A journal of creative thought and feeling published by LIOS ...

Autumn 2009 • Issue 36
A journal of creative thought and feeling
published by LIOS Graduate College of Saybrook University

In This Issue
1
LIOS Gr a d u a t e Co l l e g e
Sa y b r o o k University
4010 Lake Washington Blvd., Ste. 300
Kirkland, WA 98033
Phone: 425.968.3400
Fax: 425.968.3406
www.saybrook.edu/lios
Pu b l i s h e r
Shelley Drogin, Ed.D.
Ed i t o r a n d De s i g n e r
Kathleen Murphy, Ph.D.
Gu e s t Ed i t o r s
Timothy Weber, Ph.D.
Cheryl Cebula, M.S.W.
Ed i t o r i a l Sta f f
Margie Bloch, M.A.
Lorelette Knowles, M.S.
Co n t r i b u t i n g Wr i t e r s
Lorne Buchman, Ph.D.
Gloria J. Burgess, Ph.D.
Cheryl Cebula, M.S.W.
Shelley Drogin, Ed.D.
Marina Gordon, M.A.
Carol Jakus, M.S.W., M.A.
Catherine Johnson, M.A.
Kathleen Murphy, Ph.D.
K. Alexandra Onno, Ph.D.
Laurie Rosenfeld, M.A.
Susan Ruby, M.A.
Diane Schachter, M.S.W.
Kelly Spangler, M.A.
Timothy Weber, Ph.D.
Melinda Williamson, M.A.
Sherene Zolno, M.A.
Im a g e s o f Le a d e r s h i p Co n t r i b u t o r s
Special thanks to Gloria Burgess,
Anna Gomez, John Hinds,
JoAnne MacTaggart,
John McConnell, Noella Natalino
Li n k a g e’s cover reflects the recent affiliation
of LIOS Graduate College (Seattle skyline)
and Saybrook University (Golden Gate
Bridge) in service of positive global change.
Copyright © 2009 LIOS Graduate
College (www.saybrook.edu/lios).
All rights reserved. For permission
to distribute copies of this journal
in any form, contact LIOS:
425.968.3400 • liosinfo@lios.org
Words FROM THE presidents
Reflections on Leadership
Shelley Drogin, Ed.D., President
of LIOS Graduate College
2
A Thought of Farewell
Lorne Buchman, Ph.D., President
of Saybrook University
3
IMAGES OF LEADERSHIP
PROJECT
4
LIOS RESEARCH AND
CREATIVE THOUGHT
Intensive Family-of-Origin
Consultation:
An Intergenerational Approach
(excerpt, Chapter 18, The Wiley-Blackwell
Handbook of Family Therapy)
Timothy Weber, Ph.D., and
Cheryl Cebula, M.S.W.
5-7
Legacy Leadership:
The Call to Stewardship & Service
(excerpt from Dare to Wear Your Soul
on the Outside: Live Your Legacy Now)
Dr. Gloria J. Burgess, Ph.D.
8-11
Leading with Heart and Soul
(excerpt from Memoirs of a CEO)
Sherene Zolno, M.A.
12-13
The Trauma Chameleon
Susan Ruby, M.A.
14-16
Lessons from Sheep
Catherine Johnson, M.A.
17-18
An Invitation to Mindfulness
Carol Jakus, M.S.W., M.A.
19-20
Something Like a Pear
(abstract and excerpt, Out of Ashes:
A Return to the Creative Feminine, doctoral
dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute)
K. Alexandra Onno, Ph.D.
21
The Heroine’s Journey in
John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon
Kathleen Murphy, Ph.D.
22-23
LIOS ALUMNA
PROFILES IN COURAGE
Interview with Julia Harris, M.A.
Kathleen Murphy, Ph.D.
24-25
Raise a Reader, Raise a Leader
JoAnne MacTaggart, B.S.
26
LIOS PRINCIPLES IN ACTION
Building the Mosaic: The Art
and Practice of Psychotherapy
(excerpt, LIOS SC graduate thesis)
Melinda Williamson, M.A.
27-28
Private Practice: A Checklist
for Making It Happen
Susan Ruby, M.A.
29-30
Leadership: Using LIOS
InterAct Training to Create
a Successful Business
Diane Schachter, M.S.W.
31
On a New Track: LIOS Leadership
and Organization Development
Master’s Degree Program
Sherene Zolno, M.A.
Marina Gordon, M.A.
Kelly Spangler, M.A.
Laurie Rosenfeld, M.A.
32-34

Words From the Presidents
reflections on leadership
By Shelley Drogin, Ed.D., President of LIOS
Graduate College, Saybrook University
A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be
tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more
seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of the idea.
— John Ciardi
As I sit in our new LIOS Graduate College home, gazing at my
bookshelf filled with volumes of leadership books, I cannot help
but reflect on the challenge of authentic leadership from the inside
out—taking the liberty of borrowing descriptors from a number of
the titles on that shelf. As a student of leadership and coach of
numerous executives over the years, taking my theory into practice
has been a fascinating journey. In spite of—or perhaps as a direct
result of—having lived my leadership practice so intimately and
extensively over the last two years, the answers to the question of
“What have I learned?” do not readily surface. Not surprisingly,
more questions than answers emerge.
Throughout my years of practice I have been enamored of the
power of questions. The spiritual psychologist Robert Sardello wrote
that a sign of a healthy soul is “that more questions are raised than
are answered, and that the nature of such questions does not carry
the character of doubt but rather the inspiration to go yet further.”
What is clear to me is that my tenure as President of LIOS has been
a time of leadership without easy answers, and that such a reflection
is a journey in and of itself. And while the entry point into this
exploration is not readily evident either, there is little doubt in my
mind, that inspiration is emerging, alive and well.
Looking back over these two years, I see a trail of experiences, a
host of feelings, thoughts, and a desire for learning. The path is
rich with challenges, hopes, excitement, successes, points where
another approach may have proved more fruitful, hard decisions,
clear decisions, personal strengths and personal weaknesses, the
light of LIOS and the accompanying shadow, relationships formed,
relationships strengthened, joy, compassion, delight, sadness,
occasional anger and tears and tears in the fabric—and through it
all a weave that remains both powerful and beautiful. All in all,
a journey I am incredibly grateful for and wouldn’t want to have
missed.
As I write this, the LIOS community is in its 40th year and has
approximately 2,200 graduates. Over the years our founders,
faculty, students, alumni, friends, boardmembers and administrative
staff have contributed to the success of LIOS in a variety of
ways, and to each of them I am deeply grateful. We have crossed the
threshold and entered the realm of the new Saybrook University as
an independent and interdependent LIOS Graduate College. This
Photo by John Hinds, second-year student, LIOS LOD track, Images
of Leadership Project: “Taken outside New York’s Rockefeller Plaza
across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I like the juxtaposition between
the worldly weight that Prometheus is carrying against the otherworldly
backdrop of St. Patrick’s.”
issue of Linkage so beautifully and creatively marks that transition
and accompanying changes, linking theory and practice and
spanning a wide range of work/play grounds: learning a reverence
for life along with Catherine Johnson on the sheep farm; exploring
intergenerational intervention and family-of-origin issues with
LIOS faculty members Tim Weber and Cheryl Cebula; coming to
grips with our own loss and grief through the life journey of alumna
Julia Harris; heeding faculty Gloria Burgess’ invitation to dance
with the leadership call of service in terms of future generations.
What are you called to do, and who are you called to be? What
expression will your leadership take? What are the possibilities for
our world, and how will LIOS bring its many gifts forward to
realize those possibilities? All good questions asked in different ways
by the authors included in this issue of Linkage, the first to speak
for LIOS Graduate College. These well-crafted essays offer nourishment
that the world hungers for and inspiration to go farther in our
journey.
Be assured, as individuals and as a community, we are having a
profound impact on our world.
2

Words From the Presidents
A Thought of Farewell
By Lorne M. Buchman, Ph.D.,
President of Saybrook University
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon a blue guitar.”
The Man with the Blue Guitar
Wallace Stevens
As many of you know, I will be leaving the presidency of Saybrook
on October 9, 2009. I am leaving to become the next president of
Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, an institution with a
mission centered on the education of artists and designers. I have
a particular passion for the arts and for the challenges involved in
the education of those who shape culture through their creative
work. But such “culture-shaping” is, of course, not limited to the
artists and designers of this world, nor is the teaching of the creative
exclusively the province of the art school.
Saybrook University and LIOS Graduate College, with their
distinctive approach and focus, can certainly and accurately boast a
mission to teach creativity and to educate people who shape culture.
Indeed, I would assert that all great education, at some point, is
a process of unleashing the creative. This discovery has been a
huge part of my experience at Saybrook, and I want this farewell
reflection to be a salute to all of you and your work—and how you
change things as they are...upon a blue guitar.
might enable a self-awareness that could change the world, is a
product of a multilayered and complex set of paths. The Imperative
is not the province of any one discipline—hence the significance of
the shared values of a multi-disciplinary Saybrook University.
My deepest hope is that I have served Saybrook as one of its teachers
and as a voice that helped it honor “its own being.” When I
arrived here, a community was asking to reconnect with its inherent
creativity and with its power to facilitate transformation for and
through its students. Together we found that core purpose and
then developed it through valuable partnerships with Leadership
Institute of Seattle and the Houston Jung Center and the Center
for Mind-Body Medicine. Now our reach is larger, our calling
broader, but the fundamental has stayed the same. We seek to
empower every student and each individual’s capacity to make a
difference. We teach creativity.
We are really only at the beginning of our journey to move this
vision for the university forward. As I transition to new challenges,
my connection with Saybrook University remains strong. A new
president will come and will take the next necessary steps. I will
perhaps join the Board of Trustees or simply stay close as a friend.
Either way, we will nourish the institution as we nourish each
student to find the courage to affect the world in a positive way.
But guiding us always must be our commitment to the space we
make for the creative—at Saybrook or in Pasadena—for the
learning will always be alive in that purpose: “Things as they are /
Are changed upon a blue guitar.”
What is at stake in a Saybrook/LIOS education is more than the
teaching of skill or the acquisition of facts —it is an imperative to
honor each student’s power of self-discovery, to enable the learning
of what resides within. As Ruth Richards and her colleagues point
out in her important book on “Everyday Creativity,” that selfdiscovery
is largely an opening to the creativity we hold, moment
to moment, as human beings. Only through this kind of opening,
moreover, can one make a difference in the world. In this spirit,
Rollo May, one of the pivotal lineage holders of Saybrook,
admonished us with a sacred responsibility: “If you do not express
your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being,
you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our
community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.” I
would only add—and I am sure Rollo May would agree—that the
“contribution” holds significance no matter what the individual’s
radius of influence. The scope is unimportant—the quality is all.
Every student has the power to transform.
I think it is important to recognize as well that the way to selfdiscovery,
to the unleashing of the creative, to an education that
The Old Man with the Guitar, Picasso, 1903
3

Images of Leadership Project
Last summer, we
issued an invitation—see
below—to
the LIOS community
to submit images
for publication in
Li n k a g e that
particularly evoked
the concept of leadership.
The results were
a stunning collection
of illustrations—
personal, highly
diverse, funny,
metaphorical and
concrete, beautiful.
The image can be a person, a painting, a photograph, or a cartoon.
Again, the idea is to visually evoke some aspect of leadership that
you value or consider particularly wrong-headed. Allow yourself
to be both serious and at play in this project. There is no right or
wrong image; only the one that holds strong meaning for you. If
you wish to caption your image, that’s OK, too.
Looking forward to your creativity!
Kathleen Murphy, Ph.D.
Director, Publications
LIOS Graduate College of Saybrook University
Look for a selection
of these striking
images throughout
the pages of this issue
of Li n k a g e. Each will
be attributed to, and
sometimes captioned
by, the individual—LIOS faculty, alumni or student—who
submitted the image. We thank all those who participated in
this project: Gloria Burgess, Anna Gomez, John Hinds, JoAnne
Taggert, John McConnell, Noella Natalino, Morgan Randall.
In v i t a t i o n t o LIOS Fa c u l t y, St u d e n t s a n d St a f f:
Im a g e s o f Le a d e r s h i p Pr o j e c t
Photo by John Hinds, second-year student,
LIOS LOD track: Circus Theater, Scheveringen,
The Netherlands. “Showing balance, strength
and grace.”
As editor of Li n k a g e, LIOS’ professional journal of creative thought
and feeling, I would like to invite you to share your most meaningful
image of leadership, the one that speaks to you most strongly about
the character of great leaders, the nature
of outstanding leadership. Alternatively,
you might want to select an image
of leadership that is negative, disruptive,
non-productive. Think and feel
creatively about your selection: you
might choose a metaphor for visionary
leadership (a bird in flight), for
collaborative leadership (a pyramid
of gymnasts), focused leadership
(a magnifying glass), emotional intelligence,
self-awareness, systemic thinking,
flexibility, synthesizing, guiding,
idea-generating, courage, integrity,
sense of humor, et al.
Photo by Noella Natalino, first-year student, LIOS SC track: “Noella’s dog
Bailey holds his head high and peers into his future, never letting the bone
deformity in his front legs faze him.”
Photo by Anna Gomez, Ed.D.: Dr. Gomez’ original
collage “alludes to the GREEN movement, to stilling
one’s being and to the fierceness necessary to stand
quietly amidst challenging forces.”
Photo by John McConnell, M.A., LIOS, 1996; Images of Leadership Project
4

LIOS Research and Creative Thought
INTENSIVE FAMILY-OF-ORIGIN CONSULTATION:
AN INTERGENERATIONAL APPROACH
By Timothy Weber, Ph.D.,
and Cheryl Cebula, M.S.W.
Excerpted, with permission from the authors and publishers,
from Chapter 18, The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Family
Psychology, edited by James H. Bray and Mark Stanton.
This chapter proposes a model of intergenerational intervention
with the whole family of origin that can serve as a stand-alone consultation
or as an adjunctive resource for clients in individual
or couple therapy. The intervention is a “consultation” because of
the brief contact and limited history the consultants may have with
the entire family (Wynne, McDaniel, & Weber, 1986). We will
outline our model of Intensive Family-of-Origin Consultation—
“intensive” in the compressed three-day consultation and in the
depth and intensity of the conversation; “extensive” in the pre- and
post-consultation interactions we have with the family; and “brief”
in the punctuated impact we have on an intergenerational system
within a compressed framework. As Framo put it, family-of-origin
therapy is the major heart surgery of family therapy (Framo, 1992).
. . .
REVIEW OF INTERGENERATIONAL THEORY
We are all embedded within a deep history across the generations
called the “family of origin,” comprised of both biological and
onbiological members who define themselves as “family.” We are
usually aware of only a small fragment of our intergenerational
history as a few stories, anecdotes, maxims, rituals, and memorabilia
cross our paths. How we live within this intergenerational force
field builds the foundation of the health of our attachments, our
capacity for self-definition and compassion, our desires and
despairs, what appears in our world and what lies hidden, our
resources and restraints, our visions of what might be and what
cannot be, our gifts and our handicaps, our drives and retreats
across our life span. We are not determined by our family-of-origin;
but we most certainly are blessed, cursed, and spoken to through
the invisible whispers of our family history.
The unaddressed and unresolved relationships within the family
may unconsciously go “underground” within the self and emerge
in disguised and camouflaged forms in our body, our sense of self,
and in our interpersonal life in a process known as “projective
identification” (Scharff & Scharff, 1987). The inner conflicts of
the self, couple problems, parenting challenges (Siegel & Hartzell,
2003; Fischel, 1991), and our behavior within organizations may
often stem from reparative efforts to heal, redo, replicate, repair,
defend, attach, or hide from conflicts and relationships in the
family-of-origin (Framo, 1992, 2003). While our family-of-origin
relationships certainly may yield gifts in strengthening our adaptability,
the unresolved and unaddressed relationships within the
family of origin snag us in our life with others as they are mindlessly
“recruited” to help us deal with our history. But these “surrogates”
(partners, children, friends, and colleagues) are not the real thing
and thus, while they might serve as resources for emotional healing,
they cannot ultimately resolve our family work. Direct address
with the real family members opens new vistas and possibilities
that are impossible with surrogates. Even if family members are
deceased, their energy lives on in the living, and they too can be
addressed in conversations with other family members and at the
graveside (Williamson, 1991). Death ends a life, not a relationship
(Anderson, 1970).
In spite of the arguments supporting an intergenerational consultation,
a more frequent response to the idea of bringing family
members together for authentic conversations is some form of
protest—intense fear, disgust, opposition, numbed disinterest,
sometimes curiosity, and most often a decline of the invitation.
Examples of retorts may include: “I don’t want to disturb things;”
“My parents are too old, and I don’t want to upset them;” “It
wouldn’t do any good because they’ll never change;” “What does
a family meeting have to do with my own problems?”; “All that is
5

