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Issue 30

THE THIRD ELEMENT

THE CONSCIOUSNESS MODEL

A New Definition of Consciousness

The old forms didn’t quite work for us. We knew that we needed something new, but weren’t quite sure what it was. We remember driving across a great flat valley wondering aloud about just what it could be that would be beyond the selves and take charge of life; and what we could do to bring in the spiritual dimension. We tried and tried, but nothing gave us what we were seeking. That had to wait.

Finally, we looked at the term “Ego”. The Ego has always been seen as the directing agent of the personality and it is an excellent term – one with a long history. It is often described as the executive function of the psyche. It is the “I” that we refer to when we talk about ourselves.

What we began to realize was that this all-powerful Ego is, in fact, a group of primary selves that together run our lives and rule the personality without anyone knowing it. It can be the Rational Mind, the Pusher, the Pleaser, the Responsible Parent, the Independent One, the Rebel – it is whatever it is that we think we are – it is whichever selves are running our lives. We decided to call this group of selves – the traditional Ego – the “Operating Ego”. 

Then we had to develop a new name to described what happened in Voice Dialogue when we separated from a primary self and returned to center. That center space was no longer occupied by the Operating – or traditional – Ego. The new term we used was the Aware Ego. We found that this Aware Ego process evolves and gets stronger and stronger with continuing work. What became increasingly clear to us was that the Operating Ego is here forever but it gradually surrenders power to the Aware Ego process as we separate from more and more primaries and integrate more and more disowned selves.

Now a new way at looking at consciousness began to emerge.

We saw three levels to the process of consciousness.

First there was the level of Awareness. This has been around for a very long time. It is often referred to as the witness state in meditation. It gives us the ability to step back and see the big picture. It does not act. It is not attached to outcome. 

The second level of consciousness we began to see as the actual experience of the selves, the experience of life itself. Awareness does not experience. It witnesses. Awareness without experience isolates us from life. Experience without awareness keeps us locked into the animal kingdom. Both are essential to an ongoing consciousness process.

Then there was the new kid on the block. Someone has to live our lives; someone has to drive the car. Someone has to use the gift of awareness and the treasure of experience and, for us, that someone or something was the Aware Ego or, more accurately, the Aware Ego process. We realized that this was an ongoing dynamic process that was always changing, that there was no such thing as an Aware Ego.

As a matter of fact, over the years we have come to see that consciousness itself is a process – with each of the three levels of consciousness representing a distinct, individually evolving process.

HONORING THE PRIMARY SELVES

We were learning a great deal about primary selves in those early years and the learning has never stopped. There is one thing that we understood from the beginning that has stood us in good stead all through the years. One must always honor the primary self. In the practice of Voice Dialogue this is probably one of strongest recommendations we can make. The primary self is the ally of the facilitator. Both have the interests and wellbeing of the client at heart and there must be a mutual respect and deep understanding between the primary selves and the facilitator.

What we learned early in the practice of Voice Dialogue has yet deeper and more far reaching implications for living life. We are always dealing with people and essentially we are always dealing with their primary selves. Knowing this can save us much unhappiness.

Many years ago, very early in our work together, we were at a social gathering and a rather traditional psychologist asked us about our work. Not yet truly appreciating how important it was to honor the primary selves in the “real world”, we opened up to him and shared our ideas and work. He became very judgmental as he aggressively questioned us about the empirical basis for our work and wanted to know exactly what kinds of experiments we had designed and carried out. He accused us of making up these selves and made some vague threats about malpractice. All in all, it was a very unpleasant experience.

We are fast learners and we learned from this experience to feel into people more carefully and to explore the nature of their primary selves before we shared our ideas and feelings. We have tried our best not to share our work with people who are not ready to listen. As we’ve often said, “We go only where the door is already open.” After this experience, we were much more cautious. We began to screen invitations to speak and, before we spoke with a new group, we did our best to determine the nature of the primary self system that dominated that particular group, clinic or center. This kind of sensitivity was particularly important when we were working in other cultures. It’s important to know the rules, and to use language and concepts that do not polarize the primary selves. This attention to the primary selves in our surroundings has saved us untold discomfort – both professionally and personally.

Issue 29

 THE SECOND ELEMENT

 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELVES

The Beginnings of Theory

It is difficult to remember how and when our theoretical considerations began to intermix with our deeply personal work. We were both psychologists (practicing psychotherapists). Things were happening and changes were taking place with remarkable speed and, quite naturally, we began to organize our thinking about the events that were occurring.

