A Conversation with David Grudermeyer

The means to plotting out a first road map of the journey to healing was the Grudermeyers' many therapy clients who came to them frustrated with their inability to progress. Thanks to them as well as to their own experiences, the psychologist-authors found a universal sequence of stages of personal healing through which people pass. David Grudermeyer discusses these stages, and also gives us some surprising insights into anger . . . the part it plays in one's reactions - and how to get past it.

The Monthly Aspectarian: David, I've been browsing through your and Rebecca's much-honored book, Sensible Self-Help -- and it looks really good. Will you tell us a little bit about it?

David Grudermeyer: Well, Guy, we wrote Sensible Self-Help as a culmination of quite a number of years of studying clients and workshop participants who seemed to have a lot of personal development work under their belts -- and then, because they had hit some kind of wall in their development, came to us for clues as to what that wall was and how to get past it.

TMA: That's interesting in itself. You're not so much working with people coming and presenting problems as working with people who are already doing pathwork and have hit snags?

DG: Exactly. People who had been in therapy for an extensive number of years, had been through countless numbers of growth workshops, had been pursuing spiritual paths of various kinds for a long time . . . including members of the clergy and people who had been in 12-step recovery programs for sometimes two decades or more. We started to ask ourselves what was going on with these particular folks that was bringing them into therapy after having done such extensive -- and, usually, what they reported to be very useful -- work in the past. Where were they getting stuck?

In the process of asking this question, what we also started to recognize was that people who are successful self healers, those who seem to progress to a fairly advanced state in their healing process, seemed to follow a sequence in their journeys that appeared to be fairly universal. Essentially, we set out to be reporters, looking to find out whether in fact there did seem to be common trends in terms of sequencing or staging in the healing journey. And sure enough, there seems to be exactly that kind of sequencing, and it actually follows a universal learning curve.

We attempted to set forth a portrait of the common themes or common tendencies of the people who came in to see us -- those who weren't rank beginners -- paths they seemed to have followed in their own journeys . . . that they followed most frequently not by design but purely intuitively, and then in workshops and in therapy as well. What was more interesting to me in workshops with other therapists' clients was finding that people would say, My gosh, you've shown me exactly what stage of the healing process that I got stuck in, and now I see, through what you've taught us, exactly what kinds of activities will help me move forward effectively at the stage I'm in. We would be hearing from people who had been truly baffled because others had said to them, Well, you're doing great; what's the big problem? These people were saying to themselves, But there's something not quite right.

TMA: What are some typical examples of this?

DG: Well, one example is of someone who had been in Alcoholics Anonymous for about a decade and a half. This fellow had done all of the right things: he was abstinent, he was sober, he was working the twelve steps very, very well, he was attending meetings, he was functioning as a sponsor. He was doing everything that was asked of him by the program, and was doing quite well in his life professionally, personally. But, as John Bradshaw has referred to in the past, there was some kind of hole in his soul that he had never touched. As we looked at that dilemma for him, he started to realize that he had gotten only as far as what we refer to as stage three in the seven stages of personal healing; that he had never gone on into stage four.

In practical terms, what that means is that in the first stage of the healing journey, people become willing. They develop a sense of acceptance -- usually through being bludgeoned by life. Not some kind of comfortable "Oh, isn't this lovely" kind of acceptance, but acceptance because of feeling the heat rather than seeing the light. They come into a state that says, There must be a better way than the way I've been living my life. I don't seem to know what that better way is, but I will find it. I'm willing. I'm open. And that's the first stage in the seven stages of personal healing.

The second stage is what we call Foundation. This is where a person starts to reorganize or restructure what they devote their attention, their time, their energy, their money to in their lives so they can begin to support a reorganization of their internal lives. They start to develop a lifestyle that is conducive to a healing journey. This includes developing a network of people around oneself, others who are supportive of the healing process. It involves stabilizing oneself in terms of getting on track about eating habits, sleeping habits, dealing with biochemical imbalances that may exist, abstaining from primary anesthesias of choice, a lot of things like that. Then what spontaneously happens for people when they really have stabilized their lives, which is really about early sobriety and early abstinence in the case of the person I'm referring to who's in Alcoholics Anonymous, what emerges spontaneously at the point that they've stabilized is, their emotions start coming up; feelings start to surface. Mostly, people have learned to anesthetize, to stay busy or be bull-headed or do whatever they do in their survival plans in order to avoid dealing with emotions, feelings inside them that they've never learned how to deal with.

