A talk by Tim Jackins at the online Native Teachers’ and Leaders’ Workshop, March 2026


Here is a quick overview of the way I look at us.


We have a model of the human brain, and we use it to find each other, build relationships, and do other things. Our model says that every mind is tremendously capable of interacting with the world in interesting ways. It’s intelligent, but it has a vulnerability; when a person gets hurt, either physically or mentally, the hurt interferes with that intelligence. It makes it much harder to operate. Even after the incident is over, the difficulty persists.


Unless we’re allowed to do this natural thing that we call “discharge.” Unless the mind is allowed to take care of itself.


From the very beginning, every one of us tried to discharge and recover from our hurts. It’s inherent. It’s part of us. It’s the way humans are. We tried to do it without anybody telling us anything or even offering anything. We cried and then looked for someone who could pay attention. Someone who wouldn’t distract us, who wouldn’t try to shut us up, and who wouldn’t put us in the other room and walk away.


There was often a lot of interference, because the people around us hadn’t been allowed to recover. Hearing us discharge restimulated them. It brought up all the feelings from when they were hurt and weren’t allowed to heal themselves. When we couldn’t find what we needed, it wasn’t just discharge that was interfered with; it was our connection with another human.


As near as I can tell, every human being has gone through this separation, and it can happen very quickly. The recording of separation that gets installed makes us vulnerable to so many other hurts. But the distress is not permanent. No other distress seems permanent, so why should this one be?


THE DECISION TO SEPARATE


Some of us remember when it finally got so difficult—where the disappointment and separation became so clear, we decided we couldn’t stay. We couldn’t keep trying. I think it’s both sad and sort of a victory to decide you’re not going out there and being stepped on [mistreated] one more time.


It’s like you have your own little boat tied to the dock. The rope breaks or you untie it. You drift off all by yourself. Then you try and figure things out.


One of the sad indications of that separation is that when it happens, you know how big it was, but usually nobody else noticed. Something very big changed in your mind and nobody could tell. They couldn’t see you well enough to do that because they themselves had been separated.


Going off on your own [alone] did save you from being stepped on and disappointed again and again. Past that point, you had enough. Given those conditions, it was probably a good decision, but it was expensive. It shaped your perspective about what’s possible between us.


On your own, you figured things out well enough that you’re here. That’s a success. But this separation—this first clump of distress—has been restimulated every day of your life. It’s very real in all of our minds. We expect to live that way. We don’t expect it to change.


It’s seldom that it gets contradicted enough that we don’t feel like we’re on our own. About the only time that happens is when we get infatuated [fall in love] with someone, and then somehow our whole perspective changes. It pulls us out of that distress, for a little while at least, and the world is wonderful. I think that’s useful because it gives us a glimpse of being happy with each other.


WE ALWAYS HAVE THE 
OPTION TO THINK


Whenever something bad happens and we don’t have a chance to discharge, we end up with a recording of all the hard things that were going on during that incident. Those recordings stay there, frozen in our minds. They contain the memory of all the sounds and feelings and physical damage we experienced. They accumulate, and with each one, a little more of our minds is tied down. They have eaten up [occluded] a bit of our intelligence.


Then we have trouble telling [difficulty comprehending] what’s real in the present and what’s restimulation, because the restimulation feels so real. That’s where the struggle is and where we make mistakes. We blunder [make mistakes].


Some of the blunders are passive. Feelings come up and keep us passive when we could have taken action. Some of us have the opposite pattern, of course: we’re going to do something no matter what. It doesn’t mean we do something smart. We just do something. We’re stuck in forward instead of reverse. Maybe that’s better, or maybe it runs us off a cliff. Either way, the odds are against our being able to think and figure out a good move [decision] against the current situation. That is what oppressive societies count [depend] on. It’s what keeps them in place.


But as near as we can tell, we always have the possibility of seeing what’s real and pushing aside everything that’s restimulation. Of going ahead and thinking and deciding on the best thing we can do. No matter how badly we’ve been hurt, there’s always that chance. But the more we’ve been hurt without being able to discharge the feelings, the more we’re contending with, and the worse the odds get. 


