Re-evaluation Counseling
Encyclopedia
Re-evaluation Counseling or RC is an organization founded by Harvey Jackins
in the 1950s and led by him until his death in 1999. It introduced a procedure called "co-counseling", which Jackins said was a new and effective method of helping people and bringing about social reform. RC teaches co-counseling and runs workshops throughout the world. It is owned by Re-evaluation Counseling Community Resources, Inc., a company based in Seattle, Washington, USA.
based the recollection of psychological trauma
s (or "hurts") accompanied by various types of emotional catharsis (or "discharge"). He came to believe that discharge led to clear thinking (or "re-evaluation"). He held that repeated discharge through co-counseling, in which two people counsel one another in turn, could remove the accumulated effects of past hurts and bring about re-evaluation, a process called "re-emergence". The objective of RC became the dissemination of this method of creating rational thinking. Re-evaluation Counseling later put more emphasis on the removal of "oppression", which it considers to lie at the root of many of the world's problems.
Jackins, who had previously been a member of the Communist Party of the United States and a labor organizer, investigated Marxism
, L. Ron Hubbard
's Dianetics
, progressive movements and organizations that purported to help people function better before he creating RC in the early 1950s. At that time he was a practitioner of Dianetics in Seattle, and in 1952 formed Personal Counselors Inc. (subsequently re-named Re-evaluation Counseling Community Services, Inc.) to "engage in, conduct and teach the art and science of Dianetics." He originally used some of the terminology of Dianetics, such as "clearing up patterns", "rationality", "present time" and "passing distress by contagion". It has been suggested that he paraphrased Hubbard's terms by recasting them in his own jargon. Hubbard's "engrams
" became "distress patterns", "release" became "discharge" and "to become clear" became "to re-emerge."
He systematized re-evaluation counseling during the 1950s and 1960s and eventually abandoned Dianetics. From the late 1960s, Jackins spread RC beyond Seattle by means of workshops, and in the mid-1970s traveled outside the US, teaching in the UK, Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. RC is now practiced in most countries. From the 1970s onwards there have been several defections and expulsions from RC, occasioned by Jackin's alleged autocratic behavior and the failure of the organisation to investigate allegations that Jackins sexually abused female clients. Some RC leaders and participants, for example Shirley J. Siegel and Nancy Kline
, say they left the organization after unsuccessfully confronting Jackins with these allegations and demanding that he change his behavior.
In the 1980s, Siegel set up Stop Abuse by Counselors, a Seattle-based group that lobbied for state regulation of psychotherapy
, including a ban on sexual relations between therapists and their clients. RC opposed regulation, arguing that the proposals were unclear and too open to interpretation, might lead to breaches of civil rights
, had been promoted in a sensational manner, presumed "agreed-upon standards of counseling practice" and were "biased against lay counseling". Although professional counseling is now regulated by the Washington State Department of Health, peer counseling of the sort carried out by RC remains exempt.
After Jackins' death in 1999, the leadership passed to his son, Tim Jackins
.
RC believes that everyone is basically good. Inappropriate or hurtful behavior is caused by the unconscious "restimulation" of past hurts that have not been properly discharged. If discharge can be completed, the behavior will not be repeated. RC believes that, as a result of these past hurts, the average person "is operating on about ten percent of his or her original resources of intelligence, ability to enjoy life and ability to enjoy other people."
The RC counsellor aims to remember the fundamental goodness of the client. Client and counselor are expected to work co-operatively. The counselor is expected to listen in a non-judgmental way, but also "contradicts" errors and other conditions associated with distress so as to facilitate discharge. The counselor also intervenes to "interrupt" the client's patterns. Each co-counselor has to be emotionally healthy and well-versed in co-counseling in order to work effectively together.
RC has been criticized for encouraging emotional display and discouraging analysis of its ideas or research into its effectiveness. Although its advocates refer to the theory of Re-evaluation Counseling, it has been said that RC derives from Harvey Jackins' counseling experience and that "there has been no independent attempt to verify or otherwise the key constructs of RC theory." There have been occasional papers about RC in scholarly journals. (See Further reading)
RC does not describe itself as psychotherapy and does not ally itself with any other self-help, counseling, or psychotherapy practice. RC opposes the use of psychiatric drugs and says that "mental illness does not exist." Its methods have been compared to those of Dianetics co-auditing, and John Heron
compared it with and distinguished it from primal therapy
, Wilhelm Reich
and Freud
's early psychoanalysis
when he made use of abreaction
. The editor of the Brunner-Routledge series of books on "Advancing Theory in Therapy" says that while Re-evalulation Counseling is not generally regarded as a psychotherapy, "it has made and continues to make an important contribution to our understanding of human beings and human situations."
