At 15, with my skinny legs swinging off the exam table, I sat and listened as my gynecologist stood before me with serious eyes and told me that I had a high risk of developing cancer someday. It was a shocking message to get as a teenager; nonetheless, I made immediate decisions to protect myself.

I stayed on birth control pills for years despite wild swings of emotion, including long stretches of depression, in an effort to keep cancer away. For years, I thought I would become a genetic engineer to one day help find the cure to cancer. I endured over 25 endometrial biopsies to try and keep my chance of getting pregnant intact. The cancer threat shaped me in so many ways.

At 19, while my emotions continued to swing, I found my first life buoy: community organizing. Mentored by two pioneering community leaders named Keisha and Peter Evans, I worked with two other students to launch a youth of color environmental justice organization in East Palo Alto, California. The organization brought together middle and high school students for a founding campaign targeting a toxic waste facility in the high-poverty, majority Black and Brown town. It was my first experience connecting my individual sense of power to growing collective power. Guided by our mentors, we focused on popular education to expand the consciousness of youth of color around systems of oppression, and through that work, I began to make critical connections for my own life. Though I had no idea at the time, this experience was a critical step toward moving me to a life committed to organizing.

For the next 30 years, I spent my life building relationships with Asian youth to tell their stories of gender-based violence, organizing hospital employees and Head Start workers into a union, building power with young workers across SEIU, and leading a powerful community-labor coalition in Illinois that increased the minimum wage in Chicago, seized back hundreds of millions in Tax Increment Financing money from highly profitable corporations, and fought to make the rich pay higher taxes. We built power with Black parents in Peoria around education justice issues and trained thousands of low-to-moderate-income residents across the state around issues of race, class, and gender. We organized politically as well, which led to our members running an alderman’s zoning committee as their Puerto Rican neighborhood faced rapid gentrification. We helped elect Delia Ramirez to Congress and Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago, building off our decades of organizing to cohere a shared analysis and vision of the future.

When I started union organizing, I also joined a peer counseling community that is rooted in a collective understanding of the impact of oppression and trauma on our lives, especially in our earliest years. It is a process that centers an equitable give-and-take of deep listening, focused on collective liberation. My counseling class was made up of Black and Asian Chicagoans, and for me as a young Asian woman mainly organizing Black and white low-wage workers, having this space to process was key to me being able to show up as an organizer day after day. Organized labor was and still is a tough place to be as a young woman of color, and I’ve seen so many others leave organizing because of how ruthless it can be.

Today, at 50, I see the numerous ways that my cancer journey and my organizing life have intersected to reveal clear learnings on how to approach any seemingly insurmountable challenge. This period of consolidation of an authoritarian state collides with my own growing threat of unbounded tumors. Here are a few lessons:

Lesson #1: We Need Each Other

I could not face my third round of cancer without literally about 100 friends, family, peer counselors, and community members who have flanked me and my wife through this terrifying time. For me, leaning on people, and letting myself be helped, held, loved and cared for, has not been easy. Like many organizers, I am used to handling all the things. As this disease progresses, I find myself moving more and more toward my people.

During previous rounds of chemo, I always shaved my own head, but last September, I decided instead to ask my wife Neena to do it. Sitting in a chair, looking in the mirror, I suddenly realized that based on where I am with my disease, I may never again have hair on my head. The reality of potentially being bald until I die hit us both like a ton of bricks — less about the hair itself, but what it signaled — that I would forever be a marked cancer patient, and that I would die fighting this disease. It was then that I realized that this moment was bigger than just the two of us. I immediately texted a few friends and asked who might be able to join a video call in a few hours during which we would shave my head. Two hours later, eight friends called in and accompanied Neena and me as we cried, laughed, and shimmied to my hastily created hair-themed playlist. It was exactly what we needed.

Authoritarianism requires our isolation. Our broken connections, our aloneness. Our anger directed toward each other. The U.S., with a mainstream culture rooted in competition and isolationism, has been a prime breeding ground for fascism for so many years. In fact, the U.S. has been practicing fascism against Black and Native people since its founding.

To resist and build the world we want and need in this moment, our work must be deeply relational. Mutual care is not just a survival strategy, but also a direct route to community power building. Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C., and of course Minnesota offer us clear examples of the ways that communities have come together to resist Trump’s fascist border control, by organizing hundreds of neighborhood Signal chats; providing open trainings and guidance to each other; and showing up to disrupt, document, and stop abductions of neighbors to exemplify not just care in action but also what collective organizing can do against brutal state-sponsored violence.

We cannot win without each other.

Lesson #2: We Must Move, Even When on Uncertain Ground

At this point in my disease, the goal is to keep me alive long enough to find the medicine that will hold my tumors in check. Metastatic cancer at its best is a chronic disease, and my hope is that I can manage the tumors and keep living my good life. At some point in this last recurrence of cancer, as I jumped from drug to drug, hoping to find something that worked, I realized that I was waiting for that last part — the “something that worked” part — before I found a new role in movement building. I knew I needed to fight fascism, even as I was fighting my own cancer, which left me with uncertain energy and capacity. I was terrified of letting anyone down, of how to make a move during so much uncertainty.

What we need are possibilities, not certainty. And this principle is true in organizing against authoritarianism in this moment. We will never know it all, will never have the full set of conditions and dynamics to be able to plot out all of our steps. And we also cannot be afraid to move, even in times of turbulence and unpredictability. In fact, moving in such moments is even more critical.

Planning with metastatic cancer can feel impossible, but plan (and try) I must. I just need to be ready to pivot all the time — make a plan, pivot, make a new plan, pivot again. We must continually assess, continually shift, rest as needed, and then keep moving.

