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Issue 25 Febuary 2007

Conscious Body –  

Healing With Inner Selves

 

BY JUDITH HENDIN, PHD

 

It is an honor and a privilege to share an approach to healing and consciousness that has developed from the seminal work of Hal and Sidra Stone, originators of Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves.

 

Hal and Sidra have long taught that a whole cast of characters lives inside us. These characters run the gamut from the pusher that urges us to work hard all day long, to the caretaker that takes care of other people, to the inner child that wants to curl up and snuggle with a puppy. Each of these parts, or selves, is alive in us. Each has its own point of view. And each has its own distinct energy that affects the body tremendously!

 

We identify with some of these parts and live our lives from them. If, for example, you get a lot done most days, your pusher is a major part of you, one that we call a “primary self.” The opposite of this we call a “disowned self.” A disowned self often lies buried, and at some time in our lives it wants to emerge. In many cases of illness, disowned selves desire to be known. We can look at much pain or illness as the call of the disowned self, and we can treasure the body as a guide to this gem within us.

 

I hope we can circumvent the guilt that has arisen from the idea that people create their own illness. This is the farthest thing from the truth. Disowned selves lie in the unconscious. As the great psychologist Carl Jung said, “The unconscious is unconscious.” We have no access to the unconscious until its contents start to emerge in dreams, in relationships, or in the body. This is truly a no-fault situation.

 

Let me say that when I began working with the body and selves in 1992, it was a process of pure discovery. To my surprise, the selves emerged spontaneously from the body. While I was familiar with many kinds of body-mind therapy, recognition of selves and their vivid energetic aliveness added a new dimension. Here’s the kind of session that happened:

 

 

Walt’s Playful Side Heals His Headache

 

Walt, a manager at a local business, slunk into my office with his head pounding. “It’s been a long day, lots of pressure and decisions,” he explained. “My head throbs at the end of a day like this.”

 

At my suggestion, Walt agreed to explore the headache. I instructed him to lie down on the sofa and I led him through a relaxation process. Then I asked Walt to tune into the energy of the headache.

 

“Do any images come to you?” I asked.

 

“I see something light and yellow,” Walt said.

 

“Stay with that light, yellow energy. What do you notice next?” I asked.

 

” Play. That’s weird, but somebody says, Be lighthearted and playful. “

 

So he stood up and together we acted silly, grinning and laughing all the while.

 

“How’s the headache?” I asked after a few minutes.

 

Walt was silent. He looked amazed. “Good grief, it’s gone.”

 

And it stayed gone for the rest of the hour.

 

                                                                                                                                       Quick Summary for Walt

 

What is the primary self for Walt? A responsible part that feels pressured and has to make decisions.

 

What is the disowned self? Playful.

 

What is the energy of the disowned self? Silly, fun.

 

Can you feel those energies in your own body? Letting the energy of a buried self surge through the body is the key to healing with selves.

 

 

 

The Adventure

When a self in us is ready to be known, it leaves a trail, much as Hansel and Gretel left a trail of breadcrumbs so they could be rescued from the witch’s gingerbread house. Taking into account that many ailments are caused by environmental, nutritional, or genetic factors, in many illnesses there may also be a self that is trying to be known. It’s trying to get our attention. It’s the part that holds the medicine.

 

Some selves are easy to discover. A couch potato is yearning to exist in the life of a busy executive. A laughing kid cavorts within the strictest schoolteacher. Common sense, or a good therapist, can pinpoint the underlying cause of many symptoms. An adventure begins when we start with a symptom that has no apparent cause and discover the self behind it.

 

I’ve done thousands of sessions, and in every single case, a self emerged from the symptom. There was always “someone” inside who wanted to express.  

 

The beauty is that we can help anyone with a body symptom find the disowned self that wants to come through. Then by encouraging its expression, we can foster healing and consciousness.

 

 

Drama and Movement

 

For healing to happen, we may need to give ourselves permission to be dramatic. This is where my performing dance background has contributed to the development of this approach. I encourage full energetic presence of the disowned self, in motion and sound. This lets the disowned self flush the body with fresh, new energy, be it yearning, yelling, weeping, skipping merrily, laughing, or any other form of expression.

 

For instance, just before Christmas, Paul developed a debilitating case of sciatica. The sciatic pain led us to a mischievous sprite who wanted to be messy instead of trying to keep order (the job of the primary self) during the busy holiday season. This one made a grand mess in my office as it threw books on the floor and scattered Kleenexes and pillows everywhere, laughing all the while. The sciatic pain stopped on the spot!

 

 

Bodies Are Not Logical

 

How do we find the self that is trying to express? Not by logic or rationality. The body is connected to the unconscious. We can call this nexus the body-psyche. The language of the body-psyche is not logical or rational, it is the language of symbols, the language that we are familiar with in dreams. As we follow the symbols that arise from symptoms, we have a direct route from the body to the inner world. Symbols always lead to the self that is trying to express.

