The (very) basics of Co-counselling
This follows on the previous post on East Anglia Futures where Extinction Rebellion has been taught tips&tricks from co-counselling here, and follows in the next post a manifesto issued from this is post part.
My motto “it’s hard to be awake” came from following a 30-year path of awakening starting in Calgary CAN. I’ve used Re-evaluation Counselling for almost 25 years in Dallas TX, Riverside CA and Cambridge UK, and have used other methods such as Community-building and Men’s groups or African drumming. I am also now a Quaker and a scientist for Extinction Rebellion.
Co-counselling removes the “white coat” syndrome of provider-client, healer-patient or master-slave dyads by simply swapping roles of ‘counsellor’ and ‘client’ for set amounts of time called ‘sessions’: meeting at coffee shop or spending time with family or friends are low-level forms of that, as are passing ‘talking sticks’ in community-building to help everyone speak in turn.
Sessions consist of agreed-to time-intervals of swapping roles. In that exchange the temporary client is encouraged and supported by their counsellor to revisit anything that’s been triggered lately and is likely a pathway to earlier unhealed or unattended-to hurt or grief. Revisiting will often bring out light discharge in the form of compulsive chatting or laughing (also forms of distress-release in our lives), or heavy discharge in yawning, crying, shaking, yelling etc. (the sort that’s discouraged in public by society). The key is that the counsellor remains always present (breaks the isolation we all grew up with) and more importantly won’t leave the client ‘sunk’ as sessions end.
All this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There’s a complete theoretical and empirical background that entails some training and ongoing workshops. It’s a lifelong practice in fact, but it’s really a one-point program: to help us recover our original zestfulness and intelligence that society gradually washed out of us over time.
Re-evaluation is that part after counselling and revisiting past hurts, which permits us to re-calibrate our experiences, and peel back layers of accumulated hurts acquired over time. We thus clear out over time ‘our own gunk’ and reclaim some clarity, though it’s an ongoing process as society keeps hurting us. And collectivising this to form a ‘change movement’ to redress societal injustices is our greatest challenge. We had some success with Extinction Rebellion by offering activists ways to regenerate and support each other, soft peddling the above.
Thanks for listening! For more information go to rc.org. Go here for a review of roots and processes from co-couselling perspective (long read).
This is a slightly expanded version of a comment left on Caitlin Johnstone post How to wake up… thanks for the prompt!
