The One-Point Program
A talk by Teresa Enrico* at a webinar on the RC One-Point Program, July 2025
Welcome.
I am pleased to see each one of you here from so many places around the world. We are a group of people who use the ideas of Co-Counseling on a regular basis. We use them to reclaim our flexible minds, and we assist others to do the same. That is our one-point program.
For more than seventy years we have been building slowly, persistently. We have been coming together in the RC Community, creating a tapestry of human richness. It’s like a web, made stronger by our connections that crisscross in so many directions. And we grow richer as more people join us. Each of us has brought as much of ourselves as we are able. We grow together. And I want more. I hope for more for us.
I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, USA. Little did I know that across town from me, Harvey Jackins, Tim Jackins, and others were in the process of developing what would become RC. Tim has said to me that if he had known, he would have come to the hospital when I was born. I almost died there, but for some reason this makes everything better.
After finding RC, these ideas, this organization, and you, I have never looked back [I have been undoubtedly committed]. Finding all of you who make up this International Community has meant everything to me. It makes a difference to me, and I assume to you, that we are all committed to thinking well about ourselves, each other, and the world.
WHY THIS WEBINAR NOW
So, why this webinar now? The world has changed since Harvey, his family, and his friends were discovering and developing these ideas. The clear signs of societal collapse—the irrational distresses driving corrupt and destructive policies—are now more visible to most people. Harvey spoke of the collapse many times.
We live in a world where the domination of irrational distresses and huge systems of oppression determine how we live our lives and how our relationships are defined.
The harm being caused to billions of lives is unbearable—especially to those directly targeted but even to those who are not, if only we dare to look. What is happening to other human beings and to the physical world around us is harsh and accelerating. It restimulates all of our early hurts connected to our existence—powerlessness, isolation, and despair.
But even as society collapses, we want to continue to move forward. As RC leader Marion Ouphouet says, “We were all born with genius-sized intelligences.” We want to continue regaining our intelligence and assisting others to do the same. This is essential not only for our personal re-emergence but for helping to prevent irrational forces in our society from doing even deeper damage. We can’t do one without the other.
At this point, there are not enough people who understand the difference between our thinking minds and our distresses, and the distresses in the world around us. Most people don’t know that we can heal, and that we can determine for ourselves the human relationships we want to have—and the society everyone could have. We want and need to share that important knowledge.
Our goal as a Community is to move toward the flexible intelligence of human beings. This is what I want “dominating” our society. I want our smarts [intelligence] to be prominent in every way around us. To have enough of us connected to each other that we can think together and move toward a world that ends humans harming humans and instead is a place where we are all for one and one for all [in solidarity].
So, what does the one-point program mean in this current time? I want to think about that, and I want you to think about it with me.
THE BEGINNINGS
Today is Harvey’s birthday. If I did my math right, he would be 109! I thought it fitting that on his birthday we try and wrap our minds around [try to understand] this revolutionary thing he set up and left us. To look at our beginnings.
It’s okay to cry about knowing Harvey and loving him. (Some people are crying on this call.) Many of us were close to this loving, smart man. We all have been profoundly impacted by him.
Harvey was a mathematician and scientist and a keen observer. He was also a labor organizer, and he knew about working to make things better for everyone. He was a raised-poor man who cared about people and was willing to fight for them. Because of his commitment to people and to doing the right thing, back in 1950 he agreed to help a man named Merle—a friend of a friend who was having a hard time. In doing so, he began a discovery process that resulted in what we now know as RC theory.
Harvey had the biggest possible picture for humans and he, with others, discovered some things about the nature of humans and what it takes to help people thrive. They tried, experimented, and learned. That’s what we’re still doing, with every Co-Counseling session, every class, every workshop. This is very much an ongoing experiment we are engaged in—trying, discharging, re-evaluating, and trying again.
That early team of counselors tried a whole bunch of things. They gave one-way sessions; they figured out how to do listening exchanges with each other. As they experimented, the theory became clearer, and the implications came into focus. What if this could actually work with everyone? Is this inherent to being human?
I tell you all this in part because I want to try to get into Harvey’s mindset [perspective] back then. I want to step back into his beginner’s or discoverer’s mind. Imagine what it was like observing something that seemed to be working. Being able to tell that he was seeing something that he didn’t quite understand yet. What was this thing that seemed to be having an effect? He went to the “mental health” system to see if someone was interested; they weren’t, but he decided it was too important to drop. We owe a lot to Harvey, his friends, and his family for not giving up. And to Merle.
