An experience of Voice Dialogue
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What follows is
Tony's account of the Voice Dialogue session at Hampton Wick Cricket Club.
Others have also sent in their reflections.
Click here
to read them.
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Arriving…
Arriving at the
cricket club one May morning in 2002 it was easy to forget how much commitment
and time it had taken to arrive here. Months elapsed between idea and
realisation. Today’s meeting feeling like a slightly surreal event, stepping
outside of ordinary life, to be enjoyed, maybe a seed growing from way back,
from being born into a certain body/mind, from subsequent events that made up
my life to date, from more than a few coincidences and from some conscious
choices, leading me to a very strong but hard to explain interest in this thing
called Voice Dialogue.
How is it that nine
people (Terri, Julie, Claire, Jean, Colston, Lilly and me joined by Esther
Zahniser and Jen Hunt our trainer/facilitators) ended up here together – and
two others (Andy and Caroline) nearly made it but didn’t? How was it that we,
out of over 100 New Intermediaries who received the yahoo invitation and a much
larger potential audience in the networks we all have, were the ones who were
hooked?
What did I think this
day was for? Was it just a bit of an indulgence, pursuing a personal hobby
horse? Well I was following up on a “Voice” theme that had become quite
central, penetrating compellingly into areas that loom large in my work such as
change, team development, personal development, strategy development. Last
autumn I had found myself writing several poems and a draft manuscript for a
book on the topic of Voice. The Voice theme was there in the Forum Theatre
workshop that Andy and I ran with Roddy and
So what do I remember
of the day? I arrived with Helen to deliver the lunch she helped make. Dave,
our man in charge of the cricket club, did his usual brilliant job of looking
after us, making teas and coffees, laying the table and washing up afterwards.
Dave also entertained Jean and me with his story of peacocks coming over the
wall from the allotments eating the grass seed from his cricket pitch. Did he
say there were 235 varieties of bird to be found in the area? Seems a lot when
I can only name about 3!
But what about the
session itself? At first I experience only a contented blur, but quite a lot
more comes back to mind when I pause and glance at the post-its I was
scribbling on from time to time. I’m motivated to call more of it back to mind
because it felt nourishing, made me feel more confident about who I am, and
gave me lots of clues about how I want to work with and relate to others. Today
2 days later, I feel relaxed, sort of at ease with myself, accepting as friends
the parts of me that sometimes I feel are unacceptable, or
wrong-and-ought-to-be-worked on, or suppressed or changed.
Lilly commented in
one of the breaks that the words “Voice Dialogue” combined together sound so
democratic and sort of difficult to reject. They seem to touch in me a desire
to unconceal and include more parts of myself in conversation with others, and
to play my part more fully as a facilitator in enabling meaningful dialogue to
occur between others.
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Starting off…
Esther began the day
by inviting us to take turns round the circle to say for about 2 minutes who we
are and what interests us. This itself was revealing who and what was here in
the room. I realised I was bemused about some kind of transition I am in this
year between an old and new relationship to work – spending far more time not
working than I am used to, but not fighting it, sort of enjoying it, with only
occasional pangs of guilt. And being in the circle hearing others it was
apparent that we shared some common themes and particular differences: eg. I
was not the only one in transition, but the transitions themselves were
different, one person being newly rich and homeless, and another about to get
married.
Acknowledging roots
in Gestalt, Jung and other therapies, Esther’s fast explanation of Voice
Dialogue used two key diagrams:
1. A flower bud with
petals labelled Big Responsible, Thinking, For Others. We learned these labels were
Esther’s examples of Primary Selves, aspects of ourselves that we develop from
an early stage in life to protect our inherent, childlike vulnerability.
2. Curved sweeping grey
lines covering a whole sheet except for some coloured squiggles in the bottom
left quadrant. The picture represented All Of Life and the coloured squiggles
were your Primary Selves which although they are colourful and interesting and
useful for protecting your vulnerability, they have a bad side effect: they
limit you, preventing you from seeing and experiencing All Of Life.
Questions started to
arise such as what are the names of the Primary Selves. Esther told us she is
wary of suggesting names because they are limiting and because the Voice
Dialogue work is about finding and working with what Primary Selves are
actually alive in you right now. Some of the other names that often occur were
Pusher, Pleaser, Controller, Inner Critic…
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A demo…
Esther moved us
swiftly on. She had recently asked Hal Stone, one of the founders of Voice
Dialogue how best to approach a level one training with a group like us and he
had said “give them lots of practice working with their own material”.
