A Talk by Tim Jackins at the Under-Fifty Leaders’ Workshop


Welcome everyone. I want you to have a chance to be with each other in a different way than you would if the elders were around. I don’t think you realize quite how careful you are around them. You need the chance to build relationships among yourselves without having to look and see if the elders approve. I know you don’t mean to do that, but there are those habits.


This weekend is essentially aimed at the fact that you have decided to be a big enough part of RC that you’re likely to be a significant part of the leadership for the next couple of decades. You need to know each other better than you do. We need to pull you together to do lots of different work, some of which we’ll do this weekend—in particular, the work on isolation. 


The elder Co-Counselors started the Communities that allowed you to have RC. What they did to build them was quite difficult, but enough of them were willing to stay around and do the work. You get to take this and see what can be done with it. It will be your job to restart these Communities freshly. They didn’t know what you now know. They built RC on what they knew. In particular, they did it being isolated from each other. It was like trying to be together but having to be at arm’s length. We now know we don’t have to do that. You are only at half an arm’s length. You have more of yourselves to offer.


The job now is to take a fresh look at our Communities and figure out this center core and how to strengthen it, because a Community grows best when people from outside can see this core. When they see people committed to each other and loving each other, and every person thinks, “How did you do that? Can I do that too?” Because it’s a possibility that doesn’t exist elsewhere in their lives. 


CHALLENGE OUR ISOLATION


Part of the struggle I want us to undertake is challenging an early universal hurt that left us alone in our heads. This is not about individual failure. It’s about recognizing what happens to every baby from the beginning that gives them essentially no possibility of building the connection they thought they were going to have. We end up wondering why we’re alone, why nobody else thinks about things the way we do. Nobody even wants to talk about it, so we’ve learned to go alone. It had to be that way, given those conditions.

Going back and looking alone at harsh early material is almost impossible. As near as I can tell, that’s the most important reason people cannot stay with RC. At least eighty percent of the people who joined RC left. They left because they couldn’t reach for anyone and no one could reach for them.


Do you remember when you gave up on somebody thinking well enough about you? Ever since then, you’ve had a secret life where you couldn’t show a whole collection of things about yourself. They were your secrets, locked inside. But no one ever gives up entirely. We keep hoping there’ll be someone, somewhere, someday. It’s frozen in distress, so we wait for someone to come get us. We wait for that person to appear, and we can’t imagine taking the initiative ourselves to break this material [distress]. If we can figure out ways to discharge it, we don’t have to just wait.


This, I think, is the big struggle in this period as everything else is collapsing around us. We can’t stay this isolated. We need to become a unified force in some way. The collective part of this is important. I think growing up in a capitalist society that tries to separate us has confused us about that.


We all bring our disappointments to the RC Community, and we all hope it’ll be in shape to help us get through things without it feeling too hard. It doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t. We’re working in a very oppressive circumstance and our families have passed down distresses for generations, not being able to discharge. I don’t think we can reach our long-term goals without facing these struggles.


What do I want this weekend? It’s for you to get to know each other better than ever before. I want you to dare to use each other fully as counselor and client. To challenge the fears that have kept you playing it safe in Co-Counseling sessions. To build relationships with each other that are closer than you’ve ever had.  To dare to challenge the things that have held us all back from doing that.


I want you to be able to look at the restimulation you’ve had to live with within the Communities, because if your Community is restimulating, you will probably have a hard time finding somebody to work on it with. 

REFUSE TO LOSE 
CONNECTION


Across the world in different ways, we all know that we have to change the societies around us. That isn’t going to happen until we know how to build relationships.


It isn’t just a political thing that has to happen. Minds have to change.


We’re trying to make what we know accessible to every human being so their liberation is in their own hands, so they can do the work to free themselves of distress. But they don’t have the tools, the understanding, or the resources. We have the understanding and that’s what we can do: get this more and more widely available to people. So part of our work is to build Communities.


I think we understand more and more clearly that building Community is actually about building relationships between and among people. Think of the ease and joy of being alive here together. We don’t create that easily. It takes us days together to be able to do that. Our Communities need to be built on that possibility. On being that alive, on daring to go after any hurt we’ve ever had, on not agreeing to let anything stand in our way. 


