The Voice Dialogue Process

Your personality consists of multiple selves. Those you identify with are your primary selves, and they constitute your ego. Your repressed & disowned selves constitute your shadow. Voice Dialogue is a powerful process that helps you understand your personality & accept it in its totality.  

What Is Your Personality 

The origin of the word “personality” is the Latin word “persona” which means “mask.” Your personality is just a mask worn by your true Self. By becoming fully aware of all parts of your being, you can experience who you are, and then achieve success in every area of your life. In the 1970s, two psychotherapists, doctors Hal and Sidra Stone, created the Voice Dialogue, a unique and powerful process that helps you understand your personality and accept it in its totality. The Voice Dialogue is also known as the Psychology of Selves and of the Aware Ego. 

At the very basis of this process is the understanding of how your personality takes shape. When you were born, you were helpless, vulnerable, and dependent on others (parents, primary caretakers) for all basic needs, such as food, clothes, and care. An infant who is properly cared for is filled with joy and radiates unconditional love. This remains your essence. However, soon “life happens to you,” and you begin to get affected by the negative feelings and accumulated stress of those around you. You may experience this directly — in the form of physical, emotional, or psychological abuse. Alternatively, you may succumb to their emotional contagion — their fear, grief, anger, and worry spill over to you.  

To defend yourself, you build up “an energetic shield” and you suppress your ability to express real love. This protective cover is called your personality. It contains both positive and negative behaviors, and everything in between the spectrum. Your subconscious mind remembers all this and contains all the parts of yourself you have ever or never expressed. It is possible to use your behavioral patterns as stepping stones to love, growth, and freedom.  

Your Multiple Inner Selves  

Your personality consists of multiple parts, selves or “subpersonalities”: parental self, child self, rational self, emotional self, rule maker, rebel, pleaser, pusher, perfectionist, inner teacher, and others. The selves you identify with are your primary selves, and they constitute your ego, or what you call “me.” You also have selves that you have repressed and disowned. Different subpersonalities can take over, i.e. determine your predominant behavior at different times and in different situations. All these subpersonalities together make up who you are.  

Your primary self holds your rules, values, and much of your personal history. It developed in your childhood, to protect you and enable your survival. It is who you have come to identify with (you might call it your ego or your personality). The other-selves and energies are disowned and relegated to your “shadow,” where you judge them or have little or no awareness of them.  

Both your primary and disowned selves determine the way you think, feel, and behave. Each self holds particular memories based on its experience of the respective events; it has preferences for how you should lead your life. So, when you make choices, what you decide depends on which of your selves is involved in that decision.  

This has massive implications for all aspects of your life. If you would like to have more choice in how you experience life, then becoming aware of and integrating your selves is key. When you start to recognize the selves operating in your personality, you have an opportunity to experience real freedom, because once you become conscious of a self, you also become conscious that you are not entirely that self. Therefore, the process of understanding the configuration of selves in your psyche is an empowering spiritual process.  

The Voice Dialogue process helps you understand your multiple selves — both your primary and disowned selves. This is a powerful method for enhancing self-awareness and developing the ability to choose more consciously. By understanding how your selves influence your relationships, you become capable of solving any relationship problems. This brings you more joy, the opportunity to connect with others, and a potential for personal growth. 

How Your Inner Selves Affect Your Relationships 

Why You Are Attracted to Particular People 

Both your primary and disowned selves reveal the kinds of people you will be attracted to and enter into relationships with.  

The two main scenarios are: 

1. You will like people who have similar primary selves to you, and you will dislike people whose primary selves are your disowned selves. You will usually choose as friends those people whose primary selves you like. 

2. You will be attracted to people who carry your disowned selves. Usually, we have intense relationships with people who carry our disowned selves.  

Handling Relationship Bonding Patterns 

Fortunately, you don’t have to remain stuck in a particular bonding pattern. Once you become conscious of it, you can use it as a way to learn about the primary selves you have become identified with, and about the disowned selves you can now start to connect with. 

In a way, your relationships contain the solution to any problem. By looking into your bonding patterns and the kind of selves that are activated in both you and your partner,  you can get valuable insights into the kind of work that you need to do. 

For you to grow, you need to become aware that your primary selves are not all there is; they represent just a part of who you are. You need to also become aware of the presence of opposites within yourself.  

The benefits of discovering and embracing more of who you are extend further than your relationships. When you reconnect with parts of yourself that have been disowned since childhood or even infancy, your whole life experience improves. 