RC considers that co-counseling does not imply psychopathology on the part of co-counselors or the need for professional treatment, and that there is a need for lay counselors because of the shortage of professionals. RC says that, for the average person, co-counseling can heal emotional hurts, increase rational thought and increase one's capacity for a joyful and positive life. It has been said that, unlike professional organizations, RC lacks standards for assessing the competence of counselors or any process for handling grievances.
RC's has ambitious social and environmental objectives, including, "The transformation of society to a rational, peaceful, non-exploitative, classless form world-wide. The preservation of all existing species of life and the re-creation of extinguished species. The preservation of wilderness areas and the creation of a completely benign environment over most of the earth, the oceans, and the atmosphere. The exploration of, and eventually becoming at home in, space."
Within RC, Tim Jackins is called the "International Reference Person". He is a former mathematics teacher from Palo Alto, California, and a graduate of Yale
and Stanford. He has been a co-counselor, leader and teacher of RC for most of his life. The International Reference Person appoints senior leaders, who appoint local leaders ("reference persons") in consultation with local groups. Reference persons decide who can attend events, teach RC, lead groups, and, to some extent, who may counsel together. They are not paid. RC considers that this form of centralized leadership is essential for uniformity of practice.
RC runs classes in co-counseling and local groups are set up by people experienced in the ideas and methods of RC who have been approved by the leaders. New members are invited to join "fundamentals" classes by existing members. They are expected to be well-functioning and emotionally healthy so that they can be effective counselors as well as being able to benefit from counseling. Fees are based on the participants' income and there are scholarships for people on low incomes. Twenty-five per cent of fees are sent to the central body in Seattle. Participants are asked not to use caffeine or alcohol and must abstain from mind-altering drugs so as to be attentive and to have access to their feelings. People who counsel together are prohibited from socializing with one another. It has been said that, in discussing clients' "distress patterns" in classes and workshops, RC violates the standard of confidentiality that is normally expected in counseling.
Classes and local communities are organized into regions and loose, country-wide affiliations, although RC does not organize on national lines. The RC journal Present Time lists 270 organized areas in 93 countries.
RC is committed to spreading RC practices and insights "as widely as possible in the general population". RC does not seek publicity and states that it keeps a "low profile". Local publicity has to be approved by the regional leader and national and international publicity by the leader of RC. RC does not list local local contact information on its website.
RC does not publish membership figures or comment on estimates. On one occasion, Jackins claimed that more than a million had attended RC "Fundamentals" classes. The April 2007 edition of the RC publication Present Time listed 243 RC groups (each with about 45 members) and 428 teachers in groups of about 10 people, making an active membership of about 15,000. Present Time has circulation of about 5,000.
RC tends not to co-operate with attempts at independent investigation and is sensitive to criticism, either external or internal, which it often regards as an attack on the organization. Jackins believed that much criticism was inspired by the US government, who feared RC's "profoundly progressive nature and its effectiveness". RC instructs members to "to quickly interrupt both attacks and gossip." It says that such attacks are "dramatizations of distress and are not acceptable behaviors within the RC Community. An attack is not an effective way to resolve disagreements or difficulties." "People who participate in an attack must first stop the attack and apologize for having participated in it. Only after they have done this should counseling resource be offered to them." Critics who persist "should be made to leave the group and their attacks ignored."
