Here, for purposes of comparison and contrast, is a very different view from many years ago, a view which, from all the evidence, would still be valid for me today.
After becoming an RC teacher in 1971 and European regional reference person in 1972, I soon realized that RC systematically conditioned its members to associate a certain kind of beneficial human development with centralised authoritarian control of theory and community policy. It was clear to me that this was pseudo-liberation. It affirmed human needs for personal and social fulfilment, while denying the autonomy of the human spirit expressed as freedom of thought and freedom of political organisation.
I saw that to continue to teach RC within that set-up would generate a community of the pseudo-liberated, and perpetrate a subtle treason on human beings. It would provide a very modern release of the soul (through peer support in discharging past hurts) at the price of buying into a very ancient bondage of the spirit (don't think radically and talk freely about basic theory and don't experiment freely with forms of community organisation). It became evident, as I accumulated personal experience of the intransigent and non-negotiable nature of the central control of theory and policy, that I owed it to my own and others' humanity to resign. To have such evidence and stay on as a teacher within RC, supposing that its benefits to the human race outweighed its costs, would mean that I had become victim of oppressive conditioning and was projecting it in a damaging way onto others.
For years I have watched the tragedy of RC indoctrination unfold. Human beings have their needs for healing and loving communion with others affirmed, while at the same time becoming theoretically and politically dis-empowered to meet these needs free of continuous subtle oppression. The problem with loving relationships built up within a dogmatic and authoritarian community framework is that the love is rapidly withdrawn from any community member who sincerely questions that sort of framework. The love is only dogma deep. It is entirely divorced from a genuine spirit of co-operative inquiry about the human condition, inquiry in which there is free exchange and dialogue about any and every radical idea to do with the liberation of human beings. To separate love and inquiry is not, in my view, a fruitful way forward for the human race.
I stress again that this is my view. I respect the right and privilege of every person caught up in this dilemma to explore fully and freely their own thinking.
email: John Heron jnheron@xtra.co.nz See also: What happened next
I resigned from all my roles (teacher, regional reference person, community member) in February 1974. I immediately became interested in salvaging co-counselling from its authoritarian framework. This framework was partly derived from Leninist, neo-Marxist doctrines of firm central control of theory and policy; and partly from the example of the autocratic behaviour of Ron Hubbard (Personal Counselors Inc in Seattle was set up originally as a centre for Hubbard's dianetic auditing). All this seemed to me to be quite unnecessary.
In the Spring of 1974 I met in England with Dency and Tom Sargent who with the whole Hartford (Conn., USA) Re-evaluation Counseling (RC) Community were in process of leaving RC and becoming an independent community. We drafted some provisional guidelines for an independent worldwide network of co-counsellors which we Co-Counsellingselling International (CCI). That year saw the first CCI workshops, one in the USA and one in the UK. CCI workshops are attended by co-counsellors from several countries. Every year since 1974 there has been a CCI workshop in the USA and in Europe (in one or other of the UK, Ireland, Holland, Hungary). In 1994 there was the first CCI workshop in New Zealand and the second was in January 1997. I'll come back to CCI later on, but first some more local early developments. And I will focus on what occurred in Europe, since Dency and others are better qualified to tell the story of developments in the USA.
Including myself there were about 10 RC teachers in the UK in early 1974. My resignation was a personal act. I made no effort to persuade other teachers to do the same. I simply explained to them what I was doing and why. Three others resigned at the time that I did, and for similar reasons.
To be honest, I found it disappointing that the other six, with whom I felt strong loving connection, did not resign. I fully respected their right to do their own thing. Yet I was shocked they couldn't see the deep contradiction, indeed absurdity, of running RC as if it was an offshoot of Leninism. Above all I was hurt by the sudden severance of love between us that my resignation induced. All contact ceased forthwith, because I had become a heretic and a pariah. Within RC, overnight, I had shifted from being a luminous RC leader to being a misbegotten outcast. While this was, to my intellect, ludicrous and laughable, in my heart I learned a painful lesson that love is fickle and unreliable when attached to rigid ideology.