 

The first realization to come to us was that these selves inside of us behaved like real people and that they had to be treated with the greatest respect. If they sensed that they were being judged in any way or manipulated in any way, they withdrew. It also became clear very early that for a self to remain with the facilitator, the facilitator had to remain totally present – the self required a strong energetic connection to hold it. This was long before our more sophisticated development of the energetics of Voice Dialogue. It was, however, a beginning.

 

PRIMARY AND DISOWNED SELVES

 

Very early in our explorations we began to see that we are made up of primary selves – a group of selves that define our personality. (We had some question as to whether we should call them primary or dominant selves and we settled on primary.) It seemed to us like a very simple idea. Why hadn’t we ever been able to see this before? Who we think we are is really a group of selves that we have identified with and these selves become the persona or how we present ourselves to the world.

 

The next step seemed quite natural and obvious as we continued our work with each other. Whenever we identify with a primary self then on the other side, equal and opposite, is its opposite. We called this the disowned self. Nathaniel Branden had first coined this term – the disowned self. When he talked of the disowned self, he was referring, however, to the disowned self as the emotions that are disowned by people who identify with the mind and have a basically rational approach to life. We spoke with Nathaniel about all of this and he was comfortable with our using this term. We are grateful to him for his largesse in this matter because the terms disowned and primary selves fit together so perfectly.

 

Within the first few years, these ideas were getting pretty well set. In the earliest years, we used the idea of a Protector-Controller as the main primary self, the self that set up the basic rules and was the guardian of the gates of entry to our inner world. We saw the Protector/Controller as a self that gathered and organized information about the world around us so that we could understand it, a self that protected us, and controlled both our behavior and our environment.

 

It took time before we realized that this was a generic term and that every primary self was a protector and a controller in its own way, that each had its own way of figuring out the world around us, and that each primary self lived by its own set of rules. The Protector-Controller is still used by many teachers and is still a very good self to use at the beginning of Voice Dialogue. It provides us with a picture of what clinicians often refer to as the basic defense structure of the personality.

 

We, however, don’t think in terms of defenses; instead we think of the primary selves in terms of their adaptability and creativity – we honor their attempts to contribute to a person’s wellbeing. We always saw them as selves that were central to survival, accomplishment, and the ability (however limited) to relate to others — and, therefore, always to be regarded with the greatest degree of respect.

 

 

WORKING WITH OPPOSITES

After the first excitement of exploring individual selves, and after the ideas of primary and disowned selves began to emerge, we began in our work together to work more and more with opposites. This happened gradually because in the earliest phase of our work we enjoyed concentrating on a single self. We spent a great deal of time working with the Inner Child, the Inner Critic, the Responsible Parent, the Observing Mind, and the Protector/Controller. And we had a good deal of fun and there was much action when we talked with the disowned selves. Those selves were a lot more adventurous and rambunctious, often quite intense – and totally irreverent.

 

We began to see, however, that the real gift of the work was not simply talking to selves. Instead, we began to get the sense that the real point of the work was working directly with opposites. It seemed important to learn how to separate from the primary selves, to talk with the disowned selves, and then learn to stand between the opposites (of the primary and disowned selves) clearly feeling both at the same time. It was the opposites that were important.

 

It took time for this shift in emphasis to occur because talking to many voices, and especially to the disowned selves, was so much fun. As time passed, we increasingly put our emphasis on working between the opposites. But something was missing – we needed to address the issue of a model of consciousness that could encompass all of this.

Issue 28

The First Element 

Voice Dialogue as a Methodology:

The Beginning of The Joint Adventure

It was early in 1972 that Sidra read an article by Assagioli on Guided Imagery. She was fascinated and decided to try it out in her practice of psychotherapy. People had such wonderful experiences that she wanted to learn more about this and – most important – wanted to go on one of those “trips” herself. She asked a friend, Dr. Jean Holroyd, the head of the psychology intern program at UCLA, where she might learn more about this technique.

Hal had been teaching this work which was central to his training in Jungian Psychology.   He had recently given a very powerful demonstration of this work at UCLA that Jean had attended. She recommended that Sidra contact Hal and see him for a few training sessions.   So it was that in February, 1972, Sidra came to see Hal making it very clear that she was not interested in personal therapy, not interested in anything that might change her life, but that she just wanted a few training sessions so she could become more effective in facilitating this process.  