RC's system of unelected leadership and strict central control have been criticized by ex-members. John Heron, who was an RC leader and teacher, left the organization in 1974 to set up his own co-counseling organization, Co-Counselling International
. He said he did so because he realized that RC "systematically conditioned its members to associate a certain kind of beneficial human development with centralized authoritarian control of theory and community policy. It was clear to me that this was pseudo-liberation." He considered that the authoritarianism of RC derived partly from the Leninist doctrines of central control that Jackins had learned in the Communist Party of America and partly from the autocratic example of his former associate L. Ron Hubbard
. RC has also been criticized for suppression of internal debate. In an article analysing RC's "attack theory" Steve Carr says that "To counter attacks on RC and its leaders, RC members are instructed to interrupt the person, approach the accusation as the personal problem of the accuser, and vigorously come to the defense of the person or people being attacked." Richard Childs describes how he was treated in this way and expelled from RC when he tried to discuss allegations of sexual abuse within the organisation.
Re-evaluation Counseling has been listed as a cult while some say that it is like a cult in some respects. The Study Group on Psychotherapy Cults, a organization of ex-members hostile to RC, described it as "cult-like". Denis Tourish and Pauline Irving in a 1994 article considered the characteristics that RC shared with psycho-therapeutic cults, namely, a charismatic leader, idealization of the leader, followers regarding their belief system as superior to others, followers joining the group at times of stress, the therapist becoming central to the follower's life, the group absorbing increasing time, illusions of superiority to other groups and the group becoming suspicious of other groups. They concluded: "Given its hostility to such pluralistic notions of participation and democracy, RC has the potential to become a fully fledged and harmful cult, despite its original humanistic aims." Re-Evaluation Counselling denies this.
Re-evaluation counseling encourages its members to play an active role in public life and has set up groups to promote its ideas, which it calls "naturalized" groups. The main groups promoting RC methods are United to End Racism
" (UER), formed in 2000, and the National Coalition Building Institute
, formed in 1984. UER is part of RC and shares its HQ in Seattle. It participated in the 2001 Durban
World Conference against Racism
, the 2006 Caracas
World Social Forum
and the 2006 Vancouver
World Peace Forum. The National Coalition Building Institute is formally independent of RC but is linked through its Founder-Executive Director, Cherie R. Brown, who is a member of RC and active in UER.
The Re-evaluation Foundation aims "To provide opportunities for people to participate in Re-evaluation counseling who otherwise could not afford to participate." Founded it 1972, it supports projects based on the theory and practice of Re-evaluation Counseling that apply "bold, thoughtful action to freeing human beings from the distresses associated with past hurtful, unjust experiences." Its president is Michael Markovits, a former vice-president of IBM
. Its assets at the end of 2006 were $1,063,634. "The Foundation considers grant requests only from members of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities who are seeking financial assistance that will further the dissemination of the theory and practice of RC." In 2007, the foundation made grants totaling about $240,000 to several organizations controlled by Re-evaluation Counseling, including "People-of-Color Leadership Development, Global Initiatives, Young People Leadership Development/Family Counseling Work, Elimination of Racism, and Mental Health."
Harvey Jackins
Carl Harvey Jackins was the founder, leader and principal theorist of Re-evaluation Counseling .-Early life:Jackins was born in Northern Idaho on June 28, 1916....
in the 1950s and led by him until his death in 1999. It introduced a procedure called "co-counseling", which Jackins said was a new and effective method of helping people and bringing about social reform. RC teaches co-counseling and runs workshops throughout the world. It is owned by Re-evaluation Counseling Community Resources, Inc., a company based in Seattle, Washington, USA.
History
Jackins is said to have developed Re-evaluation Counseling after observing a troubled friend change through being patiently listened to while he cried. Curious about the effect of this crying, he worked with others to develop a method of peer counselingPeer support
Peer support occurs when people provide knowledge, experience, emotional, social or practical help to each other. It commonly refers to an initiative consisting of trained supporters, and can take a number of forms such as peer mentoring, listening, or counseling...
based the recollection of psychological trauma
Psychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
s (or "hurts") accompanied by various types of emotional catharsis (or "discharge"). He came to believe that discharge led to clear thinking (or "re-evaluation"). He held that repeated discharge through co-counseling, in which two people counsel one another in turn, could remove the accumulated effects of past hurts and bring about re-evaluation, a process called "re-emergence". The objective of RC became the dissemination of this method of creating rational thinking. Re-evaluation Counseling later put more emphasis on the removal of "oppression", which it considers to lie at the root of many of the world's problems.
Jackins, who had previously been a member of the Communist Party of the United States and a labor organizer, investigated Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard , better known as L. Ron Hubbard , was an American pulp fiction author and religious leader who founded the Church of Scientology...
