I’ll be your shrink if you’ll be mine?
If we can’t afford a regular psychiatrist, maybe we can do it for each other
An introduction to Re-evaluation Co-Counseling, or RC.
These are my personal opinions, and there are ways in which I depart from RC orthodoxy. RC has a website, but they keep a low internet profile because this is a movement that is better spread directly, person-to-person. The website will help you find a local community where you can take an 8-week introductory class and meet other co-counselors.
Perhaps there are people who have particular neurological disorders or particular phobias or extreme conditions that a professional psychologist or psychologist is trained to handle.
But almost all of us have areas in which we are stuck, where we are less satisfied with life than we could be, less of our creative potential and native genius available to us. Usually it is because some part of our humanity has become occluded. There are residual scars that remain from unprocessed traumas.
The good news is that healing from childhood traumas is a natural process, and it doesn’t require an expensive specialist. We’ve all done work on ourselves, but the healing process can be vastly more efficient with a partner.
We can be psychological counselors to one another. There are many schools of peer counseling. I come from a particular school called Re-evaluation Counseling or Co-Counseling, started by Harvey Jackins and Mary McCabe in the early 1950s. My version is filtered through the friendship of Marsha Saxton and mentorship of Carole Cloherty and Michael Weiskoff, also Bruce and Betsy Bergquist. I’ve also done a lot of interpreting on my own and I’ll take full responsibility for the ideas that I express here.
Non-judgmental listening
In most cases, 90% of the benefit of counseling comes from having a caring, non-judgmental listener. Listening, paying attention, and caring are powerful. This is why peer counseling can be a hugely beneficial path to personal growth. It’s not just that peer-counseling doesn’t have to cost money, so it is available to all of us. The fact that you have a relationship of reciprocal caring with a partner whom you are not “paying to listen to you” means that the caring can be more real because it is mutual, and we feel this and respond to it.
As peer counselors, we exchange counseling time. I’ll be your counselor for the next hour, then we’ll take some time to recover and change roles so you can be my counselor in the next hour.
Listen. Keep your attention on your partner. Don’t interrupt. Don’t judge what you think your client did wrong or even what he or she did right. Don’t give advice. Don’t tell stories of your own that seem oh-so-relevant. Approve silently, unconditionally, to everything that your client is telling you.
Keeping a smile on your face, keeping your attention out and beaming love at another human no matter what he is saying is not a trivial matter. For most of it, we are “faking” some of the time. Perhaps what the client is saying is deeply disturbing. Perhaps it reminds us of our own trauma. Perhaps we are horrified by something the client tells us that he has done. At times, we may have to keep a smile on our face and pretend. That’s OK. We do our best, and as time goes on, we don’t have to pretend.
Yes, there are skills that we develop, in order to be able to listen and to approve unconditionally, and to show this in our body language and occasionally in our words. It’s not the same thing as book learning that you acquire in psychology grad school, but it is a skill that you will develop over time.
A few words to the wise
Powerful, even if it is done with a beginner’s skills, with inevitable missteps. Here are some pitfalls to keep in mind:
Sometimes we see clearly what our client needs to do, and we’re tempted to tell her directly. Don’t. Be patient. With advanced skills you might learn to guide her toward examining what it is that is that stands between her and the future that you envision for her. But for now, just be patient and trust that she is on a path that will lead her there.
We can get very sleepy listening. This is usually not about narcolepsy or boredom. Something your client said is triggering your own trauma. Maybe you can put that aside and be present. If not, don’t hesitate to tell your client, “I need to take a breather for a few minutes.” Stand up and walk around. Look around the room. Bring your focus back before you resume.
You might fall in love with your co-counselor. That’s always a good thing. You might be tempted to turn the co-counseling relationship into a dating relationship. That’s usually a bad thing. Occasionally, that can be glorious, but usually it is fraught with pain and disappointment. The expectations that you have within the counseling framework can’t be maintained in real life. And you don’t know if this person is compatible with your preferences and habits.
If you feel yourself falling in love, it will be helpful to bring your feelings to a counseling session, either with the person you’re in love with or with someone else, or a three-way session. Focus some attention on the feeling and see what happens.Anything your client brings up in session stays in session. Don’t mention it to anyone else or to your client after the session. Outside session, it’s as if you don’t know this about the person. But if you have a later counseling session with the same person, what he said in the last session may inform you and help you better to respond within the co-counseling context.
Pay attention to body language
Listening, paying attention consistently, creating safety, staying awake and present, caring, projecting love and unconditional acceptance through everything that you hear — this is hard enough. It may seem passive, but, with some patience, this alone can catalyze profound growth and emergence from dysfunctional behaviors.
Is there anything more you might do? Anything active? For now, I’ll suggest one direction. Sometimes, you might see your client touch on a subject and there is a bodily reaction — maybe a giggle or a shudder or a yawn or a tear, followed by a turning away, changing the subject. This can be an indication of a subject that is important but uncomfortable. If you think the time is right and enough safety has been established, you might invite your client to return to that subject. “Tell me more about X.” or “A minute ago you were talking about X. Do you want to finish that thought?”
But be patient. Your client will return to the place that is most emotionally charged when he is ready, and when you have established sufficient safety.