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Year Two and beyond: peer counseling community
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But Gendlin, who was not fond of decision-making meetings even then, perhaps because of his experience in the counseling center run by Carl Rogers, and then in the large research project in Wisconsin, kept making the very important point that " we should be doing Listening and Focusing rather than spending our time talking about doing it. " This really was his mantra which I do think kept us on track and got us into having these weekly peer counseling community gatherings at the church. We were meant to be doing Listening and Focusing and never to lose touch with that activity being our priority. But it took us that first year of wrangling to get to this point!
Gendlin had seen too many good ideas get swallowed up in contentious decision-making meetings. After a full year of long meetings with much wrangling and disagreement about issues like “hierarchy” and “money” and “structure” vs. “organic growth”, and many interesting experiences as we tried to incorporate ex-convicts and schizophrenics and all kinds of people in crisis into our group, Eugene Gendlin finally won his argument that we stop talking about doing something and just start doing what we cared about. He insisted that “decision-making” happen at a different time and place, and the group time be used to actually do community mental health.
We had early on realized we did not just want to offer phone counseling but to invite people to become part of our supportive community. We were influenced by people like psychiatrist R. D. Laing in Scotland who was starting therapeutic communities where schizophrenics and regular people lived together on the assumption that everyone was really OK.
We had also realized that we graduate students, " the helpers", where as much in need of support as the so-called " helpees. " So, we started a peer counseling community where everyone learned the Listening and Focusing skills, and everyone exchanged turns as equals.
After that year of wrangling and frustrating long “planning” meetings, we came up with a model where any decision-making meetings were held an hour before the actual peer counseling meeting started. Those who wanted to attend that decision-making could and their decisions would hold. If anyone didn't like their decisions, they could come to the next decision-making meeting and state their opinion.
K. G. 's history draft which follows tells of the first year before Gendlin offered training and we started teaching Listening/Focusing at our Sunday night meetings. Jean Rickert's short history at the end tells of this important transition from being a hotline to being our own peer counseling community and asking everyone to join us.
Eugene Gendlin offered the first 10-week training course in Listening and Focusing at the church. And I guess he already had quite a reputation, because around 60 people came. That became the core of the first Changes Listening/Focusing community.
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It was also important to Gendlin that " everyone did not have to do the same thing or agree to do the same thing. " So, at the weekly meeting, there might be a presentation by Gendlin, the initial 10-week training class, for instance, but there eventually were presentations by lots of other people. But no-one had to attend the presentation. They always had the option to just find someone and go off and start having a Listening/ Focusing turn right away. Or there might be several different presentations or interest groups in various rooms. You can see how this basic tenet for Gendlin carried out when he started his own The Focusing Institute (www. focusing. org) with a guarantee of diversity of training programs.
For me, personally, the decision-making meetings themselves, one hour before the peer counseling community meeting, were fascinating. We used our growing Listening and Focusing skills to try to come to decisions that were not just a compromise but a brand-new solution which arose as we listened to each other and spoke from our felt sensing. I ended up doing my dissertation with Gendlin on this very thing, how can you incorporate Listening and not interrupting into decision-making groups in such a way that the participants can speak from their felt experiencing, instead of arguing, and see a brand-new solution arise (see my paper, " Listening and Interruptions in Task-Oriented Groups, "
http: //www. cefocusing. com/pdf/2f2e _Relationship_ of_Client. pdf)
So, Gendlin was offering the I0-week training class at the church with 60 to 100 people in attendance, and maybe the hotline crisis line was going on upstairs in an office staffed by us graduate students as volunteers, and a core community of at least 20 but sometimes up to 60 people was developing. And this community was expressing itself in a number of different ways.
We were involved in some action in the community. One story is of Mary Hendricks seeing someone being shuffled into a police car and actually stopping and offering instead to get that person a more appropriate kind of mental health care (which meant at that time coming to crash with Changes members until they could link her up with appropriate social services help).
I left for at least six months or more to follow a boyfriend to Oklahoma and Texas. So, I missed some of the development that first year.
We had incorporated as I said a number of so-called schizophrenics etc. into our community. On the one hand, in some amazing cases, we found that, when in the role of Listener, these people, otherwise seen as not completely “normal” by society, could set aside everything just like anyone else and really be there as a Listener. We learned a lot about everybody's unique world from opening ourselves to whoever wanted to belong and assuming that we were all equals in terms of our need for helping and getting help.
But also, out of this, we developed the method of forming “teams” (Glaser, K., " Suggestions for Working with Heavy Strangers and Friends, " in Part Five of this book) around people who needed a lot of support, for instance someone who was suicidal or having delusions or fighting off temptation to addiction, etc. Per usual, as we realized that we “helpers” were also “helpees”, people started asking for teams around other things for ourselves. Gendlin had a team to help him get his work out, and I had a team to help me find a husband. We had a support group for all of us trying to get our dissertations done, etc. There was a thriving Women's Group which eventually split into two, and eventually a Men's Group.
