wild anemones near Umm el Fahm close to the fence between Israël and Palestine

24 of February till 4 of March 2007

A. Why did we go to Israel?
We got in touch with members of the DROR co-counselling community in Hungary in August last year. There were differences in our way of co-counselling and their way of doing it what gave rise to the idea of running a course for DROR members about our CCI- methods. Joke Stassen and Marlies Tjallingii wanted to run the course and Niek Sickinga and Sytse Tjallingii wanted to come to Israel as well. As DROR members did not have the funds to let people come over this was not possible. However in the discussion grew the idea of stimulating the “growing together process” where we could learn from each other on an equal base. From their commitment to Israel and Palestine came the idea to go on a discovery tour Then Sytse and Marlies decided to accept the offer to come to Israel to get to know the DROR community and they were invited to stay with DROR members in their houses.

                        Avi,                                                                 Janice                                 and                                 Philo

In this report we want to tell what we did in Israel. The report is meant as a help for the CCI-2007 in the Netherlands preparation gathering to be capable to decide whether to put conditions to invitation of DROR members to the CCI 2007 or not.

B. The objectives of our visit:
· Make a connection between two cultures of co-counselling, helping the “growing together” process.
· Get to know each other on a personal basis, building a personal bridge.
· Create safety between co-counselling cultures across the world.
· Prepare ourselves for differences and being capable to discuss differences.
· Discover the richness of differences
· Teach some of the CCI and Cornucopia techniques to DROR members
· We want to learn what DROR community does in relation to social work and peacebuiling.
Our attitude in this week was to go from judging to validating differences.

                                flowers of an almondtree

C. What did we do?
1.

25 of February: Evening Meeting in Jerusalem in Avi Butavia’s house with DROR members, teachers and other members who have assisted in courses and members who have done fundamentals (about 12 people). We did a mini-session (5 minutes each way). We had a sharing of all the members. Sytse and Marlies explained about CCN/CCI. Their was a special interest in our ongoing couples group we have in The Netherlands. We did a demonstration of slow/communication. We ended with a closing circle.

2.

26 of February: Sunday afternoon A 6 hour workshop in the prison of Ramla, This workshop was the last session of a twelve weeks course for prisoners. There were 11 prisoners and about the same amount of people who came from outside the prison. The people from outside the prison were partly DROR members partly people from the friends around DROR members who were interested to come to the prison. There was a short introduction done by Avi who run the twelve weeks with Janice as an assistant. After that there was an opening circle, where everybody participated. We had a session of one of the prisoners in the group, which impressed us very much. It had to with accepting feelings dealing with guilt and building self-respect. We had two mini sessions in pairs and we had sessions in smaller groups. The basic technique used was: one person has time and the others listen and give free attention. The people who were for the first time in a co-counselling setting did participate as well. There was sometimes a situation where people reacted on the person who had said something before. This was accepted. All directions were centred around `love´, ´recognition´ and ´security´.

3.

28 of February afternoon and evening: Sessions in Jerusalem We did two times sessions with 2 Dror people with feedback on the methods we all used as client and counsellors. From this we learnt that people start their individual sessions with Good and New. They use other terminology for the techniques which are similar to our techniques. They did not use the negotiation about contracts, what we are doing, as they suppose that the contract is clear. They ask when they give a direction (suggestion in Dutch) “Can I give a direction?”. This we don’t do in a normal contract session. Present time is the same as attention shift or in Dutch “terugkomer”. It was very opening and safe to do sessions in a smaller group and to discuss about the techniques we all used. We did 12 to 15 minutes sessions and had then 5 minutes feedback on the methods.

Marlies, Haddas and Janice at the home of Haddas before a session with feedback on the methods

4.

1 of March Evening Workshop in Tel Aviv. We ran a workshop for 27 participants in which we taught the following:
a. working with contracts:
1 free attention contract
2 normal contract
3 intensive contract
b. closing the session with questions which are part of the Cornucopia method
What was good in your session?
Which of your qualities made this possible?
c. pain to power technique (from Cornucopia).
d. a flap with the countries where there is an CCI-community
e. a flap with some different and common characteristics of CCI, Dror and Cornucopia as we understood
We made a series of flip-charts with the explanation of the techniques. Janice Wasser will translate these into Hebrew and spread them among the participants.

marlies prepares a flipchart with information about the contracts, talks in the pauze, the workshop with 27 participants with the flipcharts on the wall

5.

2 of March. Evening Workshop in Yafia near Nazareth. This was a meeting of Israeli Arabs (Christians and Muslim) and Israeli Jews. They meet once a month and use some co-counselling techniques to exchange in a safe way what they experience in every day life. This groups exists for over 30 year. The structure of the evening was very much the same as in the prison workshop. Here were also people present who did participate for the first time in a co-counsel event. The main purpose is to have a dialogue between people of different cultures, which is extremely necessary in Israel and Palestine. This is one of the very few long term dialogue groups which exists. Listening, Accepting and Expression of all insights and feelings are the main purposes.