I found I was eager
anyway having read some of the theory on Hal and Sidra Stone’s website (www.delos-inc.com )
to experience a demonstration (but not eager at all to be
practised on in front of a group!). Thankfully Jen offered to play a Voice
Dialogue client and Esther a facilitator (…. letting the rest of us off the
hook for now!).
Jen sat in a chair
facing Esther and described a situation in which her boss had become
increasingly difficult and nit picky about her work. Somehow Esther quickly
established that Jen felt both hurt and angry…. and then demonstrated a series
of questions whereby she sought permission (without pressure) to work with the
part of Jen that was hurt and the part of her that was angry. Esther’s ease and
experience with the method was evident. Her key question seemed to be:
What happens in you
when I say we could give a separate space
to the part of you
that is……( hurt)?
I think from memory
Jen reported feeling uncomfortable about working with her hurt part, but felt
OK about working with her angry part. Esther invited her to move her chair or
stand up, to be in a different place while working with the angry part. Jen
chose to stand behind her chair as she said standing felt like an appropriate
position from which to feel her anger…. but then the demo ended.
It was more a dummy
run than a full demo and we did not experience Esther the facilitator actually
accessing Jen the client’s angry voice.
Esther explained that
apart from the starting position in the chair and the positions the client
moves to for accessing their parts, there is a third position the client
sometimes takes at the end of a session. This is a “witness position” standing
beside the facilitator looking back at their client chair and the other
positions they took while the facilitator runs back through a summary of what
happened in the session.
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Finding a guinea pig…
Demo over, there were
a few questions, but without dwelling on any questions Esther moved quickly
into looking for one of us to volunteer for a fuller demo session! Once again
Esther showed us how careful she is about seeking permission without applying
pressure. She held open the possibility that some of us would NOT want to do a
session today, but also held open the offer that each of us could have a
session today if we wanted.
She proceeded by
asking us each to report in turn how we felt about doing a Voice Dialogue
session. Some said not yet, some said maybe. Jean said it was a little like taking
her niece to a theme park and feeling willing to go on a small roller coaster
ride with her but not the big steep one. I felt similarly and noticed that I
was much more comfortable, for example, to explore the parts of me alive in a
encounter with my son about revision yesterday than I was to explore issues in
my ongoing relationship with my brother. Someone else seemed concerned about
how vulnerable they might feel in a demo session in front of the group… but
within a few moments of exploring this vulnerability with Esther this person
was volunteering to do a session in front of the group.
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Full demo…
Without reporting on
exactly what happened, which even if I could remember might not be proper to
disclose, there were some interesting elements we commented on afterwards:
- Two very different parts were revealed: a big,
tall, exhuberant, expressive, brave, capable, engaged-with-the-world part,
and a small, timid, quietly spoken, self-contained child part.
- The parts were easily located by the client: the
tall one standing to the right and behind her chair, the timid one
crouched on the floor to the left.
- At the closing point of the session, the client
reported feeling in-between the parts, and Esther invited her to draw in each
part and feel it inside her again, first the tall one then the timid one.
Then the client reported feeling her shoulders were different, the right
one (corresponding to the tall part) was higher than the other.
Following the demo we
were invited to sign up either for a session with Esther in front of the group,
or for an individual session with Jen in the next room. I stayed in the group,
although somewhat terrified about offering myself up here to be worked on, also
wanting to be involved in the observation and discussion of each session.
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Facilitating…
After observing a
couple of sessions the entry pattern to a session became clear. After she
invited the client to take the seat in front of her, and moving the rest of us
out of the way so as not to distract the client, Esther typically began with:
What’s there for you
when you realise that this is a chance for you to have a session?
This was asked gently
and the client was given as much time as they needed to answer. It made
in-the-moment-here-and-now the subject for the session, nothing there-and-then,
obscure, historical, false or distant. We experienced one session where the
answer took ages to come and another where the question kicked off a lively
conversation between Esther and the client.
In one case the answer was a single word (“tough”), and then Esther
followed up with:
Yes. Anything else
about that?
This elicited a few
more words (“it’s very tiring”), but still not giving many clues. Undeterred
Esther moved to her key question:
What happens in you
when I say we could give a separate space
to this (tough) part of you?
The reported response
was “I want to put it somewhere aside”, but as if unconvinced, or wanting to check
the client was not feeling forced into this Esther asked:
What happens when I
say we could put it aside?