Now, I am happily part of a new project fighting authoritarianism, and I show up as best I can. It is deeply unsettling not to know how I will feel each day, but I remind myself that this uncertainty is OK. My life, like the majority of our lives, will always be hard. But my life is also very clearly so good. We need to stop promising people ease, or even that things will be better anytime soon. It might all be harder for a while, so how do we create and maintain the community bonds, the agency to try things, and move forward collectively? Having people, and moving collectively, is key to my life being good. It fills me deeply and fuels me to keep trying. And good is the goal — not easy.

Lesson #3: Past Trauma Will Bring Us Down If We Do Not Release Its Effects on Us

Fighting brutal forces takes a real emotional toll on our minds and our bodies. We must have better tools and practices to deal with that trauma. Creating spaces to collectively grieve, to release the impact of the emotional and physical hits that we are taking in this moment — watching our neighbors be beat up, dragged, ripped apart from their families, and killed — cannot be ignored. How do we release these impacts, so that they do not fester inside us, and so that our thinking remains clear?

In my fight against cancer, I face so much discouragement and terror — triggered by new bloodwork, or a scan, or something that feels different from what I have experienced before. If I let those worries and fears build up in me, I would be so overwhelmed and immobilized. But by letting those fears out, in a community of counselors who are also working on their own pain — through crying, shaking, laughing and other physical releases — I am able to dissolve the fears and think freshly about the moment. I am able to reach for hope, but it takes significant time and energy, both of which are in short supply under capitalism. As Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline.” My vulnerability is a fast track to closeness, connection, and yes, even possibility.

We have so many traumas that we carry, and I see them disrupt our movements’ ability to cohere. We lack the skills in movement to address our upsets with each other, upsets that are rooted in our early and often lifelong experiences of oppression. I see this clearly in Chicago movement organizing. As someone who has been part of this movement-building space for decades, I reflect on situations where I wish I could have led differently, not just focusing on our campaign outcomes but also ensuring that we were addressing our leaders as whole humans. Leaders are fractured by so many assaults and pressures. The need to address the whole human is what Indigenous Hawaiian leader Norma Wong describes as the human quotient, which includes four essential capacities: courage, compassion, aloha (self-reflection and mutual relationship), and strategic wisdom. We struggle in movement to assess the first three aspects, leaving us vulnerable to fractures that not only stop the work, but also too often can set us backward. The lack of space for these types of practices has led to a buildup of mistrust that leaves us with collectively less power, to all of our detriment.

But when we can do this work together, so much is possible. For example, a few years ago there was a campaign co-led by two powerful and driven women of color from two different organizations. They hit a rough spot, which quickly escalated, given the past traumas that they both had experienced, the lack of tools in the ecosystem to manage through conflict, and the deep fatigue they were already experiencing taking on white supremacy and the carceral state. They both agreed to mediation, and in the weeks leading up to the session, I worked with one of them on what came up for her in the conflict, and supported her in doing deep emotional work on what had gotten activated through it. When these two women came to their session, they both came ready to be vulnerable and open, and through support, not only resolved the conflict, but went on to collaborate to this day as trusted comrades.

Lesson #4: We Need a Long-Arc Strategy to Move Us Past the Short-Term Pain

As I have waged campaign after campaign against cancer, I have noticed that it is easy to get caught up in what is directly in front of me and lament the difficult moments. This isn’t to say that I don’t get to feel the deep pain and trauma of continually shifting and emerging side effects and their rampaging of my body. But I cannot stay inside the trauma. I have learned that I must grieve the pain, feel the discouragement, and then keep reaching for possibility. Without a vision of where I want to go, I can get tossed around emotionally by the present-day difficulties.

In organizing, the same is so true. We too often wage short-term campaigns that do not necessarily lead to transformative wins. I think a lot of this is because we have not built a long-arc strategy and vision. In contrast, we are now witnessing the manifestations of the right’s long-arc plans. The authoritarian moment we are in today is the result of decades of planning and organizing on the right, which is now also formulating decades of plans further into the future. Even as we pursue important short-term goals on the left, we must conceptualize a long-arc vision and keep it in our sights.

Moreover, we need a political vision that is not just about one side winning and another losing. We need a vision where there is room for all. We are often not very good at this notion of “all under heaven intact” that comes from the Art of War and Buddhist traditions, but if we don’t have onramps for people to join us, we will never build the majority we need.

I don’t need all my tumors to disappear to have a good long life. My long-arc vision for my good long life includes tumors — they just need an environment where they chill the fuck out and don’t take over the rest of me. I must nourish the cells that are working hard to keep me alive, while doing all I can to remove the threat against my life — but I have no illusions that I will ever remove every cancerous cell from my body. The goal is not domination but building enough power to move forward in material ways. What’s our radical vision for justice that includes everyone?

How We Move Forward

There are of course many limitations to my analogy, but my experiences as an organizer and as a cancer patient inform each other in day-to-day ways that guide my life powerfully. My body is waging battles against forces that may kill me, while authoritarian consolidation grows and its deadly consequences become even more evident. We need to ask these questions of our movements, and ourselves: How do we refuse isolation and move toward each other? How do we take action amid unpredictable and shifting circumstances? How do we acknowledge and release the impacts of trauma as we organize? And how do we build a long-term vision that we can strive toward together, even in the hardest of times?

I never did find the cure to cancer as a genetic engineer. But my 30 years of organizing and power building work have led me to understand the work that is needed to stop this horrible disease — dismantling the oppression, corporate greed, environmental destruction, and consolidation of power destroying our families and communities. Now more than ever.

Amisha Patel

This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.

Human nature—Every human being is by nature completely good, very intelligent, powerful, loving, cooperative, and has a great ability to enjoy life.

