DECISION MAKING AND VOICE DIALOGUE
by
Hal Stone, Ph.D. & Sidra Stone,
Ph.D.
Decision making is something that we all have to do over and
over again in our lives. Some decisions are easy to make and
others are filled with conflict. In a partnering relationship
it gets even more complex because the conflict is not just inside
of us. It also exists between the two people who are living
together.
The first thing to realize is that most decisions that we make
come from our primary selves. These are the selves that we identify
with in the growing up process and eventually they represent
our personality and how we express ourselves in the world and
how others see us in the world. If you grow up and become an
achiever and a mental person, these primary selves love to buy
books, invest time, energy and money in learning and achieving
and generally value people who show similar personality traits.
Conversely, when they meet someone who is their opposite, they
generally judge that person for being lazy and unfocused or
in some cases are irrevocably attracted to that person. It is
generally the primary selves that do the judging for us.
Imagine that you grow up in a family that is very tight and
stingy about spending money. They also don’t like to take
risks and you rebel against this kind of behavior and become
someone to loves to spend money, who loves to travel and who
loves to take risks in life. You are going to make very different
choices from those that your family made. Your primary self
system is going to behave differently in the world than their
primary self system.
What we need to learn how to do in decision making is to begin
to hear the voice on the other side, to hear the voice of the
disowned self. This is very hard to do so long as you are married
to the primary self because from this place your choices seem
natural to you. The fact is that the vast majority of choices
that people make aren’t really choices at all! A choice
requires a conflict between at least two different alternatives.
Conflict in decision making is a very positive thing because
it means that we are conscious of alternatives and don’t
know what to do or which way to go.
Imagine that John goes to a computer store and and falls in
love with the new Mac Powerbook. His primary self is in ecstacy
as he sits down and uses it. He has a strong mind, a good deal
of technical capability in regard to computers and a strong
need to achieve success and mastery over the world around him.
He has a good job and enough money to live the good life but
without having independent income or much in savings. He is
free about spending money, very much the opposite of his family
of origin. His primary self is more Mediterranean and his parents’
primary self system is more Germanic.
In this situation John says to himself “I choose”
to buy this computer and so he buys it. There is a nagging feeling
in him that something is off – as though his stomach feels
strange, but he is not used to feeling anxious. He is a “can
do” person and so he takes his new computer home.
From our psycho-spiritual perspective, we would say that John
didn’t buy the computer. How is this possible? We just
said that he did buy the computer. To be more accurate, it wasn’t
John who bought the computer. It was his primary self system
that bought it. There was no choice involved. This is the way
that decision making is done most of the time. We are not saying
that decisions made this way are bad. We are saying that generally
they are not conscious decisions because there is no real experience
of opposites.
To have choice there must be opposites. To have choice we must
stand between at least two alternatives and this is the job
of the Aware Ego. It is the Aware Ego process that is the goal
of the Voice Dialogue work. It is the development of a state
of consciousness, a way of viewing the world that develops as
we separate from our primary selves and learn to embrace our
disowned selves – not become them but simply embrace them.
That night John dreams that he is wandering among homeless people
in the city where he lives. They are without money, without
sustenance and he feels deeply their hopelessness. He awakens
from the dream feeling quite anxious and suddenly he recognizes
the feeling in his stomach that he has always rejected. He suddenly
feels the disowned self. He feels his vulnerability in the world,
his fears about not making it that he long ago repressed.
John now begins to stand between the opposites. He feels the
part of him that desperately desires and loves this new and
shiny and remarkable laptop. Now he also feels the disowned
self. Can he really afford to spend another $2,500 plus another
$500 to a thousand for assorted software and other goodies.
He feels both sides. It is the Aware Ego that has the capacity
to feel both sides.
Now John begins to understand why his girlfriend is so unhappy
with him about the way he spends money and why she she keeps
saying that she doesn’t feel safe with him. She is simply
expressing to him what he has not allowed himself to feel –
the voice of the other side. This is the gift of relationship
that the intelligence of the universe has provided for each
of us in our lives, once we understand the selves and know how
they work.
There is no right and wrong in all this. As psychotherapists
we have no idea as to whether he should buy the computer or
not buy the computer. It is none of our business – Thank
God. Our job is to help him come to this ability to feel opposites
and the willingness to live with this conflict until a natural
resolution occurs.
To live between opposites is to learn to live with the ambiguities
of life. It is the ability to hold the tension of opposites
until the Aware Ego process becomes sufficiently strong that
a decision occurs organically and in a way that is so natural
that it hardly feels like a decision. This is one of the deeper
goals of Voice Dialogue and dream work.
Sometimes we have to make immediate decisions but our experience
is that the sense of immediacy is more a product of the extraverted
and fast moving pace of western culture. We simply have never
valued, nor had a reason to value, the ability to “sweat”
the opposites. We can assure you that the rewards are great.
Always keep in mind that knowledge is the province of the primary
self system. Wisdom however belongs to the province of the Aware
Ego, to the ability to “not know”, to the willingness
to feel as well as understand both sides of the decision making
process.
April, 2004
Albion, California
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