 

Peggy, a young professional woman, faced the bleak prospect of a potentially terminal lung disease with no known cause. As our session began, Peggy lay down, went through a deep relaxation, tuned into the energy of the lung disease, and waited for images to appear. She began to sense a “scary sadness. It feels like a black hole, empty,” she said.

 

“Tell me more about this black hole,” I said.

 

“There’s a coffin. It’s only about an inch wide.”

 

“That is a very small coffin,” I said, wondering if an inner child might be surfacing. “Is anyone in the coffin?”

 

“Little Peggy is in there. She’s holding back her tears.” This led to the realization that Peggy had held back her emotions ever since childhood as a way to protect her over-burdened mother. This inner child was the Self Behind the Symptom and deserved a lot of care now so she could cry her tears.

 

 

Two-fold Benefits

 

There are two benefits from approaching body symptoms in this way. The first benefit may be physical healing. When the disowned self comes through, the energy shift of the body is so profound that healing may happen. Analysis of 144 body symptoms of my clients showed that 63 percent of these symptoms healed and 22 percent improved. We were thrilled with these results.

 

Second, a disowned self points us to a new way of being in the world. As we gradually introduce this new self, we develop an Aware Ego that can embrace both sides. The woman with fibromyalgia who discovers she thirsts to speak up for herself needs to practice holding both sides – the part that stays quiet and the part that speaks up.

 

I believe bodies are devised to guide us in consciousness. Follow the energy of pain or illness and you will find characters inside bursting to express – emotions held back for decades, a little child sweetly playing, Aphrodite’s sexy hips swaying. All these, and many more, are precious medicine.

 

 

Quick Summary

 

.  Body and psyche are intimately connected. When we have a body symptom, often a part of us that has been buried, or disowned, is trying to express.

 

 .  To find this part, we follow the symbolic language of the body-psyche. It always leads to a self.

 

.  This Self Behind the Symptom is gloriously specific. It will not generically say, “I’m angry,” it will specifically say, “I’m angry at so-and-so about such-and-such.”

 

 .  This self is energetically, vividly alive. As it expresses, it literally changes body energy and may help the body heal.

.  If the self wants to move or make noise, we encourage it, because this brings the self more fully and exactly into the body.

 

.  Time frames for healing vary, from right in the moment to a healing path that can take years. We have patience as it unfolds.

 

.  There is always a primary self that holds the opposite values of the disowned self. We learn to embrace both sides and develop the Aware Ego that has the capacity to choose. The Aware Ego is fundamental to Hal and Sidra Stone’s work.

 

.  In the spirit of Voice Dialogue, this approach to the body can be integrated into any system of healing or consciousness work.

Issue 24 September 2006

     SOME THOUGHTS ON ENLIGHTENMENT

I began my Jungian Analysis when I was 22 years old in 1949.   My dream process exploded immediately and it has been with me ever since.   I very early became aware, as young as I was, of another reality that lived inside of me.   I began to experience the Intelligence that lies within the unconscious and that manifests in many different ways in our lives. For me it was through the dream process that this experience of “The Other Reality” became more real and more profound.

 

Early in my analysis, probably within the first year, I had a very memorable dream.   In the dream I had entered a small room that was filled with ancient spiritual books from all traditions.   These books were written in all languages but I particularly noticed a series of 12 volumes written in Hebrew that dealt with ancient spiritual truths.   A voice then said to me that all of the knowledge of these volumes would become available to me at the age of 56.

 

The dream had a strong impact upon me and, along with other later experiences, led me deep into an exploration of the world of spiritual reality. The years passed and I immersed myself in my Jungian studies and in spiritual studies in general. I meditated and I prayed and I thirsted for God and I was attempting to move on the fast track towards enlightenment. I read the autobiographies and descriptions of Spiritual Masters of all religions and I pushed myself as hard as I could to reach this goal to the detriment, I might add, of a more conscious relationship to my own family. My primary energetic linkage was to Spirit and much less was available to the central people in my life.

 

The years passed. I became an analyst in 1961 and then left this world in the early seventies.   I began to experiment with a variety of treatment modalities. I found a new appreciation of all of the different approaches and began to use them in my clinical practice.   A new world was beginning for me.  

 

In early seventies Sidra and I met and together we began to explore these new worlds and out of this began our work with Voice Dialogue.   I was changing dramatically through all of this and being with Sidra galvanized this change. She was a full on woman of the world and I loved her and I had to rise to the challenge of integrating what she carried for me.   At my core, however, I was still waiting for enlightenment. I was still chasing God in a variety of ways and this was the case as I turned 56 in 1983.

Somewhere after my 56 th birthday I had a consult with an astrologer friend of mine who told me that I was going to be having a huge experience and change towards the end of my birthday year.   That was all I needed to hear. The oracles had spoken and I was about to finally have the experience of enlightenment, of becoming one with God.