In general, any human behavior that is different from this basic human nature is caused by 1) painful emotions that result from experiences of hurt, 2) the lack of an opportunity to heal, and 3) the resulting confusion.

This is the basic explanation for irrational human behavior.

Distress—When we are hurt, we may have feelings of sadness, fear, embarrassment, tension, anger, boredom, and physical pain or discomfort. In Re-evaluation Counseling these painful feelings are called “distress.”

Distress comes from four main sources: 1) accidents (for example, physical injuries or diseases), 2) abuse and other mistreatment, 3) contagion (from the distress and confusion of other people), and 4) hurts caused by oppression.

Oppression—Most of our distress is directly or indirectly related to the systematic mistreatment and hurts by society because of the groups that we belong to. This is called “oppression” in Re-evaluation Counseling.

Some examples of oppression are racism, sexism, classism, national oppression, anti-Jewish oppression, oppression based on sexuality, oppression based on gender identity, young people’s oppression, parents’ oppression, ageism, men’s oppression, disabled people’s oppression, and “mental health” oppression.

Distress recording—If we do not receive help to recover from the hurt, the distress feelings from the bad experience continue like a recording. We continue to experience the same painful feelings and “thoughts” from the past over and over, even though the situation has changed.

Restimulation—When something in the present reminds us of the past hurtful experience, we are pulled to feel the old distress. When old hurts replay, they influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Even though it may feel difficult to resist the pull of the old distress, with increasing awareness we can choose not to be restimulated.

Distress pattern—If we do not heal the hurtful experience, we tend to repeat the same behavior, feelings, and “thoughts” that we experienced in the past. These become rigid habits that we sometimes call our “personality.”

In Co-Counseling they are called “distress patterns.” Patterns can confuse us and make intelligent people appear irrational, but the distress patterns are not part of the essence of who we are.

“Distress recording,” “restimulation,” and “distress pattern” are different ways of describing the effects of distress and confusion that accumulate in our minds as a result of hurtful experiences that have not been healed by sufficient emotional discharge.

The distress recording includes all the details, emotional feelings, and physical feelings of the past experience. When we encounter a situation in the present that is similar enough in some way to the past distress experience, the distress recording from the past may, without our awareness replay in our minds and make it seem as though the past experience is happening again in the present.

When this happens, we can feel the same emotional and physical feelings contained in the recording from the past. For example, we can imagine a boy who has an experience of fear during a visit to the dentist and does not discharge sufficiently. Later in his life he might be a father accompanying his own son on a visit to the dentist. Upon entering the dentist’s office, the father might feel fear, although the appointment is for the son, not for the father. The feeling of fear is part of the distress recording of the father, not from the present situation.

Restimulation is the phenomenon of feeling distress feelings from the past in the present. This may occur when something in the present reminds us of an unhealed hurt from the past.

In the previous example, the dentist’s office restimulated the father. The fear was only restimulation, and not the reality of the present situation. With sufficient discharge in his Co-Counseling sessions, the father, instead of feeling restimulated, may feel relaxed concern for his son but not the terror or the anxiety of his past experience. In this way, the father will not pass his distresses and upsets on to the next generation.

A distress pattern may result when a person has a number of similar distress experiences over time without enough discharge. 

In the previous example, if the father had some experiences of fear as a boy in which the adults were dominating the situation, as an adult the father may have a pattern of compulsively trying to control or dominate situations. Or perhaps he may have a pattern of feeling powerless in these situations. It depends on the person and their experiences.

Contradiction—A contradiction is anything (a phrase, a thought, an action, etc.) that is different from the distress pattern and allows us to see that the pattern is not present reality. For example, noticing the beauty of nature in the present can be a contradiction to a pattern of feeling depressed.

Receiving caring attention from another person can contradict a pattern of feeling alone.

Awarely feeling painful emotions that have accumulated from the past can be a contradiction to a pattern of holding in one’s emotions in the present.

Thinking about the big picture of the world situation can be a contradiction to complacency or feeling small and insignificant.

Taking action to solve a problem can be a contradiction to a pattern of powerlessness and passivity.

Discharge—If we contradict a pattern enough, a natural mental healing process happens, the outward indication of which can include crying, laughing, shaking, sweating, angry sounds and movements, talking, yawning, and stretching. In Co-Counseling, this healing process is called “discharge.”

Attentive listening from someone who is non-judgmental, doesn’t interrupt, give advice, or tell you how they feel, greatly enhances the use of this discharge process.

Re-evaluation—After discharge, we are able to better understand the past experience of hurt, be free of our distress patterns, and recover our flexible, intelligent, powerful thinking, close relationships, and enjoyment of life in the present.

Policy on drugs—Our experience is that drugs that affect the central nervous system (nicotine, alcohol, recreational drugs, psychiatric drugs, and so on) interfere with the process of discharge and re-evaluation, and add new distress. Sometimes a person may be able to discharge under the influence of these drugs, but the re-evaluation part of the process does not seem to work well as. Co-Counselors are asked to refrain from such drugs twenty-four hours before RC activities.

Internalized oppression—Many of the ways we are hurt when we are small have to do with how we are mistreated by society because of our age, size, skin color, sex, gender identity, social class, grades in school, culture, language, physical appearance or abilities, and so on. If we don’t discharge enough on the ways we have been hurt by the oppressive society, we develop distress patterns that we call internalized oppression. We may feel that the negative messages about us are true. We may agree with our own oppression and accept a powerless, “inferior” role.

We may also feel the same way about other people like us and mistreat them the same way that we ourselves were mistreated.

Oppressor patterns—If we do not discharge our internalized oppression, we may feel a pull to take the other role in the distress recording of oppression. We may take the role of oppressor and behave oppressively towards other groups. This is the basic reason for oppressive behavior by human beings.

