Voice Dialogue
Despite your best intentions, do you continue to get in your own way and sabotage your plans and goals? Do you find yourself paralyzed by indecision? Do the same destructive patterns and behaviors continue to emerge in your relationships? Do either your mind or emotions dictate your choices?
Voice Dialogue is a powerful tool for personal growth and development that can help you resolve and overcome these and other issues in a profound yet non-threatening way. Voice Dialogue is a way of learning about yourself and others and is completely accepting and non-judgmental.
The aim of Voice Dialogue is to expand your ability to make choices in life rather than to behave in an automatic and unconscious fashion.
Benefits:
- Reduce internally generated anxiety and tension
- Choose how to respond to life and express yourself creatively rather than act out old, unconscious patterns
- Heal inner and outer relationships
- Realize life purpose and create a vision for the future while learning to balance in the moment-by-moment process of today
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What to Expect
Voice Dialogue is based on the theory of a multifaceted human personality. As a multifaceted personality, we have many parts of us that function in our day-to-day lives and experiences. In Voice Dialogue these ‘parts’ of us are referred to as ‘selves.’
These selves are real live autonomous “people” in their own right. They have their own feelings, desires, memories, opinions, worldviews - they are not merely concepts and this is not therapeutic role-playing. Many of these ‘selves’ have grown up with us our whole lives, taking care of our early survival, our identification as individuals, and our success in the world. These “primary” selves form the core of our personality.
There are other parts of our personality that we disown for a number of reasons. These “disowned” selves have experienced a lifetime of repression, becoming evident only when we lose control and act contrary to character, or more commonly when we project these disowned qualities out onto others, usually those we either over value or deeply dislike. Yet other parts of us remain dormant within and many not be ‘born’ until later in our lives.
In a Voice Dialogue session, we spend time talking about your life in general or about a specific issue that you would like to focus on. At some point, a particular energy pattern, a part of your personality, is identified that has taken control and is a primary contributor to the situation or issue you would like to change.
Once identified, you move to another position in the room. Each ‘self’ is greeted and responded to individually, according to its own unique energy pattern; just as we interact differently with different people that we meet.
As each ‘self’ is spoken to directly, you become less identified with it and gain more insight into your own functioning. By meeting and becoming familiar with your various ‘selves’, you develop the ability to choose what part of your personality is in charge at any given moment. You learn to take gentle, effective control of your life.
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The Development of Personality, Vulnerability and Voice Dialogue
By Hal and Sidra Stone
Excerpt from “The Birth of Personality”
The key issue in thinking about the development of personality is the understanding of vulnerability and the pivotal role that it plays. We are all born totally vulnerable and in our early months and years of life, we must be taken care of by other people. Our very lives depend upon this. We must begin to develop a personality that will protect this vulnerability. This vulnerability remains as the Vulnerable Child that operates deep within each of us for the remainder of our lives.
When we talk about vulnerability or this vulnerable inner child in Voice Dialogue, we are not talking about weakness. What we are talking about is the basic sensitivity of all human beings. We humans are a finely tuned species. Most of us know very little about the fineness of this inner tuning. However, all of us are amazingly sensitive to the world around us - particularly to other people and their moods and to the ambience of our physical surroundings. We respond with attraction or with discomfort and repulsion. We respond with warm, safe feelings or with anxiety, fear, and loneliness.
If you know about your vulnerability – or this sensitivity - you can take care of it yourself consciously and with choice. Otherwise, it will be cared for unconsciously or automatically in your relationships. These relationships can be with spouses, parents, children, friends, colleagues, workers, bosses, teachers, political leaders, or pets. It can even be cared for unconsciously - by your computer or your TV.
Why is this important? As we say in Voice Dialogue - caring for one’s own vulnerability is indispensable for anyone who wants the freedom of choice in life. It is also the very foundation for a good relationship.
If you are not aware of your own vulnerability and you do not take care of it consciously, you have unconsciously placed your sensitivities and needs in the hands of others and - in the deepest sense - you are very vulnerable in life. Paradoxically, it is embracing this very vulnerability, this fine tuning, that can help you to enjoy life – to appreciate beauty, to feel wonder, to enjoy silence and “being” time, and to make the deepest and most delicious intimate connections with others.
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