 

Sidra and I had already started to teach all over the U.S. and the world.   We planned a trip to Israel towards the end of the birthday year. Since my next birthday was in December, this would mean that I would be completing our work a few weeks before my 57 th birthday.   At that time we were trying to train people in Voice Dialogue in Israel and in particular we were trying to establish a training process between Arabs and Israelis to see if we could help at all in a situation that was most difficult at that time and that seemed destined to deteriorate very badly.   It was a difficult task and we gave it our best with very little success.

 

To continue with my narrative, it was now 1984, late in my 56 th year.   We had finished our teaching and had some time off.   For me however my time was running out.   I know that what I am going to share with you now sounds a bit crazy, but in truth the search for God often makes us do strange things.   I felt that if my experience was going to happen it was going to happen in Israel where we were really trying to do some very significant work.   We were on our last day in the city of Svatt and we planned to leave for home the next morning. I felt that this was it and that once we left we were very close to the New Year and my next birthday.   I was feeling very disappointed that my journey towards the enlightenment experience was so very close to being de-railed, maybe forever.

 

On this last night we are in a lovely old hotel looking out at night over the quiet valley below. Sidra was tired this evening and she had gone to sleep about 9:00 PM.   I was standing at the end of an open portico of the hotel, looking out into the night, watching the lights of the valley below and the hills of Lebanon rising in the distance.   I was hoping against hope that my enlightenment might still happen on this fated evening.

 

The time seemed to pass quickly.   It was as though I was in an altered state of consciousness.   It is now 10:00 PM and then it is 11:00 and then 12:00 AM.   I am very much awake.   It is now 1:00 AM and then 2:00 AM and then I look at my watch and it is 2:30 AM. I look up again into the night and suddenly I start laughing. I laugh and I laugh and at that moment Sidra emerges from her room and walks towards asking me what is happening. When she comes closer I’m still laughing and I say to her – “Sweetheart – I get it – I finally get it.   This is it – this moment is it – right now – this moment is it!”

 

In those few moments I went through a momentous shift in my life, as though I were re-born.   Yet it was so light and so funny. How could I have not seen this?

 

I realized in those moments that if I walk and I put my foot down, where I touch the earth is my new reality. I am now present in that moment – until I move to the next moment. I saw that my path was a very different path than the Hal who had been there a minute before.   I was no longer going to be chasing God.   I was going to be learning how to be present in life. I would be surrendered to God, as we all must be whether we know it or not or like it or not.   Being surrendered however is very different than racing towards Enlightenment.  

 

The shift that occurred within me that evening opened for me a new level of exploration and joy in the act of life itself.   I had always had the notion that I have to get the personal material out of the way so that I could then move more deeply into spiritual realms. The future began to look very different to me.

 

I am constantly surprised at how the aging process has gone for me in my life. Before this experience my fantasy was that as I got older I would become wiser and deeper and more introverted and always keep moving inward as I prepared for death.   Instead I find myself today more involved in relationship, more committed to life and to feelings than I ever have been in my life. I cry so easily now that you would think someone had built a tear pipeline somewhere inside of me. Sidra calls them the “tears of the heart” as contrasted with the tears of pain and suffering.   They are really quite different.

 

There isn’t a month that passes that some new insight doesn’t occur to me that deals with my personal psyche. At other times this is interspersed with other experiences, mainly through my dreams or through Sidra’s and my work together, where the Intelligence of the unconscious infuses me with its images and wisdom.

 

I shifted at that time from a spiritual path to a psycho-spiritual path and this is how I would summarize the path of the Aware Ego Process.   It is Psycho-Spiritual.   We must learn to embrace the opposites of body/ emotion/ mind on the one side and spirituality on the other side.   Then, after a time, it doesn’t matter what side you are on.   I have no interest in leaving this life because I’m having such a good time in so many different ways and Sidra and I together have such a great joy in helping people learn how to move towards the creation of heaven on earth.

 

Enlightenment is a vision of the Spiritual Primary Selves.   It is a beautiful vision generated by the search for Spiritual reality and experience.   I honor that path, but it isn’t my path.   It is only one side of the coin. There truly are many paths.  

 

If someone has an enlightenment experience, using the term as it is used in the East, does it mean that they have embraced all the selves?   I don’t believe this to be the case. Instead I believe it means that such people have devoted themselves to spiritual work and practice and have had a direct experience of god and/or cosmic reality/ cosmic consciousness and certainly many aspects of the great mystery may become known to them major changes in consciousness will most certainly occur within them

 

Do they know how to live in relationship?   Do they know how to raise step- children?   Do they know how to earn money and invest it?   Do they know how to deal with acting out children?   Do they know what their disowned selves are? Do they know when they are in a positive or negative bonding pattern?   Do they understand the reality of Dragon energy that is a part of them? Do they know that powerful dark energy of Ghengis Kahn is a part of them? It is very doubtful that this is the case.

