Fighting Isolation
A Talk by Tim Jackins at the “Mental Health” Liberation Conference, October 2024
It can be hard to remember to work on chronic patterns, especially when they come from the oppressions of a society.
Because the chance to discharge fully has not been there for hardly anyone, some distresses have built up over the generations. These distresses become part of our societies and are passed on to each generation.
All the oppressions are aimed at making people conform so that they will serve the society. They all interfere with people being themselves. Our societies are also coercive; they force people to follow the rules.
“MENTAL HEALTH” OPPRESSION
One of the forces of oppression is around “mental health.” If the pressure to conform hasn’t been hard enough, and if people insist on following their own thoughts, they are labelled as “troubled.” Various pressures are used to try to make them conform, including trying to persuade everyone that there is something wrong with them.
Part of the medical community has joined this effort and has accepted the idea that there is something wrong with people. Capitalism supports this idea by creating and making profits on more and more chemicals [psychiatric drugs] that are supposed to solve the problem. But all the work we’ve done in the past seventy years says they are mistaken. It isn’t that people don’t misfunction; sometimes we do. But we have consistently found that when people discharge their distresses, the misfunctioning stops.
It is easy to understand people being confused about this when they don’t understand how distresses and discharge work. They and we can get restimulated and doubt ourselves. You may have proved to yourself that you can undo a distress by discharging, but that doesn’t mean you’ve discharged all your fears around “mental health” oppression.
OUR ABILITY TO THINK
Here’s another important part of RC: When most of us think of RC, we think of discharge and recovery. But also important is the recognition that we can think well even before we discharge all our distresses.
Distresses don’t destroy our ability to think. The feelings from undischarged distresses can be confusing, but they don’t have to be overpowering. Even with a good deal of undischarged distress, we still have the ability to see what’s real.
This is an important idea: Each of us can stand against the pull of our distresses, even before we’ve been able to discharge the feelings.
We can always decide what we’re going to do. We can do the best thing we can think of even if it feels terribly hard. We can fight with our distress to stay in present time reality.
In fundamentals classes we learned to ask our client an “attention out” question at the end of a session. When people start RC they don’t realize they can pull their attention out of distresses. And the more we’ve been able to discharge, the better we are at doing it. It becomes clearer that we have the power to think despite distresses, that we can pull our minds out of restimulation and be in present time. The clearer the picture we get of this, the more we can decide to fight for it.
FIGHTING FOR OUR MINDS
It is important to decide to fight for our minds, to refuse to give in to the pull of restimulated distress. We can decide this against the pull and confusion of each oppression. It’s particularly important with “mental health” oppression—because “mental health” oppression is saying you don’t have control over your own mind, that somehow you are too damaged to control your mind. We don’t think a human ever “loses their mind.” All the work we’ve done over seventy years, with hundreds of thousands of people, supports our thinking about this.
Because we’ve all been targeted with “mental health” oppression, it’s a fight. But we can oppose the recordings that say that there is something wrong with us. We can fight for the idea that our minds are perfectly fine the way they are.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t get confused and make mistakes, because we do. We will always make mistakes; that’s part of how we learn. But we know that the repetitive mistakes come from distress patterns that can be discharged. With discharge we regain the ability to think afresh.
Let’s do some mini-sessions where we fight for our minds against whoever thought there was anything wrong with us.
ISOLATION
I want to bring us back to working on our earliest distresses, especially the ones that isolated us from everyone else. Isolation has played a big, destructive role in our lives. I think it was the isolation that left us so vulnerable to other distresses. If we had managed to have one good connection early in our lives, if we could have had one person who could really share thoughts with us, we would have had someone to think with about the oppressive forces. We were targeted by the oppressions and had no one to think with about it. We also couldn’t tell if anyone else was aware of things the way we were.
It’s confusing to feel as alone as we do. A lot of us have been in RC for several decades. We have built relationships with many, many people, and we love and trust these people, but that’s often not enough to interrupt the isolation.
We still feel alone even though we’ve built these relationships. Of course, that feeling isn’t about what’s real now; it’s about the way we got hurt long ago. And like all distresses, the feeling doesn’t change until we get a chance to discharge enough.
So the question is, where did you drift off away from everyone?
I’ll say it a different way: where did you lose your connection with everyone? At some point, each person stops trying to connect, and gives up, and goes on and builds a life by themselves. It’s like you were sitting in a small boat tied to the dock, and you cut the rope and drift away.
