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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.
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 our (psychological) 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.
THE FOURTH ELEMENT
THE THEORY OF BONDING PATTERNS
The Selves and Relationship
We are giving a very short version of our theoretical structure.
This material is available in detailed form in our books, CDs and
Video Series. In this article we are attempting to give you a more
sweeping view of where we have come from. Someone who worked with
us in the late 1970's or 1980's cannot help but have a very limited
idea of what we are doing today. We do not enjoy stagnation and
neither does our unconscious. When some new idea emerged or methodology
changed then we let it change. Sometimes we weren't even aware
of a change, it evolved so naturally. It is confusing to many people
to watch this happen. For us, it is very exciting to see the work
evolve and to bring everyone along as a part of this process.
We met in 1972 and we were married in 1977. This article is not
about our personal life. We raised five children between us and
the personal work we were doing with each other helped us enormously
in understanding our parental role. These were also the years when
Sidra was the Executive Director of Hamburger Home, a residential
treatment center for adolescent girls and Hal was the Director
of the Center for the Healing Arts. Our professional lives were
completely separate, but our work together and the evolution of
our thinking were central aspects of our lives.
Those five years of work clarified our relationship and made marriage
possible. We were using Voice Dialogue in our respective practices
and Hal had started to do some teaching of the process at the Center.
It was becoming increasingly clear to us that in relationships
selves were constantly interacting with the selves of the other
person.
With our marriage, however, some of the interactions between us
were turning quite sour. Old patterns suddenly emerged but with
the new partner - a partner who was totally different from the
previous one. We called one another by the names of our former
spouses. We found ourselves judging each other - often for the
same qualities that had attracted us to one another in the first
place. We literally became other people: judgmental, closed, and
humorless. Underneath it all there was a vague feeling of betrayal,
helplessness and desperation.
What was happening? Was marriage necessarily the end of love?
There had to be a way of understanding these painfully divisive
interactions, of bringing them under some kind of control. We wanted
our relationship back. We knew that the selves we had worked with
over the previous years had something to do with this. It was obvious
to us that a set of selves had taken charge of our relationship.
There was no more "us", there was no more connection,
and the vulnerable children that were a part of our relationship
from the very beginning were nowhere to be found.
This was the start of a remarkable three months of a new kind
of exploration. We looked at the selves that had taken over our
relationship and tried to figure out what was really going on.
We wrote down and diagrammed out every negative interaction that
we had. We did this over and over and over again until a pattern
began to emerge. We began to see how these negative interactions
followed a basically simple pattern that repeated itself.
Hal would get angry with Sidra and suddenly he was no longer Hal,
he was a cold judgmental father talking to her. She became a victim/defensive
daughter and argued back. Then, in the blink of an eye, she became
a judgmental mother - withdrawn, critical and cold - and although
Hal became a hurt and vulnerable son to this cruel mother, still
his judgmental father attacked. There were always four selves (or
sets of selves) involved. We replayed this scenario over and over
again but now we were beginning to see the pattern. We looked for
all the selves involved in these interactions. Some were more apparent
than others. But they were always all there.
We named this pattern a "bonding pattern" in recognition
that it was basically a set of parent/child interactions. We also
felt that this was a way to honor it as a normal way of relating
as contrasted to a pathological one. In those years, we looked
at these patterns as basically an interaction between power selves
and disempowered selves. As time went on, our views of this have
clarified; the parent/child nature of the interaction has become
ever more apparent and we have come to see this bonding pattern
as the basic default pattern in all relationships.
We discovered other constants in these interactions. All bonding
patterns grew out of the negation or disowning of vulnerability.
This took many forms, but it was always present. When our interactions
became negative we could always trace back to a time when we lost
contact with our core vulnerability (or what we called our Inner
Child). Something had happened to hurt it, to frighten it off and
we had ignored this; instead we had reacted in a more seemingly
adult fashion. We had basically disowned our vulnerable child.
If we could hold on to the child, (or to our vulnerability) and
took care of this directly, these negative patterns lost their
power; they didn’t need to play themselves out.
The other constant we discovered was a truism that we had recognized
from our early dealings with selves. Whatever you judge is a disowned
self of your own. In these negative interactions, or bonding patterns,
our judgments would flare up and assume center stage. We looked
carefully at this. Gradually it became clear to us that as we reacted
to each other negatively we were, in fact, being given pictures
of our own disowned selves. If we recognized this, we could use
it as a teaching in our own relationship - and we could help others
see this in theirs.
This was almost painful to realize. We had hoped we were beyond
this. Besides, our judgments were so much fun. It was such a wonderful
feeling to pin the other up against the wall with brilliant and
self-righteous criticisms. It was so wonderful to be unquestionably
right.
If, however, our judgments are reflections of our disowned selves,
then where’s the fun? How can you feel righteous in the middle
of a “righteous dance” in full knowledge of the fact
that you are basically attacking your own disowned self or selves?
We had some wild and (in retrospect) funny interchanges as we
closed in on the bonding pattern theory. One evening we were still
arguing over a particular bonding pattern at 11:00 PM and Sidra
finally said that she was exhausted and going to bed. Hal continued
to work on the pattern, simmering in the heat of his judgments
and furious at Sidra’s comment that he wasn’t in his
Aware Ego. After about 10 minutes Hal stormed into the bedroom
and with great grace and dignity yelled at her: “I am too
in an Aware Ego.” We both laughed and that was the end of
that one. Such is the snake-like path of the co-exploration of
consciousness.
Our excitement at this time was enormous. What was emerging was
something quite new. It was something that worked for us in everyday
life. It was a simple, precise, and elegant way of looking at relationships
that had a sense of a mathematical certainty and balance. Later
we came to think of it as a kind of technology of relationship.
Our excitement about all of this was magnified as we realized
that the theory of bonding patterns gave us a very creative (and
non-pathologizing) way to look at the transference. The same principles
were operating. The only difference is that we refer to it as transference
if we get paid and bonding patterns if we don’t. We've come
to call this "The Psychology of the Transference".
There was immediate gratification from our discovery of bonding
patterns. We felt better. Feelings of love and intimacy returned.
Of course, we had to accustom ourselves to the loss of self-righteousness
(that deliciously seductive feeling) but we were a lot happier
with each other.
There's something wonderfully freeing about escaping from a negative
bonding pattern. And it totally changed the nature of working with
couples, making it a joy rather than a nightmare. Teaching people
about the bonding patterns and then working with the selves created
a wonderful path to change and we used it ourselves with increasing
effectiveness.
It was much later that we began to attend to the positive bonding
patterns and to realize how often these set the stage for the appearance
of negative ones.
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Contents
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