Why Should You Trust Me and My Premises?
If you trust me enough or don't care about my credentials and beliefs,
go here.
You don't know my background, personality, or motives. I've studied human
behavior most of my
69 years - professionally
since 1979. Because my premises here about personality subselves and wounds
are probably alien to you, I expect you to question whether my knowledge,
perceptions, and reasoning are credible. For an overview of my background,
read this and return. If you're
curious about my current core beliefs about
people,
relationships, families, and
"problems," follow the
links.
My undergraduate
training and 17 years' experience in engineering validated the now-accepted
idea that the behavior of groups of people can be understood via
My social-work
masters degree training (1979 - 81) and multi-year study and practice of
indirect (Ericksonian) hypnosis in the 1980s convinced me of the ceaseless
dynamic,
mysterious interplay between our unconscious, semi-conscious, and conscious
minds. With new-therapist zeal, I took hundreds of hours of post-graduate
seminars, laced with reading several dozen clinical theory and practice
books, to try and "understand" this profound mystery.
The subjects
included Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP);
personality disorders; healthy grieving, anger management, healing shame and
guilt; divorce causes and impacts; brief therapy, paradoxical therapy (the Milan Group),
Transactional Analysis (Erik Berne), and Gestalt therapies (Fritz Perls et.
al.); guided imagery; the therapeutic paradigms of Murray Bowen, Carl
Whitaker, Salvador Minuchin, Virginia Satir, Peggy Papp, Harville Hendrix,
John Gardner, Jay Haley, Richard Fisch, Paul Watzlawick, Joseph Zinker, and
many more. I was licensed as a Certified Social Worker (CSW) in Illinois,
and as a Parent Effectiveness (P.E.T.)
Trainer and a
Rainbows (divorce-adjustment)
facilitator. I had no initial training in dissociative disorders. Like most
colleagues, I paid little attention to that type of "mental health problem"
because it seemed rare and arcane.
Wrong.
This rich stew of ideas fed my evolving a theory of family-
and how they
affected human personality development. I began a solo psychotherapy practice in 1981, specializing in working with stepfamily adults,
couples, and kids. I
got early clinical training in this specialty from the writings of Dr. Clifford
Sager and Esther Wald (University of Chicago), and a weekend seminar with Drs. Emily and John
Visher who founded of the
in 1979.
As with most
clinicians, my hundreds of average Midwestern (mostly Caucasian) clients
allowed me to reality-test and meld the ideas of all my many academic
teachers into the multi-topic divorce-prevention framework outlined in this site.
In 1986, I "accidentally" discovered
that I was the son of two functional alcoholics, and came from a very
(low nurturance) ancestry. That life-changing epiphany
explained much about the painful qualities of my life, including two divorces.
I began to learn all I could about what being an
"ACoA" (Adult Child of Alcoholics) meant, and what could be done
about it. As I read and attended seminars about this and
including
and our
I began to see a pattern
in what my clients and my own personal therapy were showing me. The
pattern had three themes:
When
asked, clients
described their childhood families as having relatively few of
these
nurturance traits;
They
sketched their and their present and former mates' family trees as
having a significant number of these
traits, and...
My
clients' presenting problems and life choices had exactly the same
characteristics
as typical ACoAs, though many said their early caregivers weren't chemically
dependent. One common client trait was
and/or a series of
unstable, unsatisfying relationships. Another was an almost universal
inability of adult clients and couples to
and communicate (problem-solve)
Many had minor
kids who were "acting out" or "troubled."
I began to sense a connection among these three, but didn't know what it
was. None of my post-graduate training had affirmed or described a
connection, or
proposed what to do
about it.
By "chance," I attended a 1990 seminar led by Chicago psychologist Dr. Richard Schwartz on
It provided the missing link between my troubled clients' three patterns. His IFS
concepts, based on a decade of study and practice, made instant, intuitive sense to me. I signed up for two
nine-month externships with Dr. Schwartz at the University of Illinois, and
began my first faltering steps working with my clients' and my
"parts"
(subselves).
