Strategizing Re-emergence: A Revolution for Our Minds
What follows are my notes from a topic group I led at the East Coast USA Leaders’ Workshop in December 2020:
As humans we all deserve full, meaningful lives. We get to be completely in charge of our minds and fully enjoy living in the present.
The economy continues to collapse all around us. In the middle of this collapse, and in the face of all the environmental destruction, the biggest problem facing humanity is distress. We have to work against distress, or we will be less effective as things around us get tougher and tougher. And we will be less effective in our wide world activism. Ultimately, the change we seek is a change in every human mind.
Undoing distress—what we call re-emergence—is a revolutionary act. When we are re-emerging from distress, we are challenging how the oppressive system has targeted us with emotional hurts, caused us to doubt ourselves, and hobbled us. To pursue re-emergence effectively, we can maintain a twofold focus: both on our minds and on society.
Re-emergence is like peeling an onion. Each distress is a layer, and it’s a lifelong process. While re-emergence, undoing distress recordings, is an inherently joyful process, it may not feel good—and that’s okay. And because it may not feel good, we need a strategy to guide us in the direction of our re-emergence, to keep us from getting distracted or lost.
As capitalism collapses all around us, we get to continue re-emerging from distress, but we need to do it more and more effectively. That means that we get to
- be intentional and deliberate;
- be disciplined and persistent;
- not rely on feelings to guide us in choosing what to work on in sessions;
- not recruit our counselors to sympathize with our distresses;
- have partners and comrades in our re-emergence;
- make a plan, share it with our counselors, implement it, and persist;
- be mutually accountable to our Co-Counselors for our plans and theirs;
- when possible, set up intensives in which a team of allies thinks with and about us.
Perhaps once a year, we can step back and strategize our re-emergence. The following are some questions to consider:
- Who are our regular Co-Counselors? Who counsels us well and why?
- What chronic patterns have we identified and worked on this past year? How did we progress? What are the areas that moved decisively and why? What struggles persist, and what related distresses resist being discharged?
- What is our key chronic pattern, and how do we propose to work on it?
- What areas of our life remain unexamined in our sessions—for example, relationships with lovers, friends, and family; sexual life; addictions; money; work and career; activism; family history; early sexual memories; class; religion; teaching or assisting in RC?
- What are two or three areas of our life we would like to shift in the next year?
In answering these questions, we may want to consult with our regular Co-Counselors, our RC teacher, and the Area Reference Persons, Regional Reference Persons, and International Liberation Reference Persons who know us well. Once we have identified a key distress, we may want to consider the following framework. (The content is probably not new to you!)
A POSSIBLE FRAMEWORK FOR RE-EMERGENCE
I’ve been creating a framework for new RCers for working on re-emergence.
In my experience, many of us progress through certain stages in re-emerging from a distress pattern. They do not necessarily occur in the order below—I’m just trying to show the steps we tend to go through. Also, any stage can take a longer or a shorter period of time. And progress won’t necessarily be straightforward. For example, we may move backwards when we lose perspective.
At every stage, the client needs to discharge and find a perspective that is aligned with reality. As counselors, we can help our clients discharge to where they find that perspective and are able to keep progressing from one stage to the next.
As always, the client’s mind is in charge of the session and works in concert with the mind of the counselor. Both client and counselor are comrades in the fight for the liberation of the client’s mind.
Stage One—The client can’t distinguish between distress and their humanness: The client can’t tell [perceive] the difference between the distress and reality, between the past and the present. They repeat the distress recordings as if they are true. They hunt for evidence in the present to prove the recordings are true.
Stage Two—The client becomes able to name the distress: The counselor offers perspective and contradictions [to the distress] to help the client (1) identify the distress and name it; (2) notice the difference between what they expected as a young person and the harsh conditions of their life when they were young; (3) use the past tense when talking about the distress—it was scary, it was horrible, I was alone.
Stage Three—The client identifies the early hurts and sees that they can be discharged: The client scans the memories connected to a particular distress, finds earlier and earlier memories, and identifies the recordings that formed from the particular incidents. In addition, the counselor can ask the client, “What decisions did you make when the early incident happened? Where did those decisions leave you?” The counselor can remind the client that the “damage” is not permanent; that it won’t remain forever; that they don’t have to live in the past with a decision they made with limited information and resources. The client starts to recognize that certain things seeming impossible, the limitations in their mind, are due to patterns that will shift as they continue to apply attention and discharge. The client begins to think, “What would life look like without this distress?”
Stage Four—The client realizes they are not alone: The client reaches for the young person they were and goes back as an ally to that young self. The counselor can go back, too; love the young person unconditionally; and follow their mind. The counselor can encourage the young person to look at the unbearable feelings but not by themselves, not alone. The counselor can tell the client that it truly was that bad and they were that alone; they can help the client notice that the young person was defeated by the distress; but they can also offer contradictions, options, and perspectives as the client works to undo the decisions made by the young person and make new decisions. As Tim Jackins has said, the client is not reliving the early incident; the client is moving toward resolving the incident.
Stage Five—The client opposes the distress: The client begins to notice that they have the option to defy the past and oppose the distress. They can make a commitment to oppose it in the coming days and months. With the help of the counselor, they can be indignant, fight, and rebel against the past. Here are a few sentences the client can direct at the distress: “How dare you confuse me about my connection with others and rob me of my intelligence! I will win! I will have my mind! It is my mind!”
Stage Six—The client finds unity: Finding unity with the other humans in the early incidents is possible. We don’t want any chronic pattern to win. We don’t want to be left isolated and divided from other humans. We can claim the people in the early incidents as ours. They did their best; the situation was just a state we were all in. The counselor can offer contradictions like these: “There are no conflicts between humans. It was never personal. There is no human enemy. You and me forever! My home is with humans. My security was always with humans. I choose you (a human) over the early decision or distress.” The client starts to notice that they have made choices about people based on the early situation and that their relationships can instead be based on current reality.
Once we put a chronic pattern through these stages, we may gain the perspective that our minds are much more powerful than the distress, that in this battle our minds can win. We may be able to believe that we can have a permanent revolution in our minds as we take one chronic after another, and kick it to the curb, and unite with the humans we were manipulated to stand against.
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 203, April 2021)