 

I remember once in a dream and I stood before evil and we had been battling with each other for centuries and we were fighting again with each other.   Suddenly I looked at him and I felt great sadness and I apologized to him for all of the pain I had caused him through the centuries. He was shocked and then he apologized to me.   Then I began crying for I realized at last that Evil was by brother and he knew this too and he too began to cry.  

 

This dream, this meeting with the dark side that I have been working with all of my life, would never have been possible if I had not been blessed by the Universal Energies with the ability to separate from my drive towards enlightenment through my relationship to Sidra and to my dreams. I have met so many remarkable energy systems that I would never have met and one can only gasp in amazement at the power of this Intelligence once it gets going inside of us.

 

The psycho-spiritual path is much more the path of balance, much more the path of the snake.   On this path we are always working between opposites and learning to spend more time in this middle way – the Aware Ego process.   We are always reaching for balance as we stretch to encompass all we can that lies within and without of the human psyche.

 

I am very grateful for the years I spent searching for enlightenment because I learned so much and developed strong transpersonal muscles swimming in this oceanic world. I am also aware of how much I wasn’t present in my marriage and how unavailable I was in many significant ways to my marriage, my children, my friends and my clients.  

 

Knowledge comes from the primary selves. The primary selves are the ones that accumulate information and knowledge.   Wisdom comes through the development of the Aware Ego Process because here it is necessary to embrace opposites.   If you are in an Enlightenment Process, remember that this is only one side of the coin.   On the other side is life itself in all of its manifestations.   Our job is to embrace the spiritual on one side and life itself on the other side.   

 

This is indeed a huge stretch for all of us but I can say now with some sense of authority, looking back at the sea of life that has led us all to this moment, that the effort is well worth it and the rewards are indeed great. Possibly we need a new word to stand on an equal footing with the attraction of Enlightenment. I once heard someone use the term   Enlifenment. My spell check objects to this term and suggests the word Enlivenment. Either of these would certainly bring honor to these two dimensions of reality and I do believe that the Universal Intelligence would smile, and even laugh, at such a union of opposites.

Issue 23 May 2006

IT  WAS ONLY A DREAM!
Learning to Honor the

Creative  Imagination in Children
                                            

                                                       by Dr. Hal Stone

The growing up process is basically a process of socialization for the developing child.  There are a wide range of rules and regulations that need to be  learned as well as subtler cues in respect to the personal needs of family and  extended family members and other people and groups who are germane to the child’s  world.

The process of socialization varies greatly in different families and different  cultures, so the rules may vary and the intensity with which they are given  to us may vary. The principle remains the same however, and at very early ages  we are developing primary selves out of which we live our lives and and the  unconscious starts knocking at our door trying to show us the other side of  us, the one that was forced out of the picture by this socialization process.   These disowned selves live within each of us, often for the whole of our lives.   If we are married to our primary selves, which is the fact of it, then it is  very very difficult to discover this, let alone start the process of separation  from these primary selves.

If the primary self of a family system is basically very rational and rejecting  of dreams and other aspects of the creative imagination, then the child grows  up either identifying with this viewpoint or eventually rebelling against the  rationality and over-identifying with the unconscious and the world of the dream.   A marriage to either side isn’t good news and so it is that the idea of the  Aware Ego emerges to embrace these opposites.  There are a multitude of  scenarios when it comes to selves and what we do with them.   This  is only one possible scenario.

There are two considerations that determine which dreams come knocking  at our door at night .  There is first of all the rules/primary  selves that we live by and secondly there is the emotional intensity that attaches  to the rule/primary self.  The more emotional intensity that the rule carries,  then the stronger is the disowned self inside of us.  All of these considerations  have an effect on the kind of dreams that appear and the strength of emotional  content. The stronger the disowned selves that a child is carrying, the stronger  will be the emotional content of the dream.

One other basic consideration is very important in understanding the dream process  in both adults and  children.   Whatever is chasing us us in  our dreams is a disowned self of the dreamer.  Whatever frightens  you in a dream is a reflection of a disowned self in the dreamer and the stronger  the disowned self the stronger the fear or panic and hence we move towards the  nightmare kind of dream, something that is very common in young children.   A nightmare type dream simply means that the disowned self system has reached  a more extreme place and thus manifests as nightmare, with strong emotional  content.

Now let’s take a look at how this works in a real life situation. Jimmy is a  very active four year old who has been somewhat over- protected by his mother  who fears very often that he will come to harm.  One afternoon Jimmy is  playing outside after school and he comes running into the house crying and  sobbing and yelling that  his friend Steve had hit him and that he had  run away with his ball. Steve’s mother, Sally,  is upset by this.   Her worst fears center around the possibility that something bad will happen  to him.  She embraces him and quiets him down and then she suggests to  him that he stay with her while she is cooking and cleaning and they can talk  together.  Jimmy is only too happy to not have to face going out into this  dangerous world that he feels increasingly he lives in.  His mother supports  his fears because she shares his fear of the world and his emerging sense of  being a victim to life.  She doesn’t know all of this in a conscious way  but it is there to do its work nevertheless. So for the rest of the afternoon  the two of them have a lovely and intimate time together and the outside world  of scary Mongol warriors riding their horses on missions of destruction does indeed  feel far far away from them — but not too far away once we are asleep.

