People Leaving RC
Tim Jackins, at one of the Pre-World Conferences, 2013
Question: How do we handle it when someone leaves the RC Community? How do we handle the other Community members’ distresses about it? What do we do?
Tim: People leave the RC Community for several different reasons. Some people should leave. Some people shouldn’t have come in to begin with, and we don’t want to spend a lot of resource encouraging them to stay.
We want to be thoughtful about who comes into the Community. The Community can’t handle everyone’s distresses, even though we want to. Sometimes, in wanting to, we use bad judgment. We invite in, and make hopeful, people we don’t have the resource to help.
Sometimes it’s a friend of ours, and we can’t see their struggles clearly. Or we see the distresses clearly and we want someone else to help us, so we drop the person on the Community. Sometimes we can’t tell1 that there’s heavy distress waiting behind a smiling face.
Sometimes people don’t stay because of the Guidelines,2 especially the no-socializing policy.3 I wouldn’t work too hard on those people either. There’s a way that their distresses can have them committed to causing trouble.
Most people leave because their discouragement overcomes them. They are working on things and it gets harder for them to get their attention out of the distress. Often their Co-Counseling relationships aren’t good enough yet, so no one notices or no one moves to help them. If we are the teacher of the person’s class, then hopefully we get some indication. We can have a session with them, or do a three-way session and include their usual Co-Counselor, to help things go better. The amount of resource we put into this effort is up to our judgment.
People often leave after their first class. How much this happens depends on how strong the local Community is. The bigger and stronger the Community, the more it is a contradiction to people’s material.
Almost everybody feels discouraged in RC at one point or another. It’s useful to work on those distresses before they grab us. For example, we can have people work on them in an ongoing class. We can ask the question, “What would get so hard on you that you couldn’t keep having sessions?” We can help people recognize that there is nothing wrong when those feelings come up, but that they don’t have to believe them.
It’s far easier to get people to understand this before it happens. If it happens first, I think we want to offer people resource, but we want to do it in such a way that we are not taking care of them. We want to know enough about their distresses that we can contradict them. We also have to remind people that it’s just distress, that there’s nothing wrong now, and get them working on earlier times when they left other situations in discouragement. Many people have never been able to stay anywhere.
A way to help the RCers who watch these others leave is to get them working on the same material.
We have all lost people and relationships we have cared about, so we can have lots of restimulations and not much thinking in this area.
1 “Tell” means perceive.
2 The Guidelines for the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities—the policies for the RC Communities: /publication/guidelines_2013/contents
3 The no-socializing policy of the RC Communities states that Co-Counselors should not set up any relationships, other than Co-Counseling, with other Co-Counselors or with people whom they first meet in a Co-Counseling context.