A talk by Tim Jackins at the West Coast (Canada, Latin America, USA) Leaders’ Workshop, January 2025


Over the last six to eight years in the RC Communities, we’ve aimed at working on our earliest memories. Nobody is happy about it. We’ve spent our lives avoiding these things. And no matter how much we believe the theory of RC, everybody feels that we shouldn’t go back there. We have spent our lives staying out of that place because it made us feel just horrible.


That was reflected in our early RC theory, too. Remember that page in the Fundamentals of Co-Counseling Manual with all the different levels? You were to slowly work your way down and be ready to retreat at the first sign of trouble. If you felt like you could be trapped in those feelings, you were to back out: “What was your favorite color?” “Do you like fish?” You were to have forty random pleasant questions to ask.


There was a very good reason for that. I was in the first fundamentals class back in 1958. Imagine thirty people who had never discharged at all. People could get lost easily.


DARE TO LOOK


That’s not you. You can’t be that easily confused. You know the feeling of a distress as opposed to reality. We’ve developed our relationships and have enough slack attention now so we can use the process more fully, so I don’t think we’re in the same danger at all. But we’re still scared of feeling all that unbearable material [distress].


It’s possible to go after the hardest things that happened to you, to feel how hard they were on you, and not to be confused about it. We’d all like not to have to feel those feelings, but the important thing is that you not believe the old distress recordings. That they not make you lose perspective. Really, we feel bad about that material all the time. We all do. We just try to hold onto a smile. We know not to try to be a client compulsively by bringing up that material all the time, but the feelings are always right there next to us.


I’m trying to figure out if we can now go after everything—if we dare look at the harshest things that happened to us. Can we go directly at them? See how badly we got hurt, not get confused, and be able to discharge heavily on that crucial early foundational material? I think we can. I think we have to learn how to do it. We have the capability but not the experience. This is where I want us to go together. A crucial part of this is together.


SHOW THE FEELINGS 
OF UPSET


The ways that we were isolated from each other long ago have big effects on us still. We tend to be timid and a little distant, trying not to upset anyone. But we all need to be upset. We were squashed out of it. You want your client to be as upset as they were when the early hurt happened. You want them to feel and look at the hurt directly and show it all to you. 


What we have to be upset about has nothing to do with the present. But we’ve lived our lives trying to keep people calm. As counselors, we need to move in a slightly different direction: dare our clients to be as upset as they can be. 


They won’t be able to stay there by themselves. They will need you there, encouraging them to continue, because they will compulsively clamp down [hide] their feelings.


Some people don’t have a pattern of clamping their feelings down. They’re not part of our Communities, mainly because they scare us. Not because they’re any more hurt by distress than we are. But the way they show their feelings is restimulating to us in ways we haven’t figured out how to handle. Somebody showing you how deeply hurt they are doesn’t have to be dangerous. It doesn’t have to restimulate you. But it may not be possible for you to be a good counselor to them without some discharge.


BEYOND LISTENING


Everyone who starts Co-Counseling goes out and tries to listen to people, hoping that will solve everything. It does get a lot of people interested in talking to us. It is a wonderful resource to offer, and they will use it. But it doesn’t always broaden their perspective. It won’t necessarily teach them RC. 


You know more of RC than permissive listening. You know how to go after people who are stuck. You know how to talk to someone about what’s real versus the way they feel about it. You can help them see reality—human, benign reality—both by listening to them and by pushing them toward reality. You can find ways to do that. We get to practice this with each other. As we get good at it, we can go out more broadly and figure out how to lead people outside of RC.


By “leading” I mean helping people think about what’s real. That’s the long-term project we must accomplish. We can successfully organize people for a short-term project, but they don’t stay with us unless they see us reaching for a bigger picture of what’s real. You already know how to do that better than almost anybody.