6.

Individual talks with several people. As we stayed with Philo in his place in Jerusalem we had several talks with him. We had very intensive contact with Janice in the car and in her home with her family. We hade intensive contact with Avi and interesting exchange of views. We met in Hadas place and admired her pottery work. We stayed in Tel Aviv with Gina who is a co-counsellor as well.

7.

Reading: We learnt about the theory which Avi has written in his website and which he uses as a basis for the fundamentals. We understood that AVI’s theory is not not considered as representative of DROR community and that it is one of the co-counselling theories that we employ in the Dror co-counselling work. As such, it is not considered as compulsory or binding, but is used by the DROR teachers when, and as much as they see fit, together with theory from other sources. (see the website: http://www.avibutavia.co.il/images/treeENG.png The link between Intelligence and Emotions). He mentions 3 basic needs: love, security and recognition and 5 distresses when the needs are not met: loneliness, helplessness, shame, fear and lack of recognition. In his theory he describes ways of dealing with these distresses and possible interventions for each of them in a co-counselling session.

D. Conclusions
From the experience we made some conclusions and we want to give the CCI communities some advices in the growing together process.

1. Members of the DROR community do the co-counsel fundamentals in a mainly similar way we do. There is more that we have in common than what is different. We felt very safe to counsel with the people we met.

2. We learnt from DROR community members how they run social activities and peacebuilding, using the experience of the co-counsel members and using co-counsel techniques like free caring, supporting attention and time sharing. This has a very big potential for groups outside the co-counselling community.

3. We saw that DROR members use the theory which Avi Butavia uses in his fundamentals about the five basic distresses and possible interventions as a counsellor. This gives the co-counsellors a basic guide to how they can come to discharge and to re-built their lives. We see that people are very open to learn new methods which we taught in the workshop. They saw this as a welcome addition to what how they work.

4. Method-feedback sessions. We experimented with a new method of making sure that there is a time space immediately after a session for feedback on the techniques (not on the content) used in a validating way.
For example:
“This was good, because it stimulated me to ………..” and/or
“This was less helpful, what could have helped me was ………. “ and/or
“You surprised me with this suggestion / direction it helped me to ……………. “
This helps to open people up for differences and to make it more comfortable to hear from each other how we work together what works more and what works less!

(Advices to the organisation committee of the CCI 2007 in the Netherlands are available on your request).

E. Thanks
We are grateful for the resistance in the Dutch community in receiving members at the CCI 2007. As this resistance helped us, Sytse and Marlies to make the decision to go to Israel. This was a wonderful and very interesting experience in meeting DROR members and we learnt a lot about them and about ourselves.
We thank the DROR community for the hospitality we experienced. We thank them all for the fantastic programme they organised for us!!
We are very grateful especially to Janice Wasser who organised so perfectly our lodging with Philo, Gina and Mr Abuna, all the travelling to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, visits to Um el Fahem, the prison, our workshop in Tel Aviv and the meeting with the dialogue in Jaffia (near Nazareth) with Arab people. We also want to thank Philo for staying, discussing and eating with Philo. We appreciate very much the conversations we had with Avi, Haddas, Janice and Gina. We learned to know more than 30 Dror members and several prisoners and people of the Arab community in Jaffia. (Our visit to Ramallah and Kyryat Chaim were done for other purposes).

“Our greatest strength as a human race is our ability to acknowledge our differences, our greatest weakness is our failure to embrace them.”
Judith Henderson
Sytse and Marlies Tjallingii,
Zwolle the 5 of March 2007.

Decision of CCI Europe 2007 organisers formulated by Niek Sickenga for CCIWNS website (14-03) http://www.cciwns.com

Decision making in consensus
They confirmed in this meeting the principle, that participants only have access when they have done their CCI fundamentals in a satisfactory way according to and as they are taught by a CCI teacher. They decided in consensus to make an exception under conditions. The organisers may do specific invitations to members of the Dror community in Israel, who left Re-evaluation Counselling (RC) around 1999. The condition is that attending the CCI Europe meeting 2007 is part of a plan how to introduce the CCI-method further within the Dror-community, so that in the future accredited CCI co-counsellors from Israel can attend CCI meetings all over the world. Marlies Tjallingii (CCI trainer) and her husband, Sytse (CCI co-counsellor), who recently visited members of the Dror community in Israel, will be the personal link – and responsible as such – with those who will be invited. Sytse and Marlies reported last Saturday about their recent trip to Israel and parts of this report will be soon published by CCI World News.
Besides there is an earlier offer to Dror members of a special fundamental course just before the CCI-meeting 2007.

Final conclusion from Sytse: the process is going on and we will be careful to build more knowledge and trust in each others methods and willing to learn.