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Part Six: The history of Changes
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Part Six: The history of Changes
Kathy McGuire, History of Changes 1970- 2016
I am going to give here my version of the original Changes Listening/Focusing community in Chicago during the early 1970’s. I will also continue that history with my own lifelong career of spreading the Changes model. You can read my article outlining the model, " Changes: Peer Counseling Supportive Communities as a Model for Community Mental Health, " online at http: llwww. cefocusing. com! pdf/2F2qChangesPeerCounselingModelOfCommunity MentalHealthFinal. PDF
I can only give my own point of view, and I hope that the many others involved will write their own lived-experience of the early days when Changes was forming and when the articles in this, The Changes Book: A Handbook for Empathic Listening. Experiential Focusing and Therapeutic Community, were written, 1970-1978.
I will hope to encourage others to start their own Changes-like Listening/Focusing Support Groups, using my manual, Focusing in Community: How To Start A Listening/Focusing Support Group, available as a $5 computer download at my website for Creative Edge Focusing, www. cefocusing. com, in English and Spanish, in The Store.
Year One: Crisis Hotline, organizational struggles
I entered the University of Chicago as a doctoral student in the Department of Education in Fall of 1967. I transferred to the clinical psychology Ph. D. program in the Department of Behavioral Sciences in 1968.
I do not know the history of Eugene Gendlin there before I arrived, and I do not know if other people involved in the beginning of Changes, like Mary Hendricks and Linda Olsen and Jill Gardner and Kristin Glaser, started that year or had already been there for a year. Jill and Kristin were in the Human Development Department. The client-centered student counseling center, which Carl Rogers had founded and Gendlin and others were involved in, was on campus at that time.
Gendlin had gotten a Ph. D. in philosophy at the University of Chicago under Richard McKeon, but then he also came to work with Carl Rogers as a client-centered therapist, theorist, and researcher. Those two did extensive research in a psychiatric hospital in Wisconsin where a lot of the formative work on research in client-centered therapy and the Experiencing Scale (EXP Scale) was done. It is all summarized in a book edited by Rogers called The Therapeutic Relationship and Its Impact: A Study of Psychotherapy With Schizophrenics (University of Chicago Press, 1967). There are a lot of formative articles by Gendlin and others in this fat volume.
Mary Hendricks, Linda Olsen, and I were taking classes from Gendlin as an existential/phenomenological philosopher/psychologist and also from Israel Goldiamond, a specialist in behavior analysis and modification. We were also being intuitively involved in the rising feminist movement and the radical therapy movement. All of this worked together in defining who we were as women getting Ph. D. 's in psychology at the time. But that is another story.
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This was a time of great turmoil related especially to the Vietnam war protests and also eventually the murder of Martin Luther King and many other notables.
There was a sit-in at the administration building at the University of Chicago, protesting the Vietnam War, that some of us participated in. It got national attention. We marched in demonstrations on the streets of Chicago. Our male fellow students struggled with the threat of the military draft.
There was the Kent State massacre, where The National Guard shot and killed students protesting at that college against the Vietnam War, May 4, 1970.
It was in response to this that the first gathering of graduate students in Behavioral Sciences, including psychology and related fields, was called, perhaps by Mary Hendricks and some of these others. Gendlin was present kind of as a faculty advisor. I was not part of whatever led up to this meeting but only attended the meeting.
As I recall, at this first meeting, we were looking for some form of response to the Kent State massacre and decided that we would circulate petitions on the north side of Chicago in favor of the Hatfield /McGovern amendment to end the war in Vietnam. So, we did that.
After getting petitions signed, we decided we wanted a response to the way the Vietnam war was affecting our country that was more reflective of who we were as graduate students. I do not know whose idea this was, but it was Mary Hendricks, Jill Gardner, Kristin Glaser, Hillary?, and Gendlin who were most formative in these beginning stages as far as I recall. Linda Olsen and myself joined soon after. And eventually that is how the idea of Changes was hatched.
We decided we wanted to aim our response to helping people in our local area. We came up with the idea of a phone hotline which would help the people who were struggling with drug overdoses, suicidal thoughts, and whoever else might benefit from some volunteer psychological counseling by phone.
I have no idea who actually got us the office and the phone lines in the upstairs of the church where we eventually had our meetings (and which church was it that housed us? I remember the name of the coffee shop, The Blue Gargoyle). I don't know how Bob Whitney got involved, but I think he was maybe studying divinity through that church.
At some point, someone got us involved as one of the hotlines covered by a grant from the Playboy foundation, of all places, to help pay for these phone lines. And at one point we even had a paid staff coordinator, while the rest of us volunteered to man the crisis line. Unfortunately, as money can lead to problems in organizations, I think this paid staffer might have eventually absconded with the money. You can read about this in the draft history of the first year by K. G. which follows my history.
The core group of planners had a lot of meetings where we tried to sort out who we were and what we were really doing. One of the strands of a kind of wrangling was between being more organic versus being more structured. I don't even remember exactly what this meant but we wrangled about it. But K. G. 's paper to follow outlines a year of such wrangling.
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