in the past” (Framo, 1992, p. 16). The anxiety is pitched high. The
oppositional stance toward these kinds of meetings makes sense in
families where there has been a distressing history of destructive
abuse along with a defensive and impervious block to dialogue.
However, the initial protests and concerns by clients, often reinforced
by anxious therapists, are understandable reactions toward
the “high voltage system” of the family and are better understood
as developmental anxieties on the way to considering a family-oforigin
consultation a real possibility.
CORE FACTORS IN THE CONSULTATION PROCESS
The following are ten core factors that are instrumental in the
practice of family-of-origin consultation.
1. Pre- and Post-Consultation Phases: Our consultation model
includes a thorough preparation phase with each family member.
Family connections are made, therapeutic bridges are built,
concerns are surfaced and addressed early on, family themes are
identified, individual goals are elucidated, coaching commences,
and the overall therapeutic system is being co-created before the first
family meeting, expanding the possibilities of a good beginning. All
family members are interviewed, not just the initiator or protagonist
as in Framo’s (1992) model. Post-consultation contact with family
members includes a summary letter solidifying the key learnings
and family commitments, and reinforcing the embodiment of the
family consultation.
2. Psychoeducational Perspective: Clients appear to benefit from
having a model of human behavior which enhances their understanding
of healthy functioning, how problems develop over time,
and what might be done to resolve or at least evolve these problems
so they might be more manageable (Davis & Piercy, 2007a, 2007b).
Repeatedly, we identify and explain interpersonal and intergenerational
constructs as they unfold in the moment (e.g., triangles,
loyalty, family secrets, boundaries, parentification, gender disparities,
fairness and equity, differentiation, attunement).
accomplishments). We seize the moments of immediacy, amplifying
the conversations into what we call “a guided crisis.” These are
the “birthquakes” of the consultation when family dynamics appear
in living color. Embedded in these real-time interactions are all the
stories—stories of attachment and attachment injuries, stories of
fairness and justice, stories of loss, life, and loyalty. As the stories
take on flesh and spirit, much more is malleable as we help family
members toward greater awareness and coach them in small steps
toward change in the present.
5. Learning: Learning is the thread that ties together the family
consultations. We often ask “What are you learning about yourself,
other family members, your family as a group?” “What are your
hunches, hypotheses of what happened, what just happened?”
“How do you want to check out your hunch?” Any event in a
family’s experience is redeemable when framed with the learning
question: “What did you learn from that and how can your learning
serve you as a resource in the future?”
6. Relational Integrity: We define “relational integrity” as wholeness
when one is attentive and responsive, moment by moment,
to the dialectic between self and other. Williamson and Weber
(unpublished paper) have argued that differentiation alone is
inadequate as the primary construct in describing a healthy
interpersonal process. Differentiation must be integrated with
attunement to the other (inquiry, curiosity, empathy, compassion,
open to being influenced, etc.) with the core dialectic of life being
the ever-present attention to fairness and justice, the balance of
giving and receiving in the self-other dialectic (Boszormenyi-Nagy
& Krasner, 1986; Johnson, 2004; chapter 28 this volume).
7. Creativity: Langer (1997) describes how mindful learning is
oriented toward creative, unconventional, and novel approaches to
stuck issues. We cultivate creativity as we expand our conversations
to include free associations, metaphors, and images as we promote
3. Direct Address: Direct address describes the basic process
between family members that increases intimacy and builds trust.
Typically, family members talk about other family members (with
therapists or other third parties), talk around family members
(indirect, obtuse verbal and nonverbal behavior), or avoid family
members altogether. One of our most important roles is to host a
safe and secure context of responsiveness and accessibility between
family members—to help direct the difficult conversations of direct
address (Johnson, 2004; Chapter 28, this volume).
4. Immediacy: The most riveting and fluid opportunities come
in the immediate encounters between family members, in the
moment, when the stories are experientially enacted, coming
alive in the room (e.g., a son defends and rescues a passive mother
in the face of a father’s disengaged authority; a sister’s fragility is
her only expressed voice in the midst of a family dominated by
male power; a father lectures his son and daughters in support of
their growth without blessing them for their good efforts and past
Photo from Gloria J. Burgess, Ph.D., LIOS faculty: “My father, mother and two
elder sisters. Exemplifying family leadership.” (Images of Leadership Project)
(continued on page 7)
6

a more open system of play and experiment. For example, a more
deferring mother reported that she wore a red dress somewhat
defiantly at her wedding years ago. In the subsequent conversations
we referred to the “red dress” as a symbol of her courage and
creativity which she was attempting to amplify in renegotiating
her life and marriage. The creative theme also includes attention
to contributions. Typically and sadly, families under-attend to the
contributions their family members have made within the family.
We will model making “micro-credits”—quick acknowledgments
of something that someone does well in the moment. We will
steadily punctuate individual and collective strengths (e.g., tenacity,
sacrifice, compassion, dedication).
8. Truth Speaking and Seeking: Speaking the truth (differentiation)
and seeking the truth (attunement), especially in the midst of
a tense emotional field, are primary processes of relational integrity
that build family trust. Trust is less about resolution and more often
related to the hospitality of creating space to speak and to having
one’s experience, one’s truth, simply acknowledged. We differentiate
between truth and transparency (immediate reactions) and support
tenacity and inquiry in the face of anxiety, working to unpack the
layers of truth within the multiple realities of family members so
that a greater, more collaborative truth emerges. Family secrets
(often critical things known but not discussed openly) bind the
family within a web of anxiety that saps energy for creative
intimacy. A commitment to truth also means expanding the
elasticity of the self and the family towards giving space for those
thoughts, feelings, and questions deemed taboo and forbidden,
towards making room for the shadow side of family life. True
intimacy puts us eyeball to eyeball with the experience that all of us
are “mixed bags”—composites of the good, the bad, the ugly, and
the beautiful.
Truth also means being open to the often unsettling and surprising
experience of feedback from others that may confirm or disconfirm
what we think we know. Our consultations are replete with
challenges to family members both to give feedback and to be
open to feedback from others, whether or not it seems to fit.
latitude and perspective of the consultant. It takes two consultants
to adequately marshal the energy required to engage with multiple
family members in intense conversations in a brief period of time.
Options for building relational bridges in the family and entertaining
diverse perspectives are amplified with two consultants. Cultural
and gender diversity are elevated with our female-male team. Our
co-consulting with each other between the two-hour family meetings
helps stimulate a more enriched point of view and facilitates
sharper self correction. Sometimes we gossip about the family as
the family listens. We hope to perturb, stimulate, support and
model relational integrity as our differences are blended with
fair consideration of the other. The co-consulting team models a
relationship in which curiosity, humor and teasing, collaboration,
disagreement and negotiation, fondness and respect are all part of
the relationship dance.
…
Working with the family-of-origin is always a challenging adventure
that feels more like an eloquent epic unfolding in the family—the
first time this group has gathered in an intensive and extensive
conversation together about the things that deeply matter with the
people that matter. This is no small thing! Deep emotional
currents are pervasive. Ancient stories unfold with new twists and
fresh feelings. New commitments intersect with entrenched
loyalties. The vigilant fears that guard these conversations begin
to give way before advancing hope and possibility. The anecdotal
data we gather in post-consultation interviews appear to lend strong
validation to this intergenerational work. A more evidence-based
analysis is the next step....
Photo by John McConnell, M.A. LIOS, 1996; Images of Leadership Project
9. Relationship Renegotiation: We promote action-oriented
change within the family by coaching family members to renegotiate
explicitly and behaviorally their life together in terms of specific
requests and offers, commitments and contracts. We want family
members (in the spirit of relational integrity) to be clear about
what they want and to consider fairly the requests of others as they
discern what they might offer as they practice both differentiation
and attunement. However, sometimes collaborative contracting
gets stuck. Therefore, we also accent the power of commitments—
unilateral declarations of what one will do, where the self is headed,
the differentiated “I will….” Family trust is increased as promises
(commitments and contracts) are made and reliably kept.
10. Co-Consulting: Although the first author conducted familyof-origin
consultations solo for years, the co-consulting format
deeply enriches the entire process and increases the emotional
7

LIOS Research and Creative Thought
legacy
leadership:
the call to
stewardship
& service
By Gloria J. Burgess,
Ph.D., LIOS Faculty
The world was not given to us by our parents.
It was loaned to us by our children. ~ African Wisdom Saying
As you read this excerpt from my latest book, Dare to Wear Your
Soul on the Outside: Live Your Legacy Now, I invite you to consider
some of the questions I have asked myself since I was a young girl
coming of age in rural Mississippi and the turmoil of Detroit’s inner
city. I have come to recognize these questions as essential for leaders,
especially those who want to be mindful and intentional about
their legacy: What do I stand for, and who do I stand with? Who
do I include or exclude? Who and what do I celebrate? Who and
what do I ignore or erase? As a leader-practitioner, parent, sibling,
community steward, and global citizen—what trees have I planted
and for whom? What will I leave as a shining legacy for this generation
and the generations beyond?
. . .
Legacy leadership is about planting trees under which you may
never sit, whose shade you may never enjoy. To plant such trees is
to be a creative catalyst for social, cultural, political, and ecological
change. At this unique time in history, our world desperately
beckons us to look beyond ourselves and to see into the heart and
humanity of others. At this unique time in our history, each of us
has an unprecedented opportunity to bring forth our signature
presence to be of service and make the difference only we can make.
The Foundations of My Legacy
When I was a little girl, I thought I lived in an all-black town.
Segregation ensured that we kept to ourselves. Too young to
understand the meaning of segregation, I simply believed that we
lived in our very own town. Although I didn’t know the meaning
of the word, I certainly felt the impact of segregation. I knew it by
the tightness in my stomach whenever I went into a shop in the
“other town” with my parents and they politely addressed the white
shopkeepers as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So, yet the shopkeepers called
my parents by their first names.
From my earliest experiences of segregation, I detested everything
about it. Outraged that all the freedoms I experienced at home with
my family were denied me when we were among whites, I resolved
to stand up for myself and for my rights and to speak out against
injustice. Even as a youngster, I knew that I wanted to make it
impossible for anyone to treat my parents, my sisters, me, or anyone
else differently because of the color of our skin.
Little did I know the scaffold of my legacy was already under
construction.
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
In our culture, most people believe that your legacy is something
that occurs only after you die. Nothing could be further from the
truth. While you will leave a legacy upon your death, your legacy
is best appreciated and understood as a process—living, organic,
and always evolving. Your legacy is much more than something out
there in the great beyond. Your legacy is always forming. Its materials
include both who you are right now and who you are becoming.
Like the currents of a mighty river, your legacy is always in motion,
continuously flowing. You and your legacy are a work in progress.
Indeed, your legacy is your magnum opus, your supreme and
magnificent life’s work.
With the blessing of hindsight on my part and foresight on yours,
you can be intentional about your legacy. Inside every human being
is a glorious world longing to be born. Your responsibility is to be a
midwife, so to speak—to heat the water and bring in the towels—to
help give birth to these magnificent new worlds. Once birthed, your
role is to be of service as steward, caretaker, and caregiver—for our
children, our workplaces, our communities, our civic institutions,
and our Earth.
Service on behalf of the future is the essence of legacy. In this sense,
we are obliged to serve as midwife and torchbearer, to humbly
aid in the birth of new ideas, projects, compositions, inventions,
schools, legislation, and other creations, as well as to faithfully tend
the hearth of our own calling.
In her brilliant essay “Standing Up for Children,” Marion Wright
Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund,
writes about legacy as our living testament to who and what matters.
A tireless champion for children, Edelman says, “The great events of
this world are not battles and elections and earthquakes and thunderbolts.
The great events are babies, for each child comes with the
message that God is not yet discouraged with humanity, but is still
expecting goodwill to become incarnate in each human life.”
If you envision your life as a relay race, and if the recipients of the
baton are your children, and if the winner of the race can determine
the future of humankind, don’t you want your baton to be one of
goodwill and love?
Your life is something of a relay race, and what you pass on is the
precious baton of your values and beliefs, your principles and
(continued on page 9)
8

practices, your decisions and choices, the sum total of who you are.
The baton that you pass on is your legacy, which is destined to have
a lasting impact on the lives of your children, their children, and
beyond. It is your responsibility, indeed it is your obligation, to
keep your eyes on this, your most valued prize.
As Graham reminds us, it is no small wonder that dance holds an
ageless allure, for “it has been the symbol of the performance of
living.” In your life’s journey—or your life’s performance—some of
the most important questions that you ask and grapple with may be
questions about your legacy.
The Dance of Life
You have been summoned to become a person unique in all the
world. Just as every snowflake and leaf is unique, so are you. No
one else is like you, and no one else can contribute what you were
specifically designed to contribute.
Dancing visionary and pioneer Martha Graham likens dancing to
the art of living. Both require years of practice and development. In
her autobiography Blood Memory, Graham points out that we “learn
to dance by practicing dancing” and we “learn to live by practicing
living.” In dancing and in living, the
principles are the same. Each is the
performance of a dedicated, precise
set of acts, physical or intellectual,
from which comes the shape of
achievement, the sense of one’s
being, the satisfaction of spirit.
For dancing and for living, we learn
what we need to know through
practice, which requires thousands
of repetitions. To learn and master
walking, talking, and feeding yourself
requires several years of practice.
You learned to walk by practicing
the basics, first learning to crawl or
scoot, then pushing and pulling into
the vertical realm to grasp the eager
and encouraging hands of your parents,
or a table leg, chair, or anything
else strong enough to give you the confidence to begin again after
the inevitable triumph of gravity over your miniature yet ever aspiring
body.
Practice is the act of doing something in some aspect of our lives
over and over until the act becomes habit or instinct, so customary
that it becomes integral in two ways—first, to your way of doing
whatever you are practicing and then to your way of being, inextricably
connecting what you do with who you are.
Dancers learn to dance by practicing the fundamentals of their craft
over and over again until they can move on to intermediate and
advanced levels; their training is designed to build, strengthen,
shape, and hone their bodies’ musculature, reflexes, and memory.
Graham estimates that making a mature dancer takes about ten
years. This span of a decade in the dancer’s training is analogous
to the formative years of your life when you learn the fundamental
tasks and assignments of living—the basic arts of relationship,
nourishment, mobility, and possibility.
9
Photo from Gloria J. Burgess, Ph.D., LIOS faculty:
“Women’s hands, symbol of communal leadership
Questions to ask include: How do I want to be known…and remembered?
What is the rhythm, or presence, of legacy in my life? What
choices do I make each day to live my legacy here and now? What or
who do I believe in so deeply and passionately that I will make enormous
sacrifices for it? Host these questions as you would a special
guest in your home. Pay attention, but avoid hovering over them. In
time, the questions will take up residence in your heart, and they will
reveal their secrets to you. They will become your teacher and guide
as you keep your eyes on the great prize of your life.
Wear Your Soul on
the Outside
One of the ways I have kept my eyes
on the future is by sharing stories and
poetry, time-honored ways to impart
wisdom and to teach what might
otherwise take months or years. My
stories and poems have also helped
me work through the pain and anger
of my past. When shared with others,
stories and poems offer a lifeline or a
bridge, a beacon or a candle in someone
else’s life. You just never know
when something will awaken
in others that allows them to claim
and share their stories. As poet Theodore
Roethke wisely reminds us, we
all “learn by going where [we] have
to go.”
A couple of years ago, I delivered a keynote for an International
Women’s Leadership Conference convened in Europe. The organizers
invited me to speak about authentic leadership. They knew of
my work in developing and coaching leaders and of my work as a
storyteller and poet. I was one of the few speakers from the United
States and was sensitive to an anti-American sentiment among some
of the conference participants.
As I prepared my presentation, I contemplated how I might serve
as an ambassador not only for authentic leadership but also as an
instrument for reconciliation. I was reminded of Archbishop Tutu’s
invitational words—“God is waiting on us. He needs our help.”
Reflecting on these words, I asked myself: During this particular
conference, how might God need my help?
After my presentation, I knew the answer.
Instead of standing behind the podium, which was a considerable
distance from the audience, I stepped downstage near the edge of