I continued to teach co-counselling through the extramural department of the University of Surrey, in Guildford, UK (and elsewhere in the UK). First I called it 'reciprocal counselling', but soon used the familiar 'co-counselling'. I sought to nurture a local independent co-counselling community in Guildford. I thought it would be touch and go whether it would survive (it did). There were virtually no models, past and present, of non-hierarchical peer organisations that community members were in any way familiar with. We agreed a simple format of a small group of volunteers each with a key role in maintaining a viable community, and agreed that each role would, in principle, be taken up on a rotating basis.
The hierarchical linchpin of RC in those days was the combination of two things: (1) the legal registration of the name 'Re-evaluation Counseling' as a service mark (in the USA you could register both trade marks and service marks; in the UK only trade marks, i.e. names of products); (2) the written, signed authorisation, by the International Reference Person as legal owner of the service mark, that a named person was entitled to be an RC teacher with permission to use the service mark. This meant that in the USA, but not in the UK, anyone judged by its owner to be abusing the service mark could be pursued in the courts (to my knowledge this option was never taken).
In contrast to this top-down, hierarchical method of authorising (and controlling and sacking) co-counselling teachers, I proposed in Guildford a format of self and peer assessment of would-be teachers, followed by self and peer accreditation. We discussed and refined this format at a community meeting. The self and peer assessment assessed the applicant's competence in the light of mutually agreed criteria. On the basis of this assessment, the self and peer accreditation authorised (or did not authorise) the applicant to be an assistant teacher, co-teacher or solo teacher, now or later after further preparation. For persons emerging co-operatively to take charge of their lives, it seemed clear that this kind of self-appraisal, refined in the crucible of rigorous peer appraisal, was the way to legitimate community teachers. We tried out the method, were impressed with how it worked and discovered what emotional discipline and creative integrity it calls for.
Variations on this method have been used by many independent communities down the years. Last Tuesday [Dec 96] evening here in Auckland (where I spend the northern winter - my home is in Italy) a local co-counselling teacher was authorised in this way.
As an independent community in Guildford launched itself in 1974, Rose Evison and Richard Horobin encouraged one into being in Sheffield in the north of England; and Anne Dickson provided a strong focus for one in London. Others unfolded in later years in several other parts of the UK. From 1974 I ran a lot of fundamentals workshops in Amsterdam and other parts of Holland, and some in Germany and Belgium, and in 1978 in New Zealand. Independent communities sprang up in these places. The Dutch community got off to a coherent and well-organised co-operative start. In New Zealand there were interesting early explorations of various forms of co-teaching and of teacher training co-operatives.
In the late 70s, Anne Dickson and I launched a series of UK national workshops for trained co-counsellors. We provided an outline workshop format and filled in much of the content by consultative planning with the participants. About the fourth workshop there was a grass roots revolt among participants against our perceived over-influential roles. We heaved a sigh of relief and handed over the facilitative task to rotating volunteers. Ever since UK national workshops have been run as co-operatives in which the programme is generated from the initiatives of those attending.
Also in the late 70s I started to run co-counselling teacher training courses, both in Holland and the UK. As well as basic teaching skills to do with theory and method and demonstration counselling, these included training in the use of self and peer assessment and accreditation, and explored some of the issues which independent communities need to address. At the same time, several active teachers in London and nearby communities formed a teachers' co-operative and we held regular peer teaching workshops, in which we used a variety of methods to improve our skills. Since those days many different experienced teachers have run co-counselling teacher training courses.