In the first few sessions Sidra went very deeply into the realm of the creative imagination.   It was in these depths one might say that the two of us met.   It became clear almost immediately that the exploration that was happening was a joint exploration – not a mentor/student relationship – and that Hal could only continue on this basis. In the depths of this kind of work there could be only equality between us.   We began to share our dream process in addition to the visualizations and in the course of one of these sessions we started talking about how vulnerable we were both feeling and how unfamiliar this was for both of us.  

It was during this discussion that Hal suggested that Sidra move over and become the vulnerability instead of just talking about it.   It was the moment of the resurrection of this technique of talking to the selves.   The term Voice Dialogue did not yet exist. That came later.   In this moment the game that Hal had played with before became something quite different and the birthing process of the Voice Dialogue method began.

This is how Sidra remembers that very first experience:

Hal asked me to move over and to become the vulnerability. I knew it was the right thing to do. I trusted him. I trusted him so deeply that I moved from the couch where I’d been sitting, sat down on the floor and put my head down on the coffee table. In total silence, I allowed myself to move into my vulnerability, I literally became someone else. I became a very small child who experienced the world in a new way. There was total stillness. I had the sense that the “I” that was sitting there had been hiding in a deep cave for my entire life and that this was the first time she felt safe enough to come out. The world around me changed, my perceptions became more acute, colors and sounds were different, and I could feel Hal’s energy holding a space for me (although it would be years before we were to know more about the energetics of relationship). This was totally foreign to me; I was accustomed to experiencing the world in a rational, sensible, and controlled way. I felt that I had finally entered Herman Hesse’s Magic Theater!

Hal was himself stunned by this experience. He could feel that he was in the presence of a child and he knew that it was best to say nothing.   He was with a pre-verbal child – the child was real, and the selves were real.   When Sidra left her place on the floor and returned to her seat on the sofa – returning to what we later called the Aware Ego – we both sat in silence.   We both realized that something momentous had happened.  

Hal had to wait a week before Sidra facilitated his child.   His own experience was most profound. It was the beginning of Little Harry, a totally unknown quantity in his life up until then, and so it was that instead of Sidra and Hal exploring together, there were now four of us at work. There were Sidra and Lisa and there were Hal and Little Harry. Everyone’s stories and ideas were different.

So the work began with what we named the Inner Child – as far as we know, we were the first to use that term. It began out of a relationship in which a deep love was evolving.   It had no context so far as therapy was concerned.   These children of ours were real and the continuing work we did with them gave us a way of widening and deepening our co-exploration.   We were not just stunned by what was happening.   We were extremely excited.   If these inner children were real, who else was there?   After all, there were many doors to open in the long hallway of the Magic Theater. We were off and running, meeting the myriad selves that began to emerge into consciousness.  

In the next few years we did a great deal of this kind of exploration.   At this early stage there was basically no theory, no Aware Ego.   We were simply two explorers who were very much in love and who had no idea where our lives were heading. We only knew that what was happening was rich, creative, and original and that it deepened our connection to each other at each step along the way.   We still used the visualization process and shared dreams but in this early stage the excitement of the dialogue process quite possessed us. The theory was to come later.

 

Our work with relationship began with a very powerful experience very early in these explorations. One of Sidra’s early visualizations was that of an ancient Minoan ship sailing on mythic seas. We were both on that ship and over us, emblazoned upon its sail and protecting our journey, was a golden eye – the eye of God. As part of that visualization, we were told that we were on a journey that would not end. This meant that there was to be no real security or predictability for us. We were not permitted to set up a permanent home; we were never to go ashore we were never permitted to spend more than one night at a time on land. It was truly the beginning of our journey of relationship – a journey in which we followed relationship as our teacher.

Issue 27 August 2007

PART 2

THE EARLIEST INFLUENCES – SIDRA’S EXPERIENCES

My earliest psychological influences date back to the early 1950’s at Barnard College. At that time I was a committed behaviorist and basically a “Skinner groupie.” My friends and I were fascinated by the early operant conditioning work as an explanation of human behavior and we would go to hear Skinner whenever he came to New York to speak. I was intrigued by the idea that a psychologist could break down behavior into its component parts and see how everything worked in a very sensible and predictable fashion. This was only one area of fascination with how things worked. Along these same lines, I had seriously considered becoming a physicist.