the platform. Though I had prepared notes, I decided in the
moment not to use them. I spoke extemporaneously, from my heart,
telling stories from my life and sharing my own poems to illustrate
key points. I did not talk about authentic leadership; I modeled it,
showing my true self, using my true voice to illuminate the most
essential aspects of leadership, aspects that in Western culture are too
often ignored. I represented a mirror in which participants could see
a glimpse of their own reflected light, their own possibility.
As I was speaking, I saw that many in the audience were on the edge
of their seat—some literally. The room was charged with enthusiasm.
I mean enthusiasm in the sense of its connection to entheos—inspired
by the gods. The audience brimmed with excitement and expectancy
about their own possibilities, for what they might become. When
I concluded my presentation, I received a standing ovation, which
signified the potency of daring to wear your soul on the outside! By
speaking from my heart without my notes, I walked my talk, modeling
a legacy of authenticity and infusing its worth into the lives of
the audience. I believe ovations are not only for the person with the
microphone, they’re also a powerful affirmation for those offering the
ovation. In this case, it was the audience’s recognition of what author
and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estés refers to as “standing up and
showing your soul.”
During the conference, I met many wonderful women, including a
woman whose legacy would intersect with mine, Konji Sebati. From
the moment I met her, she felt like a sister. For the duration of the
conference, I knew her only as Konji, as she had introduced herself
to me. Afterward, I learned that she was a prominent physician,
well known for HIV/AIDS work in South Africa and had since
become the South African ambassador to Switzerland.
In the short time that I spent in her humble and remarkable presence,
Dr. Sebati invited me to speak at an event that she would
host the following summer, a tribute to the women whose antiapartheid
protests struck early chords in the death knell that
would eventually lead to the dismantling of apartheid. Without
hesitation, I accepted Dr. Sebati’s invitation to speak, intuitively
recognizing a deep kinship with a cause oblivious to place or
time, for injury and triumph anywhere is an injury and triumph
everywhere. When I asked her, “Why me?” she said, “Because you
are so passionate. When you told the stories about your life in the
segregated South, they were so vivid and yet there was no trace of
hatred.” Then she asked only half-jokingly, “Are you sure you aren’t
from South Africa?” I smiled in reply, knowing instinctively that
soul is no respecter of place.
We Are the Ones: Then and Now
On August 9, 1956, twenty thousand stouthearted South African
women of all races gathered from all parts of the country to march
on the Union Buildings in the capital city of Pretoria. The women
staged the march to protest the atrocious pass laws, which had been
in effect in South Africa for several generations. Among the many
horrors of apartheid, the passes symbolized perhaps the cruelest
aspect of oppression—influx control, a policy that relegated
Photo from Gloria J. Burgess, Ph.D., LIOS faculty:
“Three Ambassadors—to Rwanda, to South Africa, and
of Goodwill, exemplfying women’s leadership.”
husbands into the menial role of migrant worker and made their
wives into virtual widows. These unjust laws deprived children of
their fathers and robbed everyone of their basic inheritance, their
birthright—the right to live in a stable family unit.
The 1956 Women’s March was the culmination of many years of
planning and organizing, including a march on the government
buildings the previous year. The women marched on the Union
Buildings to present to Prime Minister Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom
their petitions against the pass laws, petitions that contained more
than one hundred thousand signatures from citizens of South Africa
and a multitude of other nations from all over the world. As part of
their demonstration, the women sang freedom songs, including a
song written especially for this particular occasion: “Now you have
touched the women, Strijdom! You have struck a rock. You will be
crushed!” (Wathint’ abafazi, Strijdom! Wathint’ imbokodo uzo Kafa!)
The rock that had been struck was the rock of legacy.
The women rose up because of the horror and devastation that
the pass laws had wreaked on the family. For several generations,
women had been left in isolation to raise their families, to be the
heads of their households. Season upon season, year after year,
decade after decade, the family unit that had survived for millennia
was detonated, destabilized, and ultimately destroyed in a mere
half-century by these inhumane laws. The South African women
had had enough. The disturbance was too great, and the future
facing their children and their children’s children provided the
catalyst to propel the women headlong into what can only be
called an audacious act of salvation, an act that would have an impact
on the vicious legacy bestowed by the Boer government
and restore a legacy of dignity and respect.
In August 2006, against this historical backdrop, I had the privilege
to present the opening address at the gathering hosted by Dr. Sebati
to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the South African Women’s
March on the Union Buildings in Pretoria. I shared the dais with Dr.
Sebati and other dignitaries, including Dr. Ruth Mompati, one of the
co-organizers of the 1956 march. Now in her mid-eighties, except
(continued on page 11)
10

Photo from Gloria J. Burgess, Ph.D.: “Dr. Ruth
Mompati, co-organizer of the 1956 South African
Women’s March on the Government Building
in South Africa, a milestone for women and
the anti-apartheid struggle, an example of local
leadership with a global impact.”
for a crown of snowwhite
hair she looked like
a woman several decades
younger.
I asked Dr. Mompati
what gave her and her
South African sisters the
courage to conceive and
the commitment to carry
out such a subversive
and dangerous mission.
She looked at me in a
way that I imagined she
must have looked at the
women whose hearts
were galvanized by her
great soul those many
years ago.
Though I do not recall Dr. Mompati’s precise words, I recall the
spirit of them. With fire in her eyes and ferocity in her voice, she
said, “Courage! Courage? We didn’t need courage. We organized
and sacrificed, we withstood humiliation and persecution, we went
to prison and were exiled, we risked our lives and lost some of our
sisters [and brothers, too,] along the way—not because we had
courage. We simply did what we had to do. Why did we stand up
to the white apartheid government? We did it because we were
mothers!”
Dr. Mompati and her formidable phalanx of twenty thousand
mothers were not theorizing about legacy as a philosophical or
intellectual concept. Theirs was the brute, roiling force of legacy
denied, derailed, a force as relentless and adamant as it was necessary
and redemptive. In taking a stand not merely for themselves,
this company of women who stood up for the sake of their children
and their children’s children became Woman, Mother, True Voice
for those whose voices had been systematically silenced, whose
voices would have remained unheard without these benefactors of
goodwill, vision, hope, and triumph.
Surely, Dr. Mompati and her companions knew that God was waiting
on them, that He needed their help to transform the legacy, to
change the conversation, to shift the context, to sing a new song on
behalf of the present generation and the generations to follow. Not
only did these midwives heat the water and bring in the towels, they
severed the cord that kept them bound in apartheid’s stranglehold.
These women were and continue to be exemplars of legacy living,
assuming authority and therefore victory over tomorrow by acting
with purpose and intention today.
When we celebrate the women who marched on the Union
Buildings in 1956, we celebrate ordinary women who acted as any
mother would who was hell-bent on saving her children. These
women who acted as stewards, as guardians of the past and acolytes
of the future. These women who were determined to create a new
story, a new ethos for the sake of the current generation and the
generations to come. These women who acted in an ordinary way in
an extraordinary time.
Social activist and acclaimed scholar and poet June Jordan celebrates
the power of the legacy and the soul of Woman in her rousing poetic
tribute, which is simply and eloquently called “Poem for South
African Women.”
Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world
The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire
And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye
And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:
we are the ones we have been waiting for.
I have had the privilege of sharing this poem with many people
around the globe. Throughout the world, people identify with
South Africa’s liberation struggle because it is at once unique and
universal. People of all cultures respond to and are inspired by acts
of courage, acts of righteous defiance, acts of fierce resolve. And as
(continued on page 16)
11

Figure 1
LIOS Research and Creative Thought
Leading with Heart and Soul
By Sherene Zolno, M.A., LIOS Faculty
Excerpted from the forthcoming book Memoirs of a CEO: The
struggle to lead with heart and soul.
As societies, markets, customers, competition and technology
transition and change, the crisis in our working world is causing us
to clarify our work-related values, develop new strategies that allow
us to maintain organizational viability, and learn new, more effective
and efficient ways of operating. The role of the leader must also
change to support keeping us up to date in this new global village.
Being a leader today involves having the courage to face this new
reality of complexity, uncertainty, and, yes, tremendous possibility,
while helping the people you lead to face this reality as well.
From 1997 to 2007, a national team of leadership researchers
examined the requirements for effective leadership to identify the
core competencies needed by today’s leaders. Through extensive
interviews, and by immersing themselves in the innovative thinking
and insights about leadership coming from the behavioral and
others of the sciences (positive psychology, communication,
neuroscience and brain studies, systems thinking, and the new
sciences, for example), the researchers developed the Model for a
Healthy World (see Figure 1), an integrated view of leadership for
what is possible—and necessary—to lead well in our lightning-fast,
increasingly global marketplace.
The research team’s most significant finding? That when leaders,
and the people in organizations who work with those leaders, feel
worthy, hopeful and capable, there exists the potential for
exceptional accomplishment.
And there is a special bonus for this New Century leader: the
opportunity (and the joy!) of being authentic, caring and
courageous; of igniting and inspiring the best effort of others;
and of uniting the creative spirits of many to focus on exciting
breakthrough achievements.
This is the wisdom that great leaders have to share with us: leadership
doesn’t come with position; it arises from your commitment
to yourself, to the people you are leading, and to the world around
you as you each evolve towards health and well-being.
Rick Skillman writes of his experience as a leader in his book,
Memoirs of a CEO. In his life of leadership, he sought to model a
way of leading that was both committed to being true to oneself
and, at the same time, focused on contributing to the health of
family, co-workers, and community (and thus our country and the
world). He embodied what our research team called “New Century
Leadership,” leaving behind, as his legacy, leadership teams, and
Figure 1
organizations filled with leaders at every level, committed to building
work environments that nurtured heart and soul.
Building the leader’s own sense of self worth, hope and capability
is what makes this possible. Via the contributions the leader and
individuals in contact with the leader make, organizational effectiveness
increases. From organizations filled with confident, capable
and hopeful people, a purposeful and confident community begins
to develop. And, finally, healthy well-functioning communities
contribute to global well-being. This is the ripple effect that is
possible when leaders understand their critical role in leading with
heart and soul.
Confucius said, “To put the world in order, we must first put the
nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in
order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life;
and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.”
From an unknown monk around 1100 A.D. comes the following story:
When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found
it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.
When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my
town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to
change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can
change is myself. Suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed
myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I
could have made an impact on our town. That impact could have
(continued on page 13
12

changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.
Or as Chunliang Al Huang and Jerry Lynch say in their book,
Mentoring, The Tao of Giving and Receiving Wisdom, “By cultivating
the powerful ‘self’ we begin to offer the possibility of change to
those in our world. Change comes from the individual heart and
fans outward, creating a unified, interconnected community.”
At the local level, leading with heart and soul shows up as the ability
to strike a balance between honoring the contributions of the past and
looking forward, with hope, to the future. Organizations in balance
create communities of abundance, inclusion and resourcefulness.
On the global level this kind of leadership seeks to create a sustainable,
healthy environment, with peaceful relations, where human
beings can develop to their full potential.
Samuel Johnson said, “Self-confidence is the first requisite to great
undertakings.” Our research team learned that system (organizational)
health begins with health at the core. The core referenced
here is the self-worth, hope and capability that leaders need to build
within themselves to support them in confidently leading.
Many other researchers joined us in clearly demonstrating that a
solid core of self-worth, hope and capability had a profound impact
on every experience leaders had, affecting how capable they were
in dealing with others, to what heights they aspired, and ultimately,
what they were able to accomplish within the organizations
they led.
For example:
A Harvard Business School researcher discovered that leaders with
low self-worth apparently begin to think of themselves as having
fewer choices, even when others saw many options yet available.
Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of The Leadership Challenge,
discovered that leaders made others feel capable, “enabling others
to act.”
Nathaniel Branden, clinician and researcher, compared the need for
self-worth, hope and capability to the need for calcium in the diet
––if people lacked it, they didn’t necessarily die, but rather became
impaired in their ability to function. He also demonstrated that
high self-esteem subjects in research experiments actually persisted
at a task significantly longer than low self-esteem subjects.
Jerome Frank, M.D., professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Johns
Hopkins Medical School, and who as early as the 1950s was
investigating the impact of psychological balance on capacity and
productivity, said, “Hope inspires a feeling of well-being, and is a
spur to action.”
Recent research on hope connects hope to openness, a quality
needed for resilience in the face of change.
Other researchers in the arena of positive emotions point to how a
strong sense of self-worth, hope and capability can broaden
attention and thinking, and fuel resilient coping.
As Rick Skillman said in an interview some years ago, referring to
the high turnover among executives in the tumultuous healthcare
industry, “It’s hopelessness that causes us to abandon initiatives in
midstream, and to give up on ourselves and our employees.” His
view is echoed in these words from a recent workshop with author
and organizational change researcher, David Cooperrider: “Building
and sustaining momentum for change requires large amounts
of things like hope, excitement, inspiration, caring, camaraderie,
a sense of urgent purpose, and the sheer joy of creating something
meaningful together.”
Leaders do many things: They inspire and motivate; they set
strategic intention; they wield power; they align people; they set an
example; and they represent their organization to outsiders. More
than anything else, however, leaders help the people around them
make sense of the world in which they find themselves. Throughout
large and small organizations, leaders need to influence, inspire,
and motivate people to achieve goals, and the way to do this begins
inside of you, the leader, in the internal state of mind and heart that
you bring to the job, and in the commitment you have to building
confident and healthy systems.
References:
• Zolno, S. (2007). “Educating New Century Leaders,” Li n k a g e, LIOS
Publications, Leadership Institute of Seattle, Kenmore, WA.
• Huang, C. and Lynch, J. (2005). Mentoring, The Tao of Giving and
Receiving Wisdom, HarperCollins, New York, NY.
• Zalesnik, A. (1977). “Managers and Leaders,” Harvard Business Review, Harvard
Business School Publishing, Cambridge, MA.
• Kouzes, J. & Posner, B. (1991). The Leadership Challenge, Jossey-Bass, San
Francisco, CA.
• Branden, N. (1993). The Power of Self-Esteem, Health Communications, Inc.
Deerfield Beach, FL.
• Jerome Frank, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University
Medical School, was a major figure in American psychology and psychiatry. As
a military psychiatrist in the Asian Theater during WWII, he first noted the
effects of demoralization upon the health and well-being of American troops
overseas. In collaboration with Florence Powdermaker of the Veterans Administration,
he pioneered the use of group psychotherapy for psychiatric conditions,
particularly conditions in which demoralization plays a role. He was a founding
member of Physicians for Social Responsibility and for years participated
actively in the deliberations of the Council for a Livable World.
• Hutson, H. & Perry, B. (2006). Putting Hope to Work, Greenwood
Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.
• Broaden attention and thinking (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2002; Waugh
& Fredrickson); Fuel resilient coping; acting much like the immune
system (Fredrickson, Tugade, Waugh & Larkin, 2002; Tugade &
Fredrickson, 2002)
• Skillman, R. (2000). Personal interview
13