A few hours after Jimmy goes to bed that night he wakes up screaming and sobbing.   He has had a nightmare.  He is being chased by a lion and he can’t get  away from it.  Sally tries to comfort him.  She is very well intentioned,  but since she herself is essentially a rational woman,  she has no connection  to the unconscious.  The life of the dream world has never opened for her.  So she says to Jimmy — “Jimmy — This is just a dream — Nothing more.   Come, I’m going to look under the bed with you and in the closet with you and  you will see that there is nothing there.”  She doesn’t know how to honor  the dream just as she didn’t know how to honor his instinctual energies that  were badly in need of support when his friend punched him.  She didn’t  support his inner lion, his natural aggression, his capacity to fight when necessary.   She herself had been over socialized in growing up so any kind of fighting was  dangerous to her.  Without meaning to and without understanding anything  that we are talking about now, she had stifled the budding warrior in him that  needed to emerge at this time in his life. When this natural instinctual energy  is  blocked, the unconscious brings the next best thing that it can bring.  It brings to him his lion but his lion is chasing him. It is angry at him.   This is how our lions behave when we betray them in this way.  They chase  us and keep trying to get our attention and we keep running away from them.

So Sally opens the lights and she and Jimmy look under the bed and they look  in the closet and they look behind the curtains and sure enough, there is nothing  there.  It was just a dream — just as she had said.  To hear the  words — “It was just a dream” — is something that has always brought great  sadness to me.  There is so much of the world that still lives in this  kind of consciousness, unable to hear the music of the dream world and begin  to learn about all the treasures it can bring us.  It certainly takes time  to learn about this world, but the rewards are so very great.

Sally has done two things to harm her son, the last thing in the world that  she would ever willfully do.  First she was unable to support the deeper  voice of her son’s jungle heritage, his instinctual energies.  That night  she is unable to support the symbolic picture of those same energies.   The dream image of the lion is only a dream — it isn’t real.  Sally is  not alone. The vast majority of the world lives without any kind of objective  understanding of, and appreciation for,  the world of the dream.   We do so at our own peril.  To take dreams seriously, to realize that they  are not “just a dream” is to discover the OTHER that lives within us.   The other reality is the source of a profound intelligence that is just waiting  to be awakened so that it can begin to operate in our life and bring us a new  way to look at ourselves.

Of course here we have yet another problem to be aware of and that is that dream  life is monitored by our primary selves.  When most of us do remember our  dreams it is our primary selves that think about them and reflect  on them.   This is why the process of separating from our primary selves is so intimately  bound to our work with the dream process.  If George Bush had a dream that  a very cute easter bunny was sitting at the right hand of God in heaven, his  way of looking at the dream would probably cause him to think that terrorists  were invading heaven directly and we would have a new Guantanamo Bay for Bunny  Interrogation.  By the way, I am referring to Easter Bunnies and not Playboy  Bunnies, though it probably wouldn’t really matter to the primary self system.

So Jimmy finally goes back to sleep and Sally goes back to bed and what happens  an hour later?  Jimmy is screaming again.  The lion is back again  but it’s bigger.  Of course it’s bigger!  The dream is like a fairy  tale.  Dragons grow heads and the bad guys and the scary guys of our dreams  get bigger when they aren’t dealt with, when we don’t know that the enemy we  think is out there is really our friend inside of us, waiting to come to our  support in life.

Sally goes through her routine again and they search the room and of course  there is nothing there.  “It’s only a dream Jimmy!  It isn’t real!”   This time Jimmy gets a cup of hot chocolate and he goes to bed again.   Soon Jimmy will stop remembering his dreams. They will only come back as an  occasional nightmare or he will feel an unknown anxiety that becomes so natural  to him that he doesn’t even know that it is anxiety.   Years later  when he is a lawyer defending a client in a court of law, he will find himself  shaking with fear and dread for reasons that are unknown to him.  He is  working against a killer lawyer whose  lions roar in extremis, a lawyer  who is Jimmy’s polar opposite and Jimmy is victim when he is anywhere near this  man or any man or woman like him.  Jimmy’s lion has long gone to sleep  as he pursued his path of intellectual excellence.  There is nothing wrong  with intellectual excellence so long as the lions and tigers are available to  us on the other side.  The really good news is the level of awakening that  is starting to happen to so many people in the world as they begin to catch  hold of these realities and begin to work with them.

