A talk by Tim Jackins at the South Asia Pre-World Conference, Pune, India, November 2025
We are at this conference because of a process we call “discharge.” This process exists deep inside our minds. It doesn’t exist because I told you it exists. You were born with it. It’s part of being human.
When we get hurt, physically or emotionally, the hurt confuses our minds. It interferes with our thinking.
Our minds immediately try to repair the damage by beginning the discharge process. We don’t know exactly how the mind does this, but we have all proved that this process exists. And we have seen how our minds work when this process is allowed to happen.
RELEARNING HOW TO DISCHARGE
Unfortunately, we were all born to people who had not been allowed to use the discharge process, nor had their parents been allowed to use it. So they couldn’t allow us to use it.
Every hurt put in confusion. When a human mind doesn’t get to repair itself, the confusion persists. We are confused by the hurts that didn’t get discharged. This means we are confused about ourselves. One way we are confused is that we feel bad about ourselves. But you have no reason to feel bad about yourself. No reason. I know you can’t yet believe that. You’re so used to feeling bad that you think it is justified. But there is no reason for it. Do you feel bad? Maybe not at this moment, but we know those feelings sit in our minds. Especially when we are alone, they can take over [dominate] our minds.
The negative feelings are all false, and every one of us has them. Again, this is because we were all born to people who never got to discharge. You began life with the discharge process in place. When you were first hurt, your mind automatically and instinctively tried to discharge what happened. But the people around you couldn’t stand it. They may have stopped your discharge by saying, “There, there, there, it’s okay. Don’t cry.” Or maybe they put a bottle in your mouth or they hit you.
They stopped our discharge repeatedly until we started stopping it ourselves. We are good at stopping it. When we get to a Co-Counseling session, it would be fine to just burst into tears, but we mostly can’t do that. We have internalized the stopping of discharge. Every time we tried to discharge in our childhood, somebody stopped us. Whether we are aware of it or not, we expect someone to disapprove of our discharge.
A large part of learning RC is learning how to undo the stopping of discharge, learning to discharge freely. Your parents aren’t here to stop you anymore. But the distress recordings they put in are still there, and it doesn’t feel safe to show those feelings to anybody.
RESTIMULATION AND RECOVERY
The discharge process has many outward signs. Tears are one of them. When someone is crying you know that the process is working unless some drug is interfering with their mind. A crying drunk is not changing. Someone who is drunk and crying doesn’t improve. But aside from that, if we see tears coming down cheeks, we know that the process is working. If you feel tears filling your eyes but not getting out, you know the process is working.
And the process has lots of parts. Talking to someone is part of it. That’s usually where we start. It’s refreshing to have someone really listen to us. We so long for someone to listen that, even someone not really listening lets us talk and talk, and the process works a little. But the more that person can pay attention, the more the talking shifts—it goes from telling a story, to talking about yourself. It goes from feeling like reading a script, to something alive, because all the feelings from the event you are talking about are still there.
When we get hurt, everything that we were aware of gets attached to the recording—all the sights and sounds and smells and flavors, physical or otherwise. Not only are all these things part of the distress recording, they are also a factor in another aspect of being hurt, which is that once we get hurt in an area, we are more easily hurt in that area ever after—unless we get to discharge. If we get to discharge on it, this doesn’t happen. But when we don’t get to discharge, we can easily be reminded of that hurt. We call this restimulation. Maybe you are seeing some familiar people—for example, your family. It can be difficult. Your feelings from the hard times you had with them come back. Sometimes just the smell of your house is enough to remind you of the hard times, and the feelings come up from these distresses.
Distresses form a chain of events. We can restimulate that chain and be reminded of and feel the feelings from all the hurtful events. It feels like all those distressing events are with us in the present. For example, you see someone who was mad at you last year, and you “know” they are still mad, even before you talk to them. They got over it six months ago, but you never got to discharge those feelings, so the past crowds into your mind. Some people feel like there is someone mad at them all the time, even when there is nobody there. So the restimulated feelings confuse us about each other.
AFRAID TO LOOK
In RC we learn about hurts, distress recordings, discharge, and restimulation. This makes it easier for us to be good to and like each other—to form real relationships. Do I like you? Do you think I like you? Do you know I like you? I’d be surprised if you know this. But I do like each of you as much as I’ve gotten to know you. I like you. I want you here. I want us to go on together making all our lives better. I think everyone wants this.
