Working on Our Earliest Distresses
Tim Jackins, “A Weekend of Working Early,” May 3-5, 2024, in Warwick, New York, USA
The idea of looking at earlier instances of a distress has always existed in RC since RC’s beginnings. People not in RC are almost always drawn to the most recent upset. But we figured out that it’s the early incidents and their repeated restimulation that magnify what happens in the present.
The idea of looking back on a chain of similar incidents should have been presented to you early in your RC career. If you don’t have that idea, none of the other ideas quite fit together. And what we’ve noticed, most clearly in the last decade, is that it’s our earliest hurts that have had the biggest effect on us.
NOT ABLE TO DISCHARGE
The things that happened to us when we were small and helpless were crucial. It was when we couldn’t communicate clearly to those around us, and none of us had anyone who could pay full attention to us. So we were unable to discharge the distresses, and we gave up and had to settle for however bad those conditions were. There wasn’t a choice.
Because we were denied enough opportunity to discharge them, the hurts never got discharged. They froze in patterns that hobbled [impeded] us ever after. Things that were true at that moment froze in our minds as if they had to be true forever. We were forced to accept a big limitation on our humanness, and we learned how to function that way. We couldn’t think well enough to understand that it didn’t have to stay that way forever. We all tried to make life work anyway, and that’s why we are here. We could figure out enough that we could make a life that works pretty well.
We didn’t fully understand all this for many decades. We were used to living life without a full picture of the humanness we had left behind, and we couldn’t create the conditions to challenge our limited picture.
WHAT HASN’T CHANGED
Some things still haven’t shifted for us. There are things we haven’t been able to change. You know this. You may not think about it, but you know there are things you wanted to shift that haven’t shifted. And those are the places rooted back in those earliest distresses that we haven’t had the understanding or the slack to pay enough attention to.
This is not a criticism. We did the work that made it possible for us to go on. In recent years, we’ve turned more directly toward our earliest hurts, and I think we’ve come to understand this better and better. However, few of us want to look at where we were so completely defeated. Most of us decided to never feel that again; it was just “too close to the edge.” And frozen in the recording is the defeat and the idea that we will never be strong enough or smart enough or have enough resource to change it.
This shows what a conflicted position we are in. You base your life on RC. You use RC to guide your life in so many ways. You would never give it up. You would never stop discharging. You know what it’s like to gain back another bit of humanness. You know what it’s like to see more of your mind. You’re not going to give that up. And yet you feel like you don’t want to do this piece of the work. That’s the challenge. That’s the challenge this weekend. It is part of the struggle to become fully human.
A COLLECTIVE EFFORT
The people here at this workshop want you back as much as they themselves want to come back. RC is very much a collective effort, and part of that has been hidden by our early hurts of isolation. We need to do this work together. I want it for you. I want it for me. I want it for our species. What could we be without this distress material? What could we be for each other without this? As near as I can tell, we’re the first sizeable group that has done the work to have a chance at this. Do we dare be defiant enough of the past? And not simply let the effect of the past keep going the way it thoughtlessly tends to?
There’s another way I think of it. We have to object to how we were forced to give in [to be defeated]. We were forced to make compromises against our own interests because there were no choices, and this, too, froze as if it had to go on forever. There’s no reason it has to go on. There’s no need in the present for it to go on. The main thing that needs to change, of course, is our minds, by our decisions and by our discharge. So at this workshop I want to force you back into misery so you find out that it won’t kill you, that it lessens with discharge and decision, and that it will disappear. But not without this piece of work.
You are worth this struggle whether you do anything else for anybody else ever again. Your mind is worth battling for. Every mind is.
DOING IT
So how do we do this work that’s been out of reach for so long? First, we have to decide to do it. Also, it’s not a process to do alone. Probably the first challenge is to stop doing everything alone. We have to decide to do it, but we don’t have to do it alone. Those two things are often mired together in our minds: “If I have to do it, I should just go ahead and do it.” I think you could do it alone. I don’t want to say that your mind is incapable of it. I think the human mind is capable of almost anything. But we’ve limited our minds by having to try to do everything alone. Even though we can do this, it’s probably not the best way. We need to decide otherwise, out loud in communication with others. That makes it less confusing.
We have to take control of our minds in this battle against our distresses and the habit of following our distresses. When we challenge the distresses, we feel a lot of discomfort, in part because opposition didn’t work in our early lives. We accepted the early limitations because we had to. It isn’t that we were wrong then, but it’s wrong to accept it now. To accept it now is to be wrong about the universe, the world, and life.
Our minds go on, but a pattern stays stuck in the past. Everything we decided that froze back then is wrong now. Everything must be thought about afresh. For example, all the ways you feel bad about yourself are an incorrect and mistaken picture of reality. They probably came from someone else’s distressed behavior.
