Excerpts from Chapter 10, Finding the Right Man to Marry.
In March of 1968 I met the man I would marry in 1974. I was 32 years old when John Bell and I committed to being married for the rest of our lives. We had a marvelous outdoor wedding at the Hudson Guild retreat center with about 100 of our East Harlem Block School students along with dear friends and family members.
Finding the right man to marry took 20 years, through many relationships. I think the whole process was unconsciously figuring out whether I would marry a man like my father, or not. I didn’t. I married a man a lot like my mother.
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I met John the Sunday after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968. I went to church with my fellow teacher, Tom Roderick, at the liberal mostly white Judson Memorial Church in lower Manhattan, not too far from my apartment on the Lower East Side.
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When I went home to East 4th Street, I called my brother and said, “Billy, I met the man I want to marry. His name is John Bell. We just had a great conversation at his apartment about Martin Luther King, Jr., and I want to marry him.” John still loves to tell that story.
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In June of 1971, I left my position as Executive Director of the East Harlem Block Schools, and John left his position as teacher. … Then John and I took off in my little blue Volkswagen bug across the country. We planned to explore the world, hike in the Cascade mountains, and go to Latin America on a year-long expedition.
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We surprisingly spent a year with friends in Santa Cruz. While there we read all about the primal scream therapeutic approach, and we tried it for a weekend with friends. It was interesting, but we didn’t embrace it. Previously I had tried psychotherapy for myself, and I had been trained in the Reality Therapy approach to drug counseling. Little by little I was learning the methods of the day.
As the year went on, John and I gave up the idea of our adventure in Latin America. We felt pulled back to what felt like our roots in East Harlem. After all, the struggle against poverty was critical, we had friends in Harlem and East Harlem where we could belong to a wonderful multi-racial community, and we loved the Block Schools. It seemed like our sabbatical had been long enough. It was time to go home to Harlem. And so we did.
I’ll never forget the end of our drive across country as we passed through New Jersey, into New York, back to our big, big City, up the East River Drive to 125th Street, back to our home on 137th Street. This was clearly where we belonged at that moment in our lives. We had left. … But the magnet of the struggle for justice and equality, for the beloved multi-racial community of action, pulled us back. Fortunately, we were welcome. We were home.
But we were not completely at home with each other. That awful thing that happens when couples have been together for a couple of years had happened to us. Our own deepest distresses had surfaced, had hooked themselves onto our relationship, had discovered each other, and begun to scream. John’s core distress pattern that he internalized from his father’s criticisms was that he didn’t know how to love. His father steadily communicated disappointment that John didn’t show his love to him enough and was too busy with his own activities and was therefore selfish. John began to confess to me that he didn’t love me, that he couldn’t love anyone.
My core distress that I had internalized from my father’s criticism was that I was unattractive and therefore unlovable. Not surprisingly, these two distress patterns began to hook each other. John would guiltily confess that he didn’t love me. I would feel depressed and unlovable. We both began to suffer, and our relationship was spiraling downward.
Finding a Method of Healing that Worked for Us
One night when we were ensconced in one of these struggles, stuck in guilt, hurt, and hopelessness, we talked about needing some sort of therapy. At that precise moment, my friend Janet Pfunder called on the phone. Janet had attended Harvard/Radcliffe College a year behind me and was part of my friendship group. She had called a few times recently to tell us about the amazing counseling process she had learned and was now certified to teach called Re-evaluation Counseling, aka Co-Counseling. She had previously invited us to her class, but we had repeatedly declined. This time, when she called, we were sitting on the couch in our living room, locked in painful tension, anxiously wondering what to do. We listened to Janet, looked at each other, and said, “OK, we’ll try your therapy.”
This was one of the best decisions we ever made. Co-counseling solved our problems. We learned the theory and practice, then tackled our underlying distresses, separating them from each other’s distress, helping each other overcome the effects. Co-counseling helped us over the hump at that moment and then kept us on track for the rest of our lives. It also provided a theory and practice that we could gradually integrate into our work in a way that would benefit others. Our life within the Co-Counseling Community is a story in itself … because we both took on major leadership roles for a period of years, in addition to using it personally.