TMA: I think as a society, by and large, we don't deal with emotions.

DG: Without a doubt. And so this particular fellow had gotten right to the edge of working with feelings and his own inner critic had jumped up, this set of rules and regulations that we carry inside ourselves about how we're supposed to be and not supposed to be, how we're supposed to feel and not supposed to feel. This inner critic of his had locked him down and said, Don't deal with these feelings. Let's do an end run . . . we can go into spirituality. We can do a lot of spiritual kinds of things without dealing with these feelings that we're having. Let's just do a lot of affirmations and a lot of prayer work and a lot of meditation and a lot of spiritual practice, and everything will be hunky-dory. And lo and behold, fifteen years later, this person basically says, It didn't work and I gave it my best shot. I was good. I did my spiritual work. What went wrong? How come I'm still in pain? Well, the reason turned out to be, he never really developed emotional intelligence. He did an end run around dealing with his feelings. There was a really important reason for doing that, which is that in stage three, when a person really learns how to feel -- the title of stage three is Feeling -- a person who learns how to sweat out their feelings and learns that they don't have to be afraid to have their feelings spontaneously, starts to open up into what we refer to as the abyss, their cesspool of unfinished emotional baggage that for so much of their lives they fought to keep at arm's length and to hope and pray that it's not going to affect them.

TMA: Don't go there, baby.

DG: Don't go there. Exactly. Well, stage four is the heart of the healing journey. We call stage four Healing, but a more appropriate name is The Abyss because that's what people experience it to be. They step off a cliff into free fall, into darkness; they know they're going where they're not supposed to go. The reason that most people try to do end runs when they're trying to do personal development work is to get around dealing with their feelings. We instinctively know that if we become more connected with our own emotional states, the baggage we've been protecting ourselves against dealing with will bubble up to the surface -- and then where will we be?

TMA: That's going to hurt.

DG: That's going to hurt like hell. And if we don't know how to work with internal emotional pain, we have really good and legitimate reasons to try to do an end run around that stuff, don't we?

TMA: A lot of people, especially ten, twenty years ago, who got involved in spirituality were told to just transcend it all. Don't feel.

DG: Exactly. I refer to that as New Age Denial.

TMA: Well, I wouldn't blame that on the new age.

DG: No, we don't blame it on the new age at all. What we're trying to capture with a phrase like that is that anything in the whole wide world can be used for the purpose of anesthesia if that's one's intention. There have been plenty of people who have used absolutely wonderful spiritual paths or new age approaches and a lot of other kinds of approaches too, even traditional religious approaches, not for the purpose of genuine spiritual development but for the purpose of building a better wall against dealing with their baggage. And that's a fancy form of anesthesia, a fancy form of denial. It doesn't make the technique a bad technique. It has to do with the intention on the part of the user for why they're using it.

TMA: Yeah, I have to laugh. There have been bad addictions and good addictions. It's okay to be a workaholic.

DG: Right. Exactly. And in Sensible Self-Help, we make it very, very clear why there's no such thing as a good addiction and a bad addiction. There's only such a thing as utilizing something for an addictive purpose or an anesthetic purpose or using something for a healing-oriented purpose.

This particular fellow found that he had fixated right on the edge of stage three. And as soon as he started to recognize where he was and what he had been trying to do -- an end run around it -- he was able to kind of take this huge sigh of relief and say, "Oh, that's all this is. Well, you know, I'm not satisfied with the results I've gotten doing it the way I've done it, so I think -- even though it's not the thing that I would wish for myself -- I think I'll take the plunge." He then went ahead and learned how to sweat out his emotions. The Abyss material, the unfinished emotional baggage that he had been carrying and avoiding, came up and he worked through that material to the other side.

There's something interesting that happens at that point. When a person lives through that first piece of baggage that they thought was emotionally unsurvivable, they get to the other side of dealing with it and they all of a sudden say, Oh my God, I can survive this stuff. I really didn't know, and nobody giving me guarantees at the front end was going to be enough to convince me. The only way that people know that this stuff is survivable is after they've survived the first go-round. What happens at that point for people is that they start to move into stage five.