I still see this early Skinnerian influence in the way I look at the development of primary selves – at how they emerged, at least in part, as a result of operant conditioning. I was always looking for ways in which they were adaptive and how, as selves, they did their best to protect us and to earn us love. So, as an old-time Skinnerian, I deeply honor a primary self.

The other major influences that I brought with me from earlier times were the writers Hermann Hesse and Nikos Kazantzakis. As a woman of the 1950’s, I was uncomfortable with the psychological and psychiatric establishments as they related to women. At the time, I didn’t know what it was that didn’t feel right, but I felt it was important – and somehow safer – to keep my teachers more impersonal and at a distance.

Hesse and Kazantzakis were men whose lives were deeply committed to the evolution of consciousness and whose writings contained – for me – a glimpse of universal truths. All of their books explored the struggle between opposing forces within each one of us, what Hal and I now call “the tension of opposites”. Each had his own passionate polarities. Hesse worked primarily between the mind (the intellectual) and the feelings (the romantic) while Kazantzakis’ interest was the tension between the earthy and the spiritual.

Both men were influenced by Henri Bergson and based their world views on the existence of an “élan vital”, a creative or evolutionary impulse within each of us, a powerful force that moves us towards continual evolution and greater consciousness. For me, I recognize echoes of this in what we now call “the inner intelligence” or “the intelligence of the universe”.

Hesse’s Steppenwolf was the most impactful book I ever read. It was my introduction to the many selves and to the “Magic Theater” in which I began to view my own tumultuous inner cast of characters. Once I peeked into my own Magic Theater through the doors opened by this book, my view of life and of people was unalterably changed. I could no longer look at any of us as single entities. From that moment on, I was fascinated by the many selves that I could see in myself and in those around me. This following quote sums it all up:

“Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands. Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities.   As a body everyone is single, as a soul, never.”

From Steppenwolf   by Hermann Hesse

Interestingly, Hesse was deeply influenced by Jung and this, I feel, provided much of the crossover between Hal’s Jungian background and my own thinking. Kazantzakis, on the other hand, was a Cretan by birth and Greek to the core. His thoughts, much like those of the Jungians, were never far from the ancient gods and goddesses. He knew the importance of honoring all the gods and goddesses – and I always felt that as an underpinning in his writings. His greatest book, The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel, was like a Bible to me in my own intellectual and spiritual wanderings.

My own journey was an outer journey in these early years. I traveled extensively and was particularly interested in ancient cultures. I visited the sacred sites in Greece and honored the gods and goddesses by visiting their shrines. Hal visited Jung, I paid my respects at the grave of my teacher, Nikos Kazantzakis, in Crete.

And so it was that from these disparate backgrounds – these opposites as carried by each of us – that something new came to be born. Now let us look at the basic elements of our work and see how each evolved.

In the next Voice Dialogue Tips, Hal and Sidra explain the first element of their work: Voice Dialogue as a Methodology – The beginning of their joint adventure.

Issue 26 June 2007

THE BASIC ELEMENTS  

Of

VOICE DIALOGUE, RELATIONSHIP AND

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELVES 

 

THEIR ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT 

by

HAL STONE, Ph.D. AND SIDRA STONE, Ph.D.

PART 1

THE EARLIEST INFLUENCES – HAL’S EXPERIENCES

The story changes depending upon who tells it.  And, as the journey goes on, we view our lives from different vantage points and through different eyes -as we integrate more and more selves. What seemed important at one time seems less important later. What seemed less important can assume greater importance as time goes on.

At this point in our lives – as we reach our 70th and 80th years – we have decided that it is time to look back and to tell the story of the origins and development of Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves the way we see it. We wish to honor those we know have directly contributed to our work, to clarify some misconceptions that are common, and to tell – to the best of our ability – the stories of those moments when some new element was added or our thinking has changed.

Let us begin with our view of the creative process. We find that outer and inner influences blend indistinguishably. We have lived rich, complex – and jointly examined – lives. From the outer world, there have been teachers and information from many disparate sources. We have had many powerful experiences with others, both professional and personal. From the world within, we have had our individual dreams, transpersonal experiences, and moments of sudden clarity that seem to be gifts from sources outside of our personal experience. All these are digested by each of us, providing us with the raw material from which we create. When an idea or a concept emerges, we are never quite sure of where it comes from.

