What Voice Dialogue Is

Voice Dialogue is a method for giving voice to our various selves, also known as inner selves, parts, sub-personalities and energy patterns, and include archetypes.

Voice Dialogue is also about developing the ability to handle, or manage, our selves in a more conscious way.

Our selves make up who we are. We have primary selves (which together form our ego or what we call our ‘personality’) and disowned selves (our shadow). We also have selves we’re simply not conscious of, and there are selves that will emerge throughout our lives.

It is our selves that hold our conscious and sub-conscious thoughts, feelings, memories, perceptions, beliefs and values.

How our selves are configured in us determines how we experience our lives.

subpersonalities, parts work, our selves

 

Who Created Voice Dialogue?

Dr Hal Stone and Dr Sidra Stone, American husband and wife psychologists, founded Voice Dialogue in the early 1970s. Their work is known fully as Voice Dialogue, Relationship and The Psychology of Selves and also as The Psychology of The Aware Ego.

The Stones continued to evolve their work over the decades (Hal Stone passed away in 2020), developing the theoretical framework and working on their discoveries about unconscious relationship dynamics (bonding patterns) and dreams as consciousness teachers.

Over this time their body of work, all under the banner ‘Voice Dialogue’, has influenced many other personal growth and consciousness teachers and psychotherapeutic systems.

 

How Your Personality Works

You know how the petals of a rose are hidden before it blooms? With only a few visible on the outside?

You, too, have only a few selves visible on the surface, with many more hidden underneath, all protecting your core.

Meet Your Inner Outgoing Self with Voice Dialogue

That part of yourself you feel is you, that holds your rules, values and much of your personal history, is your primary self (it’s usually made up of a few selves).

This primary self developed in your childhood to protect you and enable your survival. It is who you have come to identify as. (You might call it your ego or your personality.)

This primary self does an amazing job (you’re alive!) but it is limited by its nature. By its perceptions, feelings, abilities, energy, rules and values. And so therefore you’re limited by its nature.

Your Inner Lazy Self

 

Examples of Primary Selves

Remember, your primary selves together are referred to as your ‘ego’ in most psychological systems, or the executive function of your psyche. From the Voice Dialogue perspective this ‘ego’ is only a part of your personality. It’s a big part, but a part nevertheless. There are many other parts within your psyche.

So you might have developed a highly Responsible primary self, because that’s what worked for you in your family system. Your responsible self probably works together with your Pusher and Inner Critic to keep you in line. So now as an adult you are likely someone who others can depend on. But you probably also find it difficult to let go, be spontaneous and have fun.

Or if you developed a strong Rational Mind as a primary self, you are good at thinking logically. But you might find it challenging to express and understand feelings (your own and other people’s) and to access your intuition.

Or if you are a Pleaser, then you take good care of everyone else’s needs. Your pleaser might work together with your Inner Mother or Father or alternatively a younger child self. You probably find it impossible to feel entitled to take for yourself and have your own needs and wants met.

(I’ve included outlines of 44 different selves in my book Which Self Are You?)

The Perfectionist

 

Disowned Selves

All the selves you accept and include in the package that’s ‘you’ are your primary selves.

Other selves and energies are relegated to your ‘shadow’ where you judge them or have little or no awareness of them. Those are your disowned selves.

How your selves – both primary and disowned – are configured in you will determine how you think, feel and behave.

Inner Selves - the business self

 

Freedom and Choice

Each self holds particular memories and has a narrative about your life, based on its experience of it. Each self has preferences for how you lead your life. Each self also has anxieties and concerns.

So when you make choices, what you decide depends on who in you is involved.

This has massive implications for how your life and relationships play out.

If you’d like to have more choice in how you experience life, then becoming aware of and integrating your selves is key.

Your Spiritual Self

 

Learn more about primary and disowned selves and what happens when our disowned selves emerge without a conscious invitation from us.

 

How is Voice Dialogue Used?

Voice Dialogue is used professionally in many contexts, including in psychotherapy, personal development coaching, relationship counselling, bodywork, organisational/business consulting, communication training, sports coaching, visual and performing arts education, and in creative industries.

It has been incorporated into some Buddhist teachings, and it is being studied by some neuroscientists.

Voice Dialogue has immense therapeutic value but it is also available to anyone simply interested in exploring who they are and how they relate with their world.

 

Voice Dialogue and Relationship

Voice Dialogue involves learning how our selves bond with the selves in other people in predictable (but unconscious) patterns.

Understanding these ‘bonding patterns’ is a game-changer for understanding relationships.

Voice Dialogue also includes working with the energetic nature of the selves and learning how to use energy more consciously in our relationships.

 

The Benefits of Doing Voice Dialogue

  • You gain a deeper insight into your behaviour, feelings and choices.
  • You start to realise which selves are running your life – including your relationships, career choices and goals in general – and which selves don’t get much say.
  • As your awareness of and connection to your various selves grows, you develop the ability to make increasingly conscious choices, rather than acting – or reacting – from habit.
  • This process of growing awareness and of embracing often very opposite aspects of your psyche develops a more centred and inclusive sense of who you are.
  • You become more aware of all the aspects of your humanity, be they spiritual, instinctual, materially-focused, service-oriented, emotional, rational, parental, or childlike.
  • Your relationships become teachers for you as you realise your judgments about others hold important lessons about yourself, and that your selves bond with the selves in other people in predictable patterns.
  • Your romantic relationships become richer as you recognise when you and your partner are stuck in bonding patterns and are able to navigate those patterns before the relationship deteriorates.
  • You’re better able to handle the challenges of parenting when you can see the selves of your child emerging as they grow and develop, and that your child’s personality and behaviours reflect your own self-configuration.
  • You develop a sensitivity to the energies of the selves and learn to use these energies more consciously, such as warm, personal energy and cool, impersonal energy, and you can more easily set healthy boundaries and manage how you connect with others.

All these wonderful results from doing Voice Dialogue involve experiencing a shift in consciousness that the Stones have called the Aware Ego Process.

Watch this 10-minute video to see Hal Stone himself explaining Voice Dialogue.

 

Start Your Voice Dialogue Journey with this Free Voice Dialogue Ebook

The ebook shows you how you can use Voice Dialogue in an everyday situation, it introduces you to 20 selves, and it gives you a simple exercise to discover who your own primary and disowned selves are.

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