I have always hated counselling, therapy, and do-gooders. As a disabled person it has made me angry when non-disabled people have implied that we are miserable because of the impairments themselves and not because of the way we are treated by the oppressive society. However, when I read ‘The Human Side of Human Beings’ by Harvey Jackins, and then met the man and saw him in action, I knew this was something different. To put it bluntly, it gave me an explanation of why people are so intelligent one minute, and so fucking barmy the next. This is a phenomena I had noticed myself and puzzled over for many years. It not only gave an explanation, but also a solution – a way to get our brains back, fully functioning and rational. Traditional therapies it seems to me aim to help us understand our distress, whilst this aims to get rid of it. Hooray!
Harvey was a political animal who was passionate about the ‘underdog’, the oppressed having a voice and gaining respect and influence in society. He understood that people are hurt by society itself and that we need to gain courage and clarity in order to change it. Like me he was raised working class, and he believed that the world would, one day, be ours – we were the only class with a future. Re-Evaluation Counselling really developed the concept of ‘Internalised Oppression’ – the way we are taught to accept the worlds’ stereotyping and de-valuing of us as ‘reality’, and saw this as the main obstacle to our effective leadership in the world. The Co-Counselling Community exists as a way of helping each other, long term, to become our true selves.
I became fascinated and an avid student. I went to workshops and classes, learned to teach it myself and to use the tools and insights to be a much more powerful in the world. I have stuck with it for about thirty years, and intend to stay with it until I pop my clogs.
The theory of RC is deceptively simple, and I believe needs to be ‘naturalised’ - to become common knowledge so that we can change the way we relate to one another, and in particular, the way we support our children. Belonging to the RC Community however, is not for the faint hearted. It requires a decision to be made at a very deep level to act on our best thinking and not our ‘feelings’, and to work together, often through a painful process, to rid ourselves of the effects of past hurts. There are strong guidelines in place to protect this counselling relationship. For example we are expected not to use the relationships to act out our addictions for sex, gossiping, drinking or other such behaviours, however much we want to. This is what makes it hard, and this is what makes it work.
To my mind, Harvey Jackins was, like many of us students, fallible and full of foibles and eccentricities. He dealt with considerable criticisms of himself and his organisation, some of which are probably true, but he was undoubtedly a genius – a man with a big mind and a big heart. In the fullness of time I believe he will be recorded in history as someone whose insights changed the world. Before he died he gave me the role of International Reference Person for Inclusion within the RC Communities. This is a role I am taking very seriously.
Here is a link to my illustrated version of the fundamentals of Re-Evaluation Co-Counselling for you to read. Feel free to print these off but contact me if you want to use them in any way. Contact me if you would like to join a class to learn more. If you live in Wandsworth or Lambeth in SW London, you may even get to be in one of my classes!
Download 8 page fundamentals booklet (pdf file 450 kb)
(This takes a while and you can print it off as 'landscape')