LIOS Research and Creative Thought
The Trauma Chameleon
By Susan Ruby, M.A., SC, LIOS, 2004
For the last five years, I have been working in a program for
children who have been sexually abused and their non-offending
family members. Over and over, people have responded to the
type of work I do with the same attitude, “I could never do that.
How do you do it?” My answer is invariably, “I get to see them get
better. There is nothing more rewarding for me.” But this article is
not about the children. It is about their parents, approximately 75
percent of whom have been abused—physically, sexually, verbally,
or some combination of the three—and never told their stories to
someone who knew what to do with it. The impact of their children’s
abuse on these parents is often overwhelming and bewildering,
creating a sadness that seeps through their bones and into every
moment of their lives.
The field of treating childhood sexual abuse as a clinical issue,
deserving of its own treatment modalities, essentially began in the
1970s. This is not because childhood sexual abuse did not exist.
Most experts in the field believe that childhood sexual abuse has
always existed. But with the emerging awareness of child brain
development, clinicians began questioning the impact of life events
on that development. Ultimately, the government began collecting
statistics, public awareness evolved, funds were dedicated to helping
abused children, and socially, we created a new understanding of
the impact of sexual abuse on children.
Now, children routinely receive therapeutic intervention in many
states, and frequently move on to resume their own versions of new,
“normal” lives. With appropriate treatment, they can achieve clarity
about where the fault lies in abuse dynamics, they unlearn the lies
taught by perpetrators about sexuality, they learn to make choices
about sexual interactions, and they develop safety plans for what
to do if anything similar occurs again. For their parents who have
been abused, this is both a relief and a frustration. They wonder,
“Why my child?” “I knew something was wrong. Why couldn’t I
stop it?” “What’s wrong with me, that my child was abused?” The
self-doubts and recriminations linger long after the child’s therapy
ends, and inevitably bring back to life their own experiences that
have never been addressed. The following is a composite story of a
woman caught in this intrapersonal dilemma.
A 52-year-old woman sat in my office, explaining why she wanted
treatment. She detailed a 20-year history of depression and an
equally lengthy list of somatic complaints: constant gastro-intestinal
upsets, migraines, back and neck pain, muscle aches with no
discernible medical cause, and so on. She provided a list of her
medications as well. She stated that her depression was a result of
dealing with so many medical problems. “I feel like I’m at war with
my body,” she said in despair, tears beginning to run down her face.
“I can’t remember a time I wasn’t depressed.” She had also been
Photo by John McConnell, M.A., LIOS, 1996; Images of Leadership
through many years of therapy, with a variety of therapists, but she
said she only achieved minimal results and frequently felt suicidal.
After establishing that she was not actively suicidal at that time, I
began taking a family history. What followed sounded like something
out of a V.C. Andrews novel—a childhood full of abuse and
neglect, and a spirit crushed beyond recognition, culminating in
stranger rape at the age of 17. The story was told in a matter-of-fact
tone, as if she was reciting a story she had heard on the local news,
but had not allowed to affect her. She summed it all up by saying,
“Stuff happens. It’s the usual family stuff. You know how it is.”
I paused, then asked curiously, “I know you’ve been through a lot
of therapy. Has anyone ever talked to you about the impact of
abuse on a child?”
She blinked in confusion, “You mean about my daughter?” This was
another part of her history—leaving her husband because he had
abused her daughter.
“No. I mean your own history.”
“I wasn’t—” She paused, “Oh, the rape.”
14

It rapidly became clear to me that she did not think of what had
happened to her within her family as abusive, and yet she had recited
a list of traumatic episodes, which by any of our current Washington
laws would have clearly been considered sexual, physical and verbal
abuse of a child. The perpetrators in her story were her mother and her
older brother, with whom she had detailed a conflicted relationship.
What followed over the next several months was a comprehensive
exploration of her childhood traumas. Most of our goals were small
and achievable within the context of a one-hour session. With each
story, she began drawing pictures of her internal experience, creating
a collection of artwork that was both stunning and revelational
to her as her understanding evolved. We set small goals for her to
accomplish between sessions as well, in order to address her depression:
get outside for 20 minutes each day; call your daughter and
tell her you’re sorry about what happened to her; write a letter to
the depression; and other small actions she could take in support of
her own healing. But the real breakthrough came about six months
into our work together. She had been telling me about another
incident that occurred with her brother as a child, when she
suddenly stopped speaking and looked up at me in dismay. “He
abused me.” In that moment, she understood beyond any doubt
that the word “abuse” was not just a word that had happened to
her daughter, it was her own experience. I waited. She whispered it
again, “He abused me. Lots of times.” Tears began to run silently
down her face, “That’s why I’m so messed up.”
From that point forward, her symptoms began to recede dramatically
as she reclaimed her life, and gave herself permission to be
angry at her brother and the other family members who took no
action to intervene on her behalf, and in some instances told her
to “Suck it up. It’s not that big a deal.” At one point, she said, “I’ve
been going to therapy for years. This is the first time I can see
myself getting better. I can really see it.” I observed, “Maybe you
were ready to do the work now. Maybe it just got safe enough.”
What I often tell clients is that traumatic stress is a chameleon.
It masquerades as other diagnoses—depression, anxiety, ADD/
ADHD, sleep disorders, sexual dysfunction, to name a few.
Treatment modalities that focus on symptom reduction, as
required by most insurance plans, can be very effective for many
people. But, if there’s a trauma history, it’s worth taking a look at
the underlying causes for the symptoms, especially if conventional
treatments do not appear to be working over time. For therapists,
this creates some specific treatment issues.
At the first session, we can be so focused on getting that diagnosis,
and developing a clear treatment plan, that we neglect to ask the
questions that will evoke the information needed to assess trauma
as a possible precursor to the current symptoms. Our insurance
company contracts require us to file claims with a clear diagnosis
attached. Without the diagnosis, we do not get paid. And yet, if
there is a trauma history and we don’t know it exists, we set up
treatment modalities that are less than effective for the client.
Consider the following ideas to build an assessment process that
uncovers potential trauma in a client’s history.
Consider allowing more time for assessments than a typical session.
Taking a comprehensive family history is very difficult to complete
in a 50-minute session. It can be helpful to assess a client over two
sessions, or to do extended intake sessions, if your schedule allows.
Avoid using the word “abuse” in your questions. If you ask many
clients over the age of 40 whether or not they were abused as a
child, they may tell you they were not, because their childhood
family culture may not have recognized family dynamics as abusive.
Thus, they do not label their experience as abuse. Instead, consider
asking questions like: “How did your parents discipline the children
in your home as a child?” “Was there anyone you were afraid of as a
child?” “Were there things no one was allowed to talk about when
you were a child?” “How did your family handle secrets?”
Ask about current safety issues. For instance, you might ask: “Is
there any reason I should be concerned about your safety in your
current living situation?” “Are there any dynamics going on between
you and someone else in your home that you think might be
contributing to your feelings of depression/anxiety/inability to
concentrate?” Many victims of childhood abuse are involved
in abusive relationships as adults. The shame of these relationships
keeps ongoing victims from being willing to admit they are in
abusive dynamics at home. However, if you tie your questions to
concern about their well-being and possible causes of symptoms,
they are frequently more willing to speak about their situations.
Even if they don’t answer the questions during the assessment,
they are more likely to realize you are open to hearing about these
experiences, and to think of you as a resource when they are ready
to talk about it. If safety issues are current problems, then it will be
imperative to develop a safety plan prior to doing any other work. A
client whose home life is inherently unstable and volatile is unlikely
to be able to tolerate in-depth exploration of her trauma history.
Consider your diagnosis a working diagnosis, and be ready to
change it if new information emerges. New clinicians, in particular,
can get very focused on getting the “right” diagnosis, rather than
seeing a diagnosis as a fluid concept that can evolve over time. It
is easy to get stuck thinking of a client as “depressed, 52-year-old,
Caucasian woman,” instead of remaining open to what you do not
yet know about her. In spite of the rigor with which the DSM was
Photo by John McConnell, M.A., LIOS, 1996; Images of Leadership Project
15

developed, designed to quantify and specify the criteria for each
diagnosis, there is a lot of overlapping data between diagnoses. The
lack of concentration that causes a teenager to do poorly in school
might be ADD, or it might be Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or
it might be anxiety, or lack of sleep, or some combination of the
above. Hold your diagnosis lightly.
Ask about a client’s sexual experience. This question can make clinicians
squirm a bit, depending on their own thoughts and beliefs
about sexuality. But, for a person who was sexually abused as a
child, this opens up the possibility of talking about what happened.
Helpful questions might be: “When was your first sexual experience?”
“How did you learn about sex?” “Was sex something your
family talked about when you were a child?” “Have your beliefs
about sex changed much as an adult, or do you think they’re still in
line with what your family thought when you were growing up?”
Consult and get training about trauma issues. If you don’t know a lot
about domestic violence and abuse issues, get the training you need
to understand the impact of these traumas on both children and
adults. I have heard several clinicians state they rarely see clients who
have histories of abuse; they only work with the “worried well” or
couples. Given the current statistics on childhood abuse—3 out of 5
girls, and 1 out of 3 boys have experienced some sort of sexual abuse
by the age of 18; and this does not take into account the other types
of abuse that can occur—it seems more likely that these clinicians are
not getting complete pictures of their clients’ histories, rather than
supporting the idea that most of their clients have no trauma history.
I have also consulted on many cases with peers and asked the question,
“Is there any trauma history here?” Often, I will hear, “I don’t
know” or “I asked her if she was sexually abused and she said no.” It
may be that clinicians are not asking the right questions.
Last, but not least, the primary therapeutic stance when working
with survivors of any type of abuse emphasizes healthy empowerment
of the individual. Because survivors often subconsciously
re-create their childhood dynamics over and over again, seeing
themselves as helpless or hopeless victims, they have a particularly
strong tendency to make their therapists responsible for their recovery.
Any advice or suggestions made to the client need to be made
while still holding the client capable and accountable for making
his or her own choices for recovery. They may not believe they can
get better and count on the therapist to rescue them from a lifetime
of unhappiness. But this belief is at the heart of their mental health
issues because it is so inherent in abuse dynamics within families.
Recovery for trauma survivors means establishing a new belief in
the self as in control of his or her own life, changing a lifelong
pattern of beliefs and reactive responses to that belief system. This
is secondary change and it means the work is often slower than any
of us like. It is also work that can be immensely rewarding and lifechanging—both
for the client and the therapist allowed to witness
the transformation.
Photo by John McConnell, M.A., LIOS, 1996;
Images of Leadership Project
LEGACY LEADERSHIP: THE CALL TO
STEWARDSHIP AND SERVICE (continued from page 11)
appalling as apartheid was for South Africans, their struggle was and
continues to be very real as well as archetypal.
By looking through the lens of South Africa’s struggle, we begin to
recognize that this exterior confrontation is also mirrored within,
for each of us is engaged in our personal, individual struggle for
liberation, the struggle to free ourselves from the exile of our
perceived limitations and constraints.
Whether our struggle for freedom is global or personal, in our
complex, global village we all need reminders and encouragement
that indeed “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” These
closing words of Jordan’s poem offer an irresistible invitation to
take off our robes of inadequacy, inferiority, and insufficiency. It is
imperative that we lay these garments down on the altar of selfcompassion
so that we might forgive, surrender, and enter fully into
the heart and soul of legacy.
For 21st-century leaders, I cannot think of a higher or more
noble calling.
References:
• Burgess, Gloria J., Legacy Living: The Six Covenants for Personal &
Professional Excellence, Executive Excellence (2006)
• Burgess, Gloria J., Dare to Wear Your Soul on the Outside: Live Your Legacy
Now, Jossey-Bass/Wiley (2008)
• Estés, Clarissa P., Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times
(2003-2005)
• Jordan, June, “Poem for South African Women” in Passion: New
Poems, 1977-80. Beacon Press, 1980.
• South African Women’s Freedom Song
• World Wisdom from Africa
Dr. Gloria Burgess is Lead Faculty for LIOS’ Spring Program. She is also
Founder and Executive Director of The Lift Every Voice Foundation, a
non-profit dedicated to developing imaginative 21st-century leaders. In all
areas of her life, Gloria is devoted to legacy, imaginative leadership, creativity,
and individual and collective renewal: see www.gloriaburgess.com.
Gloria’s latest book, Dare to Wear Your Soul on the Outside, is hailed by Dr.
Warren Bennis as “required reading for all serious students and practitioners
of leadership”: www.wiley.com.
16

LIOS Research and Creative Thought
Lessons from Sheep
By Catherine Johnson, M.A.,
LIOS Faculty Emeritus
A full cycle of seasons has passed since I left teaching. In the past
I would have asked, “Where did all those days and months disappear?”
Instead, from a new vantage point, I have the distinct sense
of having fully witnessed their passing.
Last September when my partner and I arrived at the farm where
we now live with friends, the garden was full of food to be harvested.
There were apples and grapes to press, berries to be preserved,
vegetables to be frozen, canned and put up for the winter. We spent
whole days outside in the softening autumn sunlight working in
the garden and then passed the evenings leading up to the election
watching “Jon Stewart” while shelling bushels of beans and bags
of hazelnuts. I had never done any of it before and delighted in
each lesson and act. As the pantry and freezer shelves filled, I found
myself also filled with a growing sense of satisfaction and an even
greater sense of gratitude to be blessed by such abundance. The most
profound lessons, however, have come from working with sheep.
It began the day the lambs were slaughtered. How cold was that
Saturday morning when we brought coffee steaming in mugs to
the butcher and his grandson. I remember the quick and
practiced sureness with which they worked and the way the life
left each animal with a single shot. The dry grass remained stained
for days until the November rains finally washed the last of the
blood away. It was not an easy act to witness, an even harder one
in which to participate. I felt heavy for days, and I questioned
myself for some time about whether eating meat is worth the
sacrifice of the animals.
In a few short months I had gone from teacher to student, to
spending more time outside than in, from living on an island
surrounded by water and a house by forest, to a wide open valley
with a wind that could be both a relief and a curse. I had also traded
in a five-hour daily commute for work that waited just outside
my door. I had done away with the need for a day timer, taken off
my watch and settled into a rhythm governed by weather, the care
of animals and whatever needed doing next. Increasingly, I spent
longer periods of time working quietly by myself and, without
intending to, began cultivating a larger patience, an increased
capacity to listen and a sense of trust in the rightness of things.
One day, at the bank with winter fast approaching, I mentioned
something about working with sheep. The teller had glanced at
my hands and I must have self-consciously spoken as if to explain
the dirt permanently chiseled into the cracks in my fingertips and
embedded beneath my nails. She leaned forward, across the counter
and asked quietly:
“Do you kill the lambs for meat?”
“Yes.’” I replied, “We do.”
“Catherine,” Her sudden familiarity was disconcerting; she must
have looked at the name on my check, “How do you square
with that?”
My answer was less than satisfactory for both of us. As time went
by, I understood that the simple truth was that I had not; I had
not squared the killing of lambs with my desire to eat meat. And,
every time we ate lamb, which is often at the farm, I could hear that
woman’s voice asking the same question.
By the time the winter solstice arrived, so had a storm the likes of
which had not been seen in the Willamette Valley for a very long
time. Snow piled in drifts. Ice made the roads impassable. The ewes,
almost all of which were now pregnant, cowered inside the barn
for days. We worked hard to keep their drinking water thawed,
initially hauling water from the house in five-gallon buckets several
times a day. Eventually we found a heating coil that would keep
their water just above freezing, lessening our work but not our
concern. There is no calling in sick or taking a snow day when it
comes to tending animals.
In early February we began to prepare for spring lambing. (A
misnomer really, since the weather is still cold and very wet that
time of year—hardly springlike at all.) Making the shed ready
meant five stalls to be cleaned, limed and lined with new straw;
oats and hay to be brought from the big barn and stacked and
stored for the weeks ahead; rags, syringes and medical supplies to be
sorted through and readied. At times it seemed we were preparing
for a disaster rather than a natural event that often takes place with
very little help from humans at all.
A few weeks later the lambs started coming. Initially, one or two
every other day, then suddenly they started arriving all at once, like
17

