+ folks without it being oppressive.
I imagine a future with a lot less distress. I think that identity will have much less significance. We won’t categorize things as we do today, because we will have broken down the barriers between groups. We will know that as humans we are all “on the same side.”
Learning that all identities have roots in distress changes the way we talk and think. Now, the identities related to our constituencies are part of the phenomenon of identity. We are not targeting Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, or Queer. It changes everything to look at our identities as part of the phenomenon of identity rather than as “the issue.” If we face that everybody’s identity originated at least partly in distress, we have a different package. It’s no longer oppression.
We’ve also learned from all our early-sexual-memories (ESM) work that almost everything that we’ve ever thought to be normal or natural about sex—isn’t. In our ESM work we say clearly that most people think all sorts of things are normal or natural and they probably aren’t.
We know that the point of RC (and you’re going to get sick [tired] of me saying this, but there’s a reason for it) is to get rid of the undischarged effects of the early hurts from when we didn’t have the sessions we needed when we needed them. These hurts happened before, during, and after birth. All sorts of things happened in the first couple of years that led us to mistaken conclusions about ourselves and the world.
A CHANGED WORLD
When I talk about RC being at a crossroads, what am I talking about? There’s a way that Co-Counseling has been based in populations that have a great deal of agreement with each other about many things. We have tended to be on the progressive end. We have tended to be on the feminist end. We are not based on Christianity or any other religion. We have tended to be in a particular range of beliefs. A lot of us older folks who came through the Gay, Lesbian, and Civil Rights movements have had a somewhat similar political perspective. Several attitudes have been treated as normal in that range of ideas. This is now being challenged.
Re-evaluation Counseling now has some new priorities. We are focusing on younger people, activists, the climate, eliminating racism, and so on. That’s going to push us hard. We are moving outside the range of comfort for a lot of people. The world that we live in now is different than the world that formed people my age. The becoming-of-age process for a young female is different today than it was when people my age grew up. Those in my generation have institutionalized attitudes that in some cases are rigid.
For example, among younger people, it is usual in many environments in the United States, England, and Australia for everybody to state their pronouns. It isn’t weird or unusual. It’s not awkward. It’s normal. So when it doesn’t happen in Co-Counseling, it looks unthoughtful and unaware to a lot of young people. It looks like we don’t understand that there are people who don’t identify as “male” or “female.” In general, we older folks think that stating pronouns is weird. We aren’t required to identify our pronouns, but we do need to make room for people, who would like to, to identify them. Otherwise, we are being oppressive by the younger folks’ standards. It might not look oppressive to older folks, but it functions that way for younger folks.
Our crossroads is as follows: Are we attempting to impose what older folks think? Or are we attempting to follow the results of discharge and re-evaluation?
This is a challenging spot—because when we look at the chronic distresses of our friends, Co-Counselors, and students, there are a lot of things we would like these people to discharge on. The challenging part is that it doesn’t help to tell them what they should do. If people could change with that, they would have done so a long time ago. What you get to do is trust your own mind to help them discharge.
RELATIONSHIPS AND TRUST
Are we going to be pushing each other to discharge on our early distresses? Of course. But the amount of room we have to offer our thinking to our Co-Counselors and students depends on our relationship with them. If people trust us, we have more room to counsel them in ways that someone else might not be able to. If one of you were to ask me, “Is my identity as a Bisexual based in distress?” As your counselor, I could say warmly, “Well, of course it is.” And you would take that differently than you would if it were coming from a heterosexual ally. There might be more trust. If I knew you well, you would perhaps take that as an opportunity to discharge on it.
Our one-point program means that we are organized to assist each other to discharge the early things. I think there is a “gray” [unclear] area: How do we counsel each other on these early things?
We do counsel each other. And we do challenge things. But “challenge” is an interesting word. I’m not here to argue with anybody. Or criticize them. Or tell them what’s wrong with them. But is it fair to consider that at some point all of us need to look at the possibility that our identities and our sexualities may be based in distress? Of course it is. If we didn’t do this, we’d be leaving whole territories of early distress untouched. And that wouldn’t make sense.
GROWING UP FEMALE
Suppose I were to say to you, “You need to work on what it was like for you to grow up as female.” No matter how you think of yourself today. No matter how you identify. No matter if you are Transgender trying to live in the middle or Transgender operating as a different identity than the one you grew up with. It doesn’t matter. All of us were seen and therefore raised as—and treated as—female. That’s a big deal [important]. Because we all had expectations forced upon us about what being female meant that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with who we were.
