Vlada Zapesotsky is a talented and creative psychodramatist, therapist, and now, writer who brings us into her inner world and the search for the Inner Home. "The Way Home" opens with a fairy tale that is heart-warming, creative, and endearing and makes it easy to visualize what she means by an "inner world" and how we create it during our childhood enculturation. Our inner world is alive, peopled with vibrant, sullen, exciting, known and unknown parts of ourselves. In psychology, these are called roles and role theory, but Vlada's description is anything but dry and academic. Every culture has a myth or fairy tale describing the journey of self-discovery that all humans yearn to undertake, yet are afraid to without a proper guide. Vlada's book starts with her own fairy tale about a young boy and how the contrast between his inner and outer worlds developed. She then shows us how to "activate" our personal guides and talk to and heal with them. May we all learn, like the boy in Vlada's opening story, that our tears of mourning the past are precisely what the rare flower within needs to flourish and heal. Vlada conceptualizes the inner life (or psyche) as a Home with multiple rooms to which we can return for new discoveries and self-care. We can populate these rooms with inner guides of our choosing: Soul Navigator, Inner Heart Companion, Inner Personal Assistant, et al. Reading "The Way Home" can remind us all to recognize own Inner Housekeeper - to have a neutral (non-judgmental) observer of our actions and to sweep out old feelings of self-blame and shame. Vlada's Inner Heart Companion is what psychodramatists call the Double, and in Shadow Work roughly corresponds to the Lover archetype. Her concept of inner guides is reminiscent of Carl Jung's archetypes and the collective unconscious - though in her world view, we have a choice in how to personify these inner voices to serve us in our healing journey. Whether you are well-versed in stories of a 'mythological quest' or a newcomer to its terminology, Vlada's down-to-earth writing is filled with examples that will light your path. As she says, you do not need to know how to get where you are going; you "only need to make a choice...connect to [your] personal Soul Navigator who will lead [you] Home."
About the Author: Vlada Zapesotsky was born in Siberia, Russia into a highly creative family of a TV director and a newspaper editor. When she was just sixteen years-old, she decided to leave Russia, by herself, for Israel. Being a Russian Jew, she believed Israel to be her true home. While there, Vlada studied journalism and at the age of nineteen she became an Israeli cultural commentator for one of the largest International Russian Channels. After a few years, she worked in the field of movie production, taking different roles of scenarist, director's assistant, and producer. Concurrently, she was studying Educational Psychology, a field she found highly interesting, and soon discovered Psychodrama. Becoming impressed with its depth and efficacy in helping people deal with problems, Vlada continued studying this method. After graduation, Vlada worked in Barzilai University Medical Center, as a Psychodrama Creative Art Therapist. In 2014, Vlada moved to the Bay Area in California with her husband and two children. After receiving American credentials as a practitioner in Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy, she founded an international foundation and a center of healing and creativity, The Way Home, where she leads workshops, trainings, and experiential and educational sessions and courses in English, Hebrew and Russian. At this center, Vlada has developed her own healing vision and creative action model, The Way Home-to Your True Self, serving people on a personal and professional level, with a focus on trauma issues.