Reinvigorating Family Work
The Communities are in the process of re-establishing robust family work in Areas and Regions. We hope that all of you will join us.
Family work, along with our liberation work and our early sexual memory work, are the building blocks for strong RC Communities.
The collected insights and practices that we call family work have been the foundations of many of our RC Communities. Many of our Community leaders, through their participation in family work, have reclaimed their ability to discharge, worked on early distresses and confusions, developed perspective on their and others’ distresses, and gathered tools to face difficult challenges. They have become better and more flexible counselors.
In Re-evaluation Counseling, we have a unique understanding of each person’s amazing intelligence and worth from the very beginning of life. We have developed an understanding of how early hurts that aren’t discharged lead to rigid patterns that confuse us and lead us to unthinking behavior in the present.
Some of the big ideas we implement in family work are the following:
1. Special time: following someone’s lead to assist them in keeping their ability to want big [on a large scale]
2. Playing with attention: being able to notice what another person is trying to figure out in their play and join them
3. Assisting people to work on heavy fears by opposing distresses that are limiting them
4. Learning how to stay present and encouraging as counselor when someone is discharging
The last several years have been difficult for families worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, war, economic hardship, and oppression have occupied our minds and time. Early feelings of discouragement, isolation, and fear confuse us and keep us restimulated.
These conditions have reminded many of us of our childhood struggles when the adults were often so caught up in their own distresses that they could not show up to help, see, hear, or understand us or our struggles as children. When people are restimulated this way, the needs of young people can easily be forgotten.
With so much of our attention going to the immediate and big struggles that face humanity, it has been hard to prioritize providing the opportunities that we know family work provides to stay connected and build community. Many of our leaders have taken what they have learned through participating in family work and are doing important leading in our liberation and climate work. While this work needs to continue, now is the time to rebuild solid family work in our Communities.
This is a time when many young people are experiencing even more isolation than adults. Many young people’s relationships with others, particularly in affluent countries, are online. Even though it is amazing that technology has made it possible to be in contact with each other across big distances, young people desperately want the physical contact and chances to build the connected relationships that close physical proximity and play provide. We have been able to keep family work alive through online workshops and playdays, but it is only robust in a few Communities currently, and our young people want and deserve more.
In the next months, we will be holding several family work conferences. Some will be in person, and some online with in-person play days in local Areas. I encourage those of you who are currently leading family work or want to help build this Community project to come to one of them.
We are inviting RCers to make room in their lives to do special time with young people around them and to organize parent and grandparent support groups. We want to support Communities to have play days, adult play days, and family classes. I encourage RC teachers to include family work understandings in fundamentals classes.
We would like Community members and families worldwide to have the chance to gain the insights that family work can provide.
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for family work
(Present Time 216, July 2024)