Co-Counseling (also called Re-evaluation Counseling or RC)—In RC people take turns listening to each other for equal amounts of time and help each other talk, discharge, and reevaluate. The person giving attention is called the “counselor.” The person receiving attention is called the “client.” Each person learns to give and receive attention effectively in both roles.

Safety—in order to discharge well, a person needs to feel safe. Safety can be created by the following:

-Treating everything said in a session as confidential.

-Trusting the client’s intelligent ability to find their own solutions to problems.

-Not analyzing or interpreting for a client.

-Not interrupting the client when she or he is discharging.

-Showing caring and respect.

-Thoughtful physical contact with the agreement of the client (holding a hand, an arm around the shoulders, a hug, and so on).

-Acting as a client only when others have agreed to be counselors.

-Not setting up any additional relationships except that of Co-Counselors with people whom we first meet in Co-Counseling.

-Where the client and counselor are members of different oppressed groups, the client securing explicit agreement of the counselor in advance of working in session on oppressor patterns.

Community—Co-Counselors cooperate together in a Co-Counseling Community. Being a member of a Co-Counseling Community has great benefits for each Co-Counselor. Building the Community is the job of every Community member. Local Communities are called Areas. There may be several Areas in a Co-Counseling Region. The International Re-evaluation Counseling Communities is a network of local Communities that exist in over eighty countries at this time (2021). Our work together is guided by agreements called “Guidelines.”

RC Teachers—All Co-Counselors are encouraged to recover their natural leadership abilities. When and if they choose to teach, are able to adhere to the guidelines for teachers, and have permission from their Reference Persons they can become Re-evaluation Counseling teachers and leaders, building their own local Communities in cooperation with the larger International Community.

Reference Persons—Some experienced and competent Co-Counselors take the role of leaders called “reference persons” whose job is to provide guidance to others.

Re-emergence—Co-Counselors who persist with the discharge and re-evaluation process notice many important changes in their lives, outlook, and way of feeling. This ongoing process of freeing oneself from hurts and patterns is called “re-emergence.” Our lives tend to continually improve as we use these ideas and tools with each other.

Liberation—The term “liberation” in Co-Counseling means the freeing of our intelligence from the effects of societal oppression, both at an individual level through the discharge and re-evaluation process and at the institutional and systemic level through social action. Co-Counseling is not a political organization but we do encourage Co-Counselors to think clearly about all issues facing humanity. We also use RC to support each other to take intelligent action to eliminate irrational patterns in the institutions of society. We do this primarily as individuals and not as a group of Co-Counselors.

We also engage together in organized projects of the RC communities such as “Sustaining All Life” to publicly offer the Co-Counseling tools and perspectives to support the ending of divisions based on oppression between individuals and groups of people working to halt the climate crisis.

For more information about Re-evaluation Counseling visit the web site <http://www.reevaluationcounseling.org>.

Victor Nicassio

Los Angeles, California, USA

As the climate emergency escalates, our movement is growing rapidly—and the speed of growth is outpacing our capacity to fully address the longstanding oppressions in society that show up within and between constituent groups. It is easy for misunderstandings to arise and mistakes to be made as we work together.

We want to acknowledge the significance, and danger, of this historical moment. In the past, during similar moments, great harm and human suffering resulted because people failed to turn toward unification and liberation. Late-stage monopoly capitalism is collapsing and desperate. More and more of the world’s resources are being put into the hands of a few, while the working class is being distracted and divided.

Fascism is rising around the globe. The following are being manipulated to that end: racism, Islamophobia, classism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and more.

Fear is being used to mobilize people. Those in power are encouraging and widely using violence, including pursuing wars for the purpose of profit. All of this is happening in the context of unprecedented destruction of the environment.

Systems of oppression use a divide-and-conquer strategy. They try to turn us against each other in order to maintain power and weaken movements for change. We cannot allow this to continue to happen. It is not enough to privately oppose these developments. We need to stand together in unity to turn this historical tide.

Let us commit ourselves to doing the following:

• Remembering our large common goal to end the climate emergency—a goal that requires us to work together
• Standing together as we face our mistakes and misunderstandings, work to resolve our differences, and express our commitment to unity
• Not allowing the differences to divide us and weaken our efforts and standing against any forces that try to manipulate and divide us
• Not fighting among ourselves in our own constituencies
• Working to resolve the differences both now and in the future and to create the conditions that will allow us to speak with the voice of a united people
• Agreeing to stay in coalitions with each other even when we have disagreements. It is not necessary that we agree on all issues in order to keep working together.

Addressing the ways we have been set against each other can take much listening, discussion, and time on everyone’s part. Let us commit to doing this work. Let us commit to teaching each other about the elements of each of our oppressions so we understand more fully what it will take to be allies to each other’s peoples. It is possible to oppose all oppression and seek everyone’s liberation and at the same time build unity and connections.

When a mistake made in an organization working for social change is used as the justification for disrupting and undermining the work of that organization, this perpetuates the general pattern of divisiveness running rampant in our society at the present time.

Let us commit to staying united as we resolve any differences. Let us continue to work on any differences that cannot be resolved quickly. Let us commit to solidifying our connections, strengthening our movement, and ensuring that mistakes are not repeated. We have much to learn from one another.

How can we best come together to do this work, while moving forward together? We offer some possibilities:

• Use every opportunity to speak up—in our homes, our workplaces, our social places, the political sphere, and more—about the importance of including all people and developing unity among all our peoples
• Find and create opportunities to oppose division and separation
• Find and create opportunities to meet separately in caucus groups of separate identities and then together across identity groups (there is no contradiction between being for our own people and at the same time being for each other’s people)
• Organize and sponsor listening sessions and listening circles in our communities, and train people to listen

We can challenge

• feelings of discouragement, despair, and hopelessness

• fears of speaking up

• fears of listening to viewpoints that we disagree with

• difficulties in being fully for our own people and fully for other people

• all that would keep us from building broad- based communities

• where we are still vulnerable to being confused about each other’s peoples

• where we made a decision to “go it alone,” to be separate; feelings about being divided

In the coming period, we can each choose a perspective of hope, courage, and unity.