The response was “I
feel good but I don’t feel it could have a separate space”. Esther continued:
What happens if we
moved it just a bit, because we don’t have to?
The response was “A
bit does and a bit doesn’t want to move it”. So picking up on this ambivalence,
Esther asked:
What happens if I say
we don’t have to move it; that we could
have you stay where
you are, and just tune into it?
Esther then went on
to tune into the tough part and found a sad part behind it which was protecting
a vulnerable part.
We noticed Esther
being very slowed down. Colston commented she seemed in a hypnotic trance. She
was giving herself time with each client response to fully “get it”. Often,
following a client response she would be heard to say:
“Yes”…(pause,
silence) “Yes” … (pause, silence)
“YEESS… I got it!”
This represents the
facilitator allying themselves with the energies in a client. Esther suggested
“I am with you” as another way of saying the same thing.
We noticed how Esther
gives time for each Primary Self to complete what they have to say:
Let’s just sit and
see what else comes.
We noticed that when Esther
has separated out a Primary Self with the client’s full permission, when the
client takes up the position of being that Primary Self, she fully accepts,
validates and appreciates that Primary Self. Questions Esther used that seemed
crucial to this phase of the work were:
What do you want to
say to …(client)?
We want to respect
anything that is there for you--
Any thought, feeling,
image, or body sensation that comes.
It’s
Okay if nothing
comes, but we want to respect anything that does come.
What have you done
over the years to serve and protect …(client)?
Is there anything
else?
As we observed a
session being played out in front of us we noticed the familiarity of some of
the Primary Selves identified and the way in which their energies affected us,
for example when sadness came up as a Primary Self in a session, I felt a
weight in my chest. Others it seemed to me felt particular empathy for other
Primary Selves. We noticed more than one appearance of the relentless, nagging,
perfectionist Inner Critic and the calm, impersonal Planner and some others.
Esther commented that you do feel a lot of resonance in these sessions as of
course “these energies are transpersonal”.
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Reflections on my own session
It turned out not to
be half as scary as I expected. Over lunch I was a little pre-occupied knowing
my session in front of the group was to follow, but at the same time knowing
that because each session is only “here and now reality”, there is no sense in
which I could plan for it or decide in advance what I would or would not do.
The allotted time
came and I found myself taking the chair in front of Esther and she asked her
question:
What’s there for you
when you are present to the fact that this is a chance for you to have a
session?
I found myself
saying:
Maybe my mind will go
blank.
Esther responded by
saying something like:
What happens in you
when I say we could give a separate space
to the part of you
that looks after you by making your mind go blank?
And suddenly this
mind going blank thing, which I had previously considered to be some sort of
problem I had that I hoped to overcome, was not a problem at all: it was a
friend and ally, one of my Primary Selves, looking after me in the strangest
and riskiest situations. My answer was:
That would be OK. I
would be fascinated to do that.
… which enabled
Esther to identify another of my Primary Selves – a part of me which is
fascinated. So she asked her key question again:
What happens in you
when I say we could give a separate space
to the part of you
that is fascinated by this possibility?
… to which I responded:
That would be OK but
if I had a choice I think there would be more available from working with the
part of me that makes my mind go blank.
To me this was an
ordinary comment, a way of steering things a little so I got some real value
from the session, but it turned out to be significant in what followed as
Esther’s response was:
What happens in you
when I say we could give a separate space
to the part of you
that chooses between these two options, that says there is more cheese down
this tunnel than down the other?
I responded:
That would be OK
I felt a bit
surprised at Esther identifying this Chooser part of me. And then I found
myself locating the Blanker to my right, the Fascinated part to my left and the
Chooser behind my chair standing up looking down on me and my other two
friends. I was invited to leave my chair and take up the position of Chooser.
Esther asked me what I want to say to Tony and I said something like:
I can see the whole
landscape from here, the options, choices and consequences played out so that I
can help Tony make good choices that protect him from risk and help him to evolve
and develop. Like being a parent to my children, I guide Tony, assessing risks
and opportunities for him. When people say to Tony where have you gone, this is
where I am, in the Chooser role.
This Chooser role
felt very clear and important to me as I spoke. Esther gave me time to complete
what I had to say then invited me back into my chair. Once in the chair she
asked me what comes up for me now having returned to being Tony. I noticed I
felt sad because in protecting me, my Chooser had also for many years steered
me away from being spontaneous, playful and fun. I felt sad at having lost the
secure cocoon of childhood in my family, at having to take up the
responsibility of survival in a world that was far from secure. Esther then
asked me:
What happens in you
when I say we could give a separate space
to the part of you
that is sad?
