Tim Jackins at the West Coast USA and Canada Leaders’ Workshop—January 2024
We’re still learning about the process of discharge and recovery, including about the difference between our mind and the recordings. We can be clear in our understanding of the theory, and then be confused in practice. We can be confused when the restimulation is large enough and the resource around us is small enough.
One of the ways to push in the battle for clarification is to decide that RC theory is correct—that we can use our minds no matter what happened to us. The more undischarged distress we have, the more confusing it is. But it doesn’t look like any accumulation of distress makes us powerless. It is still always possible to see what is real and head in that direction.
We can make that distinction—between old feelings and present-day reality—no matter what feelings from the past have grabbed us. It looks like the human mind always has the ability to see reality and fight its way back to it.
Many of us wake up in a swamp of restimulated feelings every morning. Some of us can recognize it as a swamp and can fight for reality. We can do that because we’ve done a lot of discharging and have seen things shift. However, many of us, when we wake up in our swamp, can’t think about it; we can only live it. For example, if the restimulation has sad feelings in it, then we conclude that the sad feelings are about now.
Our vocabulary has never cleanly made this separation—that what we are feeling is what we felt a long, long time ago. We become trapped in a rerun, the rerun of a “film” we’ve seen a thousand times. The recording is real about the past but not about the present.
To stop living it involves making a decision in spite of distress. It means making a decision not to live out the past.
DECIDING AGAINST THE RECORDING
It is possible to decide against the recording every morning, to clearly and explicitly recognize that this set of feelings is just old. I’m not saying we can stop feeling it. To get rid of these things entirely takes a lot of discharge. But there’s something about not recognizing it as real in the present that’s important and doing that explicitly every time it comes at us.
Wanting to change right now
It can seem like we can’t decide against it unless we can change it right now: “I should be able to liberate myself from it immediately if I recognize it.” Maybe you can. But in my experience, it takes a lot more work than that. It changes with discharge. It changes with a lot of discharge. It’s not a mistake that it takes time. We’re just impatient to get over things [recover from things] that never should have happened. That’s very understandable. But being able to recognize it does change our understanding of reality. And that makes a difference.
Challenging the distresses in the present
Of course, one way of challenging these distresses is to work on them as heavily as we have the resources to do that.
The other way is to challenge them in the present. We can stop living them out—we do that so everyone around us can see how we are hurting, as if there were some resource that would be drawn to us if we just acted it out fully enough. I don’t think we’ve been successful in those efforts, but many of us have made them. Before we gave up as young people, we tried desperately to get someone to notice.
Deciding to be happy
But now we can decide that this confusion is not going to last in our mind. An extreme version of this is deciding that we are going to be happy. Literally, we can decide we’re going to be happy. Whatever happened in the past in some important sense, doesn’t matter now.
Can we decide to be happy? I see a question on most faces. Let’s try it. Look around in the corners of your mind. Can you conceive of being happy? Can you conceive of that idea? That you could be pleased to exist and pleased with life the way it is. Not satisfied but pleased to be alive. Life in any form is just marvelous. And we are this special form of life at the end of a long evolutionary process where we get to interact with reality and each other in ways that are marvelous. Yet most days we’re unhappy. We’re unhappy because we are pulled to the hard things that happened that we never got to recover from.
What is it, really, to be alive as a human? What are the possibilities? What are the enjoyments? What are the things we treasure? There’s a whole reality that our clouds of undischarged distress make it hard for us to stay aware of. I suspect that without distress, being alive is probably exactly the same as being happy.
What if we stop letting our distresses pull at us, just for one minute? That’s not too much to ask, to not believe the distresses for one minute.
Being more and more human now
One of the battles against distress is to not let them keep us from being more and more human now. For example, it can be something as simple as looking at the person next to us and being delighted with them and with ourselves. We can do it now. Turn and be human with someone for a minute. Be delighted with them.
Now let’s do a mini-session in which you head in that direction as best you can. I want you to be as fully alive as possible with someone else. Try being entirely pleased with yourself and with being alive together with this group of people.
Distresses are confusing, and it’s always amazing how much discharging clarifies reality.
No longer a victim
What can we do with our minds now? What can we think instead of letting the distress recordings determine anything about our thoughts?
A lot of us work on early hard distresses from the victim’s perspective. We were the victim. And it’s like we’re not going to give that up until somebody recognizes it. But it might not be the most effective or powerful perspective to work from. It doesn’t really challenge what happened. We just live through it repeatedly. What’s a different perspective?
One is that it was a mistake that it happened. It happened, but it was a mistake. Another is your opposition to it. Whether or not you could change it, you could oppose it. You could say no. You could look right at the thing as it came at you and say no. Whether or not you could change it. That you don’t have to agree to it even if you can’t stop it.
Another is that you intend to change it. You intend to change that part of your life, where you’re still hobbled by that distress recording. Whether or not you can change it right now is a different question. There may be limits to how effective we can be in any circumstance. But I don’t know that there’s a limit to what we can decide in our minds in any circumstance.
We can stand in opposition in places where we can’t do anything—and being in opposition is much better than being victim. For almost all of us, the victim position includes giving up. And that’s different from being defeated while staying in opposition.
Defiance and fighting back
Another possible position is defiance. That’s a more familiar one. “Oh yeah?” It’s like what are called the “terrible twos” when a little one won’t give up even though they can’t win, even when they’re wrong. This position is much more powerful. It isn’t about being right or wrong. It’s about setting our mind’s perspective now in a position that lets us work on material more effectively. And the way we work on things in defiance is much different from working on them as victim. It’s much closer to where we want to end up.
It’s your mind. Who else is going to change it? It’s yours. Either you do it, or distresses get it all jumbled in familiar ways. You have the ability and can choose to fight against the feelings and confusions from distress recordings, and such perspectives will make a difference in your counseling.
You can decide to fight back. That’s underneath all of this. We were forced to compromise or capitulate when we were small. We never got to discharge it, so we still lean in that direction. We can go back and finish the work so we can choose our perspectives and not be stuck in the ones that were inflicted on us.