'Co-counselling, conceived of as a movement, has two major aspects. One is it's therapeutic method, developed so as to be used within a reciprocal peer relationship; the other is the creation of an organisation or network or community within which such relationships may best flourish.' (Nichol 1993,p.8)
 

Theory and Method; Co-counselling Vocabulary

A basic account of the therapeutic method, taken from promotional material (Nichol & Wilks,1991 - see Appendix 1.1) is outlined below:

"People work in pairs taking half of each timed session to be client and half to be counsellor with each partner. As clients on a course you are first invited to value yourselves and discover your good qualities. Then you are taught specific techniques to work on problems: things that upset you, times when you do less well than expected or relationships that you find difficult. By releasing your stored up feelings you gain insight into your needs and attitudes and this frees you to become more intelligent, creative and loving.......As counselors, you learn how to give full attention and not to feel overcome by your partners' difficulties. You are shown how to help clients express themselves more fully without interrupting, intruding or taking over. As counselors, you do not give advice: you are there to share, care and provide a safe situation in which your client can work"

Simply stated, here are the essentials: reciprocal turn-taking, the celebration of strengths - or self-affirmation - and the contacting and releasing of stored up feelings - known as discharge in co-counselling vocabulary.

The pivotal figure in the development of the co-counselling concept is Harvey Jackins who began the work in the early 1950's. The first thorough presentation of a theoretical framework for the process appeared in "The Human side of Human Beings." (Jackins,1965) From a perspective of human potential which is not very different from Rogers’,(1942) Jackins outlines the process whereby the innate, zestful creativity and intelligence of the child is gradually 'occluded' by the development of compulsive, maladaptive behaviour patterns. Catharsis (Discharge) is seen as a natural 'resetting device' for mind and body after negative emotional arousal. This may work effectively for the infant but, with the onset of the normative, emotionally repressive socialising process, it is no longer always acceptable to laugh, cry, rage, shake, yawn etc. It's epitomised in the statements "Big boys don't cry" and "Nice girls don't......" The theory argues that when this natural 'resetting process' is prevented - by the threat of disapproval from significant others - then the upset does not just go away but remains locked up within one.

"The residue of emotional tension stays after the hurting event and so does the fragmentation of thinking due to blocked expression. This affects our present experience in various ways: one is that patterns of defence get built up, which may get too efficient at keeping experience out; and another is that the residue, seeking discharge, may be evoked by new situations bearing some similarity to the original distressing events. This is what is called restimulation by Harvey Jackins" (Rowan.1976 p57)

Hence, a client in a typical co-counselling session, would start work on some contemporary area of distress, cast around for similar situations - thus establishing the likelihood that she has a pattern of behaviour which is being restimulated - she will then go back to the earliest memory of 'this kind of distress' in an attempt to re-experience the original circumstances in which the defence pattern was formulated. Then, with the permissive and supportive attention of her counsellor she has the opportunity to express and release those long since locked in feelings. She will need to keep a 'balance of attention' in which she can be sufficiently with the stuck feelings so as to experience them, yet at the same time stay aware that her feelings of distress do not arise from the present time situation. When her balance swings too far to the past, then she will not feel safe enough to discharge the stuck feelings and will shut down or retreat into her pattern of defence. A balance swung too far into the present time reality, however, runs the risk of failing to re-experience.

"Mere expression of negative feelings is thus not cathartic"

write Evison & Horobin in their commentary on Jackins (Evison & Horobin in Rowan & Dryden,eds., 1988, p86)

After discharge comes a period of re-evaluation out of which may emerge positive directions - statements of intent about how to be with future circumstances now that the grip of the pattern has been loosened.

In 'Ordinary Ecstasy' (Rowan 1976) Rowan refers to Rogers' seven stage process by which he describes the process of person-centred counselling (Rogers,1961). he suggests,(p58) that Jackins is aiming directly at the sixth of Roger's seven stages:

"A breakthrough stage, where feelings come through, are experienced now, and accepted. Physiological loosening takes place, and also mental loosening of precious ways of seeing the world and self." (quoted in Rowan 1976,p56)

This breakthrough, when it happens, is achieved in a non-directive manner - both counsellor and client share the same training in co-counselling skills. (Successful completion of a Fundamentals course of 40 hrs experiential training is the basic requirement for membership of a co-counselling Community). Thus both client and counsellor share an understanding of the desirability and effectiveness of such a cathartic release; the client is not only willingly, but also actively working towards this outcome. The concept of the 'active' client is best expressed in the oft quoted co-counselling maxim - 'Client in charge' Elsewhere I use the verb 'clienting' (Preliminary Thoughts - App1.4) and discuss the unfamiliarity of this concept in the professional counselling world. More familiar to people in the Human potential movement, it is certainly at the heart of the methodology which the present inquiry group has begun to develop. (See Pamphlet: App1.6)
 

Development of Co-counselling Communities

Re-evaluation Counselling (RC) is the name taken by the original co-counselling community. This organisation, still led by Harvey Jackins, is based in Seattle,USA.