I replied that it
feels central to me, not easy to separate and I would not feel safe to try and
give a separate space to it. Esther then asked me what happens if I say that we
could ask for a reporter on this sad part.
The energy reporting on it would sit in front of it (protecting it) and
sense back into it for us. This part
that is sad can let us know a bit about itself through the reporter. . For some
reason this felt OK provided I or Esther could stop at any time. (Anyway I
trusted my Blanker would do the job of stopping me when necessary!). So then a
part of me was there being asked to let my sadness report through it and I
found this part of me describing the sad part something like this:
I am not horrible.
Something like melancholy describes me well. Like nostalgia can be quite a
pleasant feeling. I do not need to communicate anything. I am just here. I have
been here a long time and will probably always be here. I am not outraged if I
am denied a voice. I know I am powerful. I know if I want to I can overwhelm
Tony like a gas spreading through a room overtake his whole consciousness.
That seemed to be
all, or at least all I remember of it, and I moved my chair back to my starting
position. I felt OK. It felt like I had been to quite a deep place but then
returned. I was feeling light. I was feeling I had somehow learned a lot about
myself and that I was OK with several friends inside taking care of me. More secure
with myself I suppose.
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The essence of it
Through the various
sessions the essence of this facilitation seemed to be identifying then
loosening the grip of the Primary Selves. Esther’s idea of it is that each
Primary Self has its Opposite (Disowned part), so for example a Thinking
Primary Self might have Feeling as its opposite . Just as in the yin-yang
symbol, each side contains a little bit of its opposite. Loosening the grip of
the Primary Selves allows the Opposite to come in too rather than being denied,
left out, rejected or disowned, which enables the person to see and experience
more of life.
Since life wants to
happen, the opposites (disowned selves) want to be included, This is life. As a
facilitator you find your way with this. If you make a mistake, then through
permission seeking, the parts make themselves known to you and it becomes plain
which way to go and where not to go.
How this theory
explains for example a Midlife Crisis is that the Primary Selves developed from
childhood are worn out. The opposites and other potentials in a person have
become ten ton weights, getting heavier the more they are held down. If nothing
is done to address this, the opposites take over in a kind of hijack of the
person, but after a time of crisis the old Primary Selves return. This would be
a classic breakdown. Voice Dialogue in midlife works WITH the Primary Selves
until they allow their opposites in. This is more a genuine unfolding than a
breakdown or hijack.
The method is safe
and has very little backlash in it because of the way it is facilitated. The
client stays within their own feelings of safety. It is never intrusive. It is
committed to respecting each part, based on a positive psychology, which is
about accepting and unconcealing and including each part of us, rather than
trying to fix, manipulate or force a change.
To give “Voice” to
each part is to unconceal it. What seemed paradoxical to me was a passing
comment from Esther that the “being” energy is killed off by speaking. As the
facilitator you support the client’s “being” energy simply by being with it.
In response to the
facilitator’s “what’s there for you now?”, sometimes the client says,
“nothing”. Occasionally when they say “nothing”, it
means “no thing” which is no-
thing-ness, at-one-ment, which is the “being” energy.
The “Dialogue” is
never directly between the parts, but one part speaking at a time with the
facilitator. Each part affects each other part by how they interact with the facilitator.
Each part gets to be heard by the client.
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Resolving Conflict
Each Primary Self as
it develops in a person’s life to protect them, also creates a vacuum which
represents a target for its Opposite, Disowned part. There’s less tension
involved when we identify with one Primary Self, disowning and projecting its
opposite out onto others. Thus if Thinking is one of your Primary Selves then
its Opposite (Feeling) is typically disowned and projected onto others, and your
life will throw lots of Feeling challenges at you.
This explains how
people are attracted to one another and also how later on conflicts can arise
in a relationship. When two people fall into conflict their Primary Selves are
scaring each other. Two people in relationship are likely each to have opposite
Primary Selves, perhaps one person a thinker and the other a feeler. Each
Primary Self is a Disowned Opposite in the other and thus a vulnerability. When
something feels dangerous the Primary Self does its job of protection,
rejecting rather than including its opposite part.
