By Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.. Reproduced with permission.
Hal and Sidra Stone: their work and the complete article library · Further Reading
by Hal Stone, Ph.D. & Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
From Gary Zukav’s Website When Hal & SidraStone were his Soul Guests 7/15—8/15/2001
We each knew all the answers to most of life’squestions when we met over thirty years ago.They were often opposite answers, but we werein love and this didn’t seem to be a problem.Instead, we were **fascinated by our differences**(understanding rel. CD), and, as two seasoned,mature clinical psychologists, we were curious toexplore them.
As a matter of fact, we were so in love thatwe wanted to know everything that we couldabout one another. So it was that we talkedabout our lives, our feelings, our dreams and ourimaginings. We meditated and prayed together.It was a truly profound interaction, but therewere no real surprises. We each still knew whatwe knew, we still did not know what we didnot know, and we did not move very far beyondthose boundaries.
And then one day we discovered our “selves.”We had been talking about vulnerability and Halsuggested that I (Sidra) move over to anotherpart of the room and become the vulnerablechild instead of talking about it. I trusted Haland so I left the couch I’d been sitting on, sat onthe floor next to the coffee table, put my headdown on it and suddenly everything changed.I became absolutely quiet and experienced theworld around me differently. Sounds, colors andfeelings were more intense than before.
The sophisticated, rational, articulate womanwith all the answers was gone and in her placewas a very young child. I was extremely quiet andvery sensitive to everything in my surroundings. Iresponded to energies rather than thoughts. I feltthings I had not felt in decades, and knew thingsthat were not known by my everyday mind. Iknew, without question, the realities of my soul.After about an hour, Hal asked me to move tomy original seat on the couch and I returned tomy previous way of being in the world... but mylittle girl was still with me and I would neverlose her completely again.
This experience was a surprise to both of us! I(Hal) knew that something extremely importanthad just happened, that we had moved intoanother dimension of consciousness. I had playedwith talking to parts, but they were never real tome. Now they were real people. This was indeeda little girl—it wasn’t a concept or a complex; shewas a real person with rules of behavior, feelings,perceptions, reactions, and a history of her own.
This was the beginning of Voice Dialogue,or the dialogue with the family of selves thatlives within each of us. It was conceived out ofa genuine curiosity about another human beingand was born in love. Embracing Our Selves:The Voice Dialogue Manual gives the details onhow Voice Dialogue works.
We were very excited about our discovery.We saw that our psyches were not unitary but,instead, were made up of many selves and weset out on what has proven to be an unendingjourney. We went on to explore a vast multitudeof selves. We spoke with pushers and critics andpleasers and perfectionists. And we spoke withbeach bums, slackers, and manipulators. Wespoke with feeling selves and unfeeling selves,with vulnerable, playful and magical children.We spoke with heroes and villains, matriarchsand patriarchs. We spoke with visionaries andcynics. The range of selves is amazing; it seems tobe limitless.
We spoke to our “primary selves” which werevery well developed. They ran our lives or, aswe liked to put it, they drove our psychologicalcars. They were the ones that made up ourpersonalities; the selves that “knew all theanswers” when we first met. Then we went onto learn about our “disowned selves.” For eachprimary self there were opposite disownedselves, that were buried or repressed so that theprimaries could keep control of our lives.
The primary selves were familiar and wewere comfortable with them. It was easy to getthem to talk and to tell us how cleverly andsuccessfully they ran our lives. The disownedselves were unfamiliar and threatening to ourprimary selves. Each primary self felt that thedisowned self on the other side was a potentialdestroyer of our wellbeing. For instance: “Whathappens if you really let go and learned to ‘be’instead of to ‘do?’ You might never want to workagain!” would be the Pusher’s concern.
When we talked with these disowned selveswe felt as though we were living in a house withendless doors waiting to be opened with newrooms to explore. These selves carried new waysof looking at the world, new information, andcreative solutions to old problems.
Then there were the areas in which one ofus had a primary self that was the disowned selfof the other. For example, Sidra had a strong“What will people think?” self while Hal’s wasthe opposite: “I do what is right for me.” Halhad a deeply spiritual self while Sidra’s was morepragmatic. Hal was the Introvert while Sidra wasthe Extrovert. Sidra had a Financial Conservativewhile Hal had a Financial Liberal. Hal was afearless explorer of the world within and Sidrawas a fearless explorer of the world outside. Andso it went.
These opposite primary selves presented achallenge. They added a new dimension to ourrelationship: judgment. Each of these disownedselves was one of God’s little heat-seekingmissiles that impacted us where it hurt the most.In our relationship! When we examined thisphenomenon, we discovered that our judgmentswere not bad, they were simply signs that we hadsomething to learn. Each time one of us judgedthe other, we were facing a disowned self.
In the past we had tried hard to avoid judgingothers. We felt that we were too mature andspiritually evolved for this. Now we learnedto use our judgments. Each time we felt ajudgment, it gave us the picture of a disownedself that needed integration. So we looked at thejudgment, clarified it, and found the disownedself. For instance, Sidra might have judged Halto be too free with money. We would look at this,determine that her primary self was a financialconservative and then work with the opposites ofbig spender and financial conservative in her.
We went on to discover how these selvesinteract in relationships. Relationships, wediscovered, are the interactions of not justtwo people, but two groups of selves. Theseinteractions follow simple predictable patterns.To move beyond the automatic, unconsciousrelating of these selves, we entered a new area ofexploration and understanding.
As a way of learning about ourselves andothers, Voice Dialogue is completely acceptingand non-judgmental. It simply looks at whatis. Some have called it a Western meditationbecause, as each self is explored, an awarenessof that self develops. This awareness is separatefrom the self and acts as a witness. It carries withit a memory and an ability to recognize this selfas it operates in our lives.
But that is not all that happens. Yes, it isimportant to have a witness that is aware of aself, but a witness just witnesses. We live in theworld, however, not in an ashram. Who lives life?We saw that after we had separated from one ofour primary selves, there was a qualitative changein the way we lived our lives. In the deepestspiritual sense, we were separating from who wethought we were and allowing a new process toemerge. We named it an Aware Ego.
Voice Dialogue is about separating fromthe many selves that make up the humanpsyche and creating this Aware Ego. We do notdiscard anything. We embrace the selves thatare already ours and we add to them those wehave disowned. It is as though we were living inancient Greece and worshipping at the shrinesof all the gods and goddesses. We can have ourfavorites, but we take care not to neglect any ofthe others.
And as we embrace all that we are, wenaturally become more fully human andmore compassionate. We don’t have to learncompassion, it just appears. After all, everythingout there is within each of us.
We feel that the Aware Ego is anevolutionary step forward. This Aware Egoblends awareness with an experience of selves. Itmoves beyond duality by carrying the tension ofopposites and, because it does so, it allows us realchoices in life. It enables us to follow—safely—our unique paths.
As someone wrote to us recently: “Thereis something built into the method you haveseeded which reminds me of a desert proverb:‘Listen to the path... it is wiser than he whotravels it’.”
© 2001
Original source and copyright: Hal Stone, Ph.D., and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.. Read the original at Voice Dialogue International.