h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Was this post supposed to be unbiased? If so, it's not only highly biased but often inadequate. What does the description of Jackins as Marxist have to do with his theory or the actual practice of cocounseling? Where were the facts?
jlynn

You obviously know something about the subject? Perhaps you'd like to contribute your knowledge, add it to the forum here, and the entry can be updated. The Guide is about collaboration.

There are some unnecessary negatives in the article which I think could be ommitted i.e.
Omit the reference to pseudo psychology, 2nd paragraph, so that it reads "... L. Ron Hubbard in Dianetics -"
Omit the word "unashamedly" in 4th paragraph
The last sentence in the 5th paragraph to read "The local contacts are only contacts and the teachers ...."
The 6th paragraph to end "... The Netherlands, New Zealand and the Eastern United States.
The last sentece in the 7th paragraph "More and more people ..." could be omitted.

I suggest you include the heading "Re-evaluation Co-Counselling Communities (RCC)" before the 4th paragraph and include the sentece in the 7th paragraph starting "The organisation is in crisis ..." under this heading.

I suggest expanding the heading on CCI to read "Co-Counselling International (CCI)"

Dency Sargent in the US is credited along with John Heron as being in at the beginning. In the 7th paragraph I suggest that the words "He formed CCI whch is" be replaced by "John, along with Dency Sargent in the US and others formed CCI. CCI is"

I suggest that the links to The Netherlands and New York are ommitted since they are nothing to do with co-counselling.

There is a web site for CCI: [URL removed by moderator] which has a lot of information, lists of contacts, teachers and trainings and links to co-counselling web sites around the world.

The above are useful and helpful postings on this topic. I am new here and felt put out when I saw that the URL that John included was removed. Then I read the House Rules and all was explained.

But a little matter of spelling would also help, including help for anyone using a search engine to find that URL. The RC spelling is the American way with just one L; the CCI way is the UK way with two Ls: counseling/counselling.

The article on Co-counselling contains many factual

innacuracies and is written from a biased (pro-CCI and very

misinformed) point of view. Some of this does matter, so I

suggest as a first point of call checking out the official

Re-evaluation counseling website at www.rc.org.

To go through some of the misinformation in the article by

Hugs4u point by point:

HUGS: "Co-counselling was first thought of by the late

Harvey Jackins in the 1930s."

Actually Harvey Jackins always claimed he created it during

the early 50s and this ties in with his involvement with

(the then embryonic) Dianetics and (the then less

notorious) L. Ron. Hubbard. Jackins was a union activist

and general man about town in Seattle, WA, and had a deep

interest and enthusiasm for the "science fiction" wave then

sweeping the west coast - there is an intriguing photo of

him with L. Ron and AE Van Vogt, a great sci-fi writer of

the 40/50s known to devotees as one of the key people of

his day in terms of new ideas. These facts together with

many others show Jackins as original, clever, something of

a showman and a charlatan and also very dedicated to

whatever he was doing.

HUGS: "Harvey set up re-evaluation counselling in the US,

particularly in the Eastern states and California, with

himself as international contact person1. It was

unashamedly left-wing with workers, racial minorities and

women being given a head start in the organisation, but it

was also very hierarchical with the Jackins family at the

top of the tree. "

Actually officially called "Re-evaluation Co-counseling"

(RC) and later run through an organisation called "Personal

Counselors Inc." trading in Seattle and still going today.

(Jan 2003) The "left-wing" issue was somewhat later, it is

true that Jackins thought of himself as a Marxist and more

particularly a Maoist, but in general he tended to promote

people in the organisation with whom he felt he had a

rapport and who were effective. The heirarchy issue is

largely true and the organisational structure and working

methods sometimes seem a curious hybrid of Stalinist

methods (so-called 'Democratic Centralism' - actually just

centralised appointments) and US-style pyramid selling or

multi-level marketing. Nevertheless, analysing RC this way

tends to cheapen and slur it's very considerable impact on

it's practitioners. To give one example, Personal

Counselors (PC) has for many years offered one-way paid

counseling intensives to local people and there has never

been a time in 30 or more years of operation when there has

not been a waiting list for this service, spread entirely

by word of mouth. Many people have reported very impressive

and life-changing results from RC, and most of it's regular

practitioners are overtly scornful of "mainstream" therapy

alternatives, which they, possibly correctly, regard as

very confused. Harvey Jackins core beliefs were in essence:

- people can heal themselves and are naturally smart enough

to do so, and do not need professional help to do so, they

can support each other.

- human beings discharge painful emotion through crying,

laughing, shaking, etc, and this is all that needs to be

done to cure any sort of emotional difficulty.

- and that this activity, when fostered and encouraged, has

great general repurcussions on outlook, enthusiasm for life

and emotional well-being.

From it's earliest days RC (and Harvey as an individual)

made strong statements against various forms of therapy or

psychiatry which they regarded as harmful (HJ may have

picked this up originally from L. Ron H, who was also

anti-psychiatry perhaps mainly on grounds of competion -

Jackins was more considered in his approach) and this has

many times resulted in considerable pressure against RC as

an organisation from various quarters, including

considerable criticism on public websites of varying

quality and accuracy. Weighed against this, the RC

organisation to some extent developed a paranoid attitude

to criticism and Jackins tendancy to never respond to any

sort of critique sometimes fostered an attitude of

suppression or avoidance of difficult or challenging issues

within the organisation. This has to some extent modified

since Jackins's death in 2000, and his son and successor

Tim Jackins has been more discreet in his approach,

although he has continued to ban people from entering into

RC activities if he believes them to be opposed to the

organisation, sometimes in trifling ways. This leadership

approach is officially based on the need to maintain an

"anti-pattern" leadership which will sustain what they

regard as an organisation of world significance against

what they believe to be either random acts of distress

patterns, or concerted attacks by organisational patterns.