's Dianetics
Dianetics
Dianetics is a set of ideas and practices regarding the metaphysical relationship between the mind and body that was invented by the science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard and is practiced by followers of Scientology...
, progressive movements and organizations that purported to help people function better before he creating RC in the early 1950s. At that time he was a practitioner of Dianetics in Seattle, and in 1952 formed Personal Counselors Inc. (subsequently re-named Re-evaluation Counseling Community Services, Inc.) to "engage in, conduct and teach the art and science of Dianetics." He originally used some of the terminology of Dianetics, such as "clearing up patterns", "rationality", "present time" and "passing distress by contagion". It has been suggested that he paraphrased Hubbard's terms by recasting them in his own jargon. Hubbard's "engrams
Engram (Dianetics)
In Dianetics and Scientology, an engram is defined as "a mental image picture which is a recording of an experience containing pain, unconsciousness and a real or fancied threat to survival. It is a recording in the reactive mind of something which actually happened to an individual in the past and...
" became "distress patterns", "release" became "discharge" and "to become clear" became "to re-emerge."
He systematized re-evaluation counseling during the 1950s and 1960s and eventually abandoned Dianetics. From the late 1960s, Jackins spread RC beyond Seattle by means of workshops, and in the mid-1970s traveled outside the US, teaching in the UK, Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. RC is now practiced in most countries. From the 1970s onwards there have been several defections and expulsions from RC, occasioned by Jackin's alleged autocratic behavior and the failure of the organisation to investigate allegations that Jackins sexually abused female clients. Some RC leaders and participants, for example Shirley J. Siegel and Nancy Kline
Nancy Kline
Nancy Kline is an American-born author, teacher, coach and public speaker.Nancy Kline is President and Founder of Time To Think, an international leadership development and coaching company....
, say they left the organization after unsuccessfully confronting Jackins with these allegations and demanding that he change his behavior.
In the 1980s, Siegel set up Stop Abuse by Counselors, a Seattle-based group that lobbied for state regulation of psychotherapy
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a general term referring to any form of therapeutic interaction or treatment contracted between a trained professional and a client or patient; family, couple or group...
, including a ban on sexual relations between therapists and their clients. RC opposed regulation, arguing that the proposals were unclear and too open to interpretation, might lead to breaches of civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
, had been promoted in a sensational manner, presumed "agreed-upon standards of counseling practice" and were "biased against lay counseling". Although professional counseling is now regulated by the Washington State Department of Health, peer counseling of the sort carried out by RC remains exempt.
After Jackins' death in 1999, the leadership passed to his son, Tim Jackins
Tim Jackins
Tim Hugh Jackins is the International Reference Person of Re-evaluation Counseling , known officially as the "International Re-evaluation Counseling Communities". Formerly a math teacher and union negotiator at the Mission College, Santa Clara, California, he succeeded his father Harvey Jackins...
.
Ideas
Re-evaluation Counseling describes itself as "a process for freeing humans and society as a whole from distress patterns so that we may resume fully-intelligent functioning." Counseling is practiced in pairs ("co-counseling"), in which the participants listen to one another in turn and help one other to "discharge". No money is exchanged by the co-counselors but they pay a fee to the Re-evaluation Counseling organization.RC believes that everyone is basically good. Inappropriate or hurtful behavior is caused by the unconscious "restimulation" of past hurts that have not been properly discharged. If discharge can be completed, the behavior will not be repeated. RC believes that, as a result of these past hurts, the average person "is operating on about ten percent of his or her original resources of intelligence, ability to enjoy life and ability to enjoy other people."
The RC counsellor aims to remember the fundamental goodness of the client. Client and counselor are expected to work co-operatively. The counselor is expected to listen in a non-judgmental way, but also "contradicts" errors and other conditions associated with distress so as to facilitate discharge. The counselor also intervenes to "interrupt" the client's patterns. Each co-counselor has to be emotionally healthy and well-versed in co-counseling in order to work effectively together.
