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Voice Dialogue
Voice Dialogue is a tool for becoming aware of all the parts of ourselves and to live our lives with greater consciousness, choice and balance. With its help we become less identified with the roles we play. We will gain more access to our whole potential. We will act with greater creativity and self-confidence.
With "our selves" we mean all the qualities and energies of our personality and being. It means the subpersonalities that our personality consists of and is ruled by. It also means our unknown and forgotten parts and talents, and a journey into the discovery of them.
Voice Dialogue is a sophisticated tool for personal growth and transformation. It builds on awareness and acceptance of all that we are. The clarity it brings helps us make more authentic choices.
The firm belief behind the method is that all our sides are representing qualities that we need. Whether positive or negative at first glance, and whether opposing to each other or not. Rather than favoring some of them and fight or suppress others of them, we need to connect to each of them. We need to accept and integrate them - in our individual lives as well as in society - in a balanced way.
The Voice Dialogue process helps us to shift our awareness, and experience the different parts of our psyche in a tangible, feelable way, that most people experience as somewhat miraculous and awesome once they get the taste of it.
Empowerment, getting your selves together.
In a series of Voice Dialogue-sessions, we learn to talk to the parts that act in our lives, as well as carefully listen to them, and we experience and express them one by one. We accept them, but also separate from the identification with them. This shifts our awareness and gives us greater personal empowerment.
As a result of experiencing parts of ourselves in this way, we can learn to integrate their energy in our daily lives in far more satisfying and balanced ways, with more consciousness and better judgment.
Gradually we learn to embrace all of our potential: The developed parts that act in our lives, the forgotten parts, forbidden/disowned parts and unknown parts. We gradually develop a better balance with them. We get greater trust in the "flow of who we truly are". With fuller awareness and less identification we gain in effectiveness and self-confidence.
Relationship model
Voice Dialogue is not only a tool for individual development. Its "theory of the selves" helps us map relationships in a particularly effective way. Its "energetics" teaches us the dynamics of attraction, repulsion and real connection between the parts of ourselves and with other people. The model gives us important keys to transforming even most challenging relationship patterns.
Voice Dialogue can be applied and integrated with other tools for coaching, therapy and acting, in group and team development, within body-oriented psychotherapy or spiritual exploration.
Background
Voice Dialogue was developed by Hal and Sidra Stone, a psychologist couple from the USA, nowadays living in California. The method was "born" in the seventies from their efforts exploring and combining psychological tools as to keep their relationship and love for each other alive. - And yes, alive it still is (2009!). Link to Drs Hal and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Voice Dialogue has the deep view on human development of C.G.Jung, the directness and effectiveness of the north-americans, and the flexibility, aliveness and energetic awareness of the Taoist approach.
Frans Kocken
Link to Drs Hal and Sidra Stone, Ph.D.
Frans Kocken