Stage five is Rebirth. Rebirth doesn't mean that a person has no emotional baggage left anymore. What it means is that they're no longer afraid to deal with the remaining emotional baggage, so when it comes up, they say, Oh yuck! This stuff? I'm not thrilled about this, but I trust my ability to deal with this new layer of junk that's bubbled up, and here I go, I'll deal with it. What happens at stage five, along with not feeling afraid of the abyss anymore, is that people start to reclaim their authenticity; they start to discover who they really are or who they were meant to be, or . . . different individuals like to word that in different ways. And as people move into that kind of rebirth stage, wonderful things start to happen. After a chunk of abyss work in a therapy session, the next week they'll come in and say, "You know that closet I've told you about that I've known I've needed to clean out for the last ten years but haven't ever been able to get around to doing? I cleaned it out this past weekend and it didn't even feel like work. It just felt like the most natural thing in the world. What happened?" What happened is, they didn't need to hide in their closet anymore. They didn't need the anxiety to hide behind of knowing there was this piece of unfinished business.

TMA: Are you talking about a figurative closet or a . . .

DG: No, we're talking about a literal closet. And that literal closet is representative of the figurative, because people in stage five become real intolerant of unfinished business, whether it's internal unfinished business, unfinished business between them and other people, or unfinished business with them and money, or them and chaos, with them and their career. They really start building their lives more proactively because at that point, they can. They don't need to hide. They don't need to be a workaholic anymore, for example, because workaholism is a form of anesthesia. They don't have anything to hide from anymore because they're not afraid of their Abyss issues. So then, instead of being a workaholic, they start becoming passionate about their work rather than hiding in it. They start to love their work and also not take it so seriously because they also know they have a rest-of-their-lives, all the other aspects of their lives that they want to pay attention to as well.

As people become selves -- you know, Ram Dass once said, "You have to become somebody special before you can become nobody special." Becoming somebody special requires clearing away that unfinished emotional baggage. So as we become somebody special in stage five, we experience a birth of authentic self-esteem rather than the sort of canned, cookbook, false or pseudo self-esteem that a lot of people try to create before they're developmentally capable of experiencing that self-love. With the self-acceptance and forgiveness that emerges in stage five, people start to discover that the quality of their relationships starts to alter.

And so in stage six, they move in to what we refer to as Clear-Hearted Relationships. It's not that people don't have relationships up until this point in their healing process, because they do. Rebecca and I believe that we need to have relationships all the way along, because it's our closest relationships that throw up in our faces our deepest issues. We can't hide from our deepest issues in relationship, but we can sometimes hide if we're hiding in a cave. In stage six, however, after one has become the self they were meant to be in stage five, they're not so afraid of getting "lost" in relationship any more. So in stage six quality relationships, they're able to build relationships with other people where one whole person comes together with one whole person.

TMA: If they can find another whole person.

DG: That's a real interesting thing. People who are in stage five healing start to find other whole people, whereas up until that point in their healing journeys, they have usually insisted that those people didn't exist.

Rebecca and I have a saying, Ego in search of evidence always finds it. The only question is, what is my ego in search of evidence for? The reality is that when I am still avoiding my feelings, or when I am still avoiding my emotional abyss, I will not be attractive to or attracted by people who have already dealt with a large proportion of that material. In stage five, we actually reset our radar to attract and be aware of and be attractive to a different quality of person.

So stage six is Clear-Hearted Relationship. That quality of relationship in which when wounds come up or when residue accumulates -- you know, that unfinished junk that happens when there's a disagreement or a hurt, a disappointment in a relationship -- people in stage six know how to work those disagreements and disappointments all the way through to a state we call "no residue." Where they actually end up having grown closer together as a result of their conflict . . . rather than having what most people experience -- which is, with each little bitty conflict that happens that doesn't get worked through all the way to completion, there's a little bit more distance put into the relationship, and then a little bit more and a little bit more. And then cumulatively, this whole series of individual events, none of which may have been big deals by themselves, accumulate the residue from the unfinishedness to the point where the relationship buckles under the strain and becomes unviable. In stage six, that doesn't happen anymore because people know how to work conflicts through to no residue. They know how to work with conflicts in such a way that they create greater closeness rather than greater distance.

