It Needs to Be Believable
Question: People are insisting on saying, “I am a wonderful person,” when actually “I’m okay” is bringing the discharge. They say the latter is too much of an understatement and you ought to go for the whole thing.
Harvey Jackins: A client is doing fine if they’re already discharging on the “okay.” It needs to be believable. I remember when we first started validating ourselves. I would ask people to say, “I’m a wonderful person,” and they would discharge all over the place, one person after the other. So I said to Mary,1 “I want to try this.” She said, “All right. Say, ‘I’m a wonderful person.’” I said, “I’m a wonderful person,” about ten times. Nothing happened. So I sat there discouraged. Suddenly a thought crossed my mind. I said, “I’m not the worst son-of-a-bitch that every lived.” Yawn, yawn, yawn. It was believable. It wants to be a believable contradiction.2
From the July 1986 Peace and
Disarmament Activists’ Workshop
1 Mary McCabe, an important early developer of Re-evaluation Counseling
2 Contradiction to the distress