Hal and Sidra Stone, two American psychologists, developed Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves in the early 1970s. They found that what we call ‘I’ is really many selves: primary selves we identify with, led by a protective ‘protector/controller’, and disowned selves we have pushed away and then meet in other people. Healing comes not from getting rid of any self but from embracing them all, through an ‘aware ego’ that can hold opposites and choose; Therapeutic Shamanism works on much the same ground, which it calls the inner tribeInner Tribe. The community of parts-of-self that a human being actually is. Health is not one part’s triumph but a well-run tribe: every member honoured, every member doing its proper job, the Adult in charge. Read the full answer.
Who are Hal and Sidra Stone? #
A married couple of psychologists who worked together for nearly fifty years. Hal Stone (1927 to 2020) gained his PhD in psychology at UCLA in 1953, trained as a Jungian analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, and in 1973 founded the Center for the Healing Arts, an early holistic health centre that treated illness as a path for growth.1 Sidra Stone, born in 1937, gained her PhD in 1962 and was executive director of Hamburger Home, a residential treatment centre for adolescent girls; she has also written on feminist psychology.2 They met in 1972, developed Voice Dialogue in the early 1970s, married in 1977, and taught together around the world. Hal Stone died on 23 May 2020, aged ninety-two.3
Their books include Embracing Our Selves: The Voice Dialogue Manual (1985), Embracing Each Other (1989), Embracing Your Inner Critic (1993) and Partnering (2000).4
What did they discover about the selves? #
That each of us is not one but many. In the Stones’ Psychology of Selves, every person is made up of many selves, each with its own voice, posture, energy, age, history and point of view, and any of them can be spoken with directly. Sidra Stone puts the heart of it in a phrase from Walt Whitman: each of us “contains multitudes”.5 In a Voice Dialogue session the person moves to a different place in the room to give voice to a different self, whilst a facilitator talks with each in turn. How the method works, and what it offers shamanic practitioners, is set out in What can Voice Dialogue offer shamanic work?
What are primary and disowned selves? #
The two sides of every personality. The primary selves are the ones we identify with, and the first of them, the protector/controller, forms early to keep us safe; when most people say ‘I’, the Stones observe, they are in fact speaking as their protector/controller. Around it gather allies such as the pusher, the pleaser, the perfectionist and the inner critic.6 Every primary self has an opposite that has been pushed away. These disowned selves do not disappear: they go underground, grow stronger, and show up in the people we react to most strongly, both those we judge and those we overvalue.7
What is the aware ego? #
The Stones’ answer to who chooses among the selves. They describe three levels: awareness, which witnesses without judging; the experience of the selves themselves; and the aware ego, which can stand between two opposite selves, feel both, and make a real choice.8 In Embracing Each Other they add that the aware ego is always a process, not a thing: “There is no such thing as an aware ego”.9 The ego is not abolished in this work; it is grown into something that can hold the whole committee. Late in life Hal Stone urged people not to get lost in doing Voice Dialogue the right way, warning of the danger of becoming “imprisoned in the thickening cement of dogma”.10
What did they find about relationships? #
That two people relating are rarely two adults. In what the Stones call bonding patterns, the parental selves of one person lock into the child selves of the other, and back again. They see these patterns as normal and present in every relationship, often bringing real closeness, and as painful only when they lock and each person’s disowned vulnerability is stirred up.11 See What can Voice Dialogue offer shamanic work?
How does their work relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
There is a lot of common ground. In Therapeutic Shamanism, too, there is no single self, no single ‘I’: we are a community, an inner tribe, and a healthy tribe is one where every member feels welcome, respected and has a voice. The work is to get to know each part, listen to it and honour its needs, without bringing in the hierarchical thinking that ranks some parts as higher than others.12 Both also take protective parts seriously: in Therapeutic Shamanism no deep or permanent change happens without the consent of the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer, the part that stayed behind and coped.13 And their awareness is very close to what Therapeutic Shamanism calls the Aware SelfAware Self. The Witness: not a part of the self but a capacity for awareness, cultivated by hollowing-out, that can watch the flow of thoughts without being caught in them. More about this, or the Witness: nothing other than awareness, with no thoughts, opinions, beliefs, likes or dislikes of its own.14
Where Therapeutic Shamanism goes further, it does so in shamanic terms. The Stones explain even the most ‘demonic’ energies as disowned instincts; shamanism agrees that this happens, and adds that sometimes what is met is not a self at all. Some selves have not simply been disowned but have left altogether, which is soul loss, and need to be found by journeying. And beyond the selves are the Soul of the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and the Spirit of the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer. These points are set out in What can shamanism offer Voice Dialogue? and How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to IFS, Voice Dialogue and Gestalt?