the finale of a fireworks show. It seemed we worked around the
clock, but it was the bundling up and unbundling that wore me
down the most. Every trip out to check on the ewes could end up
being a many-hours’ birth, so we dressed for it. I wore long
underwear beneath my overalls, a wool sweater and down vest
under my barn coat, a wool hat, fleece-lined gloves and two pairs
of wool socks inside my rubber boots. Most of the time I would
be back in twenty minutes, having been outside barely as long as it
took to get dressed. As much as I hated the routine, it was
necessary and for the most part worked well against the cold and
the wet, although the chill always found me during the 3:00 AM
check no matter how much I wore.
After a couple of weeks I lost count of how many lambs had been
born. Were it not for the clipboards tacked by each stall, I could
not have known when it would end or who was still to go, and just
when I thought we were finished, another ewe went into labor.
We’d been watching her all day, separating herself from the herd,
circling, lying down and then getting up and moving back again
towards the rest. Just when we were certain that she was finally
going to give birth, she’d get up and rejoin the herd.
Now, in the middle of a moonless night she was in hard labor just
a few yards away. We crouched in the frozen grass listening to her
harsh breathing and low sounds. Long minutes passed, as we
shivered in the darkness. We also spoke softly about whether she
was too tired to keep pushing and whether or not we should
intervene. Finally, I went to get hot soapy water from the house.
By the time I returned, one of two twins had just, finally, emerged
steaming in the cold as its mother licked it dry. By the time the
second twin was born, both their umbilical cords cut and doused
with iodine, and the mother and babies moved safely into a stall in
the lambing shed, four hours had passed and it was getting light.
What does any of this have to do with coaching or counseling?
Nothing, or perhaps—everything. If we come to our sessions with
reverence, remembering that a client asking for help is entrusting
us with his or her vulnerability, we might slow down. If we are too
quick to diagnose and intervene, we may miss something essential,
something that can only emerge out of the quiet that patient waiting
and deep listening encourage. In that slow quiet also lies the
well of our own genuine empathy, whose water is exactly the nourishment
for which the aching heart thirsts. Of course there is time
and a place for intervention, but we are too often pulled to hurry
in: the 50-minute hour, the expectation that the client carries that
we will do something to alleviate his or her suffering, an expectation
we can palpably feel, all our training, techniques and skills upon
which we love to rely. There are so many compelling reasons to act,
and yet the lessons of this year minding sheep will change my future
work. I will do less and listen more carefully, trusting that there is a
true wisdom that the client carries, one that arises out of her or his
inherent wholeness. And, out of respect and reverence for the mystery
that has brought us together, I will trust that the right medicine
is present; I need only be the shepherd.
Photo by John McConnell, M.A., LIOS, 1996;
Images of Leadership Project
I remember leaning on the stall door and looking at the new lambs
curled together in the straw. “Welcome to the world,” I whispered.
My overalls were encrusted with mud and who knows what else.
I was utterly exhausted and long beyond cold; I was also crying.
Every birth was a miracle. Our efforts, which were once in awhile
great, but usually small, were worth it. To witness the arrival of life
in this world is a holy privilege.
So, how do I square the killing of lambs for food? I don’t. And,
perhaps therein lies the reverence for their lives and for the great
mystery in which we are engaged. The willingness to risk our
health for the sake of theirs is part of an ancient equation, a way
that the circle is completed. We usher the animals into the world,
we do everything we can to ensure their health and well-being.
We care for them daily. And, when the time comes, we take their
lives for our own. It is a blessing and a gift in the truest sense. I
look at life differently from this experience. I understand in very
real terms how beautiful life is and how fleeting, what a gift it is
to be born and how inevitable it will be to die. If I can only
sustain this sense of reverence and gratitude, I think my years
spent farming will be beyond price.
18

LIOS Research and Creative Thought
An invitation to mindfulness
By Carol Jakus, M.S.W., M.A., LIOS Faculty
Mindfulness is revealing and it is healing. — Thich Nhat Hanh
Right now, before you read another word, take a breath.
Feel the air as it slowly enters the nostrils, expanding the lungs.
Notice how it lifts the sternum, relaxing the rib cage. Gently
exhale. See how the shoulders become a bit less tense. What else
are you noticing in your body right now? Any other sensations
arising for you? Can you feel your feet? How about your hands?
Are you aware of what emotions you’re feeling at this moment? Are
you bored? Tired? Curious? Anxious? Impatient? What else is there?
What thoughts are running through your head as you read this?
Are you worrying about something you have been procrastinating
about? Maybe you’re making plans for the upcoming weekend?
Or daydreaming about an exciting new job or romance?
Take another breath. What are you noticing now?
Much has been written lately about mindfulness. In a world filled
with distractions and worries, where multi-tasking and doing more
and more in less and less time has become the way rather than the
exception, it’s no surprise that people are hungry for the opportunity
to slow down and be present.
Mindfulness can be simply defined as awareness; being awake;
fully alive to the moment...this moment...without judgment or
preference for it to be anything else than what it already is.
The practice of mindfulness originates in Buddhist philosophy. It
was secularized and made popular in the United States in 1979
when Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., developed an eight-week program
at the University of Massachusetts called Mindfulness Based Stress
Reduction (MBSR), designed to teach the general public a new
way to regain health and well-being while cultivating clear peace
of mind. The class offers simple yoga, meditation and mindful
awareness as paths on one’s personal journey towards self-discovery
and healing.
Mindfulness is not about zoning out, being in la-la-land or reaching
some level of nirvana that keeps us apart or above others. It’s more
about being in tune with our lives as they unfold day to day, accepting
what we are, flaws and all. Practicing mindfulness is like slowly
washing a window that has accumulated years of dirt and grime,
allowing us to see more clearly what’s been there all along. We don’t
have to change the view or replace the window; just clear off the
film of distraction that we’ve let build up and distort our vision.
Photo by John Hinds, second-year student, LIOS LOD track:
“Private garden, La Connor, Washington. Shows mindfulness and growth.”
Take for example our relationship to pain. Pain is everywhere. It’s
experienced in the physical body as acute or chronic illness or
injury; it’s the heartache we feel when immersed in the grief or
sadness of a loss; it’s the anxiety of being left alone or having to
confront a difficult situation. Pain is inherent in all of life. We can’t
escape it. But we sure do try! We turn to using alcohol, drugs, food,
spending money, watching TV or any other addiction that helps us
escape from the situation or condition. We tell ourselves stories and
run scams about what is true, avoiding our circumstances rather
than actually experiencing them. And so, we suffer.
Suffering is this story we tell ourselves about our pain. It’s said that
pain in life is inevitable but suffering is optional. Often, the story is
worse than the pain itself! Who hasn’t had the experience of going
through a painful or difficult situation, only to embellish its details
or impact with each telling to another person? The pimple becomes
a tumor. The break-up, the end of our love life. The failed test, proof
that we’re too incompetent to get through graduate school or ever
be hired for a job.
19

Mindfulness invites us to be more curious about our pain. We
bring compassionate awareness to it without the distractions that
numb it so we can move through it...not away from it. We no
longer operate from a place of fear or avoidance but rather from a
position of open-eyed awareness. We look into our pain in order to
better understand it. To explore its root system. We begin to realize
that we don’t have to identify with our depression or migraine but
simply experience it.
Try taking another breath as you begin to explore the
transformational journey of presence that takes you home...
to yourself.
If you want to learn more about Mindfulness or the eight-week
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) class for either
mental health clinicians or the general public, please feel free to
contact me at 206-755-9313 or cjakus@mindfullivingnw.com.
Photo by John McConnell, M.A., LIOS, 1996; Images of Leadership Project
Photo by John Hinds, second-year student, LIOS LOD track:
“Somewhere in Spain. Shows the ‘balcony view.’” (Images of
Leadership Project)
By holding this position of curiosity, rather than rejection or
avoidance, we can learn more deeply about ourselves. What we
fear, what we want, what we need. We learn about our preferences.
What calls to us. What drives us. What motivates us.
By learning how to better accept ourselves, we naturally learn
how to more deeply accept the nuances and warts of others.
We may even become models for our clients, showing how to
tolerate pain and not fall into the trap of suffering. We begin to
experience hope: a chance to more fully engage in life moment
to moment, breath to breath.
20

LIOS Research and Creative Thought
SOMETHING LIKE A PEAR
By K. Alexandra Onno, Ph.D., LIOS Faculty
Abstract and excerpt from Out of Ashes: A Return to
the Creative Feminine, doctoral dissertation, Pacifica
Graduate Institute, 2009
This heuristic and phenomenological study was conceived in a
crucible of clinical work that embraces fairy tales, myths, and other
stories, and out of an abiding curiosity about and dedication to
relationship with the creative journey.
The research was both phenomenological (exploring the lived
experience of “the other”), involving interviews with nine different
women on their relationship with creativity and story, and heuristic,
using my own experience as a researcher as a subject of study. An
essential element of the project was to allow the phenomenological
and heuristic aspects of the study to be influenced and transformed
by the other in order to create the final document.
For the phenomenological research, each of the nine women was
interviewed three times. The first interviews focused on each woman’s
relationship with the creative, emphasizing both what nourishes
and sustains creativity and what interferes with it. In the second
interviews, each woman was asked to recall her earliest remembered
“favorite story.” The third interviews took place after I gleaned a
“map” or “mirror” from each woman’s earliest remembered favorite
tale. The current point of intersection between each woman’s
creative journey and her “map” revealed the answer to the central
question of the research: would the map so revealed offer support
and nourishment to relationship with the creative?
As I attempted to capture the soul of the interviews and what
emerged out of my own deepening relationship with the creative, I
found myself in a constant and alchemical interpenetration between
these aspects of this work.
The heuristic aspect of this work was also threefold. First, as a
creative woman, and especially as a writer, I explored a “living into”
and “breathing into” my own deepening relationship with and
dedication to creativity as an active and uncensored commitment,
resulting especially in a series of muse poems and dreams. Second,
an ongoing heuristic exploration of my evolving relationship with
my own “earliest favorite tale” of “Ash Girl” or Cinderella became
an essential thread in the resulting structure of this project. Finally,
I invested in and surrendered to the constant interpenetration
between the phenomenological and heuristic aspects of this work,
allowing each to be influenced and transformed by the other, in
order to create the final document.
This alchemical interplay became a key element in the written
material born out of the dialogue with each woman. I attempted
not to summarize, but instead to invoke the living spirit of each
conversation, inviting the reader into an “alchemical immersion”
and an actual experience of relationship with each dialogue. The
final document, embodying what can also be clinically applied, is
therefore in largest part and of necessity an alchemical emergence
out of that place where the conversation with each woman and the
writer’s imagination met, transforming both.
In addition to the relationship between the aspects of study, I want
to acknowledge that there has also been a significant relationship
between this project and my work as LIOS Graduate College faculty.
There is an alchemy to shared inquiry; it is an essential power
and beauty of the LIOS program that we live a dance between the
inquiry into the other and investigation of the self in the service of
the call to serve as transformative agents of change. This project was
seeded alongside my evolution in our transformative program, and
companioned by the richness of working with the extraordinary
colleagueship it has been my privilege and my pleasure to experience
during this time.
What follows is a small “taste” of the
dissertation, from a response to the
intimate nature of heuristic research:
From Literature Review, Part
II: Something Like a Pear
Unlike the crisp public character of an
apple, there is something private about
a pear. An apple can be eaten green,
or in full ripeness; but the moment
when a pear is at its fragrant best is of
an intimate scale. It is a narrow space,
requiring both patience and vigilance;
patience because a pear cut too soon
will never yield its fullest flavor, and vigilance because a pear left too long
loses the supple texture of the fruit at its time.
It is a fruit that asks for attunement. Smooth skin finally turning just
that hint more golden, firm flesh finally softening, just enough, but key
to receiving its subtle message of its movement towards ripening is the
scent that begins to offer itself as the pear reaches that moment when the
flavor is at its full.
Just as the wearing of perfume should provide an invitation only, a hint
of what one might discover by leaning in close enough for a kiss, the pear
offers the same such subtle cues. It requires a willingness to enter into that
intimate scale space—to pause, to enter the dialogue, to separate it from
other bolder flavors in the bowl, to bring it close. Breathe it in. Let the
fragrance speak (pp. 169-170).
21

LIOS Research and Creative Thought
The
heroine’s
journey
in john
boorman’s
beyond
rangoon
By Kathleen Murphy,
Ph.D.
The world is full of women who hunger for movies that chronicle
not Gawain’s but Guinevere’s gutsy quest to repair her own—and
thus others’—broken souls and psyches. The cinematic Round
Table of such travelin’ ladies includes Bringing Up Baby’s Katharine
Hepburn, a vessel of dangerous anarchy into which her juiceless
lover (Cary Grant) must dive to save them both from deathly
extremes. And Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in The Silence of the
Lambs, scenting out the dark, devouring demon-angel who will
perversely father her into wholeness. Seat too the sadly underrated
Closet Land’s Madeleine Stowe, who braves a lacerating descent into
the “ultimate closet” of her own violated self/unconscious, with
another brutal, Janus-faced male acting as her guide and confessor.
And Sigourney Weaver’s tough mother, crucified for humankind—
in a fiery felix culpa—in the third film of the Alien trilogy.
Beyond Rangoon
Such mythic passages for distaff knights are rare as hen’s teeth.
Thank goddess for John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon, a pell-mell
adventure featuring a Lancelot who happens to be woman, doctor,
and tragically bereaved mother and wife. The derailed tourists
in this new film and David Lean’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A
Passage to India are sisters under the skin. But the real-as-headlines,
yet timeless, journey Boorman’s Laura Bowman (Patricia Arquette)
makes through alternately fecund and fatal Burma is “known” in
her (and our) blood and nerve-endings.
In contrast, the “passage to more than India” that transforms bony,
brainy Adele Quested (Judy Davis) is fueled by a drier, more metaphysical
outrage. Immersed in an Otherness of her own making,
Davis confronts primal opposition, a dark, heated disorder that
reduces character and experience to a cosmic sound effect signifying
nothing. By the time of A Passage to India’s climactic homecoming,
Quested has matriculated into an older soul, worthy daughter of
the cozily mystical Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) who, gazing into
the moonspangled Ganges where corpses sometimes float, exclaims,
“What a terrible river!” then, “What a wonderful river!” (Mrs. Moore’s
cosmic opposites flow through all of John Boorman’s films, from
Point Blank through Deliverance, Excalibur, The General. He is an
artist who acknowledges that his richest visions iris-out into darkness.)
Boorman’s quester “beyond”
Rangoon sets out as a member
of the walking dead, a shattered
spirit barely tethered to her flesh,
for whom the wheel of time, of
life, has stalled. (The image of that
wheel on monastery walls and as
shadow on the ground at her very
feet greenlights Laura’s eventual
takeoff into “more than Burma.”)
Early on, sightseeing a monumentally
reclining, dreaming Buddha, Laura listens indifferently as their
tour guide (Spalding Gray) puns on the Buddhists’ lack of belief
in the soul by gesturing at the bottoms of the statue’s great feet,
adorned by stories shaped in curving pictograms. Behind him,
parents caution their son to come down from Buddha’s back. Boorman
creates a visual schism between foreground religious studies
and background actuality. The effect suggests the kind of Hitchcockian
back-projection that often signaled psychic deracination for
traumatized heroines such as Marnie or Kim Novak X2 in Vertigo.
When the little boy loses his footing and tumbles down the statue,
Laura shrieks an SOS for her sister and fellow doctor (Frances Mc-
Dormand), then stands stock still, frozen in impotence. She calls herself
spiritual “stone” (her medical skills—the equivalent of wounded
Arthur’s Excalibur—are grounded). Later, in her hotel room mirror,
her fractured soul is imaged in doubled, separated reflections.
Gray’s punning on
soul and sole is more
apt than this first,
“false” guide knows:
the hero’s journey in
Beyond Rangoon is
driven by concrete
mysticism. When
Laura Bowman steps
out of stone into the
flesh-and-blood drama
of Burma’s politics, an authentic action-adventure is launched, far
more visually and viscerally absorbing than most contemporary
superman epics. Drawn ever deeper into Third World danger by
a highly “unofficial” tour guide (Aung Ko), Laura Bowman’s soles
touch down in a teeming backcountry where, armed with knife,
gun, and her own bright courage, this Prince Valiant-coiffed quester
fights her way through the stations of Boorman’s typically rivercrossed
path to rebirth.
(continued on page 23)
22