That’s a very important moment in our lives because the way we looked at the world changed, at that moment. And one of the sad things about it is that usually no one noticed. They didn’t notice that you no longer looked at them the same way. You no longer hoped that they would think about you. You realized that they were too hurt to do that, and you gave up.
Because we’ve never had the resources to discharge that hurt, most of us still feel defeated and discouraged about connection. And we don’t know how to try to reconnect to people now. Some of us have no hope at all. And some of us dream that somebody will find us and will be so taken with us [like us so much] that they will break through our isolation and find us. But we often have no idea that we could do this for ourselves.
COMING BACK TOGETHER
The conditions that made you go into isolation have changed. There are fifty-one people on this Zoom call who understand what these struggles are like.
None of us wants to be alone. I know sometimes you think you do, that life can seem simpler when you’re alone, and that trying to connect with people is too restimulating. But inside every human is the longing to be connected with other intelligences. It may be buried under loneliness and helplessness and discouragement, but everyone would like to have the enthusiasm that a small child shows toward everyone. Human beings—other human beings—are one of the most enjoyable things in reality. And very clearly only distress separates us from each other.
So whether you’re eager or not, you have to come back together now. I know I don’t have any power, but I order you to come back now. Until you can order yourself, it’s my job.
I know that you may not realize that you can do that now. But I know that each of us is capable of it. I think we have built the tools and understand them well enough, and we’ve built the relationships strongly enough, that we can begin to do this now.
It will help if you decide it’s true that you can do it. You need to decide this without proof. You have to decide it because you want it to be true. And then we work to prove it for each of our minds.
FACING THIS STRUGGLE AND TRYING
I want to work with someone about facing this struggle. I don’t care too much what happens when I work with them. My goal isn’t necessarily to be successful; my goal is that we learn how to try in this direction. That’s where our struggle is now. You have to make up your mind to try, no matter what. It’s your mind. You’re the only one who can make it up [decide]. And you do have the power to decide things like this.
I want to make sure you understand that all this is possible, and that in our societies very little says it is possible. We are having to go against many centuries of distresses. Those distresses are now embedded in all our societies.
So it’s a large project to change all of this. And it’s something we can do. And we can do it because we understand how to give access to discharge to everyone. And once people start discharging, they start thinking and figuring things out for themselves. And they become more able to think their own thoughts and resist the distresses of our societies. We need to give everyone the ability to discharge.
Many people feel like we should be doing this much faster than we are. But remember that human beings have existed for a quarter of a million years without much discharging, and that there are probably well over half a million people now who use this process. That’s not a bad accomplishment in seventy years.
To do this well we have to continue to trust our minds and stand against oppression, though it’s not easy because we have many distresses yet to discharge. We have thought well enough to have a good model of where we can go. And to follow that model we have to use our ability to decide things.
We need to remember that when we try things and fail, it’s not a disaster. It may restimulate all the recordings of failure, but failure can even be helpful if we can discharge and learn from it and try again.
I think the important thing at this moment is that we refuse to stop using our minds. We don’t give up and follow the feelings of our distresses, nor the oppressions of society, but that we always remember we have the ability to think and find fresh, new, good responses. And one of the first places to take that into battle is to refuse to remain alone and isolated.
If we were here in person, I would ask everyone who fights with isolation to raise their hand. And you could look around and see all these hands go up. Put up your electronic hand. And then go to gallery view. You need to see this is not about you or some failure of yours. This is what happens to all of us in these societies.
If it happens to all of us it can’t be your fault; you’re not that powerful. It has to be a distress that has become part of our societies. If it’s a distress, we can get rid of it. It may take us a generation or two. But you may have a great grandchild who won’t be alone the way you are. I can’t quite imagine what a life like that would be.
What would life be like if there are even just twenty people like that? Who never get isolated from each other, who always know there are nineteen other people they can turn to and be cared about? Who always had people they could share their full mind with? That’s what we get to aim at and see how far we can move things in that direction.
If we want to end up there, we have to do this work. We can’t sit here lonely by ourselves and hope that that grandchild won’t be. We have to begin figuring out how to do this work.
I look forward to doing this with you, and we’ll see how far we get. And part of it will feel miserable because things were that bad. And every step of it will be fun because we get to be closer to each other.
(Present Time 218, January 2025)