What that then leads people to being able to do is stage seven, which is Clear-Hearted Service. Their ability to be of service in the world becomes qualitatively a different form of service work . . . where they're no longer giving to get and they're no longer trying to make a difference in the world in an oppositional or confrontational or abrasive kind of way. They know how to collaborate effectively with people. And whether they're doing that kind of leadership in a business setting or through community activism or whether the form of leadership they take is through parenting, the quality of those activities becomes very collaboration based -- because they know how to collaborate now. Collaboration isn't just simply a set of ideas that sound good on paper, but they know how to live a collaborative life.

TMA: I've interviewed a lot of people over the last several years, and a lot have these types of systems, step one, step two and so forth. But this one is a good one, I like it.

DG: Part of why I like it is, we didn't set out to build a new theory. We weren't interested in building theories. We just set out to be as good a pair of reporters as we knew how to be in noticing what seemed to be happening with a very unique group of people that we were blessed to be working with.

TMA: I would think that the vast majority of people are hung up at the emotional level.

DG: Stage three. Yeah.

TMA: Is it true that the vast majority of people are stuck at that level?

DG: Actually, the vast majority of people are stuck at pre-Willingness.

Most of the people we've been working with have gotten stuck either just at the edge of stage three or they've gotten well into stage three and they've learned how to feel . . . and now their core issues are starting to spontaneously bubble up to the surface and they don't know how to deal with them.

TMA: If a person is very honest with themselves and they know their childhood traumas, they know what happened in their lives, what their wounds are, yet they still react -- what do you do with that?

DG: There's an old cliché in psychology, Insight is never enough. The key to the healing process is not simply knowing. You know, there are a lot of people who suffer from premature insight.

TMA: (laughs) I like that term!

DG: They know. Just like there are a lot of people who suffer from premature forgiveness, where people will oftentimes say, Well I know my parents did this and this and this wrong, but I also know they were doing the best they could, so I forgive them. Now all of that is true --

TMA: Mentally.

DG: Right. But it's not true organically yet. So with that I do a number of things with people that help them re-experience the traumas that they lived through once upon a time. When they first experienced traumas in their lives, they didn't know how to work them through to an emotional state of completion. As people re-experience those traumas in a new way, they start to find that they survive emotionally, that they're okay, that they're intact . . .

TMA: How do you help them to re-experience?

DG: There are a number of different forums that are available. We talk extensively in the material in stage four of Sensible Self-Help about the variety and the array of resources that are available for doing that. It ranges from imagery kinds of techniques, to anger completion methods, to something called "eye movement desensitization and reprocessing," EMDR. There is quite a wide range of resources that are available now to help people re-experience their traumas to a new outcome rather than just getting caught in mental masturbation where they keep re-thinking it and re-thinking it and re-thinking it. People who keep re-thinking this stuff end up being perpetual victims.

Rebecca and I define forgiveness as demonstrating in the present that I am no longer harmed by the unacceptable that occurred in the past. Well, I can't demonstrate that I'm unharmed in the present if I'm trying to affirm my way to demonstrating it. I can only demonstrate it once the blocks have been removed, once the baggage has been removed. So having people confront their false hope -- you know, a lot of what keeps wounds in place is people thinking that if only I jump through the next hoop, then I'll finally have a happy ending. If only I find the right outer fix to what's essentially an inner problem, things will be okay.

Part of what we go through with people, and what Rebecca and I have gone through ourselves in doing our abyss work is the grieving of the loss of hope that an outside fix will heal an internal problem. The next relationship is not going to save me. The next promotion is not going to save me. The next raise is not going to save me. The next purchase is not going to save me. The next book is not going to save me.

TMA: The next conquest, the next whatever.

DG: Yes.

TMA: Well, let's take anger. How do you deal with that? Each person would have their own individual way of dealing with it, I suppose.

DG: Yeah, that's certainly true. But there are some what appear to be fairly universal principles about anger.

TMA: Well, I'll make it more personal. When I was very young there was tremendous fighting in my family, bad stuff. And I said, Okay fine, that's how you deal with it? I can be madder than anybody. I can be madder than they are.