RC has been criticized for encouraging emotional display and discouraging analysis of its ideas or research into its effectiveness. Although its advocates refer to the theory of Re-evaluation Counseling, it has been said that RC derives from Harvey Jackins' counseling experience and that "there has been no independent attempt to verify or otherwise the key constructs of RC theory." There have been occasional papers about RC in scholarly journals. (See Further reading)
RC does not describe itself as psychotherapy and does not ally itself with any other self-help, counseling, or psychotherapy practice. RC opposes the use of psychiatric drugs and says that "mental illness does not exist." Its methods have been compared to those of Dianetics co-auditing, and John Heron
John Heron
John Heron is a pioneer in the creation of a participatory research method in the social sciences, called co-operative inquiry, which was based on his work in 1968-69 on the phenomenology of social encounter, and which has been applied by practitioners in many fields of professional and personal...
compared it with and distinguished it from primal therapy
Primal therapy
Primal therapy is a trauma-based psychotherapy created by Arthur Janov, who argues that neurosis is caused by the repressed pain of childhood trauma. Janov argues that repressed pain can be sequentially brought to conscious awareness and resolved through re-experiencing the incident and fully...
, Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry...
and Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
's early psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
when he made use of abreaction
Abreaction
Abreaction is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience in order to purge it of its emotional excesses; a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events....
. The editor of the Brunner-Routledge series of books on "Advancing Theory in Therapy" says that while Re-evalulation Counseling is not generally regarded as a psychotherapy, "it has made and continues to make an important contribution to our understanding of human beings and human situations."
RC considers that co-counseling does not imply psychopathology on the part of co-counselors or the need for professional treatment, and that there is a need for lay counselors because of the shortage of professionals. RC says that, for the average person, co-counseling can heal emotional hurts, increase rational thought and increase one's capacity for a joyful and positive life. It has been said that, unlike professional organizations, RC lacks standards for assessing the competence of counselors or any process for handling grievances.
RC's has ambitious social and environmental objectives, including, "The transformation of society to a rational, peaceful, non-exploitative, classless form world-wide. The preservation of all existing species of life and the re-creation of extinguished species. The preservation of wilderness areas and the creation of a completely benign environment over most of the earth, the oceans, and the atmosphere. The exploration of, and eventually becoming at home in, space."
Organization
The organization's official title is "The International Re-evaluation Counseling Communities". It is owned by Re-evaluation Counseling Community Resources, Inc., with headquarters in Seattle. Its President is Tim Jackins and its Vice President is Sarah Elizabeth Jackins. The corporation owns copyright in the terms "Re-evaluation Counseling", "RC" and "United to End Racism". It also controls the Re-evaluation Foundation, a non-profit 501(c) organization, and Rational Island Publishers.Within RC, Tim Jackins is called the "International Reference Person". He is a former mathematics teacher from Palo Alto, California, and a graduate of Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
and Stanford. He has been a co-counselor, leader and teacher of RC for most of his life. The International Reference Person appoints senior leaders, who appoint local leaders ("reference persons") in consultation with local groups. Reference persons decide who can attend events, teach RC, lead groups, and, to some extent, who may counsel together. They are not paid. RC considers that this form of centralized leadership is essential for uniformity of practice.
RC runs classes in co-counseling and local groups are set up by people experienced in the ideas and methods of RC who have been approved by the leaders. New members are invited to join "fundamentals" classes by existing members. They are expected to be well-functioning and emotionally healthy so that they can be effective counselors as well as being able to benefit from counseling. Fees are based on the participants' income and there are scholarships for people on low incomes. Twenty-five per cent of fees are sent to the central body in Seattle. Participants are asked not to use caffeine or alcohol and must abstain from mind-altering drugs so as to be attentive and to have access to their feelings. People who counsel together are prohibited from socializing with one another. It has been said that, in discussing clients' "distress patterns" in classes and workshops, RC violates the standard of confidentiality that is normally expected in counseling.
Classes and local communities are organized into regions and loose, country-wide affiliations, although RC does not organize on national lines. The RC journal Present Time lists 270 organized areas in 93 countries.
RC is committed to spreading RC practices and insights "as widely as possible in the general population". RC does not seek publicity and states that it keeps a "low profile". Local publicity has to be approved by the regional leader and national and international publicity by the leader of RC. RC does not list local local contact information on its website.