One way to begin this work is to decide to come back to us. A common mistake that gets frozen in very young human minds is that “no one else is like me.” No one else understands. No one else cares about things as much as I do.
There is a conflict between what a human is at the beginning and what our circumstances have forced us to become. The biggest problem is that the child doesn’t get to discharge the hurt so they never get to make sense of it. It’s just a frozen “fact.” It doesn’t get questioned after that.
You will have to push yourself in this work. You can. You will like it eventually. But it’s unfamiliar. It’s discouraged in our societies. An exploitative society requires you to not try in many important ways but to just settle for surviving the way things are. So we get to learn how to push in an important direction. Everything we learn to do in RC, we’re going to need to be good at out in the world. We can use our minds to challenge the borders of what’s been considered acceptable. It’s actually fun.
I have set myself to do this for a while now, and you can sometimes see me run into the edges of my mind here. It is where I can’t go on unless I can discharge a little. And my decision is “Okay, that’s what it takes.” But it means I have to face a collection of things, just like you will have to do, that have pushed me to hide myself from everyone else—to hide the limitations, to hide the struggles, to hide the caring. So now if I hit one of those spots, I go ahead and hit it. I’m going ahead no matter what I hit, because I think I can and I think you can. I think it will work. I can’t be distracted by the frozen feelings that remain there. The results so far are good. You will have your own version of something like this to figure out. It’s a good challenge, and I look forward to you doing that. I think the odds are good that everybody here will do this. It’s okay that you still have doubts, that it’s still a battle. Nothing has to be perfect or settled; we just have to decide we are human—without exception, without limitation.
We have had the early distresses and not enough resource for a long time. We learned to keep the struggle to ourselves. We tried to numb ourselves to the hurts to keep them under control—to not distract us and to not make us constantly look for a counselor. And it dulls us. We accept a certain level of numbness. So when we finally get the resource to try to work on it, it feels strange. It is in such a different direction than the one we had to take, that we don’t know what to do when we look at those feelings. It can feel like looking at them will get us lost there again, because the only way we could keep from getting lost was by not looking at them.
NOT NUMBING
I’m trying to stay aware of the feelings. Instead of burying them, I try to hold them ten degrees to my left so they’re always there when I look. When I get into a situation with enough resource, I can look at and work on them fairly quickly.
The challenge is to handle the old feelings without having to numb ourselves to them most of the time. As we begin discharging them, the feelings don’t change quickly, but our understanding of them changes. We understand why this thing is hovering over us, and that it is no longer a danger to us in the present. It is entirely an artifact of the past. It’s something we can think about, and we can choose ways to handle it. We don’t have to bury it now, like we had to do when there was no other way to go forward.
We all had to leave something behind in order to accomplish what we’ve done so far. I think we don’t have to do that anymore. So we have to dare. I want to dare to put my life in your hands. I want to dare say, “I have to leave me with you now. Do the best by me that you can, please.” I want to trust you to do that. There are people I’m willing to do that with. Not that I have complete confidence in them, but I know it’s important to them that I not wait, that I can’t wait for all the things that hold me back to evaporate. I have to challenge them.
MISTAKES
Back when the early distresses formed, it felt like mistakes would be fatal. We decided to never go there again. However, if I make a mistake now, I simply make a mistake. Very few of them are dangerous. They all feel dangerous, but they’re not. And we can tell the difference. But we have to work at it.
Most of the things that separate us are not dangerous. They’re just recordings of old hurts. And we can challenge those without danger—but not without great [considerable] feelings. There’s something enlightening about feeling the worst things we can feel and then be alive the next day, and even be in a little better shape [condition]. We can learn these skills in practice.
Part of strengthening these skills is continuously fighting these battles, not just running at them once. There’s a tendency to go hit hard material and then pull back and say “phew.” We feel successful, and yet we decide we don’t have to do it anymore right now. However, it is possible to get there and stay there, and make significant gains. But it can seem hard to decide to try again.
When we are very young I don’t think we know that we can be defeated, and we don’t expect it. But we experience defeat, and it’s all right that we can be, and were, defeated. We were all defeated by circumstances in our early childhoods. There is no reason to blame ourselves for that.
It isn’t so much that we are defeated, it’s that without discharge we end up capitulating. We give up our right to try for what we want. It seems that none of us have been able to fully reclaim that right. So our struggles become limited and confused. We’re figuring out this battle now.
DECIDING TO TRY
We can do this. I am confident we can do this. But it is something we have to decide to try, with next to no experience, so we can get experience.
(Present Time 216, July 2024)