Still lodged in the Kipling Hotel, Laura dreams of her lost life, and
Boorman’s camera lifts to look down on her through a revolving
ceiling fan. Almost immediately, as though galvanized by that
circular motion, she wakes to the sounds of people running,
shouting in the street. This is Beyond Rangoon’s first formal
wakeup call to take to the saving road, and Laura chases the street
rally as though hastening not to a tense standoff between soldiers
and political protesters, but toward some longed-for reunion.
Heralding the coming of Aung San Suu Kyi (Nobel Prize-winning,
heroic dissident under house arrest for years and now on trial in
Burma, played by Adelle Lutz), the Burmese woman who heads
the mostly youthful dissidents, a little girl shyly touches Laura’s
hand, the first in a series of guiding, arming signals by children
who stand in reality for the counsel offered by her murdered son
in dreams.
Suu Kiy walks deliberately into the soldiers’ ranked guns, almost
the graceful hostess greeting guests. Laura watches, mesmerized, as
the woman’s serenely beautiful face gathers and aims the power of
self until she literally quakes the uniformed men out of her way.
In Boorman’s Merlin-animated mise-en-scene, Suu Kiy becomes
Laura’s patron goddess. Standing in for the Arthurian lady in the
lake, she opens a channel of creative energy, breaking Laura’s “curse”
to turn stone into flesh-and-blood warrior.
Once mothered, Laura attaches herself to an exquisitely civilized
cicerone in the guise of fatherly Aung Ko, a university professor
imprisoned and exiled forever from teaching for his support of antigovernment
students. Boorman makes
us see and feel mythic resonance each
time his heroine crosses a Rubicon: it’s
as though the fabric of reality shivers
like water, racking focus into a new,
altered pattern of experience. In one
eerie exchange, Laura’s head turns—
almost in slow motion—to witness the
old man, bent forward, Sisyphus-like,
outside the passenger side of the car,
laboriously pushing the stalled vehicle
through a pelting rainstorm. With
near-ritual precision, Laura opens
her door, gets out into the heavy weather, and wordlessly adds her
weight to the effort.
And later on in our knight’s reanimation, she and Aung Ko careen
down a forest track in that old car, closely pursued by government
troops. A shot is fired, the professor is hit, and Boorman’s heroine
turns to look back–her rear-window view of rapidly gaining death
framed through the circle of a bullet hole. Previously, Laura had
gazed out impassively through car-window glass, wiped by passing,
unreal reflections. But now her bell jar has been shattered by a
plunge into the down-and-dirty, the ground where matters of life
and death draw blood.
Cast into a muddy
river with her badly
wounded friend,
Laura swims away
from the soldiers’
guns; her panting
grunts erupt from
deep inside her. In
contrast to her nearly
disembodied scream
when the child fell
from the Buddha,
these are the primal sounds of an animal fighting blindly, ruthlessly
to stay alive. Baptism and resurrection intersect, exhilaratingly, in
the rising line of her firm-fleshed arm as it reaches up–in Boorman’s
trademark image of power born of regenerative waters–to grasp a
low-hanging limb. At this moment, Laura becomes her own Lady of
the Lake, raising her submerged will, unsheathing the Excalibur of
her spirit from stone.
Almost immediately, true to mythic tradition, she faces a crucial
setback: thrashing to break through tangled branches at river’s
edge, Laura is thrown backwards, to literally grovel in a muddy
soup after she drops the locket that contains pictures of her beloved
dead. Kneeling in place, clutching her funerary talisman, Boorman’s
mother-healer trances out, as she does at several crucial junctures:
her wonderfully molded face blanks, her eyes go flat with a dull
darkness, and the flesh that lately pulsed with the desire to stay alive
pales, as though her very blood had receded, stopped flowing.
The sound of suffering Aung Ko’s groan
labors Laura back into life; she takes
renewed fire, picking up a cudgel to
beat down the thicket she has despaired
of escaping. As she explodes out of the
foliage, she’s greeted by the sight of a
little Burmese boy—he has a perfectly
legitimate reason for being there, but
he’s also a reflection of the lively child
released in her as well as the receding
ghost of her son.
Director / creator Boorman “dreams”
Patricia Arquette as he wants and needs his heroine to be. (In his
serious-whimsical I Dreamt I Woke Up, Boorman and John Hurt,
who plays the director as dreamer, exchange horrified glances at the
sight and sound of an ungendered, militantly anti-magic feminist;
Hurt turns desperately to his movie-making self to demand, “Can’t
you make her the way we want her to be?”) Weaving Merlin’s “spell
of making” from his Excalibur, Arquette’s auteur magicks his lady
Arthur into an heroic largeness that could never have been achieved
simply by the actress’s gaining 25 pounds for the shoot.
In the amniotic fluid of Boorman’s imagination and Burma’s many
rivers, Arquette grows as performer and character to inhabit her
(continued on page 31)
23

LIOS Alumna Profile in Courage
INTERVIEW WITH JULIA HARRIS,
M.A., SC, LIOS, 2008
By Kathleen Murphy, Ph.D.
I wanted you to see what
real courage is, instead
of getting the idea that
courage is a man with a
gun in his hand. It’s when
you know you’re licked
before you begin but you
begin anyway and you see
it through no matter what.
You rarely win, but
sometimes you do.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a
Mockingbird, spoken by
Atticus, leader and father
I’d arranged to meet the Leadership Institute of Seattle alumna I
was to interview at the Washington State History Museum. I knew
that Julia Harris was seventysomething and African-American, and
I’d identified myself as being “tall,” and I was banking that few folks
who looked like us would be sipping mid-morning coffee in the
cozy Musuem café.
Walking in out of a crisp, sunlit day, I spotted a diminutive figure
just ahead of me, taking careful steps with the help of a cane. Something
immediately told me that this was Julia—and my very first
impression of Ms. Harris was contained in one word: “fragile.”
How wrong I was!
§
Let me introduce the two women about to engage in an interview
that soon became, for me, a lesson in lifelong grace under pressure.
Julia Harris, 75, had recently graduated from Leadership Institute
of Seattle with a Master of Arts degree in Systems Counseling.
LIOS, as we affectionately call it, teaches leadership skills for life
and work, and has offered degrees in Organization Development as
well as Systems Counseling since 1969.
As editor of Li n k a g e, LIOS’ professional journal of creative thought
and feeling, I had a hunch that the story of our septuagenarian
alumna would be of considerable interest to our readers. Accordingly,
I asked Julia if I might interview her, with an eye toward sharing
her life’s journey with others. She agreed—shyly—and that’s how I
came to meet the deceptively “fragile”-looking lady at the Washington
State History Museum.
It’s true that Julia seems shy, but her style’s more a matter of dignity
and self-containment, perhaps the result of considerable experience
keeping her own counsel—often in the face of fools, or at least foolishness.
She speaks softly and precisely, but a quiet joy shines through
when certain subjects arise. And the irrepressible curiosity that seems
to be the keystone of Julia’s personality flavors all that she says.
Ms. Harris has the striking face of a watchful, engaged child.
Despite the length of time she’s spent in the world, her development
has never been arrested. Everything she says reflects her
commitment to an ongoing emotional journey, life as a process of
being and becoming.
When this remarkable woman speaks of pain and loss, she does so
without melodrama or self-pity. There’s a matter-of-factness in her
voice, as though these experiences are part and parcel of being human.
CHILDREN AND LOSS
Married twice, Julia mothered eight children from her first, 25-year
marriage, four boys and four girls. Growing up as a middle child,
with her siblings born seven years apart, she had felt like an only
child. So she loved having a brood of kids, whom she enjoyed as
“friends” as well as offspring. Her face shines with delight as she
speaks of her children.
Two of Julia’s sons and one daughter have passed away. She recounts
how one of her daughters, a member of the United States Air Force,
was stationed in Japan when she learned that her husband and
four children had been in a terrible car crash. The two eight-yearold
boys, one of them a foster child, were killed, while the others
miraculously survived with just scratches.
Such awful grief, I thought. But Julia speaks of “trying to understand
loss. You never know how long someone’s supposed to be
with you. There’s no guarantee. I had all my children through the
early years—that’s a gain. I had so much joy with these children. I
carry them with me.”
“Celebrate the life,” she said, and then described an urn shaped in
the form of a dolphin that holds the ashes of one of her grandsons.
“Every year, my daughter says ‘Happy Birthday’ to the dolphin urn!”
Early on, when one of her sons showed signs of schizophrenia, Julia
says, “I didn’t know what to do with him. It was all hit or miss, and
love can only go so far.”
In 1996, the disturbed young man walked out of a King County jail—
it was midnight, his ID had been lost by the bureaucracy and no one,
friend or relative, had been notified of his release. He ended up bunking
with his sister, separated from her husband, and her two kids.
Her face and voice taut with pain, Julia says, simply: “He beat his
sister to death.”
(continued on page 25)
24

In the awful tragedy’s aftermath, this incredibly caring human
being, shellshocked by loss, stood up to the angry criticism of
family and friends: “I was his mother. I couldn’t abandon him. In
time I went to see him in jail. Everything in me screamed, ‘Why did
you do it?’ But I tried to ask him what happened, tried to create a
relationship that wasn’t totally accusatory. That helped me to help
other family members, my daughter’s husband, her children. Later,
I became a grief facilitator for four-, five-, and six-year-olds who had
lost a parent.” Surmounting her own pain, she was able to develop,
design and facilitate Forgiveness Awareness workshops offered at the
Maxine Mimms Academy in Tacoma.”
“I’ve accepted that my son will be in prison for the rest of his life. But
no matter where you are, you never know what good you can do.”
Of this heartbreaking experience, Julia says simply, “It helped me
become a mental health counselor.”
By now, the notion of seeing Julia Harris as “fragile” seems nonsensical.
Perhaps the word “formidable” suits her best, despite her
petite stature.
EDUCATION
“I have a lot of learning to do, I feel,” Julia states—as though it
was the most natural thing in the world for people in their 70s to
express an appetite for knowledge. Hard enough to find young
students that hungry to learn.
The path to becoming a mental health counselor hasn’t been easy
for the stay-at-home mom who “lost a sense of my own self-worth
somewhere along the way.”
As a Christian Science nurse, she learned from her patients as she
ministered to them spiritually and emotionally through their final
hours. “It was a privilege to care for the dying,” Julia says. “This was
their most vulnerable moment, and they trusted me.” Once again,
in crisis, this natural counselor didn’t waver, reaching out to support
those in need. Count this work as another stepping-stone in Julia’s
continuing education in positive psychology.
Of her onetime employment in civil service offices, Julia notes
sadly that there was “nothing there to say you’re OK. I was
surprised how appreciative people were if, walking down the hall,
you patted someone’s back.” That small act of human kindness
“made all the difference. It taught me that we need each other,
some kind of physical and emotional connection.”
Not all of the stops along her educational journey were enlightening
or encouraging. In 1968, Julia attended classes at a Jesuit institution.
“It was an unhappy experience. The professor introduced several
studies that “proved” that black people were inferior to whites. I was
the only person of color in the class, so I went up to talk to the teacher
after class. He would not speak to me, totally brushed me off.”
A lesser woman might have been defeated by such academic bigotry,
and clearly the experience did leave a deep wound. But Julia Harris
persevered. By 1970, she was attending college lectures with an
enrolled friend. “I observed and absorbed. Took to it like duck to
water. I went to lectures even if I’d heard them before. I was a little
bit lonely because I didn’t have anyone to share all of it with.”
Then, in 2000, Julia heard good things about Evergreen
College, so she sat in on a friend’s class. “The school was so
inviting, so warm, I decided to sign up. And during the next
four years, Evergreen lived up to my expectations.” Julia began
to formalize her instinctive grasp of positive psychology and
nonviolent communication.
Julia took on an internship at the Maxine Mimms Academy in
Tacoma (for suspended and expelled middle- and high-school
students) where she researched her senior thesis: “The Effect of
Positive Psychology on the Behavior of Socially Deviant Teens.”
The obstacles she had faced in her own life, along with her formal
training, made her a “valuable resource. Kids need connections.
They appreciate being appreciated. Each of them needs to feel
valued.” The woman who so enjoyed the “friendship” of her own
children helped these troubled youngsters to develop faith in
their own worth.
In 2006, at 73, Julia Harris graduated from Evergreen with a
Bachelor of Arts degree.
But this knowledge seeker had only just begun. A few years later,
she enrolled in the graduate program at Leadership Institute of
Seattle, aiming to earn a Master’s degree in Systems Counseling.
With its emphasis on developing deep self-awareness and
positive approaches to problem-solving, LIOS seemed a
perfect fit for Julia. “I had stuff I hadn’t dealt with, and LIOS
and its excellent faculty helped me find, define and get through
it. You carry things over the years and it’s easy to think your way
through them, to rationalize many hurts, racial and other kinds,
rather than getting back in touch with yourself, your feelings.
Education plus self-knowledge helped me to go out and help
others.”
In 2008, Julia celebrated Christmas as a newly credentialed
mental health counselor, having received her Master of Arts degree
from the prestigious Leadership Institute earlier in the month.
WHAT’S NEXT?
What’s next? I inquired, expecting that a well-deserved retirement
might be in the air. And then Ms. Harris said that she was
considering studying for her doctorate at Claremont College
in California. “I’m open to it, preparing myself this year.” How
youthful and engaged her expression, already looking forward to
the next stage in an endlessly exciting journey.
Back in 1995, Julia decided she wanted to see Europe, so she
joined one of her sons, stationed in Germany. Her dream of
travel was cut short after a week, when she was struck down by
a brain aneurysm and lay in a coma for 17 days. When her left
side remained paralysed, she used her understanding of the connection
between mind and body to regain mobility.
(continued on page 34)
25

LIOS Alumna Profile in Courage
RAISE A READER, RAISE A LEADER,
IMAGES OF LEADERSHIP PROJECT
JoAnne MacTaggart, B.S., LIOS, 2005
I have just completed my first year in the Psy.D. program at
Saybrook University. My educational experience at Leadership
Institute of Seattle was absolutely foundational for my successful
growth then and throughout this last year. While at LIOS in
1992-1994, my kids were young. Now my son—born three and
one-half months preterm with horrific problems and a gloomy
prognosis—is completing his graduate degree in Scotland in
historic research with a special interest in banned literature.
He reads to lead.
When I was attending LIOS from 1992-1994, he was seven and
my daughter, four. I lived what I learned and extended it into my
parenting. Catherine Johnson was my teacher and later my advisor,
encouraging me throughout that time and again last year, when I
decided to attend Saybrook as the first LIOS/Saybrook "hybrid." I
am specializing in child psychology with a mind-body pathway.
My son and I have both found “success in the journey” toward
personal mastery. Last September we went to the airport
with destinations in opposite directions, both of us following
our dreams.
The captions for my pictures are: “Support a child’s readership and
they will have a better chance at leadership” or “Raise a reader,
raise a leader.”
I have attached two images for the Images of Leadership Project,
with my son’s permission. The hand in the picture above is mine.
I practiced "therapeutic touch" with him when he was born. The
doctors at the University of Washington predicted mental retardation
and debilitating cerebral palsy. He did not develop either. I
think the image of my hand and my newborn represents how my
support of Mack—through respect of his subjective experience,
even as a one-pound infant—allowed him to exert his spirit in all
ways. I never doubted his potential, and he has set and met goals
that far surpass the wildest dreams of everyone—but him.
He started reading at three and reads a book each day. He is now
24 and will be entering a Ph.D. program in Library Science with a
focus on academic research. He has been a leader among his peers,
advocating for those who are disenfranchised and suffer social
stigma. He does not let the biopsychosocial barriers of our society
get to him. He is my son, and my hero.
Photos by JoAnne MacTaggart, B.S., LIOS, 2005;
Images of Leadership Project
26