Any type of vulnerability that is disowned triggers a conflict, and your disowned selves then provide the fuel that keeps the conflict going. The way through conflict is to peel back on both sides
to acknowledging vulnerability, and through this, learning about how you influence and scare
one another. Not easy!
As a person becomes
more aware, their Primary Selves loosen and their Opposites get included. This
can create inner conflict eg holding a tension between a Primary Self that is
“personal” and its opposite which is “impersonal”. Knowing that they are both
in us, and both valid. Hal Stone calls
this “sweat psychology”. It is about
claiming back the opposite we usually disown and project onto others,
reclaiming our vulnerability, experiencing the conflict inside us instead of
between us and another person.
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How do we use this in our work?
We had experienced a
method that operates 1-1, in a therapeutic setting and personal development setting.
How might this be relevant to our work in organisations?
Jen offered an
example of a client who was a bully but through Voice Dialogue work was able to
rebalance his life and rebuild relationships at work. She asked how often we
encounter issues of bullying, and what kind of work we actually get involved
with.
We discussed the
difference and overlap between the kind of coaching we do (referenced to a
person’s work role, or work role transition) and the voice dialogue work
(probably more centred on the person and their whole life).
I became interested
in the quality of work relationships and the often stifling effect of
organisation culture, particularly where the performance ethic is very strong.
Esther’s advice was to appreciate the performance part – I think she meant to
appreciate that part in my clients giving rise to the pressure to deliver
results, and also she might have meant to appreciate and include that part in
me.
In this conversation
I also became interested in what Voice Dialogue suggests when we are working as
group facilitators. Each person in the group is a “Voice” or part, protecting
the team, and they need to be acknowledged and included, from which position
they can find their place and best contribution. The group facilitator is doing
similar work to the Voice Dialogue facilitator. They need to work just as hard
to ally themselves with the energies in each client. Through drawing out the voices, participants
are able to hear and accommodate to one another. Voice Dialogue feels to me
more than a loose metaphor for what happens in a group: more like a direct
fractal equivalent, in other words just the same thing but operating at the
level of the group.
There was some
discussion of how, where and when we show our vulnerability in our work. Given
that this seems to be key to our success, it is still not easy. As we enter a
client system or open a workshop there is a leadership role we play in which we
need to display experience, confidence and reliability, seemingly the opposites
of vulnerability. When does this become obstructive to the development of
others? Certainly this is something I am still learning about.
There are
applications for Voice Dialogue in relation to Myers Briggs which is
increasingly used in our organisational work. See article by Pierre Cauvin and
Genevieve Cailoux on Hal and Sidra Stone website http://www.delos-inc.com/Reading_Room/Articles/10/10.html
My conclusion is Voice
Dialogue provides a coherent underpinning theory of human nature and
relationships to support many facets of our organisational work. This can
manifest in all sorts of useful ways, giving strength and direction to a
facilitator’s in the moment decision-making.
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How did we go away from this session?
During the day the
earlier fears and concerns about having a session seemed quickly to evaporate
and each of us had a session and seemed to get in touch with some of our primary
energies.
Colston asked at one
point “what is this time thing?”, responding to some precise timing
instructions and a bit of a sense of bustle coming from Esther and Jen. But
Lilly also noticed the expansiveness and ease with which each of the 1-1 sessions
was conducted, quoting something in Latin which meant “going slow to be fast”.
With hindsight it seems our facilitators ran the day with great precision,
coordinating their sessions with one another and giving each client a sense of
having all the time they needed.
Julie commented that
at times the sessions in the group felt voyeuristic: personal material being
played out publicly…. But on the other hand by offering ourselves up for work
in the group we created an arena in which we could observe the voices with
their own distinctive characters, we could discuss how a session unfolded and
how it was facilitated. This would not have been possible to the same degree
had we held only 1-1 sessions.
Terri commented that
this approach seemed to enable a reframing of the classic
victim-persecutor-rescuer triangle into vulnerable-personally powerful-enabler
(and she sent us all a document afterwards containing the diagram – click here).
How do I feel after the
session? My daughter noticed a difference in me the day after following quite a
pressured day of travel: “you’re not frowning, you’re having fun, I don’t want
to go to bed and leave you now!” Well this on its own makes the day worthwhile
for me. I’m rediscovering a fun child part of me, at the same time appreciating
more a performance driver part too. I’m still discovering other parts and
learning that these can be my friends too.
Esther is running a
further session on July 27-28th. For details click here or contact her esther_zahniser@hotmail.com
Tony Page
22 May 2002