The Facilitator

A person helping another person with the process of viewing is called a "facilitator". We avoid the term, "therapist", both because of our dislike of the medical model and because that term implies that something is done by one person to another, which is not the case in viewing. We also avoid the term "counselor", because the facilitator does not counsel the viewer about what to do in life. He merely assists the viewer to view his world and thereby to alleviate the charge and aberration contained therein. We use the term "viewer" instead of "patient" or "client" because "patient" has the same disadvantages as "therapist" and "client" emphasizes the financially contractual nature of the relationship instead of the functional one.

No one (unless, perhaps, he is a telepath) has direct access to another being's world. Therefore, the facilitator can only find out about what the viewer is viewing via the viewer's communications. Nor can the facilitator change anything in the viewer's private world except via the viewer. The facilitator can merely help, or facilitate the process of insight and charge reduction. To make, perhaps, an ungracious analogy, the facilitator is like an expert car mechanic talking to the owner of a car over the phone and helping him fix it. The mechanic, like the facilitator, must get the car owner to describe to him what the car looks like, perhaps what it sounds and feels like, what the various instruments show, and how the car behaves when the owner does certain things. Perhaps he gets the owner to rev the engine or pull out the choke and describe what happens. The mechanic can suggest various actions, like "Open the hood and look inside.", to help the owner get a better view. Finally, from the owner's description of what he sees, the mechanic can decide what's wrong and can then describe the various tools needed and where they can be found, and walk the owner through the steps necessary to repair the car, all the way along having the owner report on what's happening.

Similarly, the facilitator gets the viewer to do various things to appraise the situation and figure out where the problem areas are. He then walks the viewer through various procedures to correct the problem. The viewer does the procedures, not the facilitator, though he does report frequently on how things are going, and the facilitator gives him each step to do in turn.

Some might object to this rather mechanistic-sounding description of viewing, on the grounds that it is anti-humanistic. There is somewhat of a bias, amongst humanistically-inclined individuals in the helping professions, against "using techniques on a person". This distrust of technique is, I feel, based on the idea that the person to whom the techniques are being applied is thereby being manipulated, dehumanized, and treated like an object. I share this distrust of technique. However, there are conditions under which it is acceptable to use techniques to help someone.

First of all, a being can in no way be considered to be a machine, and any methodology that attempts to deal with a person as though he were a machine is doomed to failure, since:

A person is not a machine, so the technique is based a lie.
A person resents terribly being thought of as an object, because he knows he is a living, perceiving, acting being, so he will resist manipulations predicated on such an idea.

One might be able to produce behavioral changes using various manipulations, or even using resistance to manipulations, but any changes so produced may be of more benefit to the surrounding society than to the individual himself. A person may, in other words, manifest correct social behavior but feel miserable or frustrated. Many, perhaps most, people need to work very hard on coming out of their social machinery and overcoming their social conditioning or programming, and on becoming aware of their thoughts and feelings and in control of their actions and their lives. The last thing they need is to have another layer of conditioning and machinery plastered on top of what they already have, and they will resist any effort to do so. People need to be de-conditioned, not conditioned. So we hold no brief for mechanistic theories of human nature.

However, just because the being is not a mechanism doesn't mean that he can't be surrounded by an environment that operates by certain mechanical laws. The mind is not the being, nor is it inside the being; it is part of the being's environment. It does not detract from the power and causativeness of a being to say that the physical universe that surrounds him can be understood in terms of various mechanical laws. On the contrary, a knowledge of these laws helps him gain mastery over his world. In the same way, a being is not his disabilities; his disabilities are part of his environment. His disabilities operate by definite principles. A knowledge of the nature of his disabilities and their causes adds to, rather than detracting from, his ability to control his environment. It does not dignify the being to consider his disabilities to be part of him, nor to disregard the principles by which they operate and refuse to help the being to use the methods that will handle them.

When a person has handled a fair amount of emotional charge and has been well-trained in the methodology, he can actually become his own facilitator. Up to that point, however, he needs another person to get him through the process. The reason why the facilitator is needed initially is that the pain and avoidance connected with the material he is viewing distracts a viewer's attention and may throw him off the task of viewing. The action of viewing runs directly counter to that of repression. In such an encounter with the repressive forces, the unassisted viewer who is not in excellent shape will almost certainly be the loser, and instead of being successful in viewing something and gaining insight, the being will most likely just add further delusion and repression on top of what is already there. The presence of the facilitator is crucial to the process of viewing, because the facilitator does not (generally) find the material presented by the viewer to be painful or distracting and so can remain undisturbed and undistracted, and can keep the viewing process on the right track or return it to the right track when it's derailed by some distraction or other.

If the viewer starts viewing something and the process is interrupted part-way through, the facilitator has created another incomplete receptive process (an incomplete learning process ¹), i.e. another repression on top of what is already repressed, because the viewer is unlikely to carry on the process on his own. So the facilitator is responsible for seeing to it that each action of viewing is carried out to a satisfactory conclusion.

Because the viewing session is begun and ended crisply, the viewer can have other relationships with the facilitator when he isn't being a facilitator. The role of the facilitator and that of the viewer are quite definite, and the viewing session is sharply compartmentalized from the rest of life. The agreement between viewer and facilitator is that for the duration of the session, the viewer is being a viewer and the facilitator is being a facilitator; other relationships are suspended. There is no use of transference or counter-transference in viewing, so there is no need to protect a "neutral image" outside of the session. Two people can do a session and then go out to a movie together, or they can reverse roles and the former viewer can become a facilitator and the former facilitator become a viewer. This means that the conditions under which viewing can be done are much more flexible than those that appear to be needed for many helping technologies. It is possible for a person, with the appropriate training, to do viewing quite successfully with friends and relatives. The only caveat is that people who are very intimate with each other, such as close family members or significant others, may find it difficult to do viewing together. The reason is that they can be quite restimulative to each other, because, having spent a lot of time together, they may share a great many traumatic past incidents in common. So when the viewer describes one of these incidents, that can cause the facilitator to be affected by the same incident, and the facilitator can get upset or distracted and lose track of what's going on, at which point viewing ceases to occur.

Viewing techniques have the additional advantage of being quite discrete, well-defined, and easy to learn. So it is possible to learn to be a facilitator without an exceptionally long training period. Long training periods are only needed when a discipline has not graduated to the stage of being clear, concise, and definite in its actions, but remains an "art" that is quite difficult to master. In a few weeks, a person can become quite effective as a facilitator, well-versed in some of the simpler (but still effective) techniques. Of course, it is possible to spend months training and interning and thereby to become skilled in the more advanced techniques. And, of course, having years of experience in the subject enables the facilitator to refine his skill considerably. But excellent results can be obtained without extensive training. In a world where there is a lot of pain, aberration, and unawareness to overcome, this is a great advantage.

The economics of the world situation demand that there be a relatively inexpensive and readily available method of raising awareness and handling aberration. The various ills to which the world is prone can ultimately only be solved by handling individual aberration on a broad scale. Unawareness and aberration are not a group or national matter; they are an individual matter. It is the individual, not the state, that must look into his own world and repair its deficiencies. Therefore a methodology that is widely accessible to individuals is much needed. It is towards that end that we are striving.

Frank A. Gerbode, M.D.
Director, IRM

¹ See JOM Article 5 "Pain and Repression" for more data on the various forms of repression, as related to the various steps of a receptive process.

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