Community Building and Confidentiality
My name is Bafana Matsebula. I greet you with words of peace. I write from the beautiful mountainous kingdom of Eswatini.
We have just completed the International Black Liberation and Community Development Workshop (BLCD) led by Barbara Love and Tim Jackins. It was on Zoom, and more than three hundred people attended.
Tim reminded us that our goal is to help each other liberate our minds, the minds of people we care for, and eventually other people’s minds so we can have a better world. We do this by using our discharge process.
We were reminded that RC has been an ongoing project for the past seventy years. “We’ve learned a lot, tried a lot of things, made a lot of headway, and reached a lot of people. And we are still learning how to get the discharge process back under our command.” For the process to work well, we need an RC Community. As we build our Communities, we want to make use of the lessons learned over the past seventy years to avoid making the same mistakes.
We must remember that it takes a very long time to build trust and safety in a Community. They are our currency. We value them. And it is all of our responsibility to guard them and remind one another to do so when we forget.
A key element in building trust and safety is maintaining confidentiality. How do we know when somebody has forgotten about confidentiality, and what should we do when that happens? The minute somebody talks about a session they had or what somebody said in session, we stop them. The minute somebody is having a session and names other members of the Community, we stop them. The key is to discharge our need to hear the story. We must focus on the feelings that are restimulated and discharge them. This works every time.
It is often easy for us to be bound by and preoccupied with the distresses of the present. We were reminded at the workshop that “to liberate each of our minds, we need to discharge on what happened to us.” This is not just what happened to us today or yesterday or even last year. The discharge process works much more quickly if we challenge the ways we got hurt early in our lives. Also, when we focus on discharging our early hurts, we feel less pulled to rehearse what is currently happening in our life or our Community and are therefore less likely to break confidentiality.
Barbara said the following about being a client: Remember to go back to the early memories. It is often tempting to focus on what is happening right now. However, as often as you can, go back to early memories. Whatever is happening right now has roots in your early life. You can tell your life story. Start with “I was born”—that is not speculation—and then go to what happened after that. You get to tell the story over and over. The point is to notice what happened and how it affected your mind, and how it’s affecting the way you think about your life right now—and discharge that. It is efficient to work this way as clients. Also, we are less likely to break confidentiality and therefore better able to build strong Communities.
Barbara promised us that the International Black Liberation and Community Development Workshop in 2024 will be in Africa. She challenged us to go out and build our Communities.
Mbabane, Eswatini
(Present Time 201, October 2020)