In the past, people’s first reactions to Voice Dialogue were usually: “That’s a Gestalt technique” or “It’s psychosynthesis.” Interestingly enough, Hal’s actual work in Gestalt started only after Voice Dialogue was definitively established in our lives and although Sidra had some contact with very early Gestalt work, her experience of it was extremely limited. As for psycho-synthesis, we were both fascinated with its use of imagery, but neither of us had delved deeply enough into it to know about its concepts of the different selves. Nor were we particularly influenced by psychodrama or TA, having only a passing acquaintance with both of these through the popular press.

We have always honored these various approaches as having some relationship to Voice Dialogue since they were clearly a part of the general psychological culture in the early 70’s. At the same time, we recognized that our own creative process was based upon a very different, and unique, set of experiences. The roots of our work go far deeper than our exposure to these newer schools of thought. We came from two contrasting, one might even say conflicting, backgrounds.

THE EARLIEST INFLUENCES – HAL’S EXPERIENCES

I was trained as a Jungian analyst, eventually becoming the president of the Society for Analytical Psychology in Los Angeles in 1968. I studied at the Jung Institute for several months in 1957 and actually had the opportunity to meet with Jung himself for an individual session. These experiences went deep into my being and have, to some extent, informed my work throughout my life.

My experiences with the Jungian community and my early training gave me the gifts of a deep understanding of dreams, myths, fairytales, and depth psychology. On the other hand I knew that something was missing. I didn’t feel like a grownup. I go into these matters in greater detail in the 5 CD series I made last year.  The outcome of all this was that I left the Jungian community – and the traditional practice of analytical psychology – in 1970.  This was two years before Sidra and I met.  My experience of all of this was the end of my personal and professional life as I had known it and the beginning of a new life that was as yet totally undefined and unknown to me.

Though I found it necessary to separate from the professional organization in 1970, I realize now that I would have had to separate from anything that I was a part of.  I needed to float free and not be tied to any kind of outer professional form. Only in this way could I begin to move into an entirely new kind of creative process that has led me to where I am today.  I shall be eternally grateful forever for the remarkable opportunity I had to discover Jungian Psychology, to the colleagues I had, to the clients I worked with and to the innovative spirit of Jung himself. From my very first analytic session my unconscious opened and with it the life of spirit and a most remarkable dream process that has always helped to maintain some kind of objective clarity.  From that first session I had come home to the symbolic life of spirit and I was able to separate from the arid desert of my rational mind.

My first encounter with Voice Dialogue, or the idea of talking to selves, came some time in the late sixties.  The story I am about to tell you is not about Voice Dialogue directly.  It is concerned about a clinical experience that led me to a different place professionally and that is intertwined in my mind with the early origins of the work.

In the late sixties a couple came to see me in regard to their son who we will call Jimmie.  The couple lived in Southern California and their son had spent the past year at a special residential treatment center on the east coast for acting out or disturbed children.  In particular Jimmie was acting out in school and it was felt that he couldn’t function in a regular academic setting.

Jimmie was eleven years of age when his parents first came to me and they   were very upset. They had just received a letter from the school informing them that they had done a complete psychological evaluation on the boy because of his disturbed behavior, that he was being diagnosed as schizophrenic and that they were strongly recommending he be placed in a special setting run by a psychoanalytic group in the area. Since they felt that he was schizophrenic they felt that he needed a special facility for this level of mental impairment.

The parents had moved out West the year before and they were looking forward to his joining them in their new home.  They were very upset by this letter and their question was whether I could help them in this situation.  I told them I would be willing to see Jimmie if they brought him to L.A. and I would do an independent evaluation.  I would need all of the medical records that were available before I saw him.  I couldn’t promise them more than that.

Two to three weeks later Jimmie walked into my office.  He was a very curious child, interested in everything he saw.  On my desk I had a pile of psychological and psychiatric reports four or five inches high containing notes, test materials and psychiatric evaluations. All of them concurred in the diagnosis of schizophrenia.  They described how what had begun as acting out behavior had, over the past year, developed into an increasingly disturbed state.  As I sat with Jimmie I was experiencing a huge conflict because my experience of him was very different. It was very positive. I liked him very much and I thought he had a wonderful spirit. On the other hand, I had these reports from a very fine school and very qualified health care practitioners all making the same diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Jimmie was easy to talk to and he told me about his school and about its philosophy.  Basically, their management style was to never let children be alone but to always keep them busy doing things.  It was felt that being alone allowed them to collapse into their own imagination and fantasy and that this would be damaging to them.  It was becoming clear to me that Jimmie was a very imaginative youngster and that the school routine might not have been the best kind of experience for him.