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Since many of us were doing Ph. D. 's, there was a strong research component, everyone doing our research on some aspect of Listening and/or Focusing with Gendlin as our advisor. Jim Iberg, who was in the business school, did research on Focusing as a way of centering people before they went to job interviews. Elfie Hinterkopf and Les Brunswick went out to a local state hospital and taught Listening and Focusing to psychiatric patients and did research on that. I was doing my research on Listening in decision-making groups. Mary Hendricks was developing a version of Klein and Mathieu's “Experiencing Scale” to be used in analyzing low to high experiencing in dreams. Linda Olsen and Gendlin worked together on a model for including Focusing imagery work in psychotherapy. And many more.
And there were other people allying with us, who had discovered Gendlin and his work on their own, like Nonn Don doing research on Focusing and brainwave changes, and Ferdinand van der Veen, who became a central driving force behind this The Changes Book.
Then there was a community of people who might have initially found us through crisis but went on to become central to our community. So, they were not graduate students at the time at least. And some of them actually were the drug addicts or ex-cons or schizophrenics that we had initially meant to reach out to and include in our peer counseling community. And others were just everyday people who came to us through the crisis center advertising and became fascinated with Listening and Focusing in community. And I would list their names, but it feels like almost a violation of their privacy since they were not really graduate students or authors in this book, so I will not do that.
But some of these combined with us graduate students to build a wider supportive community consistent with the visions of the time. Some of us shared communal housing. We had communal meals. We shared resources like a vacuum or a car or a photography studio. We were involved in a food co-op. A group of us drove to visit Walden Two, a self-sustaining commune based upon the principles of positive reinforcement outlined in B. F. Skinner's novel, Walden Two (1948; MacMillan, 1976).
And, also consistent with the times, we were involved in a lot of different kinds of intimate and sexual and love partnership relationships. Given the free love and open relationship tenets of the 1970s, you can imagine that there was quite a lot of potential for conflict.
However, we applied our same Listening and Focusing skills when conflict arose. I have written a chapter in my manual for starting Listening/Focusing groups on how to use the skills to resolve conflict (see “Interpersonal Processing” in Focusing in Community: How To Start A Listening/Focusing Support Group, my manual available in English and Spanish, and in a $5 computer download version, in The Store at www. cefocusing. com).
To me, as with decision-making meetings, it was beautiful and sacred to see the way in which owning and Focusing upon one's own reactivity, and really trying to Listen to the other person's point of view, could lead to deeper sharing. People actually became closer through conflict resolution. It was really pretty amazing how much conflict we worked through and how, at least at that point, conflict did not tear our community apart. From my point of view, it was only when people refused to engage in Listening/Focusing conflict resolution that schisms arose and the Changes movement and Gendlin's separate Focusing Institute took differing paths.
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At some point, Mary Hendricks started the first purely Focusing group. A bunch of us went off to a quiet chapel, lay down and closed our eyes, and Mary guided us through the Focusing process. And then she Listened to us on our experience. So, this was not a peer counseling model for exchanging Listening/Focusing turns but a new model more emphasizing Focusing on its own. Mary's paper on how to run a Focusing Group is in Part Three of this book.
A number of people became involved in the more eastern spirituality of Vasavada, who was a Jungian analyst as well as something like a Zen Master. Out of this interest in Jung and dream analysis, Mary Hendricks also started a Focusing and dreams group. This interest of many of us, including Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, in dream work and Jungian psychology eventually led to Gendlin's book Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams (IL, Chiron, 1986).
A lot of us became involved in re-evaluation co-counseling. And Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of nonviolent communication (NVC), was a frequent presenter at our Changes meetings. Rosenberg had been one of the therapists in the huge research project done by Rogers and Gendlin and others when he was a graduate student in Wisconsin, and so he and Gendlin had met. Reuven Gold taught us about Gestalt. We were exposed to yoga, meditation, massage, rolfing, reiki, primal therapy, whatever was out there.
But it was always important that we held the line at one hour for a presentation and then everyone splitting up into peer counseling Listening/Focusing turns as pairs or triads or small groups. We were there for the primary purpose of Listening and Focusing and were not to be coopted by someone who said, " Oh let's be a Gestalt group instead. "
Ann Weiser Cornell entered Changes in 1972, and became one of the foremost teachers, developing her Inner Relationship Focusing model. She will have to tell that story. Her article in this The Changes Book is about common problems in a beginning Listening group.
Gendlin used our early Listening/Focusing exchanges to do phenomenological research, figuring out what we were doing when we were Focusing by watching us and also asking us what we were doing inside. So, in this way, I at least came to feel like we had some ownership in the specification and development of Listening and Focusing skills as they were defined in those Changes years.
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