When I began to work at a school outside Philadelphia many years ago, I realized that boys’ need and interest to talk about their lives far exceeded the resource available in a conventional school counseling model. I also realized that that most boys vastly preferred to talk to each other than to a strange adult, even when he was an experienced professional. For these reasons, I developed a peer counseling program as a way to prevent the ills of emotional restrictedness and to offer boys an opportunity to practice emotional literacy.  What resulted has been wonderfully successful.  In a visit to the program, a writer for the University of Pennsylvania’s alumni publication, the Penn Gazette, which featured the program for a cover story, sat in on a session and wrote: “What transpires over the next hour is unlike anything I ever experienced in my youth—or, if I’m being honest, my adulthood.” I am myself frequently awed by how whole-heartedly the young men embrace the opportunity to be real with each other and help each other take care of their mental well-being.

In several things I have written, including my most recent book, How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men, I have described how participation in Reevaluation Counseling benefited my own life, inspired my decision to become a psychologist as a way to “pay it forward,” and provided me with an understanding of how ably people can naturally help themselves through all sorts of emotional challenges and trauma. There are many aspects of the RC model that make it work but perhaps most important is the completely voluntary nature of the relationship of the participant to the organization. It is the individual who must figure his own way out of difficulties and problematic behaviors; there is no advice-giving in this self-help model.  I invite the boys to in my program to openly care about each other and to listen deeply to each other; they do not substitute their thinking for that of the boy they listen to. 

In times when misinformation, distortion and sensationalism are so common, all of us have developed a healthy skepticism about claims made by any organization, particularly those advocating cultural change.  I can vouch for the transformative possibilities of this model for helping regular people help each other.

Michael C. Reichert, PhD

Wilmington, DE   

I hope all is well with you in these perilous times. I am sending this letter to people I know personally, and relying on our webs of solidarity to hold this conversation.

I’m writing because I’m concerned about a developing situation around very negative portrayals of Re-Evaluation Counseling (co-counseling) and the potential for a “cancel culture” phenomenon in which people who are associated with RC are regarded with suspicion, and disinvited from taking part in movement organizations and alliances. Given the large number of us spread throughout the left, this could do deep, long term harm to our movements.

RC has been an important source of liberation theory and both collective and individual healing practices for tens of thousands of activists worldwide, including myself, and has contributed to the thinking of many important leaders doing the work of social justice. My concern is not with anyone’s story itself, but with the reckless way that such accusations tend to spread and be acted on without any kind of due process, and the tremendous damage this can do. The unprecedented challenges we’re facing require so much of us, and we are all stressed. This means we need to exercise even more care in tending our alliances, require of ourselves even more integrity in how we handle disagreements. We can’t afford to lose each other.

I respect everyone’s right to their own story, so I’m not going to argue with their version of what RC is. Instead I’ll share my own.

I’ve been a part of Re-Evaluation Counseling since 1984. I was thirty years old, already a published writer, teaching creative writing from a liberation perspective, assuming that what most people needed in order to write well was to be freed from what censored their authentic voices. Several of my writing students told me about RC, saying it had the theory for my practice. It had that and a whole lot more.

RC’s theory and practice, its profound and detailed understanding of how the traumas of oppression are internalized, and its sophisticated practices for healing that trauma, have had a major impact on my own thinking and writing. What I bring to the table has been deeply shaped by 38 years of collectively crafting tools to take on all the real life ways in which the political is personal, the personal political. That includes learning to separate the painful emotions of past hurts from what’s actually needed in the present moment. I’m only one of thousands of people you’ve worked with in some way who use these tools, these theories, to be better at what we do.

While we do have a leadership structure, our practices are egalitarian and collective—all co- counselors have access to a vast array of peers with whom to exchange active listening, which often leads to emotional release and fresh insights. We have the option of grouping ourselves with people we share identities or concerns with, in ongoing support groups or classes or workshops and through journals and online lists. I have found life changing solidarity within a huge range of specific RC groupings—BIPOC and queer parents for whom sharing parenting difficulties is high risk; artists grappling with climate justice work, Jews of Color, Latin American women from half a dozen countries, children of blacklisted parents, LGBTQ Jews, the chronically ill. RC has not only given me tools I use every day to keep my head clear and my courage strong, but also an international community of co-thinkers with whom to continually sharpen my thinking.

Like any human endeavor, like all my most cherished movement organizations, we make mistakes and strive to learn from them. As with any large and diverse organization, oppressive behaviors show up and must be addressed. As with any group working with the effects of trauma, strong feelings arise, and we strive to hold safe containers for them without acting on them. We are continually making course corrections and figuring out how best to share what we’ve figured out, do the practical work of coordinating a large international organization and bring our best selves to the work of tikkun olam.

For all of these reasons, I care passionately about protecting what RC has to offer, and the people who are offering it.

My request is that whatever you may hear about RC, you take the time to also hear from the many people in our movements who have found it invaluable. I am happy to answer any questions you may have. The best way to reach me is by email at aurora@historica.us.

