You Have to Make Up Your Mind

From a talk by Tim Jackins at the Northwest USA and Southwest Canada Teachers’ and Leaders’ Workshop, September 2012

Because of the lack of understanding of who young people are at the beginning of their lives, we all end up plotting our own course. We end up having many, many defeats in our efforts to be ourselves. We have good ideas right from the beginning, things we want to try. We reach for people as far as we can, but nobody even looks back most of the time.

We are defeated. We have lots of defeats. That’s all right. It’s all right that we are defeated. The problem is that we never get to discharge on it so it freezes on us. You will have more defeats, I promise. We all will. That’s not inherently a problem. The problem is that when we can’t recover from them, we can’t bounce back, we can’t be as alive afterward as we were before. That’s the problem.

MAKING UP YOUR MIND

As we go back and look at these early defeats, we’re confused by the feelings of defeat because they feel so permanent. That’s one of the confusions we have to face in deciding to clean them all up. You have to make up your mind. You think this is a good idea, you would like it to happen—but you haven’t made up your mind. This is true with many things. We are intent on working on something, until we touch it. Then it isn’t easy to work on. It doesn’t feel good. “I feel like I should work on something else, something I know how to work on better.” We take a quick detour to something we can cry about easily. We abandon the effort, because we feel like it won’t be successful. We run into all the recordings of defeat, and they are so believable that it isn’t simple to work on them.

What’s necessary is that you keep your mind there on those distress recordings. It isn’t necessary that you know what to do. You will figure that out if you can keep your mind there and if you can discharge. Just keep your mind near it. Very often a client says, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this.” The counselor’s role is interesting. It’s not quite being reassuring. We’re used to being a little too reassuring sometimes, because we get scared as counselor. We want it to be better quickly. We hunt for positive directions, positive tones—not because clients need them for discharging but because we need them as counselor, because we’re getting worried we’re in deeper water than we know how to handle.

RESOLVING WHAT HAPPENED

It’s related to what I said this morning: “It was that bad.” Your early life, those defeats, were that bad and that hard on you. The distinction I’m trying to make is that we can look directly at how hard it was and grieve about it, without simply allowing ourselves to slip into suffering it as if it were still real. You are going back to resolve what happened by discharging the rest of it.

You’re not going back to change it. You can’t change it. You don’t need to change it. But something was not allowed to happen, and because of that, because you didn’t get to discharge, your perspective froze. All of the feelings are still in there. You are continually misguided by those undischarged feelings and the distorted perspectives. I think the accurate picture is, you can beat all of that. All of it can be gotten rid of, every single bit of it, to where it doesn’t pull at your attention ever again. But to attain that, you have to make up your mind.

You have to make up your mind that you’re willing to try, no matter what it feels like and no matter what the results are. I’m not worried about the results. I just don’t want to reassure you about them because that will lead you to try to find a way not to face how bad it was. You can face it. With these people around you, with this collective resource, you can face anything.

Now is nothing like when it happened. This is the crucial distinction. We are confused into feeling that it is now the way it was. It feels the way it felt. Is it the way it was? No. You are not small. You are not without allies. You are not without people who understand what’s going on.1 You are not. You have everything that was missing then.

It’s also important to realize that you understand the discharge process now. You didn’t understand it when you were small. You used it spontaneously, but you didn’t understand what it was; you couldn’t think about it and use your mind to push for it to work. You understand it now. That’s a tremendously powerful tool. You get to think your own thoughts and set your own perspectives. You tried to do that then, but you didn’t have an overview of what the struggles were. Now you do. Now is so different from when those things fell on you. That’s part of what makes facing and discharging the hurts possible.

YOU ARE WORTH IT

You have to decide that you are worth it. Are you worth it? Are you? (Unsure sounds) I actually don’t want you to answer, but I want you to ask yourself the question. The challenge is for you to actually think about it now, not just listen so you can think about it later. It’s to take this opportunity, with this much resource behind you, to push your mind to think that thought: “Am I worth it?”

What does your mind run into if you try to see if you are worth it? What are all the old battles you didn’t get to fight through that have you shrugging, “I’m okay. It’s all right like this. I can keep going like this.” What are all the old battles? Those are the things you have to face.

Now you get to face them, but not secretly and silently in your head like you always have. You get to face them out here with your Co-Counselors, with all of this resource around you, and defy the recordings, defy that sense that you are not worth it.

You are worth it. Every single human being is worth it. I know you are worth it. If you have doubts about it, I have none. I have no doubt at all. Every one of us is worth the struggle, with all of us behind each of us. RC is set up that way. You have a session. You get to be client. You have the universe behind you for that half hour. It is not in competition with anything else. It’s not taking away from anyone else. It is your time, simply for you.

It’s in all of our interests for you to dare to take on2 the fight as fully as you can and as out in the open as you can. You are simply worth it. But you have to decide that before you go into battle. Once you get there, the fog of restimulation is too thick to figure things out. You have to know, before the effort is made, that you are worth fighting for.


1 Going on means happening.
2 Take on means undertake.


Last modified: 2022-12-25 10:17:04+00