How do we manage not to forget this? That’s a decision we need to make. A commitment to ourselves first. That I refuse to lose this. It’s a commitment to each other. I refuse to lose you. You are mine. It’s a commitment to our species. I refuse to give up on us. I think we can do this. I think we can get a clear enough picture of each other. We’ve created the circumstances that are safe enough that we don’t have to hide it. We get to refuse to lose what we know, and we get to refuse to forget what’s possible for us. 

DON’T ACCEPT 
DISLIKING PEOPLE


One way to really rile [irritate] a Community is to go around having sessions complaining about other Co-Counselors. It’s just too restimulating. You actually don’t get to dislike anybody. You can’t accept that you’re that confused about anybody. You cannot accept disliking anyone, including yourself, as a rational part of your life.


We all have lots of strange things we do out of our distresses. We’re not always thoughtful of each other. That’s not a reason to be unhappy or not like somebody. It gives you information on where they struggle, what they can’t do yet. But they don’t intend to be difficult. Nobody intends that. They’re trapped in distress and they can’t find ways out. You get to discharge on it. It gets easier, the more you challenge it in practice. Even if you haven’t discharged much on it, the more you see the reality behind it, the more you see that there’s no reason to hold back.


You have to remember, no matter how mistaken they are, the fact that it bothers you is a different fact. That part is yours, and they can’t do anything about it. There’s a way to decide not to be vulnerable to being restimulated by other people, no matter what they do. To not lose track of who they are, because no matter how restimulating or how troubled they are, they’re just like us. We got some breaks [opportunities], so we got here.

CRITICISM AND ATTACKS


Just like you must learn not to be confused by your childhood, you have to learn not to be confused by how troubled our societies are now. They don’t have to be this way and they will not continue to be this way forever.  We need to do the work to end our confusions, and we need to learn not to be scared about reaching deeply for other people. We need to remember that they’re only troubled and restimulated, and that there’s a mind just like ours right behind that. And that we know how to help them get through that confusion.


For those of you who have tried to take RC ideas out to other groups, they’re not always welcoming because somebody will get restimulated and will restimulate others about it. You have to listen to what scared them, and not be worried about it and not get defensive about it.


We have to counsel on places where we are vulnerable when somebody says something bad about us, whether or not it has any substance. The attacks will come, and they won’t actually be about you or us. They’re about upsetting people and splitting them apart, which is what our society tries to do all the time. 


COUNSELING ON 
HARD MATERIAL


One way to undertake looking at and counseling on very restimulating things is to be in opposition to what happened to you. It had to happen that way, and it shouldn’t have. Those are both true in some sense; they seem contradictory, but they probably aren’t. It’s important to decide to step into opposition to all of the irrational things that happen to you. It’s much easier to discharge on them in opposition than as victim.


We’re going to be defeated many times. That’s not even a mistake; it has to happen under these conditions. Defeats are alright if you live through them. What’s not alright is if you don’t get to discharge on them; then you stay defeated and you stay confused about defeat. But if you get the chance to discharge on the losses, then you can actually learn from them.


Part of working early in places we were defeated is that we gave up. There’s a difference between being defeated and giving up. You can be defeated but never leave the opposition.


Even though the ways we got hurt were not our doing, not our choice, and not our fault, they’re now ours. We want to do the work so that they don’t get passed on. In particular, we want to do the work so they don’t get passed on to our Communities.


RELEARNING HOW TO LEAD


Every young person wants to lead. Every young person wants to lead us. They have things they want to do. They want to tell us, “No, those aren’t the rules. These are the rules.” And they make them up. They want to take their ideas and test them. We lose that as we accumulate distresses. We don’t want to be in a position where mistakes would show, where people would be upset, and where we would be attacked. We don’t want to do that.


But remember what a difference Co-Counseling has made in your life. It will be that way for the people you lead, too.


How do you do it? Whom do you do it with? You get to figure that out.


People learn from you. They learn the Co-Counseling that you can show. And we all have a lot to show. We are still timid about that, so we give them a book and think that’s what they learn. And the book is helpful; everyone should read more RC literature. But what they’re learning is to be human again. And you don’t learn that alone. You learn that from and with other people.


NOT ALONE ANYMORE


I know how good you are, how much you care, and how hard you try. We need to know and remember that about each other. We were made to feel alone as young people. You’re not alone anymore. You are in all of these minds. Whether they’re nearby or not is a different question. Alone is actually about not being in anybody else’s mind; that there is no one thinking about you. I think that’s over in your life. Really over. We will go on together.