The general issue is counselling with intimates: friends, lovers, partners, colleagues. This involve several factors:
* Mutual restimulation, i.e. the better you know someone, the more potential exists for upsets around mutual patterns. This means it's harder to stay in the counsellor role, and harder to feel safe as client.
* Mutual collusion, i.e certain areas of distress are never noticed or are avoided; this is usually done unawarely, but very restrictive of growth for both.
* Despite the two dangers above, your intimates are the people with most to gain from you getting rid of Distress, so if two people are committed to each other's growth, they can be powerful allies for each other. A useful guideline is to start working together in terms of Attention Switching (News & Goods at teatime!) and appreciations (before and after joint tasks?). When both partners have a reasonable mastery of techniques, they can then have sessions on events involving others and not each other.
Now consider attractions between people who first meet as co-counsellors. It is normal to appreciate and love your counsellors. This can be a mindblowing experience initially, and it can be hard to remember that some of the delights arise because of the mutual contract, and are likely to be hard to sustain if you saw more of each other. It is also generally true that sexuality is one of the most distressed areas in our culture, and many patterns express themselves disguised as sexual attraction.
The general approach of co-counselling is not that the co-counselling community becomes the living group, but that it is used to enable people to go out and remake the lives they are leading outside the group. Thus if you are short of friends, an excellent co-counsellor will help you break the patterns that stop you making lots of friends.
If you try to turn your co-counsellor into a friend then, at most, you gain one friend, and maybe not even that. Experience suggests that attractions to people you first met as co-counsellors should be viewed as opportunities to counsel in the area. It may be you really have met the love of your life; usually you have not, it is distress running you. If the attraction is undistressed, you can only benefit from counselling on it. In Re-Evaluation Counseling communities there is a firm rule that no social events are organized, and people who insist on taking up social or sexual relationships may well be excluded.
Within CCI there is much less clarity, and in our opinion that is to the detriment of the communities. We would personally follow the guideline of not having organization of purely social events by a co-counselling community. People who think a co-counselling community needs social events to hold it together have not experienced the full power of co-counselling. However, we would not want to exclude people on the grounds of their personal choice to socialize but would try to alert people to the issues in this area and help them be aware of choices they are making.
How do you deal with a client who starts declaring their love in a way which expects return? There are several suggestions. Get them to check who you remind them of. Get them to be concrete and literal about what they want to do about it. Push them for the details. Try, "And then what?" And of course make the usual co-ounselling suggestions to intensify any Distress and push for Discharge. If your own distress prevents you from continuing usefully as counsellor, then acknowledge this, and find yourself another partner to have a go at your own patterns in the sexual area.
None of this is to suggest you should give up friends you knew before co-counselling. In the short term they may not be your best co-counsellors, but in the longer term they may be excellent.
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