Some Thoughts About RCers Attending Wide-World Activities Led by Co-Counselors
We are three Co-Counseling leaders who have begun to set up wide-world organizations to bring RC theory and practice to people who have no previous exposure to RC. Increasingly, we are encountering Co-Counselors who want to attend our programs and learn from us how we naturalize RC. We are not adverse to experienced Co-Counselors attending our events, but we propose the following guidelines that can help to insure the ongoing rigor of our rela-tionships in RC and prevent unawareness from creeping into our wide-world activities.
1. Please do not speak about RC at our workshops. We want to be in charge of how, when, or if we present direct information about Re-evaluation Counseling. Therefore, do not introduce yourself as being a member of the RC Community. (People will be confused and not know what you are talking about.) We ask you not to use specialized words from RC, for example, "discharge," "re-stim-u-lation," "counselor," "client," "mini-session," etc. We have thought very carefully about our choice of words and how we want to naturalize terms that we use in RC. For example, if we have not called "switch" when we have asked participants to speak to each other about something in pairs, please don't come up to us -- or call out -- "Aren't you going to call switch?" Assume that we have thought about the program in its entirety, and back our leadership.
2. We ask you to refrain from recruiting people you meet at our wide-world activities for Co-Counseling classes or sharing Present Time with them, or similar actions. We want to stay in charge of when people are recruited for RC classes, whose classes they enter, and so on.
3. Please refrain from asking us complicated questions that presume an understanding of RC (for example, what is the relationship of this work to Re-evaluation Counseling?).
4. Please do not use knowledge that you have gained from RC to work with participants in any way that is different from the way we are modeling in our leadership of the program. Again, we have worked very hard to determine how we want to demonstrate RC tools in a non-RC setting. We welcome you to learn from us but to save your specific modifications for the wide-world work that you will lead.
5. Please be respectful of our desire to focus our attention on the non-RC participants. If we don't sit with you over meals, invite lots of contact at breaks, use you for a demonstration -- do remember our primary aim is to focus our energies on the non-RC participants.
6. If we do decide to work with you in a demonstration, please remember that the other participants are not familiar with RC -- tears are often acceptable, but strange noises, dramatizations of shaking, etc. can be confusing.
7. Think about bringing non-RCers with you when you attend our wide-world events. This will ensure that we are all taking charge of spreading RC information. If we do not want you to have ongoing involvement with our wide-world work following the session you attend, do understand that it isn't because we don't like you; we want to encourage you to build your own wide-world activities and contacts.
We are very excited about what we have been learning in our efforts to naturalize RC. Honoring these agreements will help all of us in RC move forward in developing effective wide-world activities.
Cherie Brown
International Liberation Reference Person for Jews
Charlie Kreiner
International Liberation Reference Person for Men
Patty Wipfler
International Liberation Reference Person for Parents