Humans innately possess vast powers of intelligence, meaning the ability to respond to each new situation, not with instinct or habit, but with a new, unique action adapted and tailored to that situation.

As children, we possess and use this intelligence with great glee, but we are only able to do so when secure in our connection with our family. That connection breaks very easily when we are children. We make a lot of mistakes. We get hurt. A lot. And it breaks our fragile connection, our sense of security, and while we are in that state, we can no longer function intelligently. But, we instinctively know how to heal from the hurts we experience. Then, we can regain the connection to and safety in our family, and with it, our intelligence. This healing work takes the form of some sort of physical/emotional release (crying, shaking, tantruming, talking, laughing, and even yawning) while within the loving and totally accepting presence of a care-giver (most likely mom or dad). With the healing work done, the child can integrate the experience as wisdom and return to playing intelligently with zestful and genuine enthusiasm, just as before whatever hurt it was occurred.

The problems arise when that healing process is interrupted or disallowed by the care-giver. When children are told to stop crying, to stop tantruming, in short, to behave, and are then often forced into some form of isolation as punishment for not complying (time-out, going to your room), they cannot restore their broken connection and cannot begin acting intelligently again. The vastness of the child's intelligence is reduced in some small measure as the hurt emotions remain unresolved and in essence jam up some portion of their intelligence. It then becomes a positive feedback loop as any future event that is similar in some way to a past, unhealed hurt will trigger the same response. And so, instead of being able to respond to that new situation uniquely (intelligently), we become more like robots that perform a particular habit when a button is pushed, enslaved to unresolved emotions. And all the little unresolved hurts accumulate, tying up more and more of the child's vast innate intelligence, and he or she grows into the all-too-common adult who is completely ruled by habit and burdened by a childhood's worth of emotional baggage.

This is my paraphrasing of the basic theory behind Re-evaluation counseling, otherwise known as Co-counseling. So, the whole deal of co-counseling is to spend the time to work through and discharge those old jammed up emotions, with the loving, accepting presence of a counseling peer as a stand-in for the connection you needed with mom and pop. Peers take turns as client and counselor, sharing equal time, making this a largely non-hierarchical, low/no-cost form of mental health care.

Certainly, there's a lot of potential in that kind of work, but of more pressing interest to me is the ramifications it has for how we as physically mature, but emotionally wounded, adults tend to those who are children right now. When caretakers of this culture interfere with the healing process in children, it is most often because the adults' buttons are being pushed - their past unresolved hurts are triggered by the crying they were not allowed to do. But with an understanding of the healing process, it becomes possible to look beyond the push button responses and sit with and listen to your child's grief, and allow them to heal themselves.

I think it becomes possible to do that because this theory is a myth, a story we can tell to make sense of these situations where two-year-olds are behaving terribly for seemingly no good reason. We need a story like this to guide us towards the right action because "babies don't come with instruction manuals", at least not in our fragmented culture, and a theory like this begins to restore that kind of very necessary instruction manual that is woven seamlessly into a healthy culture.


I've only poked around the website I linked to above a little, but it seems pretty extensive. I've read The Human Side of Human Beings, by Harvey Jackins, which is a short but thorough introduction to these ideas. I'm participating in a co-counseling group while I'm still here in st. louis. The facilitator says there's a thriving co-counseling community in portland, but I think I'll be pretty well immersed in other things while I'm there.