RC does not publish membership figures or comment on estimates. On one occasion, Jackins claimed that more than a million had attended RC "Fundamentals" classes. The April 2007 edition of the RC publication Present Time listed 243 RC groups (each with about 45 members) and 428 teachers in groups of about 10 people, making an active membership of about 15,000. Present Time has circulation of about 5,000.
RC tends not to co-operate with attempts at independent investigation and is sensitive to criticism, either external or internal, which it often regards as an attack on the organization. Jackins believed that much criticism was inspired by the US government, who feared RC's "profoundly progressive nature and its effectiveness". RC instructs members to "to quickly interrupt both attacks and gossip." It says that such attacks are "dramatizations of distress and are not acceptable behaviors within the RC Community. An attack is not an effective way to resolve disagreements or difficulties." "People who participate in an attack must first stop the attack and apologize for having participated in it. Only after they have done this should counseling resource be offered to them." Critics who persist "should be made to leave the group and their attacks ignored."
RC's system of unelected leadership and strict central control have been criticized by ex-members. John Heron, who was an RC leader and teacher, left the organization in 1974 to set up his own co-counseling organization, Co-Counselling International
Co-Counselling International
Co-Counselling International is an international peer network of co-counsellors .- History :...
. He said he did so because he realized that RC "systematically conditioned its members to associate a certain kind of beneficial human development with centralized authoritarian control of theory and community policy. It was clear to me that this was pseudo-liberation." He considered that the authoritarianism of RC derived partly from the Leninist doctrines of central control that Jackins had learned in the Communist Party of America and partly from the autocratic example of his former associate L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard , better known as L. Ron Hubbard , was an American pulp fiction author and religious leader who founded the Church of Scientology...
. RC has also been criticized for suppression of internal debate. In an article analysing RC's "attack theory" Steve Carr says that "To counter attacks on RC and its leaders, RC members are instructed to interrupt the person, approach the accusation as the personal problem of the accuser, and vigorously come to the defense of the person or people being attacked." Richard Childs describes how he was treated in this way and expelled from RC when he tried to discuss allegations of sexual abuse within the organisation.
Re-evaluation Counseling has been listed as a cult while some say that it is like a cult in some respects. The Study Group on Psychotherapy Cults, a organization of ex-members hostile to RC, described it as "cult-like". Denis Tourish and Pauline Irving in a 1994 article considered the characteristics that RC shared with psycho-therapeutic cults, namely, a charismatic leader, idealization of the leader, followers regarding their belief system as superior to others, followers joining the group at times of stress, the therapist becoming central to the follower's life, the group absorbing increasing time, illusions of superiority to other groups and the group becoming suspicious of other groups. They concluded: "Given its hostility to such pluralistic notions of participation and democracy, RC has the potential to become a fully fledged and harmful cult, despite its original humanistic aims." Re-Evaluation Counselling denies this.
Re-evaluation counseling encourages its members to play an active role in public life and has set up groups to promote its ideas, which it calls "naturalized" groups. The main groups promoting RC methods are United to End Racism
United to End Racism
United to End Racism is an ongoing program of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities , whose publicly stated aims are "dedicated to eliminating racism in the world" and "to illuminate the damage done to individuals by racism and to undo this damage on an individual basis, using the resources and...
" (UER), formed in 2000, and the National Coalition Building Institute
National coalition building institute
The National Coalition Building Institute is a nonprofit leadership training organization based in Washington, D.C.- Foundation and approach :...
, formed in 1984. UER is part of RC and shares its HQ in Seattle. It participated in the 2001 Durban
Durban
Durban is the largest city in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal and the third largest city in South Africa. It forms part of the eThekwini metropolitan municipality. Durban is famous for being the busiest port in South Africa. It is also seen as one of the major centres of tourism...
World Conference against Racism
World Conference against Racism
The World Conference against Racism are international events organised by the UNESCO to struggle against racism ideologies and behaviours. Four conferences have been held so far, in 1978, 1983, 2001 and 2009...
, the 2006 Caracas
Caracas
Caracas , officially Santiago de León de Caracas, is the capital and largest city of Venezuela; natives or residents are known as Caraquenians in English . It is located in the northern part of the country, following the contours of the narrow Caracas Valley on the Venezuelan coastal mountain range...
