We have known for some time the importance of the button Help. It is first and foremost amongst the key buttons of Scientology. Thoroughly clearing Help alone, and on back track terminals, has made clears.
In an essay published on the otherwise unpublished Students’ Manual, I stressed the fact that unless the preclear and the auditor had Help straightened out they were not not likely to make very much progress. Help is the key button which admits auditing. The remaining buttons of Control, Communication and Interest, give us a session. But we cannot even start presessioning with any other button than Help.
Since the winter of 1957/58 when this was used in an American ACC I have been working with this trying to get a better understanding of it for you.
It now appears that Help is the make-break point between sanity and insanity. That a person cannot accept help along some minor line does not mean that he is insane, but it certainly means he has some neurotic traits.
The inference level of this condition of aberration on the subject of Help would be a fear of dependency. This means that Help has already gone wrong with the person. We see in children occasionally an enormous striving to be self-reliant. We ordinarily applaud this but if we inspect the child carefully we will find that resistance to being helped goes along with an obsession to help. Parents themselves, disbelieving that the child can help them, usually inhibit the child’s help and thus worsen the condition. I have seen one child go downhill to “normal” by reason of a thwarting of help by the parents. But no matter how fondly the psychologist used to believe in the nineteenth century that childhood was a good pattern to use for estimating future social conduct, we in Scientology know that the child has already become aberrated on the subject before it is manifested in this light.
My examinations have now led me to the conclusion that a person has a make-break point of sanity on any given subject. This point is help. On the tone scale it would compare at 2.0 for any dynamic. The whole index of a personality could be adjudicated by an examination of the person’s reactions to various types of help. Above this point a person can help, and can be helped, providing, of course, the help is sincere, and really is help. Below this point help becomes betrayal.
Help is always betrayal to a thoroughly aberrated person. This explains a great deal to us when we understand it. The first example that comes readily to notice is the reaction of a very low scale pc undergoing auditing. He invariably thinks, and may even sometimes tell the auditor, that the auditor has not helped him but betrayed him.
All auditing protests except those against flagrant breaches of code denote a breakdown of the help button in the auditing session. While it does no good to run Help on a preclear and continue while running it to repeat flagrant code breaks, it does do a great deal of good to clarify the whole subject of help if a session seems to be full of ARC breaks, no matter what the auditor tries to do to patch them up.
It is unfortunately true that help can be as wrong with the auditor as it can be with the preclear where we have uncleared people doing auditing. However, it has been my experience that even while some of their efforts were completely knuckleheaded, practically no auditors exist who are not sincerely trying to help the preclear. The trouble comes about when the preclear clips the effort of the auditor into the category of betrayal. This makes the auditor react against the preclear, and the situation deteriorates.
We have, in the immediate past of this civilization, the deterioration of several of the practices which began as a sincere effort to help and which are not now classifiable as anything better than betrayal. Psychiatry and medicine are both good examples of this. The person who goes to a psychiatrist usually finds himself betrayed. He does not receive help, he receives brutality in the form of electric shocks, brain surgery and other degrading experiences. Even in the highest form of psychiatry it was common advice for the psychiatrist to tell the wife that the best cure for her troubles was to betray her husband, and vice versa.
The psychiatrist was caught in this help-betrayal deterioration. Psychiatry had so long attempted to help the insane without success that at last they began to Q and A with their patients. Of course, to an insane patient help is always betrayal. Medicine is now going a similar course unwittingly, and has lost most of its public repute through not having stayed on a research line that would bring medicine upscale, but continued with a line of application which considered man a body and would not consider him anything else. Considering a person to be a “hunk of meat” is a sort of a betrayal in itself. Naturally one betrays a thetan when he regards the thetan as a piece of meat.
World War Two pretty well saw the end of the last dregs of sincere help in psychiatry, most governments involved in the war employed psychiatry, it now turns out, for political purposes. They were set a very good example by one, Hitler. Thus the last embers of sincere help in psychiatry were more or less extinguished. Nothing like this would happen in Scientology because we are dealing with basic truths rather than basic ambitions. Where ambition becomes greater than truth any sphere of activity goes to pieces. Indeed, in the final analysis that is the fundamental deterioration of the track.
Another excellent example is found in the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya. The terrorists killed only twenty whites as compared to thousands of natives, but the whites they chose to kill were only those who had sought to help them. The Kikuyu was evidently completely certain that anyone seeking to help him was only betraying him. Their reaction, then, in killing their best friends becomes more understandable. The action remains insane, but in their frame of reference it was entirely comprehensible. Any time we go about the task of handling large bodies of insane people or illiterate and fearful native populaces, we would do well to keep in mind the importance of this help button, realizing that to these help is totally betrayal. The thing to betray is this help-betrayal identification, not the people.
If you sort this out and find your own examples and see whether or not it holds true for you, I think you have a small gasp of relief coming to you. No Scientologist has been without a preclear who has not become absolutely certain somewhere in the course of auditing that the entire goal of the auditor was to betray. This left one hanging with an unsolved riddle. Our own sincerity was beyond question. How to be misinterpreted this wildly was so incomprehensible that we often assigned the reasons to ourselves. Perhaps some of these reasons did lie with ourselves. Nevertheless, in the final analysis the only thing we did wrong was not to clear the Help button with the preclear.
There are many ways to clear the Help button. As this is the first step on presessioning, it may be that the button has to be cleared several times in the course of auditing.