3 Steps to Start Improving Your Relationship 

1. Learn to listen to your partner with full attention and see them 

Try to see who in your partner is speaking, and listen for the vulnerability that you might be experiencing underneath what they are saying.  

2. Listen to yourself and consider who in you is involved 

When you listen to yourself, consider where the feelings and thoughts you are expressing come from. You don’t have to express all this out loud to your partner, but use what comes up for your information about the selves you might identify within this particular bonding pattern. 

3. Take care of your vulnerability 

Find out what your needs and wants are and look after them. The more you take care of yourself, the less power the bonding patterns have, and the freer both you and your partner will become to relate as complete people. 

How Voice Dialogue Heals Your Relationships 

• You gain a deeper insight into your behavior, feelings, and choices. 

• You start to realize 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 centered 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 realize 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 recognize when you and your partner are stuck in bonding patterns and can 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 behaviors reflect your 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. 

The Basic Principles of the Voice Dialogue Process 

1. An attitude of acceptance: Be an explorer, an interested observer who is trying to discover as much as possible about each self. The selves are extremely sensitive to your feelings and judgments, and they will not respond if they sense disapproval or manipulation. This is a method that will not work effectively unless it is used with a proper attitude. When it is used properly, however, it provides quick and easy access to much of your psyche. 

2. There should be no agenda: Do not try to change selves, to get rid of them, or to help them grow up and be more sensible. Changes will take place, growth will occur, and there will be healing, but these cannot be your aim when you begin the process. 

3. Do not negotiate amongst selves: Don’t attempt to get the selves to agree on anything. Each self is different, and these differences are to be respected. Instead of trying to get the selves to agree, help each self to clarify its views and to give as much information as possible. Thus, you will learn to live with the tension of opposing viewpoints represented by these selves and to make decisions that consider these opposites. 

4. Voice Dialogue aims to expand your ability to make choices in life rather than to behave automatically and unconsciously. 

The Method 

The Voice Dialogue process consists of one person (facilitator) interviewing the multiple selves or sub-personalities of another person (the client). The emphasis is on discovering both the primary self and the suppressed selves, without judgment or effort to change any of them.  

Step 1: Relaxation 

The facilitator relaxes, gets centered, and silences their inner pusher and critic. The facilitator will be observing the subject’s energy patterns and looking at physiological, emotional, and linguistic cues from the client. 

Step 2: Mapping the Psyche 

The first step in this process is to create a “psychic map.” The facilitator will identify some of the primary selves that are operating in the subject’s relationship and the selves that carry the opposite characteristics that are disowned. The facilitator will listen to the primary selves as the client discusses values and characteristic behaviors. The facilitator will also listen to the disowned selves, as the subject criticizes others. 

Step 3: Introducing the Idea of Selves and Seeing the Client’s Response 

For example, the facilitator may say, “It sounds like there’s a part of you that’s always in a hurry and trying to do more even when you are getting tired and want to rest.” If the facilitator hits upon a primary self, most people will respond easily to this suggestion: “Yes, that’s me. I can always do a little bit more.” 

Step 4: Begin Voice Dialogue by Physically Separating the Self 

When the facilitator is ready to talk to a specific self, they ask their client to move to another space/position/chair in the room. The original position of the client’s chair is taken as the position of the client’s ego or the Aware Ego. This movement away from the original position is very important even though at first it may feel somewhat artificial. This aids in the separation and the objectification of the selves. It is also a great help for the facilitator because they will be able to use the positions of their selves to identify themselves and to see how they relate to one another. As the selves position themselves about the room, they create a psychic map. The selves will return to their positions when the facilitator talks with them on subsequent occasions. Each self has its position and the selves will play out their dramas around the Aware Ego. 

Step 5: Facilitation 

Once the self has taken up its position in the room, the facilitator can begin to speak with it. The facilitator simply talks with the client's self as though it were a real person. The facilitator’s attitude will be most important at this time.  

Step 6: Begin with the Primary Selves 

The most important work that the facilitator will do is to separate the subject from his or her primary self. Although the work with disowned material may be more dramatic, it is the separation from the primary self that is the essential goal. 

Step 7: Return to the Ego Position (the Aware Ego) for Centering and Integration 

At the end of the session, the facilitator always returns the client to the original chair or position. They leave adequate time (at least 10 minutes) for discussion. This is a time when the facilitator helps the client to separate from the selves that have spoken and to integrate the work that has been done. It is important to discuss what has happened and to encourage the subject to speak about his or her reactions.