Some other developments call for comment. In those early days slightly different brands of co-counselling emerged. There was, coming out of re-evaluation counselling, the mainline brand which prevailed in independent communities. This is not the place to detail a number of significant differences between this version and RC. A noticeable one is the use of three counselling contracts from which the client can choose:
There were also two interesting other brands each with a small following: one developed by an ex-RC teacher, Glyn Seaborne-Jones, drawing on RC and primal therapy; and another by John Southgate, drawing on RC and the work of Karen Horney. Both affirmed the reciprocal, peer principle. These diverse but related brands affirm the inescapable principle that any innovative theory and method has its roots in what already exists. RC itself is an innovative extract from the theory and method of dianetics, and the practice of co-auditing, plus the early theory of Freud on abreaction (catharsis as a cure for neurosis), probably plus some bits of the work of Moreno on psychodrama. RC in particular and co-counselling in general is set in a context of unfolding cultural development, in which diverse strands and influences properly play their part, and will properly continue to do so.
Another development within independent communities was the emergence of a cottage industry in producing co-counselling manuals. I had published a basic manual through the University of Surrey in 1974 (and a teachers' manual in 1978). In subsequent years, Rose and Richard in Sheffield published their own manual which went through several editions and revisions. Barbara Williams, a teacher in London, published hers, and Gretchen Pyves in Manchester hers. And there are others which elude my memory or I don't know about. The manuals broadly concur in theory and method, yet each has its own idiosyncratic perspective on both. This cottage industry affirms an important principle: that human beings need to make any theory and method valid for themselves by refracting it in their own terms and from the perspective of their own experience and reflection. It also encourages any reader of different manuals to clarify her or his own standpoint.
In the early 1980s I became interested in more formal and structured ways in which co-counsellors could develop theory and method. Over three years from 1978 I had been a founding member of the New Paradigm Research Group in London, which met every three weeks to share discussion and projects about ways of doing research with people rather than on them. Co-operative inquiry is one kind of such participative research (see Heron, J. Co-operative Inquiry: Research into the Human Condition, London: Sage, 1996). It is a method in which all those involved are both researchers and subjects. As co-researchers they design, manage and draw conclusions from the inquiry. As co-subjects they explore the experience and action that the inquiry is about. And they move cyclically between reflection together as co-researchers and experience together as co-subjects.
In 1981 and 1982 Peter Reason and I launched two co-operative inquiries with co-counselling colleagues. The first of these focussed on mapping the various states that we as clients entered and passed through in a co-counselling session, together with strategies for moving between them; the second explored how we handled restimulation in everyday life. We published our findings in two reports (Heron, J. and Reason. P., Co-Counselling: An Experiential Inquiry 1, Guildford: University of Surrey, 1981; Heron, J. and Reason. P., Co-Counselling: An Experiential Inquiry 2, Guildford: University of Surrey, 1982). Both reports contain interesting developments of theory and method. A few years later, James Nichol initiated a co-operative inquiry with co-counsellors on the relation between co-counselling and the transpersonal (unpublished manuscript). And in Italy since 1990, at my centre in Tuscany, I have initiated several co-operative inquiries with co-counsellors on spiritual and extra-sensory experience.
While the whole of independent co-counselling is a kind of informal and tacit collaborative inquiry, I believe the occasional use of the more formal discipline of co-operative inquiry has a great deal to offer the future of co-counselling. Its potential has so far been only minimally tapped. It empowers co-counsellors to do research with other co-counsellors and has some well developed validity procedures which help sustain the rigour of the process. Its emphasis on parity and participation is deeply consonant with the ethos of a co-counselling culture.
Back to some comments on CCI as peer federation of national and local communities. Such a federation needs to have some kind of working statement of what it stands for, what differentiates it as a human association. Dency and Tom and I drafted the first version back in 1974 and sent copies to other interested co-counsellors to comment. It was printed inside every edition of the first CCI newsletter. In the early 90s John Talbut drafted a revised version and came over to Italy to discuss it with me. I proposed a few modifications. I append the modified version below, which was published in the UK in One-to-One two years or so ago, as a basis for further comment and modification. It is not a final or official or immaculate version, but will give you an idea of what CCI is about. [See: A Definition of CCI and The Principles of Co-Counselling.]
email: John Heron