Let us imagine a different scenario for Sally.  Imagine that she was somewhat  comfortable with the world of dreams and they are alive and real for her.   Jimmy starts to scream and she runs in and comforts him and he tells her his  nightmare.  She might say to Jimmy — “What a wonderful dream.  Your  lion wants to meet you. Tell me what he looks like?”  They begin a talk.  She asks if the lion has a name and Jimmy tells him that the name of the lion  is Jilson.  It doesn’t really matter what she does or says so long as she  honors the dream and stays away from any kind of attempt to interpret   the dream to him. Maybe she brings out a pad of paper and asks him to draw a  picture and then she may ask him to tell a story about Jilson.

It is no longer “just a dream.”  It is now the magic of the dream. She  is teaching Jimmy to dance with the world of his own creative imagination.   She is teaching him how to build a bridge between the marvelous world of the  rational mind and, on the other side, the magical kingdom of his creative imagination,  the world of fairy tale and myth.  She can even, if she wishes, make him  a large cup of cocoa.  Personally, I prefer coffee — but then I’m not  four years old and Sally isn’t my mother  — or is she?

Issue 22 March 2006

SEPARATING  FROM PRIMARY SELVES

ONE  SECRET OF GRACEFUL AGING

By  

Sidra  L. Stone, Ph.D.

I  remember my first pair of really special shoes. They were perfectly delicious  – a buttery, chocolate colored suede – and whenever I wore them, all was wonderful.  But now, more than sixty years later, I wouldn’t expect to be walking around  in the same shoes or in any shoes that resembled them. They would not longer  fit my circumstances – to say nothing of the fact that they would no longer  fit my feet.

And  neither would the personality – or primary selves – that worked for me at that  time still be appropriate. Our primary selves drive our psychological cars –  their rules and expectations determine how we live our lives. Why should any  of us expect the primary selves that we developed early in life to still work  for us? Why should they still fit our lives any more than the shoes we wore  or the cars we drove?

One  of the secrets of aging is to know this very important fact of life. The  primary selves that worked for you in earlier times are no longer appropriate.   The older you get – no matter what you do to avoid it – your  strength and stamina will eventually diminish and your body and your rational  mind will become less flexible.

Primary  selves that depended upon limitless energy, good health, a strong body, agility, power, speed, beauty, youth, instant recall and totally up-to-date knowledge  – or on being indispensable to others – face real challenges! There are also  some selves – like some shoes – that simply do not fit properly in the later  stages of life.

Let’s  look at some common primary selves and see what this might look like.

Susie  was a “Good Girl”. She learned how to follow the rules, to do whatever  she was told, not to make a fuss, not to demand any attention, or be a bother  to anyone. But now she is older and it is important that she gets some attention.  Susie needs to tell her doctor about a lump she’s found in her breast, but when  the doctor asks her how she’s doing, this “Good Girl” primary self  automatically tells the doctor “everything is just fine”. She can  no longer carry her heavy suitcase but her Good Girl does not wish to ask for  help because that would make her a bother to others. If she waits for someone  to notice that she needs help, Susie might wait forever as people hurry by.  I know a  woman who waited to call “911” until after 9:00 AM so that she wouldn’t  bother them. She had fallen the night before and had lain on the floor for six hours waiting until her Good Girl felt it was the “proper” time to  call.

It’s  time for Susie to integrate a self that she has disowned for her entire life  – the part of her that can ask for what she needs even if this might inconvenience  others. Her mother had been so self-centered and demanding that Susie vowed  never to behave in that way. So for Susie and all the Good Girls of the world,  the later years are a time to learn to care for themselves rather than others  and to ask for – and accept – help when it is needed.

Susie’s  sister, Dorothy was her opposite. Her primary self was a rebel. Her way of dealing  with a demanding mother was to fight. Whatever she was supposed to do, she did  the opposite. This Rebel self had great ideas – she thought outside the box  and was very amusing and quite attractive to others.

As  she gets older, Dorothy’s rebellious primary self begins to present problems:  she automatically resists all requirements. She refuses to do what is necessary  to protect her health. She is grossly overweight and has multiple medical challenges.  Unlike Susie, Dorothy’s primary self glories in the discomfort she causes those  around her and takes pride in her resistance to the suggestions of others.

Dorothy  could use some of Susie’s Good Girl at this point in her life. She could use  a little of the Good Girl’s self-discipline and respect for the rules. It would  help her to deal with her current health challenges if she could seek out the  wisdom of others and follow their guidance.

Dan  was a Responsible Father. When his own father died, Dan was only 9 years old,  but he was now the man of the house. He took great pride in his new role and  fulfilled it beautifully. He was the Responsible Father to his mother and to  his siblings; later in life he was Responsible Father to his wife and his own  children. He was even Responsible Father at work. In fact, it was the Responsible  Father who had lived Dan’s life.