In the course of our discussion I asked Jimmie if he ever remembered any dreams.  He told me that he had one just last evening. This was the dream:

“I am sitting in a wheelchair in the lobby of my school. My parents are visiting me before they go back to California.  I am crying and begging them not to go.  They feel they have no choice however and they get up to leave and I wake up sobbing that they are leaving me here.”

The dream was totally stunning to me.  He was in a wheel chair. Why was he there?  Did this mean that he was indeed crippled in the way the reports on him indicated was the case?  Why else would he be in the wheel chair?  Yet every instinct in me felt a core of health in him that was incompatible with the diagnosis.

I asked him to close his eyes and go back into the dream and be in the wheel chair.  He did this easily, just as I expected, and after a half-minute or so I asked him why he was in the wheel chair.  What was wrong with him? Could he tell me anything about how he felt sitting there?

Jimmie then said a remarkable thing to me.  “What I feel is that there is a magnet in the back of the wheel chair and that this magnet is holding me in the chair.”  I said before that I was stunned when I heard his dream.  Hearing his response to my questioning was being stunned to tenth power.  Suddenly it was all so simple.  Everything made sense and the excitement I had been feeling began to lessen and I really felt very happy with things.

I realized then that Jimmie was a highly creative, highly gifted, highly imaginative child who had been misplaced in this school. I’m sure the theory worked for many of their children, but for a youngster like this one it was totally counter-productive. He was a magical child and the world of imagination was essential to him. It had literally driven him into schizophrenic behavior because he had nowhere else to go.  It was an artificially induced state and this I felt could be changed.

I then said to him that if he was being held in the chair by this magnet it seemed to me that he could do something to break the power of the magnet. We did this together. First he broke the power in his imagination and then he actually got up from his chair in my office (as though it were the wheelchair) and walked around the room.  All of this was done using simple methods of active imagination.   After five or ten minutes we then went into my art studio where he began to work with sand play and painting. I saw him for about 12 sessions. He was now ready to stop our work together and he began public school near his home in Southern California.  I saw him for two sessions when he was in High School and he just wanted to talk over some of the issues he was dealing with in high school.  Through other sources I can tell you that Jimmie ultimately went into the film business where he has led a successful professional life.

It was a month later that I received a call from Dr. Hedda Bolgar from Mt. Sinai hospital.  Hedda was a lovely woman, a gifted therapist and analyst; she was the director of psychology at Mt. Sinai hospital in Los Angeles.  Hedda was also affiliated with the psychoanalytic group that was in charge of the school that Jimmie attended.  Apparently they were very upset because Jimmie was now in public school and they couldn’t imagine how this could happen.  They contacted Hedda and asked her to talk with me and find out what had happened.  I told her that it was a long story and maybe it was best for us to meet in person over lunch and I would share with her what had happened.

Hedda has always been a remarkable woman.  She has always been open to new ideas and new possibilities. When we met and I gave her the whole background on what had happened with Jimmie, she really understood what had happened at a very deep level.  Shortly after our meeting, she called and invited me to become a consultant to the department of psychology at Mt. Sinai and then to become a consultant to the department of psychiatry, also at Mt. Sinai.  This was the beginning of a wonderful few years working with Hedda and other staff members and students in training in this dual capacity.

It was about a year after I started my consulting work that Hedda told me about a clinical demonstration that she had witnessed that was facilitated by a professor at U.C. Santa Barbara.  She had watched him working with a  client using a number of chairs for the different selves of the subject.  I was fascinated by her description of what had taken place in this session.  I contacted the professor and asked him about the demonstration and he told me at that time that he had no real interest in this work and he didn’t mind at all if anyone wished to explore it more deeply.  Whatever he was doing had no name though it certainly seemed like the way a Gestalt therapist would work even though the professor had no connection to Gestalt work

I then began to play with the idea at home using my daughter Judith and my son Joshua (now deceased) and my then wife, Thea, as subjects.  We facilitated each other and it was fun, and sometimes seemed important, but it never went any further and within a year or so it seemed to have died a natural death. The resurrection did not happen for another two years or so when Sidra and I first met.

In the next Voice Dialogue Tips, Sidra explains her EARLIEST INFLUENCES and EXPERIENCES.