THE IMPORTANCE 
OF WORKING EARLY


Early hurts happened to all of us. Somehow back in 1950 we stumbled on the beginning of a picture of what was going on and what we could do about it. This became our model. It’s not what’s really happening in your mind; it’s our model of it. It’s a good- enough model. We’ve gotten this far. We know to try and figure out how to let this process work again, and we know there’s no “use by” [expiration] date on it. We can discharge hurts no matter how long ago they happened. The healing process stays within reach.


We’re trying to learn to help each other let this process operate. When people start RC, they usually begin by looking at a recent restimulation about how they feel bad now or who upset them or how bad they feel every morning. Things that seem immediately within reach. Even though the feelings are really restimulations of things that happened thirty years ago, they feel real now, so people can work on them.


It helps, but it’s not enough to work on the most recent restimulations. It leaves all the other incidents in place. We’ve realized that the very earliest hurts play a tremendous role. They’re the ones that make us most susceptible to confusion. The more we work on those early hurts, the less restimulated and vulnerable we are to feeling like things from the past are happening again.


I can tell you about these ideas and what we think works, but you don’t have to take my word for it. You get to go try them out and find out for yourself if they work. That’s what’s interesting about RC: everybody gets to test our ideas and prove them for themselves. What we learn from each other are different ways to create the conditions that make us feel safe enough to openly show our hurts. 


THE WORK AHEAD


I want you to stop blaming yourself for the way you feel. When you wake up in the morning or whenever it hits you [whenever you feel it], I want you to understand that there are reasons from the past that set that up. It was not your failure in any way at all. I also want you to understand that it’s not just you—it’s us.


RC and Co-Counseling and the discharge process may seem like personal things, but they’re about all of us. I think it’s made to look personal by our distresses and by the society we’re living in—that you do things for yourself—but this is about doing something for us collectively as well.


Why has this entirely natural process been interfered with everywhere for so long? How did we get to this point, if every mind has the capacity to recover? These are interesting questions. Someone can do their doctoral thesis on them later. But for right now we get to do the work to change the situation—to think in spite of our distresses in the present, and to try and interrupt all of the irrationalities going on everywhere.


In my mind, our goal is to create a world where no one has to lose any bit of humanness.


To do that, we need to increase the number of people that understands these ideas and can use them so that more and more minds liberate themselves. That will make everything easier. The more we discharge, the more we can think about everything, including this. How do we make discharge and RC more accessible to people? It’s all part of the very large project of trying to create a world where everybody has a good chance at a good life.


I WANT YOU BACK


We need to understand that, to do all the things we want to do, there’s some piece of work we need to do back early. Until we do that, we’re separated. How are we going to figure out how to build a world that’s good for everyone if we’re separated? I don’t know that we can. This has to be faced and taken care of.


No matter what our distresses tell us about ourselves or about other people, it’s only confusion that makes recovery from separation seem so hard and so distant. We all have the tools to change that. At this point it’s nothing but work. It’s a godawful [extremely unpleasant] amount of work sometimes, but we know how to work.


I want you to discharge both about when you gave up and about the fact that you’re going to come back together with all of us.


One of the goals in RC that I finally figured out how to say a little more clearly is that you want to be invulnerable to restimulation. You want to have discharged enough that nothing pushes your mind back into the past confusions. That you stay in the present and can think about it without those confusions coming after you. It’ll be a good while before the sources of restimulation are no longer present in our minds.


We’ve always had a choice about whether or not to let recordings from the past derail us. The more early hurts we’ve gotten to discharge on, the better the odds are that we will be able to think clearly.


Let me say something very explicitly: I want you back. I know you had to leave. I understand that. I know it feels like it was a permanent decision. But it was a decision made in distress. And the conditions under which you made it don’t exist anymore. We are changing those conditions. I want you back now. I want us joined again. Like it should have been at the beginning. Like it should have been for generations.