The first thing to do is to put the preclear on a meter. If you don’t have a good meter, and you don’t know what a meter does, order one fast and get instruction. Discuss help with the preclear, and note the needle reactions. If the needle tended to stiffen and stick on any discussion of help, then you have your work set out for you. If the needle remains free and continues to be free on the subject of help, no matter what you run or how you discuss it, of course the button remains free.
It is important that any attack you make upon this button be continued as a presession activity for auditing period after auditing period, if necessary, until the meter needle is free on this subject. There is no need to go on, in fact there is no point in going on, if the preclear thinks that you are going to betray. Somewhere this will manifest itself as ARC breaks, the whole auditing programme will go to pieces, and you will wind up without a preclear, as well as an unfinished cycle of action. So pay attention to what I tell you here, where auditing is concerned: work with help and nothing but help until the needle is free on the subject.
What processes should you run? The first process, of course, is ordinary two-way comm. One discusses the preclear helping others and others helping the preclear. One gets the preclear’s views on the subject of help, and without evaluating for the preclear, lets the preclear express these views.
The next process is Help on a two-way bracket. This is, “How could you help me?”, alternated with “How could I help you?” Do not expect this to do very much to the tone arm, because it won’t. A two-way flow of this character is not a reliable way to bring a tone arm down. But it does do something, and does tend to free up the needle on this particular subject.
The old five-way bracket on help can then be employed: “How could you help another person?” “How could another person help another person?” “How could another person help you?” “How could you help me?” “How could I help you?”
This is a rough bracket but it is useful and should not be dropped out of the repertoire.
Is there any process which would clear up the help button thoroughly and totally?
Naturally, since it moved forward again into such importance, I have been doing work on it and have developed up to a stage of conditional application (which means, I leave myself free to change my mind when broad experience has been gained) a new way of loosening up any solution. I have been applying this to the central buttons in Scientology and have found it working. The general formula is to take the button one wants to clear and ask the pc what problem a certain solution could be to him.
Applying this to help, one would repetitively ask the pc, “What problem could help be to you?”
I first used this on the button responsibility with very good results, since I found that responsibility is very aberrated in its reactive definitions and, because one is often being a valence, is run irresponsibly. This version of running responsibility to a flat point seems to be quite workable.
If the preclear is inventing answers rather than picking them up off the track, you might do better to ask him the following version, “What problem has help been to you?” If invention was present one always has the remedy, in spite of the fact that no terminal is apparently present, of running, “What help could you confront?” “What help would you rather not confront?” I don’t know how far this would go as I have not tested it over a long period, but at least in its first stages it works. Responsibility, oddly enough, can be run on a no-mass terminal or significance. I have not had much chance to test out confront, but on the theory that anything you could run responsibility on you could also run confront on, I would say at first glance this is probably a workable process. I will know more about it soon and I would appreciate your telling me anything you have on it.
You have, therefore, several processes by which help can be flattened. Unfortunately, none of these processes reach an unconscious or insane person. Of course, when I say unconscious, I mean somebody with his eyes shut, and when I say insane, I mean somebody who is institutionalized, and should be. In the matter of the unconscious person, you have the CCHs and you also have them with the insane person to some extent. However, the best thing for an insane person is not processing, but rest, and when the person has had considerable rest, still processing is not yet the answer, exercise is. And when the person has had some exercise over a long period of time, you will find that group processing with other insane persons is still better than individual auditing. Only at this time is it possible to do very much for the insane. The first reason, of course, that one takes this approach is the auditor. Why attack large numbers of insane cases with individual auditing when other methods are far more economical and efficacious, so long as those other methods are only rest, exercise, group processing, hobby work, and such. Efforts to reach the insane with help, of course, simply restimulate the insane idea that help is betrayal. This is why psychiatry resorted to such savage and bestial “treatments” as shock and surgery. They were up against people who apparently would not be helped. Thus psychiatry went into total effect. This is why psychiatry failed, and is in a failed state today and has lost all of its public repute.
People have been betrayed so often on the whole track that it is no wonder they get help mixed up with betrayal, but help became betrayal only at those periods of the track where the dwindling spiral had been reached for any civilization. Even the upstanding Roman by the third century A. D. was happily using the political mechanism of inviting all the Germanic chiefs, that would accept, to feasts and then poisoning them, after vast assurances that Rome was about to help the chief’s country. A deterioration of help can occur on any dynamic and in any area, but, as I said above, it occurs at the make-break point of sanity-insanity.
One word on all this. The preclear may be sane analytically and still react violently at times in session. Remember that he is reacting in session because he has been thrown into the area of his reactive mind. In reactive zones and areas help is almost always betrayal. Thus when running a rough engram do not be amazed to find the pc (whom you have carefully cleared on the subject of help) getting rabid about betrayal. He is in the middle of an engram and, of course, the hard core of any engram is betrayal. Don’t break off and start running help on him, just run him on through the engram. He will come out of it all right, if you do your job. Help should be handled as a presession process and should be handled well and thoroughly and if in any series of sessions the preclear’s idea of help apparently deteriorates, you have gotten him into a series of incidents where help is betrayal and he should be cleared once more as a presession activity in some later session on the subject of help.
There are many possible processes, there are many possible approaches. As a Scientologist, understanding this, you should not permit yourself too far into the frame of mind of believing a pc is evil or cannot be helped, simply because he apparently will not be helped. All pcs can be helped. Most pcs have aberrated ideas on the subject. It’s up to you to take hold of these as a first order of business and clean them up, at least until the meter needle is free on the subject, no matter how many hours that takes.