August /Septmeber 2005

ENERGETICS—Understanding What Makes Relationship Come Alive:
An Interview with Hal Stone and Sidra Stone

— Miriam Dyak

Since the early 1970s, Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone have together explored the possibilities and potential evolution of human relationship. The Stones are the originators of the Psychology of Selves and the Voice Dialogue Method, tools for personal growth that can help us to become conscious of the many different and often conficting aspects of our personalities, our inner selves, and to learn more and more to hold a new balance at center where we can be free to explore all of our humanness. This process at center which the Stones call the Aware Ego offers a key to positive transformation in both inner and outer relationships.

An essential aspect of the Stones’ work is knowing that the inner selves and the Aware Ego process are ener-getic realities rather than concepts or ideas. Voice Dialogue work focuses on the understanding of energetics, the way in which an inner self inhabits our being and expresses itself in the world through tone, body language, presence, and vibration as well as through words. Voice Dialogue teaches us how to shift our energy in order to create relationships that are more alive, boundaries that really work, and an inner balance we can count on in meeting life’s chal-lenges. More about the Stones’ work can be found on their web site www.delos-inc.com.

Miriam: How is your concept of relationship different from what we already know about relational dynamics between people?

Sidra: Well, you know, the first thing to realize is our approach to relationships between two people is not between two individuals but between two families of inner selves. So everything we look at is in terms of these two groups of selves interact-ing, as opposed to two single people interacting. That immediately changes everything.

Hal: People are really enormously relieved when they discover that some way they interact all the time is really one self in them that’s out of control. When they discover that, it’s like being released from prison. When they realize that an inner critic makes them constantly a victim with their partner or discover that it’s the pusher that fills out their calendar book, it really and truly is a revelation.

Sidra: It’s a revelation when you realize that the wonderful person you went to bed with at night didn’t turn into a monster in the morning and that that is another self. You haven’t been gypped, you haven’t been cheated or misled. It’s just another self that’s come in. That’s one of the beginning differences—we’re looking at a bunch of selves, not individuals.

Hal: Another major difference in our approach is that we pay a great deal of attention to energetic link-age.

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Miriam: Can you explain what you mean by energetic linkage?

Sidra: Linkage is about the inter-actions of our body energy fields (familiar to many people from Chinese medicine or martial arts, for example). The interactions of these energy fields are closely related to intimacy but not exactly the same thing. People can be physically, emotionally, intellectually, psychologically, and/or spiritually intimate, and most but not all of the time this intimacy carries with it energetic connection, what we’re calling linkage. The exceptions are often people being intellectually intimate, sharing ideas and concepts without any energetic connection at all. The same thing can happen with psychological sharing—people can talk for hours, but have essentially no energetic connection. They enjoy their conversation, but they can’t feel each other. When we learn to link energetically with choice and awareness, we feel each other, and a soul connection is made.

Hal: Now energetic linkage is really the new kid on the block in all relationship work, and I would say that in the next 20 to 40 years the development of psychotherapy is going to deal with energetics. We always think in terms of the psychological connection between people, the physical connection, the emotional connection—the energetic connection is unknown. But it has enormous consequences because it creates linkage.

Miriam: Is this energetic connec-tion that you are calling linkage something that everyone is naturally capable of, or is it something new that we are learning to express?

Sidra: It’s totally natural, and we’re all capable of connecting in this way. What is new in our work is the ability to teach people how to recognize/identify energetic reality and then to learn to use it in a con-scious way. And people want this. Linkage feeds us. It fills us up and makes us feel good.

Hal: There are some people, though, who extend their energy to others all the time, and their partner gets tired of that. When one person is always trying to merge energetically, it can feel invasive to the other person, even suffocating. One hears such expressions as “he or she is all over me” when there is no physical contact at all. On the other hand, some people are more identified with the mind. They have no linkage whatsoever. This can feel cold and disconnected to their partner. The discovery of which selves in you are relating to your partner and whether or not those selves have any energetic linkage creates an enormous spurt in con-sciousness and often has immediate benefits in terms of progress in psychotherapy.

Sidra: And people are always trying to get deeper connections with one another, which they can’t have without linkage. Until there’s an energetic connection, you don’t have the richness and the amount of nurturing and the depth that you want in that connection with another human being. Once you understand this concept of energetics, then you begin to be able to notice it in other people and to help them learn about linkage and how to handle it, how to gain some kind of mastery with it. Someone put it beautifully at our last workshop, saying that we teach the difference between being connected and paying attention. I think that’s incredibly important.

Miriam: So I think what I’m understanding is that people are made up of different selves, and some of these selves create a natural energetic linkage with other people and other selves, but other parts of us don’t have that capacity at all.Hal: Yes, that’s correct. Let me give you another example of how this might typically work in relationship. If a man comes in, for example, and he’s talking to me from his mind, he has no connection to me.

Sidra: Or to his wife . . .

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Hal: Well, that’s the wife’s complaint. The wife says the trouble with you is you talk but there’s no connection. And then the man says, because his wife is the opposite, the personal one, that the trouble with her is she’s so emotional about everything. He has to learn how to unhook from his mind to be able to make an energetic connection, not just a mental one, and she has to learn how to unhook from her personal energy to be able to be more impersonal. They each have to have both sides. And it’s amazing to see the results of that—it’s quite profound when members of a couple begin to realize the reality of energetic connection. Often the man begins to see that he lives out of his mind, and he says, “God, you know, a lot of people have said that to me—that they don’t feel me.” I’m familiar with this in my own life because I used to be the champion of impersonal energy. It feels like millions of people used to say to me “You’re so impersonal!” What they were saying was that they didn’t feel any energetic connection, because I was a mind person.