Love, Aurora

Aurora Levins Morales
Maricao, Puerto Rico


In our current society, oppressive dynamics are at play to some degree in almost any situation. This is not anyone’s personal fault. We have all been heavily influenced by society over many years to play roles of oppressor or oppressed – to take up more or less space, to have more or fewer expectations, to believe we are better than or worse than others, and so on. While we may work to build organizations and communities that are free of racism, sexism, adultism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and all other oppressions, it is very difficult to completely eliminate those dynamics from playing out, because we are all humans who bring with us our human difficulties. The skewed perspectives we have learned and the patterns of behavior we have absorbed have been so internalized and are so subconscious, it is nearly impossible to operate completely free of them (whether oppressed or oppressor) all of the time.

In Re-evaluation Counseling, we set up structures to illuminate and address these dynamics, and we use our emotional healing tools to work at removing the patterns related to oppression that we have absorbed. We know that we are not yet oppression-free, and we do not claim to be. We are evolving, learning, growing, and changing continuously. No organization or individual is completely free of oppressive dynamics. But we can watch for their impacts, interrupt them as they happen when possible, learn from our mistakes, repair any damage we have caused, and reach for even more liberated relationships with each other.

S.F.

In working on this monumental task over the last 50 years, we have learned that the harmful effects of oppression go well beyond the tangible forms of mistreatment people have suffered.  Everyone is negatively impacted by oppression; none of us has gone unharmed. Whether we have been targeted by oppression, witnessed it, or unawarely benefited from it because of our position in a dominant group, societal oppressions have left a harmful residue in all of our minds.  Though no two people have the same experience, the residue is quite similar: recurring feelings of helplessness, fear, loneliness, grief, distrust, and hopelessness, and, in some, greed and a sense of superiority.

This damage to our minds is by no means permanent. But, left unaddressed, it holds us back from achieving our personal goals and prevents us from working together effectively to solve the many challenges facing humanity.  The residue of oppression leaves our social justice movements vulnerable to the divide-and-conquer tactics of those who defend the status quo.

Listening as Liberation Practice
Our solution in RC is to create opportunities for people to tell their stories in a safe and confidential environment. When we have a chance to tell our stories, when we have someone who will just listen to us and pay caring attention to us without judging or interrupting, we find that something significant happens in our minds.  We can release the hurtful emotions—grief, anger, fear, sadness, shame, loneliness, a sense of helplessness, hopelessness, or powerlessness—that we have been carrying around with us. Releasing these painful emotions typically leaves us feeling more confident, more powerful, and more connected to others, all of which helps us think and work better, wherever we choose to focus our attention.

We have found this practice works well for people who live and work in villages, as well as for people in big cities. It is helpful for people who work as farmers, scientists, journalists, activists, and for every other kind of person. Painful emotions and the irrational ways of thinking and acting they engender keep us from doing our best work, keep us separate from other people, and prevent us from working together to create better conditions for everyone.

No Human Enemies
I’d like to share an idea that I’ve learned from listening to people all over the world for many years.  It’s a simple idea that I think will help us build social justice movements that are more sustainable and less likely to be divided (and conquered) by oppressive forces protecting the status quo.

There is no such thing as a “human enemy.” The concept that some people are “enemies” who need to be defeated for us to achieve our goals is a fabrication and a lie.

I know that this may sound wrong to some people. We have all been told there are enemies—enemies of our people, country, family, or movement. We have been told that the problems we face, such as poverty, racism, war, and the climate crisis, are the fault of an “enemy” and if we could just get rid of that person or group of people, things would be better.  Some of us have organized campaigns or entire movements on the basis of targeting a perceived enemy.

Ultimately, the problem is not with any one person or group. The problem is with systems of oppression and domination—like sexism and racism, genocide and colonization. Those systems are propped up by patterns of greed, racism, exploitation, and domination—some of the harmful residue described earlier. Such ways of thinking and behaving are irrational and highly destructive, yet are considered an integral component of success under capitalism.

What if we don’t organize against other people, but organize instead against the systems of oppression themselves? What if we stop trying to eradicate people and focus on eradicating the patterns of domination, greed, and powerlessness?  Could we eliminate these ways of thinking from our own minds and help others to eliminate them as well?

Enemies and The Slippery Slope
We all have strong feelings about people in positions of power who are doing harm to other people or the planet. But, if we agree to the concept that some people are “enemies,” and that we can eliminate problems by eliminating people – we open the door for this same mindset to seep into our organizations and movements.

Have you seen this before? An organization or coalition is doing good work but it all falls apart when someone inside the organization attacks the leader and vilifies them over disagreements in strategy or tactics. They blame the leader for a lack of progress. The leader is now the enemy, and the leader must change or be thrown out for things to go well.  

I have seen this scenario many times. But I have yet to see an instance in which vilifying a leader as the enemy has helped that leader improve their performance or lead the organization more effectively. So many good movements have collapsed because of vilification and scapegoating, because some leader was portrayed as the enemy and people organized against that person rather than against the actual problems they were concerned about.

I think we have an opportunity for social justice movements to deepen our integrity—to remember that an individual person is never an enemy who should be demonized, vilified, or scapegoated. The “enemy” is always the patterns of thought and behavior and the systems of oppression that enable and validate mistreatment and exploitation of people.

We Need Our Best Thinking
When we move past the concept that people are our enemies, we will be more effective as social justice activists. If we agree that there are no enemies, all our time and effort can shift from how to get rid of our enemies to how we can build unity in order to transform our society. Isn’t that the real issue?  It is hard to build unity among people if we keep seeking out enemies—if some people are vilified and scapegoated and set up against each other.

We might think of the concept of enemies as part of that same residue we have in our minds as a result of living in an oppressive society.  Can we listen to each other in ways that help us see that we have all internalized unhelpful ideas?  Can we listen to each other as we find ways to free ourselves from hurtful ways of thinking and behaving?

All social justice movements need our best thinking. We need to work together more effectively than we ever have before.  And that will only come from unity.

