“Don’t use program words,” Jimmy says. Program words are an important context for understanding one’s actions, but in a Separation Cycle exercise, where a singular moment is deconstructed, they can also be euphemistic, a way of not taking ownership for one’s actions. It’s the difference between, say, I had a moment of fatal peril and I punched her in the eye. So the story comes first, and then the group together contextualizes the story within the pedagogical framework of the program, attaching certain elements from what they learned during the curriculum. This split second was a threat to
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