Some New Ways of Looking at Dialogue
New Directions?? New Terms??     


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Introduction - What do we need to do to get more people interested?

Communication succeeds only when people can both understand clearly and feel comfortable about understanding what we are talking about. If that isn't happening as well as it should then it's up to the speaker rather than the listener to make most of the changes. 

Let's face it, voice dialogue is a wonderful process, that gets outstanding results. We love it, we tell people about it and after more than 20 years it still isn't gaining the acceptance it deserves. In order to address this problem one aspect of the storytelling approach as explained on  these pages is to develop new ways that will tell the story to the world at large but in particular to gain the attention of more professional practitioners.

Any process that has been around for more than 20 years needs to make changes in the terms it uses as well as the way it functions. As long as the changes do not harm anyone and results in growth and understanding it is working.

If that means talking about the work in a different way ( a way that uses the language of today's practitioners) we should be willing to do that. It won't change the basic process of dialogue as we know it  and as long as more people listen and want to learn more, surely that is what counts, not the words we use.

But not everything needs to change.

What doesn't need to change?

  1. The basic dialogue process is as good as it ever was. Maybe it doesn't need to be changed at all. But I think it’s OK to experiment with variations, to discover additional ways of dialoguing and share these.
     
  2. The selves that are primary, those that make up our daily operating system need to be identified and dialogued early in any kind of exploration. They are real and exist. We cannot alter that aspect of the work even when we wish we could.
     
  3. The sense of oppositeness, polarity, duality of energies is like a law of nature. Nothing seems to alter this reality.
     
  4. There is clearly a higher system, or a number of higher systems that we can aim to move towards. That means no matter what we do to increase awareness we should all aim to move away (gradually) from the original operating ego system into new and more functional systems .

By the way, Hal and Sidra Stone have never, to my knowledge, tried to hold voice dialogue back by making fixed rules about what we call it or how we do it. I have nothing but the highest admiration for them and their open approach to the work. Long may it continue.  I don't know what they think or feel yet about what is suggested here, but it's not our intention to suggest new rules or judge others who wish to work by their own rules.
Rather, we would like to question the idea that there are rules out there about how dialogue must be done or not done or the need for rigidity in the terms used to talk about it. 
If some terms are no longer accurate or acceptable we need to have a good look at them.  

The latest brain studies are showing us that much of what Hal and Sidra hypothesised  twenty years ago was incredibly accurate and underlines their foresight. But with so much new understanding of brain processes much more detail is now being added. The picture is a great deal more complex than it appeared to be in the 1980's. To keep up with and  integrate these new understandings into the tried and true old model and  explain these new complexities it's probably necessary to expand some of the key terms we were used then. 

Some suggested changes for professional practitioners:

DO WE NEED TO KEEP CALLING IT "VOICE" DIALOGUE?

  1. There is a strongly expressed  need among psychologists for less emphasis on ‘voices’ as if they were an essential part of the process. The ‘dialogue’ is what makes the process, not the ‘voice’. When  I set out to explain this wonderful method to  people, I  find  talking about  'voice dialogue' starts them thinking in terms of 'voices in their head' and 'multiple personalities'. In the interests of getting  people to give it a try, isn't it better to talk about 'dialogue'. (Those of us who have been doing this for some time notice it does seem to get better responses and is more acceptable at the start.) 
     
  2. Those remarkable energetic states we dialogue with are known by many other terms according to the school of psychology you come from. Whether we dialogue with them using their individual names (pusher, pleaser, rule-maker) or call them selves, ego states, patterns, systems, sub-personalities, energies, inner families etc etc does not change what we are doing with them or the positive results.
    It may be better in the long run to introduce more general terms like 'patterns' or 'systems' than to stick rigidly to ‘selves’. The term 'sub-personalities' seems to be gaining acceptance in the academic world and amongst CBT therapists though I still  find it a bit heavy for daily discussions. Words like patterns and systems seem to get more general acceptance. 
     
  3. Practitioners and therapists need to be encouraged to combine dialogue techniques with other modalities and supported as they discover new ways that work. On these pages we will encourage this storytelling approach and offer findings on the work of therapists who combine dialogue with other modalities as well as training around this storytelling approach.
     
  4. As we recognise the individual selves (ego states, sub-personalities patterns, systems) that make up our daily operating system we need a far more discrete and accurate set of labels to allow a clearer distinction between  the variety of different systems that exist opposite the primary selves. The single term ‘disowned’ is just too broad to cover all kinds of opposites except the one instance where a self has been sent far away, its existence inside us is denied and  it is totally inactive in the primary sense (as in the Biblical sense where disowning meant casting out). The disowned person was 'forgotten' and their name not mentioned in the family.
     

  5.  But in many other cases the term 'disowned' falls far short of  describing what is happening or has happened with a self.  For example many polar opposites are neither primary nor fully disowned. They include the denied and disguised selves (actively destructive or negative, for example addiction patterns) They are not primary but they are far from hidden in fact they may be very obvious to others but if the client is unwilling to identify them, recognise them or allow them to dialogue then calling them disowned only encourages this.

Many of us prefer to restrict the term "disowned" to refer only to those sub-personalities/selves/ego states etc that are very distant and inaccessible.

Psychologists are developing different, discrete and more accurate descriptions for those other ego states or selves that are significant in different ways as the energetic opposites of  primary selves or just less powerful than a primary one. (This is one of the most fascinating areas of the newer discoveries in sub-personalities based psychology)

The trauma based selves/ sub-personalities/ patterns, are active and powerful in their own way but inclined to increase vulnerability rather than reduce it. While it is more difficult to dialogue with them, it is essential that we have techniques to allow this so that we can understand them and balance them. Again just trying to distinguish them as primary or disowned makes it much harder to clarify their true and often complex roles.

In particular this includes trauma based patterns or sub-personalities, like the negative core beliefs.

So that's an outline of what we are doing and thinking at this stage. It's exciting.

We invite you to join us in this exploration and share our  joy in the discoveries we make.

Growing Awareness and Classic Voice Dialogue - Similarities and Differences (updates and additions 21 February 2004)

Most new postings about this alternative approach are now found on the Growing Awareness 2005 website at http://www.growingaware.com/

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