Azi Khalili

The divisions and irrationality in our world are largely driven by class-based distress recordings, many of which have been passed down through a long history of greed, exploitation, and poverty. To move our lives forward and ensure that our children have a future, we need to help people from all class backgrounds free themselves from class-based distresses. In particular, releasing poor people’s power to create positive change is essential to creating the world we all want.

It is a goal in RC to make our theory and practice available to people who are not yet well represented in RC and to encourage, support, and follow their leadership. Poor people are most of the world’s people, and they face more crises and are more vulnerable in times of crisis than people with more resources. Re-evaluation Counseling, founded and developed by Harvey Jackins, who was raised poor, is well suited to poor people. But we have not yet managed to get it fully into their hands.

I have found the RC theory below to be particularly relevant to poor people’s liberation.

CRYING HELPS

I took my first RC class many years ago, and the basic theory about crying matched my personal experience. Despite people’s attempts to stop me, as a child, from crying, I still cried when things became overwhelming. In graduate school, long before my first experience with RC, in moments of high stress (before a test, a talk, or writing a paper), I often allowed myself a few minutes to cry. It dependably helped me to think better and center myself so that I could successfully complete the task at hand [the task I was facing].

I knew that many people saw crying as weakness, so I never discussed my crying with anyone. And never in all my psychology, child development, and anthropology classes did anyone ever mention that crying might be an important “survival mechanism” or a natural built-in process we humans have engaged in since the beginning of our existence—a process that frees us of painful feelings that interfere with our ability to think and find solutions to our problems (such as how to find food and shelter and, in my case, get through graduate school).

After graduate school, I finally met a teacher, my first RC teacher, who said what I had thought: that “crying helps.” I also learned that crying works better with a caring listener. In my first Co-Counseling sessions, I was not only talking and crying about my life but someone was attentively listening—without interrupting me, giving me advice, or analyzing.

My teacher and my Co-Counselor also encouraged me to set goals, and they listened as I released the feelings of inferiority and the negative self-talk that were getting in my way of reaching the goals. They communicated their belief that I was more than smart and good enough to reach those big goals. It was an extraordinary experience for a raised-poor woman.

With that initial support, much began to be possible. First and foremost, I was able to save my troubled eight-year-old marriage. Thanks to the many sessions both my husband and I had, I have now been married to this good man for fifty-two years. After that big success, good things began to happen in my other relationships, in my work life, and ultimately in my leadership and parenting. Now, as an older woman looking back through the many ups and downs of my life, I am so thankful that I have had this profound and simple way to create a good life, one that most raised-poor people never get to have.

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PEOPLE ARE INHERENTLY GOOD

Another basic RC concept that caught my interest was that all people are inherently good. I, like most children, had initially believed in our goodness as human beings. However, because I’d experienced and witnessed a lot of violence and disrespect, that idea had become a bit shaky. I was happy to have it confirmed that every human being is good and deserves complete respect.

That perspective is such an important one, whether we grew up wealthy or poor. It is the opposite of what our class-based distress recordings tell us. And it is essential for moving past human conflicts and divisions.

Imagine what could happen if we could keep the reality of human goodness firmly in our minds and act upon it. Maybe we could build a child-centered society based on equality and respect—one that helps all children hold on to a sense of their goodness and the goodness of others; one free of the classism, sexism, racism, and white supremacy, and all the other oppressions that interfere with self-respect and rational thinking. When I feel alone and like such a society is too much to hope for, I remind myself of John Lennon’s song in which he says, “Imagine all the people, living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.” Being able to change things starts with reclaiming our dreams and remembering our goodness.

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VALIDATION AND SELF-APPRECIATION HELP

Our class-based societies are a long way from giving poor children and their struggling families the message that they are good and deserve complete respect. Communicating respect to poor children means meeting their material, educational, nutritional, safety, and health care needs.

Poor children are also constantly invalidated and treated as unworthy and inferior beings. They are given the message that their minds are inferior, that their bodies are not worth protecting, and that they are to blame for their difficulties. Validation and self-appreciation contradict the shame, terror, and feelings of inferiority that accumulate from such mistreatment. Appreciating myself, and taking in validations from others, has made my work as a raised-poor leader possible.

Validation and complete self-appreciation are important for people from every economic class. I always knew that poor people were treated as if they were “less than,” but after listening to lots of people from the “better than” economic classes, I also understood how thoroughly children from those classes are treated with disrespect, too. After a few years of listening to people in RC classes and workshops, I began to see that almost no child, from any class, gets treated with full respect, and that those higher on the economic scale are also burdened with shame, outrage, and terror (usually well hidden). Instead of being appreciated for who they are, they are often approved of only for their accomplishments, their beauty, their clothes, how they speak, or their material goods. Their training to be someone other than who they are, and to win at all costs, starts early.

Mr. Rogers, a children’s television host, noticed our society’s tendency to reward superficiality. He addressed it by singing, “It’s not the things you wear. It’s not the way you do your hair. But it’s you I like. The way you are right now. The way down deep inside you. Not the things that hide you.”

We all want to be appreciated for who we are. That song has been important to thousands of U.S. children from every class background. Thank you, Mr. Rogers!

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PEOPLE ARE NOT TO BLAME FOR THEIR STRUGGLES

A concept I particularly like as a raised-poor woman is the following (by Harvey Jackins): “Every single human being, when the entire situation is taken into account, has always, at every moment of the past, done the very best that he or she could do, and so deserves neither blame nor reproach from anyone, including self. This, in particular, is true of you.”

The above perspective, so basic to RC, is crucial for thinking well about poor people. Blaming poor people for their struggles is at the heart of class oppression. We are all born good and are always good. However, through no fault of our own, we get hurt. Then we get hurt again when we try but fail to get the love and attention we need to discharge the hurts. We are left with many distress recordings, some of which include feelings of worthlessness, powerlessness, and aloneness.