"It has a clear chain of command - essentially a softened version of the Leninist model of democratic centralism, with an emphasis on consistency of theory and practice. Consequently, althought RC does change and evolve, this is done in a highly deliberate and controlled way. Not surprisingly, it has proved to have a short way with dissenters" (Nicholl,1993p.10)

In 1975 a network of ‘dissenter’ groups came together to create the co-counselling International (CCI) with an international committee and guidelines for CCI communities. The core theoretical model adopted by the CCI communities was pretty much inherited from the original movement; though developments took place in technique: role-play and chair (cushion) work from Gestalt therapy were incorporated. The principle of 'client in charge' was consolidated and the idea was established of making a choice between 3 different kinds of contract: Free Attention, Normal and Intensive. (Client chooses, at start of session the level of counsellor interventions she wants. Free Attention = zero, Intensive= counsellor draws client’s attention to every cue noticed)

"....as part of reaction to the perceived authoritarianism of RC, local groups within CCI are self-determining and there is no coherent overall organisation.....CCI has no formal leadership,no administrative structure and no publishing house. However,at the time of the split John Heron, it's main theoretician, had an academic base at Surrey University. During the course of the 1970's and early 1980's he set out his own distinctive positions in a series of pamphlets......which rapidly aquired informal canonical status within CCI. (Because of it's repudiation of structure, CCI has no way of either regularising this position or challenging it)"

(Nichol,1993 pp10-11)

Nichol goes on to contrast and compare Heron and Jackins. Heron,he describes as breaking new ground - in co-counselling terms - when he talks about transmutation. Complementary to catharsis, both processes can deal effectively with distorted feelings. Transmutation is what happens when:

"a shift of consciousness takes place through the exercise of mental aspiration and choice" (Heron,1982,p4) and "The traditional home of transmutative skills has been in the religious and mystical traditions, both in the East and West. These subtle skills are to do with the management of consciousness itself and are acquired by what may be termed consciousness training" (Heron, 1982 p10)

John Rowan, discussing this transpersonal element in CCI, remarks:

just as there can be repression of what is low and nasty about us, so also can there be repression of what is spiritual and beautiful about ourselves" (Rowan 1976,p60)

Distorted feelings relating to the former are mostly amenable to cathartic release; distortions relating to the latter may be more easily identified and processed with the transmutative skills.

Now transmutative skills have never been systematically taught in CCI, nor is there a consensus about what they are or whether they are a part of co-counselling. Attempts to discover what constitutes a core-curriculum of a Fundamentals training were made in the National CCI newsletter One-to-One in 1992. The resulting checklist made no mention of transmutation - nor even meditation.

In the seventh and final conclusion of his research Nichol suggests that CCI co-counselling is significantly impoverished as a developmental method by the community's inability to develop theory in any recognised way.

"In particular, there is no platform from which to launch a critique of the total commitment to a discharge and re-evaluation approach to the work.......The experience of people who grow beyond this model as their predominant way of working cannot be recognised or validated. This remains the case even though significant workds within CCI's small literature" (Heron 1977 & 1982) invite consideration of "transmutative" work based around meditation."`

(p.97)

He goes on to remark that meditation was the commonest of the alternative methods(to CCI) practised by the participants in his inquiry. (Nichol 1993 p96).

Since that time there has been renewed theoretical input from John Heron in a series of articles, letters, workshops and Inquiry Groups. It is best summed up in a talk he gave at a CCI teachers meeting at Harlech, Wales, 28/7/95 which was annotated and is available on CCI's website. Heron's recent input has been called the paradigm shift and the talk was a response to the question "what is your account of the original theory of co-counselling and how has this changed in the paradigm shift?"

The original theory held that there are three root causes of human distress: ignorance, natural disaster and social oppression. Heron now focusses principally upon the ignorance factor. Surely, ignorance of various learned social skills is a factor- this kind of ignorance he call external ignorance.

"It's about coping in the physical and social world. But there is another kind of ignorance, which I call internal ignorance.This is not so much ignorance as a form of deep amnesia, a forgetting who I really am. And this is where we get to the core of the paradigm shift. Who I really am is a divine being with limitless capacity for expanded awareness and charismatic abundance. Somewhere in my being I know this and somehow in my being I have become nescient, not knowing it, or, which is more to the point, somehow I have forgotten it" (Heron 1995)

Heron's initiative had a mixed reception in CCI. Many co-counsellors have deep seated suspicion regarding the mystical 'Unscientific', quasi-religious overtones of the new paradigm, preferring the apparent certainties of the original more strictly humanist model. But Heron points out:

"The whole (original) theory is a form of humanism, and gives a very limited and superficial account of human nature. It has no reference to imagination and the depths of the imaginal mind; to higher intuitive processes; to psychic capacities and altered stated of consciousnesss; to spiritual, religious, mystical experience. The practice of co-counselling neither utilises, nor provides an outlet for these deep potentials of the human being." (Heron 1995)

Finally, perhaps in acknowledgement of the peer principle in CCI, Heron points out that there is nothing prescriptive in his recent statements -they are simply a description of how he intends to be working in future.

"In CCI we need not simply to have a tolerance of both humanist and post-humanist versions of co-counselling theory and practice. We need to have a loving celebration of our differences in this area. (Heron 1995)

This overview of 3-4 decades of co-counselling history has had a particular focus upon the CCI limb of development. The present inquiry could be seen as a shoot off the post-humanist branch of the CCI limb.
 

Co-operative Inquiry and Co-counselling

A final word in this section of comment on the frequent presence of co-counsellors as co-researchers in co-operative inquiry. A large proportion of Inquiries reported in "A Handbook of Co-operative Inquiry" (Heron 1996) involved co-researchers who were co-counsellors. The peer principle of CCI is clearly a valuable asset in this work, furthermore, to have a shared 'emotional vocabulary' and to share a discipline of recognising and working with emotional distress when it arises is clearly of immense value in the often highly charged emotional environment of a leaderless inquiry group. Also, some familiarity with the experience of fostering a 'balance of attention' - necessary for effective discharge work - is also useful for the exploration of subtle states and altered states of consciousness.

Updated 16 June 99
by Martin Wilkss