encouraged and supported to counsel through these feelings, often leading to profound changes in their perspectives and abilities around closeness. For the most part, co-counselling relationships become life-long, therapeutic partnerships that enable the participant to have healthier relationships in general. Therapeutic context Many co-counsellors take the view, often quite strongly, that co-counselling is not psychotherapy. In the beginning, this was because Re-evaluation Counseling decided not to draw on any discipline of psychotherapy for its theory and practice, although RC did incorporate some ideas from psycho-analysis such as "unconscious promptings" which Jackins adapted and relabeled "restimulation". A similar view is taken by some non-RC co-counsellors who regard psychotherapy as involving specialist techniques used by a therapist on a client and is therefore not peer and the client has little or no control over the process. Others consider that co-counselling is psychotherapeutic, in that it enables change or therapy to take place in the psyche, soul affect or being of an individual. Co-counselling takes a positive view of the person (i.e. we are all essentially good), considers the mind and body as an integrated whole and acknowledges the value of catharsis; it is regarded as an approach within humanistic psychology, a view that would be rejected by some within RC. Re-evaluation Counseling The core organization structure of RC consists of classes and local communities set up by experienced co-counsellors, which are in turn organized by regions and country. The term "re-evaluation" refers to the client's need to rethink their past distress experiences after the emotional hurt in those experiences have been discharged, and thereby regain ("re-emerge" with) their natural intellectual and emotional capacities. The RC organization and literature do not accept the description of its practice as psychotherapy, maintaining instead that the process of developing distress patterns that dissolve through emotional discharge in the context of appreciative attention is simply a natural process that does not imply either psychopathology on the part of the individual or the need for professional treatment. Re-evaluation Counseling regards other forms of "mainstream counselling" and psychotherapy in general as frequently inadequate attempts to bring about relief from distress using methods that do not focus on discharge and re-emergence. In RC, the client and counsellor are expected to work co-operatively, participants are expected to provide non-judgmental active listening and to "contradict" the misinformation or other conditions thought to be associated with distress patterns. RC also engages techniques such