We solved our problems. But we weren’t married … not yet. John was still not ready. He couldn’t commit. He was still searching for his true self and his meaning in life. He also was not ready to have children. I was 30 years old, ready and waiting… in fact, I was a little impatient.
We Made It!
Without sharing all the ups and downs, I will simply say that we made it! On June 13, 1974, we had a marvelous hippy-style wedding. I sewed my orange, yellow, and white full-length wedding dress and John’s cool daishiki out of the same brightly colored fabric. We drove our blue VW bug to New Jersey to the East Harlem Block Schools spring camp for the big party. We sent rexographed invitations to our friends that said either give us no gifts, or limit gifts to pretty fabrics I could use for sewing. We had no professional photographer, spent hardly any money on the event, took no honeymoon, and exchanged no rings.
Children from the Block Schools sang to us, baked the cake, and decorated our VW Bug. Young Chantay Jones witnessed the official marriage certificate, and Victor Soler was the official bearer of the flower necklace that John presented to me instead of a ring. Our friends Tim Parsons and Tom Roderick played the trombone and the clarinet while we walked happily to the minister who stood in front of the crowd that was sitting on the grass.
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It was a blessed union, that would indeed last all our lives and support all our work and dreams. Our worldview was completely in sync. John would stand with me and behind me for the rest of our lives, helping me succeed at every successive venture, making decisive contributions in his own way, and I would do the same for him.
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I had definitely found the right man to marry, and with a lot of help from our friends and from co-counseling, we got across the bridge. Neither one of us has ever regretted it for even one minute or ever wondered if it was the right decision. I could not be more grateful to John for our lifelong partnership. Behind the scenes, whenever I was scared, or hurt, or uncertain, or sleepless, John has been there to hear my feelings and support my strongest most confident self. We did extraordinary professional work together for decades, each doing what we did best and complementing each other’s talents. We have been exceedingly lucky.
Excerpts from Chapter 35, Some Lessons Learned
More on the Need for Personal Healing
In 1972 I found my personal healing system in something called Re-evaluation Counseling (RC), or Co-counseling. It teaches that we are all born brilliantly intelligent and profoundly good, but that personal and societal hurts impact us in ways that create distress patterns resulting in behavior that is not fully intelligent. “Intelligent” is defined here as being attuned to the actual reality before us and able to think clearly and act rationally to make the situation as good as it can be. “Intelligent” means that we are free of the reactive behavior caused by similarities of present experiences to our past hurtful experiences that evoke painful emotions that trigger reactive behaviors that don’t serve our real goals.
Re-evaluation Counseling teaches that we can heal from all past hurts through emotional release of the stored pain, and that we can heal from new hurts the same way in present time. It teaches that we can set deliberate directions for our attitudes and actions in opposition to those old patterns and we can create new capacities within ourselves. It sets up a system of peer counseling in which people become trained in how to offer each other the safety and support to go through that healing process, to take more intelligent actions in present time, and to set new directions for our attitudes, free of emotional confusion caused by early hurts.
I have practiced this since 1972 with co-counselors met only through the RC Community as well as with family and friends who learned the theory and practice with me and then we built it into our ongoing relationships. It has been an essential tool for acting rationally and for not burning out. I make sure to cry – or share other deeply held feelings of fear or anger – at least an hour a week with a trusted co-counselor. Sometimes when things get rough I do it several hours a week. I have never taken any medication for moods or feelings. I have never been pulled down by depression. Co-counseling gives me a way of facing, releasing, and healing from negative feelings. The process has been reliable for me and doesn’t cost a dime because we are exchanging time and attention, not money. You can find out more about Re-evaluation Counseling at www.reevaluationcounseling.org. I currently teach RC classes to young social activists and entrepreneurs reaching for their most rational and resilient selves. I recommend finding a system that works for you.
In Closing
The greatest reward of all is knowing that my life has made a difference. I hope that you will win joy through your own life of service and struggle, loving humanity and all life on our beautiful planet.
by Dorothy Stoneman, founder and former CEO of YouthBuild USA, Inc. (1978-2016); RC NYC Regional Reference Person (1980-1988), and RC International Liberation Reference Person for World Changers (1988-1996); recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (1996), Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2007), Harvard Call to Service Award (2011), and Promise to America Award (2017), among others.