At some point Harvey taught the first fundamentals class in Seattle. When people outside of Seattle wanted to learn, it meant that he and others had to think about how to help more distant Communities use this process.
As the Community expanded, they had to consider how we can build and preserve our unity as we work through our messy and complex distresses. How do we steer clear of where our distresses may clash with one another, so we can focus on healing and taking the action needed to move things forward? How do we relate to each other as people who are doing this work together? How do we apply these ideas among people from different backgrounds, with varying experiences, cultures, and histories? And how do we keep the theory and practice consistent and the Communities intact?
These are issues we continue to grapple with, and the Guidelines for the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities are one of the most important tools we have for doing that.
We’ve grown over many years and now have RC Communities in ninety-three countries. We have over ninety Regions with Regional Reference Persons (RRPs). We have more than 200 Areas and over 1,500 teachers. We have RC classes, support groups, and all kinds of activities taking place across the world. We have deepened our understanding of RC theory, and our relationships have grown and developed. Some of us have had Co-Counseling relationships for decades now, and new people continue to join us. There are countless people both in and outside of RC who are using this process of exchanging attention to move themselves forward.
We know there are ways that we could think better about ourselves and other people. We know there are more groups of people we want to reach and think about. But clearly something is working.
THE ONE-POINT PROGRAM
The one-point program first appeared in the Guidelines in 1973. At that time we only had four or five guidelines, and the one-point program was one of them. The others explained what it meant to be a member of the Community, and the nature of our relationships to each other as peers—all important ideas that we continue to stand by [support]. There are now eleven chapters in the Guidelines. It’s an amazing document that has guided our growth and functioning for years and supported our efforts to implement the one-point program.
The one-point program is Guideline A3. It reads, “There is only one program of the RC Community that is binding on all Community members. It is to use RC to seek access to one’s occluded [hidden] intelligence and innate [natural] humanness and to assist others to do the same. All other activities undertaken by the Community are in support of this program. No agreement is required of Community members beyond the consistency with this program and support of the Guidelines.”
The one-point program provides a revolutionary framework to approach transforming our relationships and rebuilding a society that considers [thinks carefully about] everyone. Together with our basic theory, the one-point program does the following:
- It encourages us to reclaim our full minds and assist others to do the same
- It assumes that our theory and the practice of it applies to every single human
- It assumes that it is possible to reach each of those humans, so that eventually no one will be left behind
- It means that we are working toward a society where each human gets thought about by at least one other person—and that can happen from the beginning of life
If English is not your first language, I would encourage you to translate the program into your first language (if it hasn’t been done already), so you can really take in [understand] what the words mean and what feelings, questions, and thoughts you have about it.
Let’s do a mini-session. Think about the one-point program. What do you like or dislike? Maybe you struggle with the word “occluded”—what does that mean? What do you think Harvey was thinking when he set it up [expressed it] like this?
A STRONG BASE
The one-point program is the lowest common denominator [an idea that works for everyone] that we can agree on. It’s the foundation we can all share, even if we don’t agree on anything else. It’s just like in math class, when we had to find the lowest common denominator to add fractions together: the one-point program gives us a common starting point.
I love the idea that no matter how many of us there are, we are like fractions coming together to form a whole [we are each a part of the same Community]. If there are two of us, there is one half and one half and together they make a whole. If there are 135 of us, each of us is 1/135th of a whole. We still add up to a whole. And each fraction, each person, matters and is part of the whole.
We have also developed a model of what it means to be human. We understand that humans are emotional, thinking, and physical beings. You don’t have to put away [hide] your emotions to be with us; you don’t have to put away your thinking, either. And you always have your body with you. We know recordings can affect our bodies and our thinking. In RC we create the space to be here as ourselves—including our struggles, our past, backgrounds, beliefs, and politics, and our people. We believe that you are yourself, you are significant, and you are just right. There is a space here for you to be you.
Our one-point program along with our model of humanness gives us a strong base from which to work. Where our distresses might confuse us or get in the way of our Co-Counseling relationships, the decision to back [support] each other’s minds combined with discharge enables us to hold those distresses at bay [out of our way].
WE ARE A LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION
We welcome you to develop your leadership with us. You get to grow and move with us. But it is entirely your decision.
I think of leadership as seeing to it that things go well for you and the people around you. One image I use is of concentric circles around yourself [groups of people who are connected to you]. You are at the center. It has to start with you—you thinking better about yourself and your life. Taking charge of yourself first. Then you have the chance to think outside yourself, about somebody else. When you assist somebody else, you get to help things go well for them. That is helping to set things right in the world, with the people around us.
