Usually our personality is a confusion of contradictory impulses. We both want something and we don't want it. We love and we hate the same person. We despair of ever understanding ourselves.

The solution is to become literate about our personality. Hal and Sidra Stone developed the Voice Dialogue technique that enables us to interview the different parts of our personality as if they were individual people. Through it we learn to understand their conflicts and we submit their desires to the overall control of our Aware Ego. Awareness is always the solution to life's challenges.

This is the first Do-It-Yourself Voice Dialogue manual.

This is the formal stuff: Joy Manné has a BSc in Psychology and a PhD in the Buddhist Psychology of the Theravada Canon. One of the obstacles she had to overcome before achieving this goal was learning Sanskrit. Part of her reward was her husband, whom she met at a conference on Buddhism. She also took training in Spiritual Therapy with Hans Mensink and Tilke Platteel-Deur in Holland. Part of her reward was the skills to keep the in-loveness of her marriage lively through nearly thirty years. Joy Manné is not very good at being formal.

Now we get to the informal stuff: In the middle of the training, her partner with whom she looked forward to living a beatnik lifestyle was appointed to a professorship in Lausanne, Switzerland (Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies) so she became a portable wife (the qualification for living in Switzerland with him) and moved to Switzerland, from where she diligently commuted to finish her training. Before you could say "snowy mountain," clients were asking her to train them. So she did, starting with a four-year training modelled on her own teachers' training. Joy still believes four intensive years are necessary to develop enough life literacy to understand what being human is about, and perhaps, if it is your calling, to work with other people. The techniques Joy's work is based on are: Conscious Breathing Techniques: how you breath is how you are, so breathe well and be well; Voice Dialogue (Hal and Sidra Stone's technique) for becoming literate with regard to your personality; and Family Constellations (Bert Hellinger's technique) for understanding how the family energy field (also called family system) works and getting the best out of yours.

And the personal stuff: Commitment is my thing. It's the only way to make progress with our task of being human. I hope you enjoy this book, and all of my other books.

And: I'm a daughter, a mother, and a grandmother. I know what I'm talking about.