LIOS Principles in Action
Building the Mosaic: The Art and
Practice of Psychotherapy
By Melinda “Lena” Williamson, M.A., SC,
LIOS, 2009
Excerpt from Systems Counseling graduate thesis, LIOS, 2009
The way I see life, and by extension psychotherapy, is much the
same way one might view a mosaic. The definition of a mosaic is
generally considered to be a picture comprised of smaller pieces
of glass or tile, or of a philosophy drawn from many ideas. In my
opinion, the human experience is much like a mosaic in that it is
comprised of many fractured pieces of self and experience, combined
or restructured to create a whole picture. To understand this
metaphor more completely, one must examine both the nature
of the human experience, and the nature of the glass that is to
compose a mosaic. When speaking of glass, it is important to note
that there are two primary types of glass, one being the kind that
is manufactured, and the other being hand-made or hand-blown.
For the purposes of this theory, one may consider hand-blown glass
as very similar to the human existence in many ways. The nature
of hand-blown glass is that no two pieces are ever completely alike;
each piece has its imperfections, blemishes, divots, and markings
that create its unique beauty. I believe that human beings arrive in
the world in much the same manner. From conception to birth,
one is given a set of individual imperfections, blemishes and
markings that comprise one’s unique genetics and individual makeup.
The type of nutrients or toxins that one receives, trauma, and/
or illnesses that are carried in one’s DNA, influences one’s unique
biological make-up.
It is my belief that neither glass nor human beings are able to remain
in their original form for very long. I believe that change, transformation,
and evolution are the natural order of existence; the transformation
of all things is unavoidable. The transformation itself may come
in any form, whether through trauma, or through the natural wear
and tear of existing. Glass encounters trauma whenever it is dropped,
cut, or delivered a forceful blow. Human beings encounter trauma
in a variety of manners, whether it be through acute trauma such as
physical violence or abuse, or through more subtle, pervasive methods
such as neglect or a general lack of availability of a caretaker. Even
given the absence of traumas, neither glass nor human beings exist in
a fixed state. Glass is considered to be an amorphous solid, which is a
solid in which there is no long-range order of the positions of the atoms
(Dictionary.com, 2009). This means that glass, over long periods
of time, moves and shifts in ways very similar to a slow-moving
liquid. So, even without any significant environmental influence, glass
shifts and transforms over time. The human experience is similar, in
that one cannot remain unchanged, even if one is given a safe and
secure environment in which to thrive. Simply being in the world—
observing and experiencing the world— can alter one’s original form.
Health and Dis-ease
At this point in the discussion, it becomes necessary to discuss the
beliefs and values regarding health and dis-ease that inform my
theory. I believe that health lies not in remaining in the original
form, but in the piecing together and creation of a new form, or
mosaic, comprised of the pieces of the original form, the environment,
and the integration of new pieces and experiences that may
enter one’s life. Given that neither glass nor human beings remain
in the original form once exposed to the world, I believe that health
is the capacity to rebuild and restructure the various pieces of self
into a new form, or create a mosaic out of one’s life. This capacity
requires several key components, including connection, meaning,
and resiliency. One might consider this the framework on which a
mosaic can be built.
Connection
I believe that connection is a necessary component of healthy
human experience. I believe that human beings do not exist in
isolation; we are inherently connected to the world. However, one
may feel misunderstood, apathetic, or disconnected. Human
beings must be able to find or create authentic connections to other
human beings, ideas, passions, or purposes as an essential piece of
the framework upon which one builds their mosaic. When one is
disconnected from others and the world, one may lose one’s will to
continue growing and evolving. I believe that in times of dis-ease,
connection may mean the difference between the broken pieces of
glass remaining shattered on the floor and their being picked up
and rearranged into a new form: a mosaic. Connection is what gives
human beings a receptacle in which to put the broken pieces of the
original form, until such time as they can be integrated into the
mosaic. Margret Wheatley recognizes the importance of
connection, writing, “Relationships are all there is. Everything in
the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything
else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are
individuals that can go it alone” (Wheatley, 2002, p. 23).
Meaning
Meaning is another essential piece of the framework, in my
belief. I believe that meaning is an essential method by which one
makes sense of what one does, what one experiences, and what is
27

happening in one’s world. Victor Frankl states, in Man’s Search
for Meaning, that:
Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not
a secondary “rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is
unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone;
only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to
meaning… Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of
his ideas and values! (Frankl, 2006, p. 99).
Meaning is the method by which one connects the dots of
individual experiences, tying them together into a cohesive story.
As a therapist, when I’m sitting with clients, I believe that there is
no part of a client’s story or experience that is meaningless. I take a
great deal of care to witness, hear, and sort all of the aspects of that
person, in order that we might begin to forge a schematic for the
mosaic to be built upon. Meaning gives order to the pieces of the
original form, as well as the new pieces that one is integrating into
a picture that makes sense to the individual. It is important to note
that I do not believe in any type of ultimate meaning, or a meaning
that can be imported from one to another. Meaning is something
that each individual must uncover for themselves, on one’s own
terms and in one’s own time, in a way that fits one’s unique being.
Frankl speaks to the individual nature of meaning, writing that:
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, for day to day and
from hour to hour. What maters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in
general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment
(Frankl, 2006, p. 108).
This is not to say that the meaning that one makes is not informed
or influenced by others. Often that is why one opts to seek
psychotherapy: in order to gather input when one can no longer
make sense of the experiences of one’s life.
Resilience
Resilience is the final aspect, in this theory, that composes the
framework for human health. Resilience, with regard to human
beings, is the capacity to absorb impact or change and adapt to it.
In terms of the mosaic, it is the capacity to accept new pieces into
the picture, reorganize and forge a new picture out of what one is
given in life. In other terms, resiliency is not the capacity to resist
breaking, or even the tendency to take the broken pieces and
attempt to put them back into the original form, but instead the
capacity to absorb the breaking and reorganize the pieces of one’s
self or one’s life into a new form. It is important to note that
resilience is intricately tied to, and built upon, many factors,
including the previously mentioned components of connection
and meaning. It also relies heavily on one’s access to basic needs
and resources, environmental factors, and on the capacity to
absorb change that has been modeled in one’s life. One’s capacity
for resilience is reduced when one does not have access to important
resources: for example, when an individual experiences many
crises in a short amount of time. When sitting with a client, it is of
prime importance for me as a practitioner to assist in uncovering or
rebuilding resilience by acknowledging and normalizing one’s
current feelings of helplessness, and by highlighting past and
current successes that one may build upon.
Dis-Ease
As previously discussed, I believe that it is impossible for one to
exist in this world without experiencing some form of trauma, or
at the minimum the natural wear and tear of living. This is often
painful, confusing, and difficult. One may experience a break in the
expected, such as significant changes in circumstance, deaths, loss
of primary relationships, or significant traumas. These can significantly
reduce one’s capacity to maintain a healthy existence. When
one loses, or never develops, the capacities for connection, meaning
making, and resilience, one may have a difficult time organizing the
pieces of one’s life into a recognizable picture. For example, in the
midst of a crisis such as the molestation of a child, a parent may feel
incredibly disconnected from others, and find it nearly impossible
to make any sense or meaning out of the event. It is during these
times, that one often seeks to look outside of oneself for assistance
rebuilding the key components of the framework of the mosaic—
hence psychotherapy. In the absence of connection, meaning, and
resilience, one may reach out to a counselor or therapist to help
construct a new frame for the mosaic of one’s life. As a therapist,
this is a cornerstone of my work with clients. In the absence of one’s
own framework, I use the self of the therapist, our time, and the
therapeutic relationship to forge a new foundation for the client to
build a mosaic upon.
. . .
Mosaic in Flux
At this current moment in the evolution of myself as a person
and a practitioner, I recognize that this is a theory in flux: a true
representation of what I believe to be true about the world and my
work, and that is not fixed or static. My beliefs and theory have
been forged in the fires of my own experiences with brokenness and
the crafting of a piece of art that is my life. I believe that we all, as
human beings, are given a limited set of circumstances or glass with
which to work, and it is what we craft out of these pieces that gives
the true meaning to our existence. As I continue to evolve the
mosaic of my life and belief, the work that I do for and with
humanity will also continue to evolve.
28

LIOS Principles in Action
who can help support you and believes in the work you want to
do? Great! If you don’t, then consider taking at least a part-time
job that will keep the bills paid. A stressed out therapist who cannot
meet his or her basic needs does not do good work.
Put together a basic business plan that takes into consideration
everything you need to run a business. Set your session rates
based on: (1) your level of experience, (2) what the local market
will bear, and (3) what you need in order to meet your business
expenses. Ask around to find out what others in your area are
charging. (There are many good, basic business plan books out
there. Check them out at your local bookstore if this task seems
too daunting.) You may want to consider a small business loan.
If so, the bank will want to see a business plan.
Private Practice: A Checklist
for Making it Happen
By Susan Ruby, M.A., SC, LIOS, 2004
People become therapists for as many reasons as there are leaves
on a tree. They find the ticking of a human brain fascinating.
Their own experiences in counseling lead them to consider
taking on the role of therapist themselves. They have a driving
need to make a difference with a certain population. They live
to serve other human beings. Whatever the reason, the desire
to be a therapist and what makes us choose this profession is
often in conflict with the needs of starting and thriving in private
practice. A successful private practice begins with good
planning, followed by effective marketing and a healthy dose
of self-care.
The following is a list of ideas for getting your practice up and
running if you’re thinking about getting started.
1. Clarity of Practice. Develop your area of interest and
expertise, and focus on that area in your conversations with
other people about your work. Who do you love to help? What
types of therapy give you an inherent glow when you talk about
them? Create a brief description of your work that you can say
when people ask you about your work. In Western cultures, we
ask about work more often than we ask new acquaintances about
anything else. It’s helpful to be prepared. Avoid saying anything
that sounds like, “I’ll take any client who can pay me.” Do
consider a statement like: “I work with women in life transitions,
like re-entering the workforce, empty nest syndrome, new
marriages or motherhood.” Your goal is to make sure people
remember you for something specific, not as another therapist
desperate for work.
2. Review Your Finances. A financially viable private practice
takes between three to five years to build. Do you have a partner
3. Administrative Minutia That Matters. Get your administrative
issues in order. Set up a simple billing system, all of the
forms you’ll need, and your business papers (cards, letterhead,
receipts, etc.). If you don’t know how to set up forms, hire
someone to produce professional forms for you. Forms represent
you and your work in print. Give them the attention they deserve
up front, so that you can focus on doing the work. Review forms
once per year to make sure they are reflecting your current needs
in practice. You may be surprised how often revisions are made
when you’re building a business. Make sure you note the
revision date somewhere on each revised form, so that it’s easy
to track whether you’re actually using the new and improved
version everytime.
4. Networking and Avoiding Isolation. Working in private
practice can be a lonely, demoralizing affair if you don’t
connect with anyone except the mentally ill. Plan ahead to
address this issue. Find a group of other counselors in your area
and start showing up at meetings. You can use this group to help
develop a consult group, and to start building a mutual referral
base. Other practitioners will refer to you when they have a good
sense of who you are and the work you do. This is a good place
to practice that brief description of your work we talked about
earlier. Some networking groups ask participants to make presentations
about topics of interest. This is a perfect chance to shine
and show your passion for your work. Include handouts that
provide contact information for referrals. If presentations are too
intimidating, then volunteer to serve on the board or to organize
group events. Whatever you do, show up and get involved.
5. Meaningful Advertising. The web is where you can get the
least expensive exposure. If you’re in the Seattle area, sign up
for counselingseattle.com and/or other internet-based referral
services for therapists. Other counselors in your area can tell
you which sources have produced the best referrals. Track your
referrals. If a site is not producing for you within six months,
stop paying for it. You need your marketing dollars to produce
real results. Ask people you trust to read and give you feedback
29

about anything you write for the web. It helps to ask people who
are not therapists, because they are more like your prospective
clients and will likely have more relevant feedback.
6. Build a Practice Website. When you list on any web-based
referral service or provider directory, you can usually include a
link to your own website. Clients consistently report that they
chose their therapists because they were able to get more detailed
information than the basic contact information provided in
most directory-style services, and they liked what they saw.
Think of your website as a marketing brochure in digital format.
It should be simple and clear, and should answer questions
that prospective clients might have about your services. Avoid
psycho-babble or jargon that could be off-putting to people who
know little or nothing about counseling. Make sure the language
sounds like you. And avoid
pictures that are not professional
or too abstract to be
relevant for the average user.
That picture your best friend
took with her mobile phone
last Christmas is not an option
here. This is one area
where spending the money
is well worth it. An unprofessional,
glitchy website
can undermine even the best
copy-writing because it
creates frustration for
potential clients before they
even meet you. If you don’t
really know how to build a
website, then hire a pro to
do it for you.
7. Other Opportunities for Exposure. Beyond a website,
consider writing articles for publications on your area of expertise,
and include a brief statement about your practice at the end,
including contact information. People have a tendency to reprint
articles if they are genuinely useful and meet a specific need.
Reprints are like free advertisements for your practice.
8. Return Calls Promptly and Without Fail. Many clients
report that they chose their counselor because she was the first
one to return the call about services.
9. Screen Clients. Get into the habit of screening prospective
clients before you make that first appointment. The right clients
will need your services—the services you know you can do
well. If that guy on the phone has severe anger issues and you
get anxious around intense, irrational clients, he is not a client
for you. Refer out when needed, and trust that your clients will
come. This is not only a personal, self-care decision; it is a
business decision.
10. Set Your Hours and Stick to Them. Trying to fit clients into
random niches of time that work for them, but not for you,
creates a tired, cranky therapist. You won’t do your best work,
and the fear-based decision to take any client at any time undermines
your business objectives. Make sure you allow time for
paperwork in each day.
11. Get Your License. It is an unspoken reality of our business
that therapists are very careful about giving out referrals, because
this process reflects on both the person receiving the referral, and
the person who provided the name to a prospective client. Call it
professional snobbery or elitism if you like, but a license is the
credential that tells other professionals you have been authorized
by a higher authority to practice as an independent therapist.
This credential also allows you to start getting registered with
insurance companies as a preferred provider. Without it, you are
limited to clients who can pay out of pocket.
12. Do Good Work. This
seems self-evident, but the
old saying “good work gets
good work” is particularly
true in the counseling world.
If you do good work with
your clients, they will tell
their friends and colleagues
about you. Good work refills
your personal energy well,
and keeps you going when
a hard case is making you
wonder why you decided to
enter this field. Stay on top of
your training, and make sure
you are not over-scheduling
so that you’re too tired to be
present in sessions. With each change you consider making to
your practice, the first question should be: Will this change allow
me to do better work? If the answer is not a resounding “yes!”
then you need to reconsider the change.
Finally, make sure you have a “Plan B” if you discover that
private practice is not the right path for you. Sometimes, just
knowing that there is an alternative available can keep you
going through the hard times. It also helps to remember that
private practice is a choice you are making, one month, one
day, one client at a time.
Susan Ruby, M.A., LMHC, is a therapist in private practice in
Edmonds, WA. She specializes in work with complicated
families, those who may be experiencing divorce, attempts to
blend, non-traditional structures, or anything else that makes
life harder than it ought to be. For more information about
Susan’s practice, please visit her website at www.susanruby.com.
30