Taking leadership in successive concentric rings around ourselves makes a sphere of influence that gets wider and wider as we move through more distress and can take responsibility for more of what is around us.
For some of us, it’s easier to think of the circles that are farther out [easier to focus on others], and we have to discharge to bring our leadership in closer and include ourselves. Others of us can only think in close, not knowing what power and influence we could have with other humans. We get to grow and bring our influence and thinking out wider as we gain confidence.
Wherever you begin in those concentric rings is fine, as long as you have a chance to try—to discharge and try again. We get to release our individual initiative as we move distresses that have held us back.
As we are freed from our distresses, our tendency will be to try and influence things around us in the direction of inherent humanness and away from distress. Our experience has been that as humans move [heal] their most immediate hurts, they gain awareness of the people and world around them and want to set things right.
We can add other projects and leadership to our basic one-point agreement. It is important to do this by choice as individuals—not at the behest [instruction] of others or the organization, not because we “should,” and hopefully not driven by our early urgencies and other distress. The projects that we add for our re-emergence can (and need to) have at their base the one-point program. We can use this as our organizing principle—going for the whole picture of freeing our minds and supporting others to do the same—no matter what project we are involved in. We can ask, How does this move me in my re-emergence? Who am I assisting to move forward, and how?
BUILDING CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
We begin our relationships as imperfect allies. We can only start where we are at with each other. We have to do our own work. And then we get to move together. If we can support one another then we can become better allies.
Tim has been encouraging us to work on how separated, isolated, and discouraged we have been made to be. The hurts that installed our patterns and are keeping our distresses and oppressions in place came in on us so early and so harshly. They keep us from showing ourselves and from moving toward one another. I think this has led to the worst of what we see in the world today.
As young people, we had to decide to go on alone, without the connection we expected. This has affected every human as far as we can tell, and all of our relationships. Every new human born is forced into this setup.
When we contradict the isolation and separation of our early lives, we can be with people first and foremost. Whether people come into Co-Counseling or not, we want and need to be with them, and to let them be with us.
We need a committed and growing core of people in our organization to be doing this healing work intentionally—systematically moving our distresses and building close relationships. Many of us are here today. We are learning what it actually takes to get this accumulation of distress off of us. We are learning what it means to be close, connected, and caring with all humans. Remember, we are trying to remove thousands of years of accumulated distress in our society, and we are only seventy-plus years into the process.
ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL
Everything we do in RC is about working toward connection with each other. That is our goal—to be in touch with other human minds and hearts. We want to heal anything in the way of doing that. The closer we can be, the more our flexible intelligence shows. The one-point program creates a framework for that to happen.
Separation and disconnection bring fear, distrust, and other hurts to young people, and if there is no discharge, the pain and recordings persist as we grow older. It is scary for young people to be isolated like that. Those early hurts are breeding grounds for dominating, oppressive structures like fascism, and they enable authoritarianism to take hold in our society, which leads to environmental destruction.
Connection, on the other hand, begets [creates] trust, which can yield a “we” mindset that in turn creates possibilities in a human mind. This can lead to the idea of “all for one and one for all.” We can be for each person. And each person can be for the good of the whole. There is no inherent conflict.
I am looking for a permanent revolution in our society that is based on connection, closeness, and caring. One that includes everyone. That means there must be a transformation of our relationships built not on the basis of isolation, fear, or the myriad [vast number of] oppressions that dictate how we relate to one another.
Instead, we can build our relationships on the flexible intelligence and connection that are inherent to us as humans. On the principle of “you assist me to heal and be myself, where I will be able to think as far out as I possibly can, and I will do the same for you.” That is a revolutionary idea and the basis for something very different from what we have at present.
I am committed to you and to doing this with all of you.
THE ONE-POINT PROGRAM TRANSLATIONS
BASQUE
EB Erkidegoan programa bakarra dago kide guztiek onartu beharrekoa. Hau da, EB erabiltzea bakoitzaren adimen estalira eta berezko gizatasunera sarbidea lortzeko, eta besteak laguntzea gauza bera egin dezaten.
Erkidegoak egiten dituen beste ekintza guztiak programa hori euskarritzeko dira. Erkidegoko kideei ez diegu eskatzen programa horrekin koherentzian dagoena eta Jarraibideak euskarritzea baino haragoko adostasunik.
- - - -