The reality seems to be more that as an organisation there

are insufficient safeguards against domination of

particular individuals to prevent mistakes being made in an

authoritarian way, the most painful of which is the

suppression of intellectual discussion of the methods and

theory of the organisation. However, to be fair to RC,

nobody comes under the sort of pressures one might normally

associate with cults; deviants are simply prevented from

continuing activity within organised RC. This is regarded

by some members as a considerable punishment and by others

as of little importance.

HUGS: "Despite the lack of an organisation. CCI is still

going in Britain, Ireland, Hungary, The Netherlands and New

Zealand, with a small community in the Eastern United

States3."

Hugs4u tends to give the impression that CCI

(co-counselling international) has replaced RC in some way.

In fact, CCI probably currently (late-2002) has about 2,500

worldwide members, compared to an estimated membership of

RC worldwide of around 75,000. In addition, theory and

practise in CCI appears to be slow-moving and people moving

from CCI to RC report very considerable surprise about the

limitations of CCI methods.

In addition, CCI has notoriously been plagued for many

years by difficulties around sexual misbehaviour within the

organisation. One of the oddities is the fact that this

accusation is often thrown at RC, but of the many people I

have known practising RC, I have known of only two cases

where I think an RC counsellor abused trust in this way (to

be fair, one of them was Harvey Jackins himself!!) but of

the half a dozen or so people I've known in CCI, each has

reported such problems.

This last point is fairly key. HUGS does not mention

(perhaps to avoid embarassment) that one of the key reasons

for the split between CCI and RC was accusations of sexual

misconduct directed against Harvey Jackins. These took the

form of an attempted lawsuit in Seattle by a former female

adherant of the organisation. She later withdrew the suit,

but not before it had been widely publicised. Jackins

refused to comment, but there is widespread agreement

amongst those "in the know" within RC that (a) he was

guilty of this and on a regular basis, (b) he sometimes

promoted women into leadership roles on the basis of his

sexual attraction to them and (c) he had slept with many

women RC'ers, contrary to the guidelines of RC, which

(handily) do not apply to the International Reference

Person, Jackins' self-determined job title. Many RC'ers "in

the know" have apparently been willing to forgive Jackins

for these transgressions on the basis that he did a lot of

good (and he did) and that the organisation's own theories

do not condemn people who do this, just the behaviour,

which is supposed to stop whilst the perpetrator submits to

counselling. The problem appears to be that Jackins was in

many ways too forceful and domineering a personality for

many followers to easily summon up the courage to challenge

him on this.

Tim Jackins, the son and successor, remains something of a

mystery figure to the great majority of his followers. He

works through a series of small, elite workshops to which

only about 1 in 500 counsellors in communities are invited.

As with his father, followers of the organisation, whilst

they are called upon to commit large amounts of time and

(sometimes) reasonable amounts of money (although not on

the scale of most cults) to it, know little of their

leader. It is not known, or discussed, for example, if Tim

Jackins is married, has children of his own, etc. This is a

cause for some concern given that he regularly leads

workshops for young and very young children of RC

supporters and his father's known proclivities. However, so

far, there have been no reports circulating within the

organisation of sexual misbehaviour by Jackins junior.

An ongoing problem remains the lack of accountability and

something approaching democracy within RC; there are no

means by which someone can even become a true "member" of

RC - organisation is locally based with small units known

as organised areas, a thin layer of middle-managers

("regional reference people" and a thick layer of paid

staff at Seattle working for Personal Counselors (which is

not even officially part of RC according to the Guidelines,

although it dominates it) together with "International

Liberation Reference People" (ILRPs) appointed by

Harvey/Tim Jackins and paid through regular workshops, some

of them earning well in excess of US$250,000 a year from

this latter activity. A "World Conference" is held every

four years, consisting of invited leaders, which debates an

agenda carefully pre-set by paid staff with little room for

independent thinking. It is in this latter area that the

organisation most consistently fails in it's stated aim of

liberating human thinking, since it behaves suppressively

to any thinking not held to be consistent with established

theory, often with troublingly little analysis. This is

regarded as a great shame by many within the organisation,

who hold it in high esteem in other ways.

I must not understand what this group is about. Do we do a copy edit on each other's posts?

Re CC itself: I was in it for several years, and I am afraid there are deep problems, such as lack of any trace of honest democracy. The only elected offices are the Area Reference Persons. Everyone else is appointed. Thus total power resides in Seattle.

But things get worse when you get to content: CC (or RC) forbids any talk of alternative approaches which might be more helpful for many. Thus it refused to even acknowledge the enormous Adult Child movement of the eighties.

I have known countless oldtime RCers, and they don't get better, they don't grow. They are like the "party hacks" of political parties, clinging to their small positions within the organization, and deathly afraid to ask questions or make waves.

Sorry, and please don't copy edit me. An intelligent reply is what I am looking for, especially an informed one.

Regards, Joe