Now  nobody in his family needs him in the same way as before. The Responsible Father  is out of a job. If Dan stays identified with this Responsible Father, he has  two ways to proceed. One is to feel unnecessary, and unwanted – he may even  begin to think that there is no longer any reason to live. A second way for  the Responsible Father to proceed is to continue to do as before – he can find  new areas in which to be responsible even though it is no longer natural and  may require an inordinate amount of effort at this time of life.

Looking  at this from a growth orientation, we see that now Dan has the opportunity to  separate from this Responsible Father and to begin to reclaim the selves that  he needed to disown earlier in life. He has the chance to discover what it is  in life that would give him pleasure. He has a chance to explore his own creativity,  to take up golf or snorkeling, to read the historical novels that he’d never  had time for, to study a foreign language, or perhaps take a romantic cruise  with his wife.

Angie’s  mother always seemed to be busy and, by the time she was only three years old, Angie knew that the most important thing in life was to be productive, to never  waste a minute of precious time. So, in order to be loved and appreciated in  her house, she developed a primary self of Pusher. Much  to her mother’s delight, Angie became a world class Pusher. When she was younger,  this was a source of great pride – she could get more done than anyone else  she knew and this made her special to her family, her friends, and her associates. Most important, it made Angie special to herself.

But  now Angie is older, her mother has been dead for many years and the stress of  a constant busyness is beginning to wear her down. Now it’s hard for her to  keep abreast with the Pusher’s demands. So Angie spends a good deal of time  worrying about her advancing age and her inability to get things done. In the  eyes of her Pusher, she is no longer a worthwhile person. According to her Pusher,  she is now incompetent, no better than the others who – in the eyes of the Pusher  – aren’t as productive as they should be.

If  she wants to enjoy the remainder of her life, Angie needs to take over the wheel  of her psychological car from her Pusher. It’s time to take back her judgments  of the “lazy good-for-nothings” of the world, integrate her Beach  Bum, learn to relax and start taking an afternoon nap without guilt.

Gary’s  father was a perfectionist and very judgmental of anyone who didn’t match up  to his expectations. Nothing ever seemed to please him and his family never  knew when he would burst into a tirade about their inadequacies. So Gary developed  an Inner Critic that tried to protect him from his father’s devastating criticism.  His Inner Critic tried to get there first – to criticize Gary before anyone  else did so that he could correct his mistakes thereby avoiding the pain and  humiliation of a very public judgment.

Gary’s  Inner Critic enforces the major rule of his Perfectionist: “No mistakes!  Thou shalt be perfect in every way.”

Now  Gary is older, he can take this opportunity to make his own rules. How about:  “You don’t have to be perfect. Just do what you can do.” If he keeps  the rule of perfection as the foundation of his life and the Inner Critic remains  one of his primary selves, life will be a total nightmare. There is nothing  more devastating than an oversized Inner Critic as you age. Each time Gary would  forget a name or an appointment, each time he would look in a mirror, each time  he would try to stop the aging process and get more control over his life, the  Inner Critic would pounce on him. He needs to integrate other selves that will  balance the Inner Critic – perhaps a spiritual self, an unconditionally loving  grandmother, a nurturing mother, or a protective father.

Each  of our primary selves brings us something special. Each has its own area of  expertise, a certain kind of knowledge. We need this. We don’t want to lose  their gifts. But we need something more, more than any single self can bring  to us.

Our  primary selves bring us knowledge but the Aware Ego process, as it embraces opposites, brings us wisdom, a wisdom that comes from living life completely  in all its complexity and carrying the paradoxes and contradictions.

As  we grow older, we can make use of our changing circumstances to move away from  the primary selves of our youth. The selves are basically inflexible, and the  older we get, the more inflexible they become. Their solution to all vulnerability,  and to any new challenge, is to do more of the same, more of what they do. So  a Pusher’s solution is to do more, a Responsible Parent searches for more responsibilities  to assume, and a Rebel finds more rules and requirements to rebel against. But  the Aware Ego process is just that – a process – and as such it is changing,  fluid and flexible.

As  we lose the flexibility of our bodies and our minds, we can introduce more flexibility  into our lives through the psyche and the soul. We can use this precious  time to separate from our primary selves and bring back into our lives the many  selves that – over the years – were left behind. We can live our lives increasingly  in the flow of an Aware Ego process and we can make this a time for “coming  home”!

To  apply this in your own life, think about these questions:

1.  What are your primary selves or – to put it another way – who is driving your  psychological car?

2.  Why do you think you developed these particular primary selves?

3.  How did these selves work for you? What rewards did they earn or what dangers  did they avoid?

4.  How might these selves not work so well any longer?

5.  Or, if they are still working, how might they not work as well in the future?

6.  If you were to introduce just a tiny bit of the disowned self (which carries  the opposite qualities) into your life what might it bring you?

Sidra  Stone,

March  2006

Issue 21 January 2006

The  Negative Ego

A  Response from Hal Stone and Sidra Stone to a letter

asking  for clarification about the concept of the negative ego.

