Is Kline's Thinking Environment simply Reevaluation Counselling re-packaged?

 I was re-connecting with an old colleague recently and he was interested in my enthusiasm for Nancy Kline's work (which regular readers of my posts will be familiar with, of course; you will find a list of my posts on the topic, with links, here.)

He then commented that Nancy's Thinking Environment (hereafter TE) was essentially Reevaluation Counselling (hereafter RC) re-packaged (and very skilfully, he added). So I went away, did some reading and reflecting, and recalled conversations with Nancy that had faded from the forefront of my memory; and I conclude that he was mistaken.

So this post is to clarify the distinctions, as I understand them, between the two approaches.  I am not an expert in RC, though, so I welcome any corrections or clarifications from anyone with more knowledge and experience. 

RC is, as its name suggests, an approach to Counselling. It assumes that our natural gifts, abilities and energies are often blocked by experiences of distress and trauma in our past, and offers a way of working to enable and encourage the appropriate expression of that distress, in order to free us from it. The ways of working, to enable that, are in many aspects similar to the TE approach: listening with interest and respect, not interrupting, creating space for everyone to contribute and sharing time fairly (eg via rounds). And Nancy Kline was certainly an active member of the RC community for a time (see for example, this article extracted from an 1985 speech).

However, I think there are differences and I think that they are significant. The first difference is in purpose. RC is clearly a counselling approach, seeking to help people overcome past distress. But TE is a different type of thing: it may be useful in counselling, or in coaching, or in team development, or in conflict resolution.  It is a methodology that focuses on helping people to think for themselves and as themselves, in the presence of one or more other people. Specifically, it
focuses on what we can do (and ultimately, be) to create an environment that enables that.

I remember Nancy talking to me about the RC world, and thinking it was limited as it seemed to focus on an emotional catharsis as both necessary and sufficient. Nancy's view (and indeed mine) is that it may sometimes be necessary and may sometimes be sufficient; but that neither is necessarily the case.

So TE allows for that - the component of Feeling is explicitly about that. But in Nancy's understanding, unexpressed or unprocessed emotions are only one of the potential blockers to good thinking. Others include inaccurate or incomplete information, or denial of information that is available: hence the component of Thinking as one of the ten components. And perhaps the most intriguing blocker is untrue assumptions, where Nancy's distinctive contribution is the formulation of the Incisive Question, and its inclusion as one of the ten components. 

And sitting behind all of that, is the assumption that the thinker's brain normally knows where it needs to go to address whatever it wants to think about; so creating and holding the space for that, and continuing to encourage each thinker to go further and further with his or her thinking is the primary focus of the work, on a one to one basis; and in group work, to encourage all members of the group both to contribute their own independent thinking and also to pay attention, with genuine interest, to the thinking of all other members of the group - particularly where it differs from their own.

As I mentioned, I am no expert on RC so if you think that I have misunderstood or misrepresented it, or if there are more commonalities than I think with TE, I'd be very interested to hear from you.  What do you think?