Most people have trouble believing that our inherent nature as humans is good. They do not understand distress recordings and their power to confuse us, create negative self-talk, and change our behavior from good to outrageously bad. In reality, we have no evil side in our inherent nature. We need many people to understand that.

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WE CAN CHOOSE WHERE WE PUT OUR ATTENTION

It’s been important for me to be reminded that at any point I can choose to act according to rational thought rather than on my negative self-talk and the “pulls” of my raised-poor distress recordings. It is key to all of our liberation, regardless of our class background, to give up our negative self-talk and blaming of ourselves and others. We can choose to act upon the reality that it never was any human being’s fault that they got hurt and were left saddled with distress recordings. No poor person is to blame for not “getting on top of their life,” and people from other classes are not to blame for their unthinking behaviors. It’s the society that is to blame, a society that distributes resources unfairly — including the resources of safety, caring attention, and respect.

Wilmington, Delaware, USA

Before I became a therapist myself I had some experience with the mental health system. And since becoming a therapist, including my years in graduate school and internships and my many years practicing as a therapist, I have been exposed to many other theoretical orientations to providing psychotherapy. I currently work with many therapists who have been trained in different schools of thought. None of what I have learned from other more traditional forms of psychology has offered what RC has to me and to the people I have assisted in my clinical work.

RC’s model of human beings and how we accumulate distress is not entirely out of sync with other forms of mental health work; however, what RC has to offer is a fuller picture that humans can heal, through the discharge process, from the hurts and distresses they acquire. The discharge process, which is natural to all humans if not interfered with, provides for healing to take place. It includes the release of emotions or feelings through crying (grief), shaking (fear), laughter (embarrassment), yawning (physical hurts) as examples. I’ve often suggested that people watch babies or very young ones who spontaneously use this healing process when they cry or yawn or tremble in someone’s arms. They do this naturally and are more relaxed as a result.

What we’ve learned in RC is that this process works best when people are paid attention to by another warm, open and accepting person. Then they switch roles, one becoming the client or talker and the other person being the counselor or listener. We learn how to do this by attending classes and workshops and by seeing techniques demonstrated for their effectiveness. All of our theory and practice is build on and from our actual lived experience with each other.

What also makes RC unique in its perspective about human beings is its understanding of oppression and liberation from oppression—that most of our hurts or distresses come from living in a society (a global society, also) that is oppressive to all of us and to some groups more than others, mostly based on class (economic exploitation) and racial or ethnic identities and backgrounds.

In my work with clients over the years I have shared RC ideas with them and I can honestly say that everyone I’ve talked to about our nature as humans and about oppression and how it operates on us by confusing us about who we are has nodded in agreement with these ideas. What we have to offer through our theory and practice comes naturally to humans and people respond positively and openly when they hear this, learn more, and have the opportunity to use the process.

Some of the criticisms which RC encounters are criticisms I’ve heard about self help groups, peer counseling, and different forms of psychotherapy—of therapy itself. I see this as people wanting, longing for, a fuller picture or perspective about ourselves to help us make sense of the world we live in and to find ways to feel better about ourselves and each other.

As a long time practicing therapist and as an even longer time practitioner of RC, I am ever more grateful for the ideas I’ve gained from RC. In my mind, the attacks or criticisms of RC don’t seem to really be about RC. They seem to be about peoples’ fears and their not knowing what else is possible or available to them. What we in RC are dedicated to is reaching peoples’ minds so that they can have a theory and practice that makes sense to them, is natural and real to them, that they know to be true for them as they remove and recover from the hurts installed on them.

Jean Hamilton, Palo Alto, California

Republican officials in ‘red’ states rigorously upheld voting rights though threatened by party leadership. Liz Cheney chose to be purged rather than submit to irrationality. Capital police slowed a mob, some intent on violence. One officer died, a Trump supporter.  

A young Black woman had teenage Tweets unearthed that disparaged Asians. Though long apologized for, she resigned her dream editorial job amid a hail of condemnation. Graeme Wood, an Asian man, countered in the Atlantic: “the entire point of being a teenager is to make and correct the most mortifying errors of your life…not hounded eternally for their dumbest and most bigoted utterances.”

Natalie Wynn, YouTuber and trans activist, parsing a controversial JK Rawlings article refused to demonize the author. “There’s…two sides to humanisation. One is that if you’re trying to persuade someone, it helps if you can get them to see you as a human being, but another is that it helps if you can…recognize their humanity.”

Women support “Calling Men In” and “Truckers Against Trafficking” who work on behalf of women, girls and boys and help men become effective allies.

Justice requires holding ourselves, our allies and our institutions accountable while challenging ourselves to remember the potential ally, the human trapped in unhealed wounds. James Baldwin’s “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of things you do not see!” 

We can compel destructive behavior be stopped, yet not condemn the individual. The goal is to heal injury as we change institutions, policies and industries that encourage division, oppression and the systematic installation of damage. 

An enduring corrective ethic takes work and decision, getting ready to say or hear hard things, resisting easy answers, telling the truth as we see it, grieving, raging, welcoming disagreement and diverse thinking, willingness to admit error, and celebrating learning. A truthful conclusion is more likely, more believable across sectarian boundaries, when it comes from such engagement. 

Cornel West asked “how do we create the conditions in which people can enter into public space without humiliation…able to be themselves…Of course you are going to agree, of course you’re going to disagree, of course you’re going to contend, of course you’re going to clash but you feel you can do that in such a way that you can transform yourself and transform others.” 

Bryan Stevenson:“We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others…
…we all need mercy, we all need justice, and – perhaps – we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”

K Webster, NYC, NY