What we generally refer to as “ego” is in fact a group of sub-personalities  that each of us has grown up with and these sub-personalities ( ego ) determine  how we feel, think and perceive reality.   If you have grown up in a family  that is identified with mind and you are an oldest son then you well may identify  with the mind as a primary self. Going along with this will probably be the  selves we refer to as impersonal, controlled and possibly perfectionistic.    Our “ego states” are simply the many selves within us that we have identified  with in the course of our growing up process.

To  refer to them as “negative ego” is really quite sad. They are the  selves that were conditioned into us in the maturation process and they have  been doing their best to keep us safe and protected and successful on the planet.    Now spiritually identified people come along and they say that the mind  or arrogance or selfishness or self-involvement are false selves or parts of  the negative ego.   For us nothing in the psyche is, in itself, negative  or positive. The mind is a very handy thing to have available so long as  you are not identified with it. Arrogance can give you power. Selfishness  can give you boundaries. Self-involvement gives you entitlement. The trick is  to learn how to not be identified with them or married to them.

The  issue of identification is the key to understanding the psyche.   From  our perspective each self is an energy pattern and they are neither bad nor  good. So we have developed a method to help you to separate from your primary  selves ( ego states/ negative ego/etc ). We have you move over and we talk to  the mind. After we have done this for a period of time you move back to the  place you were before the work started. The you that is sitting there is not  the same you that was there before because the new “you” is no longer  identified with the mind. You are now in the Aware Ego process .  Separated from the mind you begin feel energetic connection to me. You begin  to experience feelings and emotions because your mind can no longer shut down  the opposite side. Eventually we spend time with the opposite selves — with  your feelings, your more personal selves, your selves that are related to intimacy.    

Eventually  you come back to the center place, the Aware Ego place, and now you are resting between opposites. On one side is the mind/impersonal selves and on the other  side is the feeling/personal selves.    The Aware Ego has to learn constantly to rest between opposites — and  there are many of them.   On one side is the primary self system and on  the other side is the disowned self system. Whenever you judge someone you are  dealing with a disowned self. Whenever you are unconsciously fascinated by someone  or feeling inferior to someone, you are dealing with a disowned self.

Is  compassion good?   No — it isn’t good and it isn’t bad. It depends on  what part of you is practicing compassion. If you are a spiritual type and you  have learned that compassion is good, then you will always try and be compassionate.  If you always try to be compassionate then you will bury your “non-compassionate  nature.” So you will have compassion as a primary self and underneath it will  be the garbage dump of all of your disowned selfishness, judgment, negativity,  etc. Our approach is very different. We simply would begin to talk to your compassionate  side. You would learn about it and hear its voice and enjoy it but you would  no longer need to be married to it or identified with it. We then would talk  to your other side — your non-compassionate nature. Here you might be in for  a surprise because the more you try to live in the light, the more darkness  there is on the other side.

Let  us say that your spiritual teacher tells you that you are arrogant and this  is part of the negative ego. Now you must get rid of arrogance. You can meditate  and you ask for God to bring in the loving energy and light and the arrogant  feeling disappears. Where does it go?   It goes into the giant energy pool  of disowned material that keeps psychotherapists in practice unto all eternity.    You can mask the arrogance, but it doesn’t disappear. It simply goes  underground.   In our dreams we discover the multitude of disowned energies,  often chasing us and terrifying us and making us victims to them.

We  do something very different. We say — Okay Michael so you are arrogant. That  is an energy, a self that lives within you that is behaving unconsciously. So  let us talk to it. We then move you over and begin a dialogue with arrogance  as a self. We find that it gives you great power and authority. It is angry  at you because it feels you have always hated it so. It is always trying to  break out of the prison that has been created by your “anti-arrogance” selves. Then we go back to the Aware Ego and eventually to the other side where  we talk to your spiritual voice or your anti-arrogance voice and then back to  the Aware Ego and now you must stand between these opposites.

You  must embrace your arrogance while at the same time you embrace your anti-arrogance.  In this way the Aware Ego is in a constant state of sweat because the opposites  are so numerous. There is Christ and Satan, Pusher and Beachbum, Power and Vulnerability,  Hatred and Love, Personal and Impersonal, Being and Doing, Extraversion and  Introversion, being open and straight and being Machiavellian on the other side.  The list is endless.

God  is many different things and manifests in many different forms and energies.  Certainly for people who work with the Psychology of the Aware Ego, God lives  also in our ability to sweat the tension of the opposites.   It is our  view that every conceivable form of darkness is a part of us just as the highest  and sweetest expression of divine light is a part of us also. This is the human  condition.   Nothing can be left out of the equation. What you leave out  bites you, over and over again, until we learn to honor that which we thought  was our enemy.

I  hope these ideas are helpful to you in your search.

With  Best wishes   — Hal and Sidra Stone