Sidra: So he paid a lot of attention, but he didn’t make connection.

Hal: Oh, I could pay attention. I mean, I was a trained analyst, so I knew how to pay attention. But I did not know how to handle the energetics of psychotherapy, and this has huge consequences. The energetics is a juicy thing that changes the whole nature of therapeutic work.

Miriam: How does the energetics change psychotherapy–what are the consequences?

Hal: Basically the interaction between the client and the therapist is an energetic interaction as well as an interaction at all other levels. The energetic interaction gives you information about what’s happen-ing with the client that is extremely useful. For example, as the therapist, if I find myself getting tired, there are three possibilities (other than the fact that I may not have slept the previous night). Possibility one is that strong emotional contents are being withheld by the client. Two, reactions are being withheld by the therapist. And three is that the client is talking using the mind without the energetic involvement of the rest of his or her being. The absence of this energetic connection makes one tired, and it makes one try to focus, in contrast to the more natural being with the other person, which happens when that energetic connection is there.

Sidra: What we’re doing is teaching people how to play their own energetic instrument in a relationship, as opposed to trying to fix the other person. Couples have a tendency to come in and say they know what’s wrong with the other person, and please fix him/her, and it’s a great maelstrom. We’re showing people how to step back and learn to play their own energetic system, how to connect and how to not connect at will. For example, a woman may need to learn how not to be the kind of woman who is all over the guy energetically—she needs to learn how to contain her own energy. Or someone else may withdraw totally, wall themselves off from everybody, and then not understand at all why nobody listens to them or how to get their connection back. These kinds of situations remain a mystery until you learn how to play your instrument at some level. In our workshops and trainings we actually show people how to play that, and once you know how to play it and make the connections, that’s when you know how to get nurturing at a whole different level in life.

Miriam: It seems you are saying that it is really natural and even easy for people to connect with each other on this deeper energetic level. What is it that seems to get in the way of having deeper connections in our relationships? So many people come into therapy experiencing less rather than more connection with each other over time.

Sidra: That’s because our linkage for the most part is unconscious, without choice.

Hal: A lot of times you’ll hear people talk about the fact that, well, they got married and they had children and it’s all over. Well, sad to say, it often is. But there are reasons for that. It’s not because people get married or because people have children. It’s because things happen when you get married. You fall back into old patterns of behavior, primary selves that are basic to you. And then of course with children it’s just very, very simple. The woman has to bond to the new child energetically as well as in other ways. That’s natural. But if that bonding is too strong, if the linkage between the mother and the child continues to be stronger than the one between her and her partner, over time the marriage is over. They may stay together for a long time, but the energetic relationship, the “juice,” is over. The primary linkage in relationship, in partnering, must be between the partners. If it isn’t between the partners, all hell breaks loose, you see, and then the primary linkage goes to the children, or to the dog, or to the computer, or to a spiritual search.

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Sidra: The computer is a big one these days.

Hal: Or to television—there are a lot of things waiting to receive linkage, and they literally replace the primary linkage. You can’t imagine how many couples have never just sat down in front of each other, facing each other, and sat there quietly, and really felt each other. It’s amazing. Connecting in this way is actually frightening to some people until they learn how to do it.

Sidra: Once we get some sense of what the energetics are about, and start to feel how important our own vulnerability is in relationship, then there’s more control and mastery and it’s less scary.

Miriam: And, I imagine from what you’re saying that there is an enormous reward in becoming more conscious of how we really feel toward each other.

Hal: It is like night and day. When you go from having no consciousness about energetic linkage to being able to recognize whether or not you have a connection with other people, the lights come on. It makes it possible to know how you feel toward another person in relationship, and because you become aware of what is going on between you, you can have some choice about it, some ability to communicate about it and to change it.

Sidra: The more we pay attention to linkage, the more amazed we are by how powerful awareness of our energetic connections can be. The energy is often what makes or breaks a relationship, and if the people who are energetically disconnected from each other can’t figure out what’s missing, the relationship can starve to death. But when people know about link-age and start to use it consciously, with choice, then they begin to tap into something that truly nourishes them and their soul.

HAL STONE, Ph.D., began his career as a psychologist with the U.S. Army and then practiced as a Jungian analyst for 10 years. He established and served as chief executive of the pioneering Center for the Healing Arts from 1973–1979.

SIDRA STONE, Ph.D., served as a clinical psychologist working with the Veterans Administration. In 1972 she became executive director of Hamburger Home for teenage girls. Since the late 1970s, the Stones have worked together developing Voice Dialogue and its theoretical basis, the Psychology of the Aware Ego and the Psychology of Selves. They have co-authored seven books and developed more than 30 teaching and training CDs. They conduct workshops, private consultations, and write at their home in Mendocino, California. They have five children between them.www.delos-inc.com

MIRIAM DYAK co-founded The Voice Dialogue Institute in Seattle, wrote The Voice Dialogue Facilitator’s Handbook, and conducts a private practice in Seattle. www.thevoicedialogueinstitute.org

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