The Emergence Of Voice Dialogue

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

(Page 2 of 9)

The discovery of the reality of these inner selves was quite dramatic for the two of us. Our relationship has always been one in which we spent a good deal of time doing personal work with one another. In one of our very early work sessions, Hal asked to speak to Sidra's vulnerability in what he thought would be a Gestalt mode. What emerged, however, was a very little girl, probably a year to a year and a half in age. We realized, much to our amazement, that this child was quite real. She was a total surprise to both of us. She was totally different from Sidra who, at that time, was a pretty rational Eastern establishment type of lady. She looked different from the way Sidra usually looked, and she saw Sidra's life quite differently from the way in which Sidra usually saw it. At first, as a matter of fact, she did not talk at all, but remained silent. She thought her thoughts to herself and sometimes she wept. It was only later that she began to speak to us. We had expected something a bit more theoretical. Neither of us could quite believe what had happened.

In subsequent work sessions with one another, the same kind of Vulnerable Child emerged in Hal. We then began to experiment with other selves. We explored the Inner Critic and Pusher. We talked to each other's Pleaser and Mother and Father Voice. We had never truly experienced the reality of these energies before. With all the dream work and visual work and Gestalt work that we had both done, why had these selves never been real to us? We began to research the literature and found very few references to the reality of these parts. Maurice Nicoll, a follower of Gurdieff and Ouspensky, described the reality of the parts in the first volume of his Psychological Commentaries. 1 Nicoll spoke of observing the selves with a kind of analytical precision. Yet it was clear to us that even the Gurdjieff system, over time, had become too analytical and had lost the awareness that these parts were quite real.

In the early years of our work together, there was very little theory and a great deal of practice. We worked in many different ways with one another as we explored these selves. Gradually, we evolved a new way of working with these selves which we named Voice Dialogue. This method is described in the last section of this chapter. A more thorough discussion can be found in our book, Embracing Our Selves, published by Nataraj Publications in Corte Madera, California.

Once the basic form of Voice Dialogue was established, we began our investigations of these selves in earnest. When we used Voice Dialogue, we had the "subject" move over to a different place whenever we talked to, or "facilitated" a different voice or self, very much as in the Gestalt mode. There were important differences, however. If, in the facilitation process, we related to each new self as a real person who was totally alive and wished to be heard, then the way that self emerged was qualitatively different from the kind of self that emerged if our perception was that the self was "just a part" and "not real." We cannot emphasize enough how critical this point is. If you are facilitating a self in someone that is associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sensuality, what you will constellate in the subject will be a function of how real that part is for you. If you know about archetypal energies and the reality of Aphrodite, then you can help to induct the energy of Aphrodite. If you know the reality of the Pusher, then you will constellate the Pusher. If you are working with a Killer then what you get will depend on your relationship to your own inner killer and how real this is for you.

There was another subtle quality that began to emerge in our work that was different from what we had done before. We did not try to change the parts or to get them to become friendly with one another. When we did, we found that they reacted just like people. They did not like to be manipulated and, as a matter of fact, they were more sensitive to manipulation or disapproval that most individuals seemed to be. So we decided that a Pusher was entitled to be a Pusher and could do its level best to get us to work all the time. Conversely, the Beach Bum, was entitled to be a Beach Bum. The Power Voice had a right to be just the way it was and the Vulnerable Child on the other side had a right to be the way it was. We began to work more and more with opposites, helping them to clarify their viewpoints, always trying to balance the different energies, but never trying to change them.

We did not have opposites try to talk to each other because we found that the purpose of having the parts talk to one another was usually to help effect some kind of reconciliation through change and accomodation. Instead, we allowed each self to remain true to itself. There is nothing inherently wrong with having two different selves talk to each other, however, so long as the autonomy of each self is respected and the therapist's underlying motivation is not reconciliation.

We showed the same respect to each self that we would show to a person. We allowed each self to grow and to change at its own rate and in its own way. Trying to get opposites reconciled seemed to us to be a way of trying to control peoples' lives, a way of controlling the therapy. We became aware of the tension created in us when we had to live with the reality of opposites in another person. We began to see how our need to reconcile opposites and thus solve problems for others was a function of our own inability to live with the tension of these opposites in ourselves.

The Jungian framework provided yet another dimension to this concept of allowing the opposites to remain as opposites. Let us say, for example, that we are working with two selves that would be related to the archetypal figures of Apollo and Dionysius, two irrevocably different energy systems. Apollo was the Greek god of the mind, clarity, organization, and pure thought and Dionysius was the god of expression, ecstasy and release. In the ancient holy city of Delphi, both gods were worshipped, but worshipped separately. Each had his own shrine and each had his own time of the year for worship. Apollo's were the summer months and Dionysius, the winter ones. Thus, we can see the respect accorded to opposing energies on an archetypal level. The gods and goddesses of mythology are simply the projected images of our own inner selves.

As we continued to work in this way, we began to see the psyche as a vast array of energy patterns manifesting in a variety of different ways. These different energy patterns could express themselves physically, emotionally, mentally, imaginally, or through the direct experience of energy. We saw that we needed to become aware of all of these different energies/selves and that we also need to experience them. They each wished to be honored, very much as the gods and goddesses in the tales of ancient Greece. Each new part that we met and spent time with added a new color to the psychic palette of the individual.

How, then, was one to hold the tension of these irreconcilable opposites? To do so, one needed a new kind of ego, one that we named an "Aware Ego", an ego that was always in the process of becoming more aware and one that was able to experience a greater and greater variety of these selves or energies. We began to see with increasing clarity that what most people refer to as an "ego" is, in fact, a cluster of dominant or primary selves. These selves represent the traditional ways of being and operating in the world that have characterized an individual over time. Until the work is done that separates one's ego from these primary selves, the Aware Ego does not yet exist. The Aware Ego is born out of the separation from the

We continued to use Voice Dialogue, along with other approaches, to explore ourselves. Our primary objective was the maintainance of the vitality of our own relationship. We also used it in our clinical work with clients. As a result of these explorations, we began to formulate new ideas about the selves and how they operate in our lives and we developed much of the theoretical material that now underlies our work. We were particularly curious about why a relationship would shift from a place of the deepest love to total negativity in the space of seconds. In looking for an answer to this, we examined the interactions of the different selves in relationship. We looked at our relationship at first and, later, we looked at the relationships of a multitude of clients. It was out of this exploration that we developed our way of thinking about bonding patterns and how they affect relational issues. This article is too short to allow time for a complete discussion of bonding patterns in relationship, but let us look now at some of the basic concepts underlying our work. A more complete discussion can be found in our book -- "Embracing Each Other" published by Nataraj.

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