World Social Forum
World Social Forum
The World Social Forum is an annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Brazil, which offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization...
and the 2006 Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
World Peace Forum. The National Coalition Building Institute is formally independent of RC but is linked through its Founder-Executive Director, Cherie R. Brown, who is a member of RC and active in UER.
The Re-evaluation Foundation aims "To provide opportunities for people to participate in Re-evaluation counseling who otherwise could not afford to participate." Founded it 1972, it supports projects based on the theory and practice of Re-evaluation Counseling that apply "bold, thoughtful action to freeing human beings from the distresses associated with past hurtful, unjust experiences." Its president is Michael Markovits, a former vice-president of IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
. Its assets at the end of 2006 were $1,063,634. "The Foundation considers grant requests only from members of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities who are seeking financial assistance that will further the dissemination of the theory and practice of RC." In 2007, the foundation made grants totaling about $240,000 to several organizations controlled by Re-evaluation Counseling, including "People-of-Color Leadership Development, Global Initiatives, Young People Leadership Development/Family Counseling Work, Elimination of Racism, and Mental Health."
See also
- Co-Counseling
- Harvey JackinsHarvey JackinsCarl Harvey Jackins was the founder, leader and principal theorist of Re-evaluation Counseling .-Early life:Jackins was born in Northern Idaho on June 28, 1916....
- Tim JackinsTim JackinsTim Hugh Jackins is the International Reference Person of Re-evaluation Counseling , known officially as the "International Re-evaluation Counseling Communities". Formerly a math teacher and union negotiator at the Mission College, Santa Clara, California, he succeeded his father Harvey Jackins...
- List of psychotherapies
- List of counseling topics
- United to End RacismUnited to End RacismUnited to End Racism is an ongoing program of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities , whose publicly stated aims are "dedicated to eliminating racism in the world" and "to illuminate the damage done to individuals by racism and to undo this damage on an individual basis, using the resources and...
Further reading
- Edwards, D. J., "The effect on self-actualization of a personal growth programme based on co-counseling", South African Journal of Psychology, 1984, 14(2), 54-56.
- Evison, R. and Horobin, R., "Co-counseling", in Innovative therapy in Britain, Ed. by Rowan, J. and Dryden, W., Milton Keynes: Open University
- O'Hartigan, M.D., "Psychotherapy Conspiracy: Inside the Strange World of Re-evaluation Counseling," PDXSPDXSPDXS was a biweekly tabloid newspaper in Portland, Oregon from the early 1990s until the early 2000s. It was founded by Jim Redden, a reporter formerly with Willamette Week and subsequently with the Portland Tribune, and his brother Bill, a public defender...
, Portland, Oregon, August 28 and September 11, 1998] - Heron, J., "Re-evaluation Counseling", British Journal of Guidance and Counseling, 1972.
- Heron, J., "Re-evaluation counseling: Personal growth through mutual aid", British Journal of Guidance & Counseling, 1973, 1(2), 26-36
- Heron, J., Re-evaluation Counseling: A Theoretical Review, 1973, Guildford: HPRP, University of Surrey
- Jackins, H., Fundamentals of co-counseling manual, 1970, Seattle: Rational Island ISBN 1-58429-073-0
- Jackins, H., The human situation, 1973, Seattle: Rational Island ISBN 0-911214-04-6
- Rosen, R.D., Psychobabble, Avon Books, 1979 ISBN 0-380422-91-3
- Scheff, T.J., "Re-evaluation counseling: social implications", Journal of Humanistic Psychology, April 1972, vol.12, no.1, 58-71
- Somers, B.J., "Re-evaluation therapy: the theoretical framework", Journal of Humanistic Psychology, April 1972, vol.12, no.1, 42-57
- Somers, B. J., "The cocounseling class: People learning to exchange effective help with their distresses", Journal of Human Relations, 1972, 20(4), 475-490
- Wolf, R. B. and Hirsch, B. J., "Outcomes of parent education programs based on reevaluation counseling". Journal of Child and Family Studies, 2003, 12(1), 61-76
External links
- Re-evaluation Counseling
- Re-evaluation Counseling Resources Site Featuring critical analysis of the RC organization and its doctrines.
- National Coalition Building Institute. Founded by RC member Cherie Brown as an RC project.
- Re-evaluation Counseling Glossary