Thinking Aloud: Co-counselling listening partnerships

A limited number of these introductory taster sessions are available each month at a 50% reduced cost of £10.00 for the first session. Thereafter 1:1 sessions will be charged at £20.00. The purpose of learning how to exchange listening time using co-counselling tools is to assist each person to recover our innate and inherent ability to think and to function well. Learning how to exchange listening time can be a powerfully effective means of breaking out of isolation and of building supportive alliances at home, within the family, with friends and with colleagues. There are a unlimited variety of situations where these skills can be applied with transforming effect.

Those students who begin with 1:1 sessions are also encouraged to move on to take Fundementals Classes in Re-evaluation Counselling. Participation in a Fundementals class requires a commitment to complete the entire programme over 20 weeks but the cost per session is reduced for all students introduced through these introductory taster sessions. Classes are taught by teachers who are trained and licensed by the International Re-evaluation Counselling Communities. Teachers are both licensed and supervised. Students who have successfully completed a Fundementals class are invited to join their local co-counselling community where they will be able to access support groups, on-going classes together with the opportunity to participate at national and international re-evaluation counselling workshops.

We are part of a network of co-counselling communities that are busy all over the world setting up listening partnerships, support groups, counselling classes and workshops. People who try co-counselling are mostly busy trying to undo all the way that we get messed up by sexism, by ageism, by gay oppression, by economic situations, by poverty, by racism, by anti-semitism and by class oppression.

Co-counsellors can help each other to get this important work done which can help us all recover from all the different ways in which we have been hurt. We can each figure out how to recover ourselves and how to help each other to re-emerge out from under all the heavy seabass and all the distress that keeps us frightened.

About Re-evaluation Counseling:
An abstract from the text on the RC website http://www.rc.org/ is included here and all rights are hereby acknowledged:-

Re-evaluation Counseling is a process whereby people of all ages and of all backgrounds can learn how to exchange effective help with each other in order to free themselves from the effects of past distress experiences.

Re-evaluation Counseling theory provides a model of what a human being can be like in the area of his/her interaction with other human beings and his/her environment. The theory assumes that everyone is born with tremendous intellectual potential, natural zest, and lovingness, but that these qualities have become blocked and obscured in adults as the result of accumulated distress experiences (fear, hurt, loss, pain, anger, embarrassment, etc.) which begin early in our lives.

Any young person would recover from such distress spontaneously by use of the natural process of emotional discharge (crying, trembling, raging, laughing, etc.). However, this natural process is usually interfered with by well-meaning people ("Don't cry," "Be a big boy," etc.) who erroneously equate the emotional discharge (the healing of the hurt) with the hurt itself.

When adequate emotional discharge can take place, the person is freed from the rigid pattern of behavior and feeling left by the hurt. The basic loving, cooperative, intelligent, and zestful nature is then free to operate. Such a person will tend to be more effective in looking out for his or her own interests and the interests of others, and will be more capable of acting successfully against injustice.

In recovering and using the natural discharge process, two people take turns counseling and being counseled. The one acting as the counselor listens, draws the other out and permits, encourages, and assists emotional discharge. The one acting as client talks and discharges and re-evaluates. With experience and increased confidence and trust in each other, the process works better and better.

Everything that you ever would need to know about can be found among the 28 little pearls of wisdom on this page here: http://www.rc.org/index.html

There is also a page you can download that explains how to get started with co-counselling here: http://www.rc.org/home/How_to_Begin_RC.pdf