DG: What you did was, you developed a survival plan. You figured out how to survive the anger that you experienced in your family, and your strategy for doing that was to get more angry than anyone else. What Rebecca and I have been trained to do is work with people in the following way. If you would come into my office telling me this is still going on today, I would work with you to express and complete your anger toward the people who taught you, whether they meant to or not, that you needed to be more angry at them than they were angry, in order to get your way . . . so that you could ultimately, in your gut and in your heart, turn back to them what you learned about anger -- so that you could then in your heart and in your guts open up to another way of being angry or another way of not being angry. Another way of being effective in the world without having to use anger.

People learn to equate anger with power, so a lot of people are afraid that if they stop being angry, they will stop having power. All that anger is life energy that's wrapped up in unfinished stuff. People continue to get angry because they think that if they get angry enough for long enough, in the right ways, somehow the other person will finally change.

There's a kind of phenomenon with anger that Rebecca and I refer to as looping. What looping is, is a repetitive process of being angry, even if it's just internally. It says, I have to be angry in order to get something to happen. Usually, the something that needs to happen is, the other person has to understand what they did to me, or they have to take responsibility for what they've done, or they have to change, or they have to apologize. And until the other person does something differently, I can't get off it. A lot of people have learned to believe, and I certainly grew up believing, that I couldn't be done with my anger until the other person changed.

TMA: You would wait a long time for that.

DG: Well, that's the problem, and that's why we call it looping, because the people we loop with are exactly the people that aren't going to be changing. We've already tried all the ways of getting them to change, and nothing's worked. But we're still busy holding onto our anger toward them anyway.

TMA: Is anger really a cover for fear?

DG: Anger -- it's an interesting thing, because in the anger workshops that Rebecca and I give, some people get angry in order to avoid their grief, and some people, when they're trying to do anger work, start crying in order to avoid their anger. Is anger a cover-up for fear, or is fear a cover-up for anger?

TMA: The chicken or the egg.

DG: Yes. And the answer, in a non-facetious way is yes, and the reason that it's not facetious is that for some people, they use anger as a way to avoid their fear; and for some people, they use being afraid as a way to avoid dealing with their anger. Rebecca's and my job is to help each individual discover what their ways of relating to anger are and help them restructure their relationship to their anger so that they start to experience that they can complete their anger without the other person's cooperation, involvement, or even knowing about it. And that they can complete their anger in a manner that actually leaves them feeling more empowered rather than feeling like they were at risk for becoming a doormat.

TMA: Of course, if you have a couple where one goes through this transformation and the other doesn't, that's a whole other issue.

DG: Then the relationship is in jeopardy.

TMA: I see we're about out of time, David. Is there something more you'd like our readers to know?

DG: Well gosh, we've covered seven stages of personal healing, we've touched a little upon the question of anger -- and we've barely scratched the surface, of course, in terms of anger work. But what I think I'd like to end with is a message of hope for anyone who has felt like they have hit a wall or feel like they've become stuck in their healing journey. Most of us have tried to undertake our healing journeys without a road map, without a sense of what the territory is going to look like as we progress, and without clarity about what kinds of resources might be available to any particular person -- the resources that are going to be the best fit or the most useful to them at each point along the way in the healing journey. What Rebecca and I most wanted to do in Sensible Self-Help is to help people become really excellent consumers of personal development resources, to help them learn how to measure their healing, to help them learn how to get the most out of their efforts and, most importantly, to help them see ways to get the results that they're after.

David Grudermeyer, Ph.D. and Rebecca Grudermeyer, Psy.D., are the co-proprietors of Willingness Works, which they founded in 1988 in Del Mar, California. Through Willingness Works, they give presentations, conduct workshops and consult on the Seven Stages of Personal Healing, spiritual and emotional growth and relationships.

They are co-authors, with Lerissa Nancy Patrick, of the critically-acclaimed, award-winning Sensible Self-Help: The First Road Map for the Healing Journey, providing a roadmap for developing the emotional and relationship intelligence necessary for durable, happy relationships.

Sensible Self-Help can be ordered through your local bookstore or directly from Willingness Works. Also, for a catalog and information about ordering tapes and workbooks, or for information about attending or sponsoring Willingness Works workshops, call (800) 915-3606; fax (619) 755-1988; or write to Willingness Works Press, 1155 Camino Del Mar #516, Del Mar, CA 92014.