Re-evaluation Counseling

I know I want to write. I have been wanting to write all evening. When I haven’t written for a while I have to push through a lot of fear to write. At first I don’t recognize what I am feeling as fear. It is a voice inside my head that says,” You don’t even know what you want to write about.” That is often true. The desire to write often precedes knowing what I want to write about. It is easy for me to not write when I buy the belief that I need to know what to write about to write. On the other hand, I can challenge that belief and open my I-pad. In doing so, as I am doing now, the next belief emerges. It is the fear that I’m not a good enough writer to write. I am learning to let myself shake to discharge the distress of fear that I am not a good enough writer to write. I am shaking now as I write this and it gets easier to write.
I have been participating in counseling sessions using a structure called Re-evaluation
Counseling or RC for about 8 months. RC sessions involve peer counseling sessions where each person takes a turn and deeply listens to the other and offers support to discharge distress. Distress is created from the time we are born where we weren’t given the support we needed to express the emotions we had from our experiences.
 Let’s say when I was a young girl, I fell down and hurt myself and was crying. After a short time of crying and Way before I was done, one of my parents would get uncomfortable and  threaten me saying, stop crying or I’ll give you a reason to cry about. As a young girl this was very confusing. I remember thinking, I have a reason to cry or I wouldn’t be crying. I would stop crying. I learned to interrupt my natural desire to cry to discharge sadness and to shake to discharge fear and to laugh to discharge embarrassment. Distress accumulates in our bodies and new distresses pile on top of old ones. In my RC sessions I am working to allow the counselor to give me the loving attention I need to feel safe enough to discharge distress. It is challenging to trust that being deeply listened to could be so healing. In the past month my partner and I have also become part of a weekly class to learn the theory and practice RC in a group. This process is having the effect of creating more safety in our relationship.
Everyone I know has had the experience of having the natural response to both physical and emotional hurt interrupted. What if it were possible to heal this hurt by finishing the process of expressing natural responses to hurt? What if one effective way was for adults to deeply listen to each other to heal the wounds of childhood? What if by healing early hurts we could create an impact on all the patterns of distress that built on the early hurts? If you watch a young child crying because of a physical or emotional hurt and that child is being listened to, held and spoken to lovingly, in a short time he or she often feels complete and skips off to play. This loving holding environment is a sanctuary adults can recreate.
Because I am a therapist and have been practicing for thirty five years I know the value of good therapy. It has been my joy to support my clients in their healing journeys. I am grateful to have work I love in which I can contribute to the well- being of my clients in body mind and spirit.
  It is also gratifying to practice being a peer counselor where I am a humble beginner and other people have more experience than I do. I get to watch masters in action who have encouraged each other to discharge distress patterns for many years.
I practiced RC forty years ago for several years when I was in graduate school. It was life-saving for me to do many sessions a week and helped me to begin to express myself with less self-consciousness, heal my disordered eating and begin to meditate and do yoga. Then I stopped doing RC as I continued to do therapy as a client and continued my clinical social work training.
Now I am back. I appreciate RC and the current opportunity to learn and change and grow. The intention of RC is to help people discharge distress from the past that has accumulated in the present to increase the attention each person has available to be fully present now.
Practicing RC regularly has inspired me to laugh and cry every day on my own also. My body naturally wants to support me in being fully expressed. I cry after I meditate. I think meditation supports my natural discharge process because of the safety of mindfulness, which is awareness with acceptance. Maybe that’s what practicing RC or deep listening is doing. We are creating awareness with acceptance and beaming it on another person. I feel hopeful that the thousands of people who are practicing RC worldwide are making a difference in the safety of our world. I think the resilience and spaciousness that is being created in the RC community is an important contribution to the planet.
Thank you for listening. I love to write and I can be afraid and write, too.