Because of our hurts, we mostly feel alone and uncared about. We sometimes have sessions like this: I will talk, you will listen, but we won’t look at each other. I might get a glance, but that’s enough. We’re afraid to look and see if someone is there, if someone is trying to be with us because they want to be with us. There were so many times when nobody could be there.
We need to question every feeling we have, especially those that are negative about ourselves. We can challenge them. We can look at our counselors. We can see if they look back. We can find out if they really want to be with us. If we let those old feelings of hurt not let us try, how will we ever know?
OUR MINDS NEVER GIVE UP
We all have this process for healing our minds, and it was taken away from us. Nobody meant to take it away, but nobody understood it. They just did what their parents did, what society wanted them to do, what everybody else did. It was a mistake—and we know how to correct it.
A wonderful thing about the discharge process is that our minds can recover even from things that happened long ago. We can recover from undischarged hurts that we have lived with all our lives.
Our human minds never give up on using the process. Maybe the person sitting next to you needs someone to listen to them. They don’t know you and they don’t know if you care about them, but they have to talk to somebody. And you are it. So they try to use this process by using you. None of us has given up.
Most of us have learned to keep quiet until we are desperate, until we have to talk to someone. Let’s do it before that point.
SHOW YOU ARE LISTENING, SHOW HOW YOU FELT
The one who listens, the counselor, has to show that they are listening. There are lots of ways to do that. One way is to look at the client. Another way is to hold their hand and lean against them. Any sort of human contact works.
Part of suppressing discharge is hiding how we felt. We didn’t get to show people when we were happy or when we were sad. So it’s hard to tell what’s going on in each other’s heads. When you are the client, you can do more than describe what happened in a distant way. What was it like to have it happen to you? Describe how you felt—whether it scared you, embarrassed you, or made you sad. Put yourself in the story. Don’t be looking through the window at what happened from the outside. Include what it felt like.
We’re trying to get out of the packages that our distresses hold us in and that keep us separate. Human beings are one of the most interesting and enjoyable things that we will ever come across. We can get good at knowing and enjoying each other fully.
The discharge process never stopped working, but it gets harder to make it work the more the distress piles on and the more separate we feel.
How many of you would like to live alone on a desert [uninhabited] island? I’d like a few months of it myself. It would be so simple. Nobody to upset me. I would only have to handle my own problems, nobody else’s. Distresses can make contact difficult, and a lot of us try to avoid contact. But we can discharge the distresses and come back.
LIFE AS IT SHOULD BE
Wouldn’t you like to feel as happy and look as bright as a two-year-old can? Hopefully you’ve experienced a two-year-old who likes you, running at you. They want you. They really want you. It’s not like us, who you can feel may just be tolerating you. There’s nothing in their mind in the way of wanting you and running full speed at you. It makes them happy to want you. It’s part of the way life should be. We want that back. Distress is the only thing that prevents us from having it. Every mind would like to have it back.
If we give someone enough resource, if we give them enough attention, the discharge process starts to work despite the distress feelings. They didn’t mean to talk to you, but you looked at them and smiled, and they started talking. You looked friendly, and tears came to their eyes. You offered them a possibility. It doesn’t matter who you are. It isn’t about being someone special. It’s about meeting another human mind.
That’s what we’re trying to do in our sessions. The process can begin to work, not because we choose it but because it is part of being human. It feels like it sometimes happens despite us: l didn’t mean to burst into tears, but poof! [like magic]—there it is. My mind sees there is some attention there. A little bit of humanness showed through all the conditioning, and my mind could take a chance. We get to take chances in our sessions.
The better we show our attention as counselors and the more we dare as clients to challenge our feelings of being careful, the more this process will try to assert itself.
TAKE A CHANCE
Sometimes we have three-way sessions, and there is more attention. Sometimes we meet in groups, and there is even more attention, which loosens things up even more. Sometimes the workshop leader will bring someone up front, and there are seventy people listening. Often that person doesn’t know what to do—it feels like there is a chance at something, but it feels dangerous to take that chance. Do I dare show how I hurt? Do I dare show how much I feel instead of just being distantly friendly? We can decide to do that. This inherent process is pushing us in that direction, but we still have to decide. It feels dangerous, yet we know it is the direction of our liberation from all the hurtful things that happened to us. So we need to take a chance with each other, to see if showing ourselves a little more lets this process work and lets it free us a little more. The more chances we take, the more we learn.