As girls, all of us—and I mean all of us—were raised in cultures that drew conclusions about who we were and what we would do as grown-ups. There was more flexibility for some of you who grew up later than I did. However, the culture still expects housewives, mothers, wives to operate in certain ways and accomplish certain things, whether they work outside the home or not. (For example, in the United States, females work nineteen hours more a week than men.) If you are treated as if “of course you will be a mother,” that means they expect you to operate in certain ways. Many of us looked at that and saw “death.” Living the life we saw our mothers lead looked horrible.
Over the forty-some years that I’ve been doing this liberation work, I’ve noticed some things. Most of us in our female LGBTQ+ constituencies still work in helping professions. Most of us don’t do plumbing, electrical, construction, or engineering work. The great majority of us still do things in the territory of being helpful to other humans.
As a girl you had relationships with people before your body started to change. Then you had relationships with people after your body changed—and for many, if not most, of us the relationships changed. Once we started to get shape and breasts, the oppression landed on us differently. We weren’t just a person or a child, we were girls.
For a lot of us, our breasts were where people focused their attention on us as females. And for many of us that has a lot of humiliation attached to it. People focused on our breasts instead of our faces. They were weird about us because of the societal fixation on breasts. Whether our breasts are little or big, we have feelings about them. We’ve experienced weird behavior based on people’s feelings about them. It’s not surprising that people would be trying different things to deal with that.
At various points in the past, and in the present, people have bound their breasts to minimize them and the reaction of the world to them. In the Western world, where elective medical procedures have become more normal, it is not surprising that one of the ways to deal with this would be to get rid of one’s breasts. It’s important to understand that there are reasons why females would decide to do this.
Removing a body part is a bigger deal than most people want to face. For a lot of us older women, it is horrifying. We need to counsel on that to think well about Transgender folks.
Is there a position that we’re supposed to be taking? Yes. It’s simple. Everybody needs to discharge on Transgender, identity, sexism, and bodies.
The world modifies us from the minute we are born—with expectations and attitudes about what it means to be a proper “girl” and/or “boy.” What it means to get your parents’ or your social world’s approval. These are all modifiers on who we are as humans. We’ve all been “sanded” with the sandpaper of cultural expectation, sexism, and male dominance. We’ve all been sanded to make us more like what people are comfortable with. And many of us don’t want to be what people are more comfortable with.
WHAT WE GET TO DO
We get to counsel each other. We get to counsel on what hurt us and confused us in our childhoods and, in this case, counsel on being female. But we don’t get to impose what we think onto each other. We get to counsel each other. If you get rigid on any position in relationship to identity, I’m going to want to jiggle that. For example, if you were a “girlie girl” [“feminine” in appearance and behavior] and you stayed a “girlie girl,” there’s rigidity there. If you were forced to be a “girlie girl,” your response might have been to be “tomboyish”—to be athletic, wear jeans, have short hair, and want to do all sorts of physical things. If you got rigid about that, I want to counsel you on it. Not because it’s wrong but because it is a rigid response to a societal rigidity. It doesn’t matter where the rigidity is, we want to move all of it. We want to put attention on where things got rigid.
We get to counsel people. We get to use everything we know. If we’re close to someone, we get to ask questions and push them in ways that we can’t do effectively if we are not close. We talk about this all the time—that people learn best from people whom they love and respect and whom they know love and respect them. If you want to challenge people’s early distresses, particularly if you want to do so in an active way, you need to be close enough for them to understand that your counseling attempts are on their behalf. They need to know that you are not trying to get them to “not be how they think they are.”
A TEST CASE
As I said, this is a crossroads. This is a test case. Can we deal with people whose ideas are different than ours, be smart about each other, and keep each other close at the same time? If we can’t do this around the Gay issues while being aware that we’re all on the same basic side, if we can’t do this with each other, then we don’t have the slack to bring people with significantly different political perspectives into Co-Counseling and make it work. (And, of course, there’s always the possibility that what we think we know may not be right.)
So, here we are. We have all sorts of identities within this general category of “Queer.” We have to think about each other—not just assume things. Because of our different ages, we come from different experiences that lead to different conclusions.
We have concluded what we have because of the lives we’ve lived. It behooves us to want to know about each other’s lives and why we concluded what we did. We can ask, “How can I assist this person to discharge so they can get bigger and smarter?” Everybody needs to discharge. Everybody’s got rigidities, even if they are the rigidities we like. The more we discharge, the more we will learn as we follow the results of discharge and re-evaluation.
I think we are at a crossroads. Can we be for each other, against distress, against oppression, and not conclude that we know better than other people?
(Present Time 209, October 2022)