Since then, I have had hundreds of clinical and personal experiences of
hearing and seeing people's subselves in action. I have watched scores of
average women and men
react with amazement when their
an array of
reactive
- and their
wise, resident
- would "speak" (produce
thought streams and emotions), when respectfully invited to.
I
watched people's physical posture, facial expression, and vocal tone change
subtly or clearly, as different parts took turns running the
client's inner family of subselves. I have witnessed several hundred troubled
people interviewing their subselves, and learning that these personality parts
were certain they were living in a time decades before - the
"bad old (childhood) days." I have listened to people cry and
laugh as they recounted having inner-staff or
council meetings, and
live dialogs
between their conflicted or distrustful subselves.
I began to study dissociative disorders intensely, including multiple personalities. I
read a series of three helpful
books on
"voice dialog," a kind of therapy by veteran psychologists Hal Stone and Sidra Winkleman
Stone. I adapted their ideas, and found the high majority of my clients very
receptive and responsive to them. The Stones' book "Embracing
Each Other" helped me understand
"relationship difficulties." A recovering colleague gave me this poetic
excerpt
about a stepfamily-couple's subselves from Michael Ventura's book
Shadow
Dancing in the USA. I began to see more and more evidence of false
selves and their effects in and outside my clinical office, including in the
media.
As Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote, "You'll See
It When You Believe It." The
fact that the
Internal Family Systems
Association (IFSA) staff has been conducting clinical training workshops
internationally since 1995 testifies that I am one of many who
sees the reality of inner-families of subselves and
their effects.
The annual IFSA conferences in Chicago have been attended by hundreds of
clinicians from all over the country who are finding the inner-family
concept real, useful, and viable. International interest is growing as I
write this.
|
A core
premise in this site is that
childhood years
promote the formation of a survival-motivated false self. This needs to be independently validated by formal
research. If this premise is true, the social implications are as
impactful as discovering fire.
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Another core
premise here is that
until well into true (vs. pseudo) wound-recovery,
people ruled by false selves tend to pick each other as mates
repeatedly, despite painful results. From my experience, most
American re/marriers divorce psychologically or legally (the "/" notes
it may be one partner's first union). Veteran
marital counselor Dr. Harville Hendrix (Keeping the Love You Find) and
others seem to agree. Logic is
clearly not useful in explaining this.
I have studied and experienced personal
from a low-nurturance
(traumatic) childhood since 1987. I have met several hundred other people (including
clinicians) who
spontaneously testified they came from childhood lacking psychological and
spiritual nourishment, and who were clearly dominated by a
protective, reactive false
self.
What I can report factually is that the two premises above seem to be
born out in interviews with hundreds of average, random
and
stepfamily clients since 1990.
Since 1981, my stepfamily clients have been referred from dozens of different lay and
clinical sources around Chicago. I continue to get unsolicited
email like this from people who are
exploring these ideas in their own lives.
As far as my motives for maintaining this Web site and my zealous focus on
breaking the silent [wounds + unawareness]
causing most major
personal, family, and social problems - I want my life to matter by
contributing to the common good. I want to use my knowledge, talents,
and limitations (e.g. my wounds) to raise public awareness of the toxic
link between low childhood nurturance,
and
and (re)divorce. In studying relationships and
family dynamics across almost three
decades, I've never seen the link proposed here. This has become a
compelling
life mission for me.
At 69, I'm not interested in wealth, fame,
prestige, or power. My payoff is epitomized by a sexual-abuse survivor with
whom I worked for several years toward harmonizing her terribly chaotic
inner family of subselves. She called unexpectedly one Christmas day to say "You've
been on my mind, Pete. I just called to say thanks so very much for the
(inner-family) work we did. It has made a major positive difference in
my life! I'm passing it on to other people now..." Her true Self was
speaking...
AH!
Letter
concluded
on p. 3
The Web address of this
3-page letter is
http://sfhelp.org/01/letter1.htm