Embracing All Our Selves

Embracing Our Selves: The Voice Dialogue Manual
By Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone

PREFACE

We met one another in the early seventies and, from the very beginning, our personal lives and our professional lives have been inextricably intertwined. Hal had been a Jungian analyst, committed to the individuation process. He had enjoyed teaching and consulting from his earliest years. Sidra had been trained in a more eclectic fashion with an emphasis upon some of the more practical aspects of psychology such as community mental health. She particularly enjoyed her years as executive director of a residential treatment center for adolescent girls. When we came together, we began a period of exploration and innovation that has continued ever since.

Our relationship has been a teacher for both of us from our first contacts with one another. We decided at the outset that we wanted to open ourselves completely to the relationship, to let it lead us where it would. We tried to be as honest as we could and to explore what was really happening both intrapsychically and interpersonally rather than what we wished were happening. This commitment has led to some very exciting discoveries as well as to some rather “dicey” moments. The basic ideas in the following article are the outgrowth of this joint personal exploration.

Since Voice Dialogue and its accompanying theoretical framework have evolved out of our relationship and out of love and acceptance, it is a work that is basically non-judgmental and non-pathological in its approach to the human psyche. It seeks to discover what is rather than what is wrong. It is committed to the belief that there is no correct way of conducting one's life, there is just the process of life, itself.

In our own clinical work, we have both continued to use a wide range of therapeutic and teaching modalities in addition to Voice Dialogue. We never saw Voice Dialogue as a therapeutic system that must stand alone or conflict with any other. It seemed to us that a practitioner of any form of therapy, healing or consciousness work could use Voice Dialogue in his or her system. Furthermore, it became clear that non-therapists could learn the dialogue process as well. Couples could be trained in the work and it would serve to enhance their relationship. One of our aims has been to establish as clearly as we could the lines between Voice Dialogue training and psychotherapy.

In our travels around the world, and as this work has become better known, we have taken a very strong position on these issues. We have taken the position that Voice Dialogue is not a therapeutic system in and of itself but belongs to all systems as an effective tool for enhancing consciousness and objectifying the many selves that inhabit the psyche. When an individual needs therapy, he or she must see a therapist and should not get locked into Voice Dialogue as a substitute for therapy. There is no substitute for good psychotherapy when this is required. In the hands of a competent psychotherapist, however, Voice Dialogue becomes a particularly effective and powerful tool.

Despite a good deal of encouragement from many of those whom we have trained in our methods, we have consistently refused to institute any kind of formal certification training in regard to Voice Dialogue. We see the facilitator as a creative musician, if you will, and Voice Dialogue as the instrument that is to be used. It is clear to us that any kind of certification process would effectively kill the spirit of this work. In this way, we have found that the Voice Dialogue process has been used quite imaginatively and innovatively not only by psychotherapists of widely differing backgrounds, but in areas as far afield as business consultation, astrological analyses and sculpting. We like to think of this work as belonging to everyone, as our gift to the seekers of the world.

Hal Stone, Ph.D. Sidra Stone, Ph.D April, 1997.

INTRODUCTION

The consciousness process as it relates to the complexity of the human psyche and its many disparate facets has always been a source of fascination to us. During the early seventies we were struck by the realization that our psyches contained many individual selves, each with its own way of perceiving the world, each with its own personal history, physical characteristics, emotional and physical reactions, and opinions on how we should run our lives. Since then, we have spent much of our time, both professional and personal, in studying these selves.

Because of this interest, we have been delighted to note that one of the areas of psychotherapy receiving increasing attention today is the phenomenon of multiple personalities. Not only are multiple personalities being studied in terms of their theoretical implications and the appropriate therapeutic interventions, but there is also a growing literature of brain research that seems to demonstrate the existance of physiological correlates of these psychological entities in all of us.

Up until now, the multiple personality has been seen only in terms of its pathological implications. What we have discovered in the course of our personal and professional life is that we are all made up of multiple personalities -- all of us with no exceptions! The essential difference between ourselves and an individual clinically diagnosed as being a multiple personality is that we have an operating ego of some sort that can observe and reflect on the fact that we are not a single psycholgical entity, but rather, as Walt Whitman would say, we contain multitudes. That is the only difference. We are, each of us, inhabited by an inner family of selves no less real than the outer family of individuals into which we were born.

About the Author

Hal Stone, Ph.D. and Sidra Stone, Ph.D. are the co-creators of Voice Dialogue. They are hopeless romantics and, as clinical psychologists with a combined experience of about 80 years, they are committed to keeping the magic and vitality in relationships. They have co-authored five books. Their latest book, Partnering: A New Kind of Relationship, sums up a lifetime of wisdom. Their books are available at local bookstores or from Amazon.com. www.delos-inc.com