LIOS Principles in Action
How a real leader uses LIOS
Interact training to create a
successful business: Interview
with steve anderson, M.A., LIOs
By Diane Schachter, M.S.W., LIOS Faculty
Steve Anderson is no stranger to LIOS. He was a student in the
“Managing and Consulting” track (now Leadership and
Organization Development), graduating in 1996. Since then, he
has maintained a connection with LIOS through his work on the
LIOS Board, and as an employee, a trainer, and most recently, a
vigorous supporter of the “InterAct: Quality Workplace Relations”
workshop. (See www.saybrook.edu/lios for more information on
this three-day intensive training experience.) We thought it would
be interesting to hear his thinking on InterAct and how it supports
his goals and visions for the company he now leads and owns.
Steve is owner and president of Index Sensors and Controls, a small
manufacturing company in Stanwood, WA, soon to be relocating
to Bellingham, WA. “We make widgets,” he says, “switches and
controls that are used under the hood of heavy-duty equipment.
These are the kind of parts that keep the world running in a variety
of industries where heavy equipment is used. Without them,
nothing goes.”
The company has been thriving for over 33 years, and Steve
attributes its success to the business’ strong, high-quality relationships
with its customers and suppliers. “All businesses are in the
people business,” Steve says. “I prioritize relationships because they
are at the heart of what we do here.” Steve sees his company as more
that just “tables full of switches. We are humans and the
human-to-human connection is critical.”
The word “partnership” came into the conversation multiple times.
Steve is currently in the process of shifting the sales mix of Index
Sensors products so that 25 percent of the total sales goes toward
sustainable energy and clean transportation. Currently they are
developing new sensors that will be compatible with hybrid trucks
and heavy duty equipment. New partnerships with these customers
are happening right now. A proponent of the triple bottom line
(people, planet and profits), Steve is tracking the impact internally
at the level of his company, as well as the entire planet. “How we
hold ourselves, our way of being and leading with our customers,
suppliers, the world around us, and with each other is critical to
our success.”
LIOS’ InterAct training has helped Steve’s employees with manifesting
this vision. “People are able to turn to one another internally
and respond well to a request from the outside.” InterAct helps his
managers lead in a way that supports their authority without losing
themselves. “They have the tools to be real without sacrificing their
roles.” The atmosphere is casual and light-hearted. Conflicts are
resolved directly without any of the distancing tactics employed
in the past. Productivity is up and his employees seem happier.
Production is more efficient and effective. Since so many employees
have had the training, they share a common language. “The
increased transparency creates clarity from the beginning which
feeds the efficiency and job satisfaction. Transparency is hard to
achieve, but super-powerful. The InterAct work expands our skillset
for increasing transparency.”
Steve believes that LIOS’ InterAct training has also taught people
how to learn from one another and from their relationships with the
community. InterAct is foundational work that provides the skills to
be a successful member of his leadership team. “I want people to keep
growing. There simply is no substitute for the InterAct experience.”
THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY IN BOORMAN’S
BEYOND RANGOON (continued from page 23
previous screen incarnations. Every plane and curve of her face
and body seems gravid with that appetite for life, fueled by some
vital essence that makes humankind cling so passionately to earth.
Her face projects bravely forward out of Boorman’s frames like
some almost heiratic mask, a sustaining larger-than-life fabrication.
Never constricted by conventional sexiness, Arquette’s lush body—
at home on ground as in water—carries the promising weight of
strength and usefulness.
When she bridges her last river, Arquette’s aptly named Laura
Bowman strides into her future, a red cross knight ready for the long
haul of life. Out of a terrible wound—the murders of her husband
and little son—this Fisher-Queen has fashioned and mastered her
soul’s best art and armament: her regenerated gift for healing restrings
Laura’s bow. (See Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow.)
In a sense, Beyond Rangoon is the story of a woman who comes to
be comfortable in her own skin, one of the better definitions of a
hero—mythically or psychologically speaking. In I Dreamt I Woke
Up, Boorman’s “better homes and gardens” mythification of his
Emerald Forest estate in Ireland, the director admits that he feels
himself to be a “ridiculous man,” far short of a hero and never at
home in his own skin. Cinematic avatars such as Merlin and Arthur
are “the men I ought to have been.” Add Laura Bowman to the
pantheon. She’s a wondrous fish, that old fertility goddess symbol
of knowledge and fruitfulness. Toward the end of Boorman’s
dream of an Irish Camelot, his beloved vegetation deity the Green
Man wrestles a beautiful, silvery, salmon-like water spirit into the
mud and opens her belly to devour the multihued flowers teeming
there. This randy coupling emblemizes Boorman’s dynamics of the
imagination and the mythic cycle of death and rebirth that drives
the waterwheel of Beyond Rangoon.
31

LIOS Principles in Action
ON A NEW TRACK: lios leadership
AND organization development
master’s degree program
By Sherene Zolno, M.A., LIOS Faculty;
Marina Gordon, M.A., LOD, LIOS, 2009;
Kelly Spangler, M.A., LOD, LIOS, 2009;
Laurie Rosenfeld, M.A., LOD, LIOS, 2009
Leadership and Organization Development (LOD), as the new
LIOS Master of Arts degree program is named, is a new and unique
blend of the best of the Coaching and Consulting in Organizations
(CCO) program that it replaces, and a new approach to preparing
students for their roles as leaders, coaches and consultants. Changes
spanning the two years of the program have now been fully implemented,
and lessons learned are being applied to “tweaking” each
course. Below is a brief description of the changes and how the
first graduates of the LOD program applied their learning in their
leader/consultant roles.
In moving from CCO to LOD, three significant changes were made:
• Masters Change Projects (MCPs): LOD students “go live” as
consultants in their first year (and not just in their second year)
with a team Action Research project that takes place in the “real”
world. Thus, instead of a one-year thesis project, LOD students
engage in two years of Masters Change Projects.
This means that small teams of students are placed in a business,
non-profit organization or government agency to consult
with and coach executives, boards of directors, teams, managers
and supervisors on their business, team and leader issues. These
engagements, while differing in specifics, usually aim to improve
system functioning as a result of a collaborative problem solving
process. The ultimate goal is to have each organization and leader
capable of identifying and solving their own problems after the
LIOS consulting team leaves.
• Professional Consultation Group: In the past, when only secondyear
students worked on consulting projects outside of LIOS,
Professional Consultation Group occurred in the second year only.
With Masters Change Projects now starting up in the first year,
Professional Consultation Group begins then as well, and continues
through the student’s second year.
This course serves as an adjunct to the student’s experience in the
MCPs. The focus is on developing consulting skills, examining legal
and ethical issues related to consulting, exploring themes within
the student’s consulting work, building relationships with other
professionals, and enhancing the student’s development as a
LIOS LOD graduating class of June 2009. Top Row L-R: graduates Paula
Fitzgerald Boos, Autumn Allen, Lori Rowe, Emily Bowen, Laurie Rosenfeld,
Brandy Boak, Marina Gordon, Jennifer Shen Lee, Kelly Spangler; Sherene
Zolno, faculty. Bottom Row L-R: Jeff McAuliffe, faculty; graduates Robin White,
Molly Maloney-Clark, Aleishia James, Sam Fernandes and Anna St. Martin
professional. Students get coaching on their MCP and have an
opportunity for increased access/interaction with faculty, with the goal
of integrating learning from curriculum, project, reading, and life.
• Enriched Leadership Curriculum: Significant changes have
been made in a number of second-year courses to ensure a focus
on developing the ability to lead, and to work with leaders as a
consultant and coach. This occurs in Strategic Leadership (formerly
Vision, Goals and Strategies); Leading Change (formerly Change
Management); and Leadership and Management (formerly
Management and Supervision). More about these changes will
appear in a future issue of Li n k a g e.
What are Masters Change Projects like? Read below to
learn about them in the words of three recent graduates.
Laurie Rosenfeld on client selection: What qualities in a client/
project sponsor and client issues are most appealing to me? What do
I want and what do I have to offer?
“I was most interested in working with a client who was excited to
grow and change, a client who was willing to partner with me using
the collaborative consulting model, and a client sponsor who was
energetic, open and willing to co-create this project together. I was
reminded that this was a two-way, win-win proposition. It would
not work if I somehow viewed myself in an inferior position or if I
allowed myself to be viewed merely as a student. In fact, I was and
am a seasoned professional. Indeed, I was fairly new to the collaborative
consulting model and to the action research process. But, I
was quick to account for and promote the value and experience I
would offer.
(continued on page 33)
32

“Recognizing that my needs are as valid as those of a potential client
(Block, 2000; Weisbord, 2006), I prepared a thoughtful proposal. I
began brainstorming on my own and with colleagues and mentors
about prospective organizations. I think my greatest learning from
this stage in the process was the power of a personal vision and a
positive attitude.”
Laurie Rosenfeld on contracting: Who is the appropriate sponsor
for this project and how will sign-off occur?
“The client group, a nine-member sub-committee of the board,
consisted of a cross-functional representation of the organization’s
key stakeholders. Since we had to identify initial project goals and
complete a Memorandum of Understanding within a specific timeframe
for my Masters Change Project, the sponsors and I did some
preliminary work. Taking a systemic perspective, we utilized O’Neill’s
(2005) Three Key Factors and Zolno’s (2008b) Field Alignment
Model to identify three initial project goals. A project timeline
and Memorandum of Understanding were developed and shared
with the committee.
“I made an assumption that approving this project was a formality,
but instead, it was met with resistance by several vocal and seemingly
powerful members of the committee. Afterwards several questions
came up for me: Who needed to sign-off on this project? What
decision-making style would be used?
“Since time was drawing near for my MCP contracting deadline,
I decided to be upfront and direct with my sponsors. I openly and
honestly shared my observations and my questions. I told them that
if we were going to work together we needed to complete contracting
and stay on or close to our scheduled timeline. I brought diagrams
and taught them about the various decision-making styles, explaining
that no style is better than another and each is appropriate in different
circumstances (Johnson & Johnson, 2006; Tannenbaum & Schmidt,
1973). I said that as much as I wanted everyone to be committed
from the start, consensus is not always the most appropriate style.
“To my surprise, they thanked me and told me how much they appreciated
my honesty, directness, and the clarity of expectations and
next steps. They appreciated the lesson in decision-making styles and
the visuals I provided. They took a majority vote and the project was
approved 5-3 to move ahead.”
Kelly Spangler on holding steady in a storm of change: How do
you support a client system that is experiencing so much change?
How do you help them increase their capacity to relate to one another
even while storming?
“Relieved is how I felt as I walked from my car into the building. My
first planned intervention for my Individual Action Research Project
was about to happen.
“The first few months of my project were full of unexpected changes
and occurrences. A change in sponsorship resulting from three
different iterations of the organizational chart sent waves through
the entire system and tested my internal anxiety range as well. The
hard part was behind us now, I thought, and it would be smooth
sailing for the rest of the project.
“As soon as I saw my sponsor I knew something was wrong. His
eyes were heavy and he seemed nervous. He explained that there
was no point to carrying out our planned intervention because he
was contemplating leaving the agency because of conflicts he was
experiencing. Conflict avoidance was one of the main systemic
patterns we identified on this team. My sponsor decided, in the
moment, that we should change the planned intervention from
brainstorming a new work schedule to addressing conflict on the
team. Unless the team made a commitment to work at engaging in
“robust conversations,” he did not want to work there anymore.
“So much for navigating through a calm discussion. It was
‘whitewater’” (Vail, 1996).
“I agreed with him that it was time to get it all out on the table. We
determined that I would set the ground rules for the difficult conversation
and facilitate. I coached him on sharing his feelings and how
to be transparent. I explained that if he opened his heart and risked
some vulnerability the rest of the team would follow suit.
“Feelings were shared and differing stories were respectfully heard.
The team and leader heartfully committed to working with each
other instead of around each other. The team gained so much
energy from connecting in this way that they began to create action
plans faster than I could write them down. The sponsor stepped
right into his leadership role and took over facilitating the evolving
creative process.
“I sat there listening to the energized chatter with a big grin on my
face as I had just worked myself out of a job. Holding the team and
leader capable of creating their own healthy system, while simultaneously
listening, re-framing, and working through the Action
Research process, helped me nudge them toward their goals.”
Marina Gordon on systemic intervention design: How do you
meet these whole system goals: a) Create a high-performing, reliable
team and improve cross-team collaboration (business goal);
b) Increase the number of personal connections and deepen the
level of emotional support within the client group (team goal); and
c) Become a role model in collaboration for my subordinates during
the leading of this project and develop more personal connections
with them (leader goal)? Marina, an international student,
facilitated Action Research with a group of 12 departments in a
Russian University.
“One of the technical challenges I faced was that I received my
consultant education in English and sometimes it was hard for me
to find the right words while working with my Russian clients.
Even though my intention was to speak their language and not
overwhelm them with specific terminology, sometimes it was still
33

needed (for example, when I explained the Action Research process
for them). I also had to translate the project proposal, client report,
and other materials from Russian to English and back, so that they
could be understood both by my clients and my faculty. I have
to admit, though, that it was a great practice, especially because
it made me think of some cultural differences and become more
mindful of them.
“Our implementation was quite a complex series of events. The
first part was a one-day hike in which participants had to collaborate
and get from point A to point B. They had to cross rivers and
overcome other obstacles. In the end they reached a cabin where a
couple of group members, who could not join the hike for health
reasons, prepared a dinner and some games to continue the team
building process. It was a truly great day in which all the participants
got to know each other better. They later reported that they
were inspired by their colleagues and new friends.
also reported that they had developed a new sense of identity—
based on belonging to this team.”
References:
• Block, P. (1999). Flawless consulting: A guide to getting your
expertise used (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.
• Drucker, P. (1954). The Practice of management. New York:
Harper and Brothers.
• Harrison, R. (1970, April-June). Waterline model, Choosing the
depth of organizational interventions. Journal of Applied
Behavioral Science, pp. 181-202.
• Johnson, D.W., & Johnson, F.P. (2006). Joining together: Group
theory and group skills. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
“The second part of the implementation strategy was a formal
meeting in which I facilitated a discussion about what the client
group members had learned about their team during the hike and
how they could apply this learning in the work place. I included an
exercise in which the participants dreamed about their ideal work
environment and then described it to each other. I also introduced
some models of group development (Tuckman, 1965), SMART
goals (Drucker, 1954), and the Waterline Model (Harrison, 1970).
It helped them to put our activities and new learning into a theoretical
context.
“The participants reported that the discussion of how to apply new
learning was helpful to them; it created a sense of confidence and
ownership in them.
“In addition to the group intervention, I facilitated an intervention
involving two of the client system members. From the contracting
conversations as well as from some interviews I was aware that two
of the department heads were in a conflict, which contributed to
the poor collaboration among departments. I facilitated a conflict
resolution between the two, having decided it would benefit the
system and me as well, since I would get to practice facilitating a
difficult conversation (Stone, Patton & Heen, 1999). I believe that
this conflict mediation was one of the most significant events during
the project, not only because this conflict got resolved, but also
because these two people, who had been enemies for several years,
modeled for the rest of the team the willingness to collaborate.
“These interventions helped participants become more aware of
the importance of collaboration, and shifted their ways of relating.
The informal part of the intervention (the hike) created emotional
stimulation for building new connections and deepening the old
ones, and the formal session helped them understand that every
group goes through a certain development cycle and that without
storming they could never get to norming and effective performing
(Tuckman). As a result of the project, participants created new ways
of formal collaboration (such as weekly meetings); some of them
LIOS ALUMNA PROFILE IN COURAGE:
JULIA HARRIS (continued from page 25)
Do I have to tell you that the indomitable Julia is ready for a second
try at that European vacation, along with a couple other adventures:
sky-diving like George H.W. Bush, cross-country skiing, learning to
swim and speak Spanish. “Is it an easy language?” I ask. “It will be,
once I learn it,” she ripostes.
She’s a wise warrior woman, disguised as someone’s diminutive
grandmother, and my conversation with Julia Harris has left me a
little awed. Some lives read like sustaining fiction and the people who
live them resonate with something larger than everyday fortitude.
When, at the end of our talk, I asked Julia to share her defining
moments, her quiet reply immersed us both in the ongoing stream
of experience: “I’m not finished getting defined.”
34

Graduate College
of Saybrook University
r e t u r n s e rv ic e r e q u e s t e d
LIOS GRADUATE COLLEGE
4010 Lake Washington Blvd.
Suite 300
Kirkland, WA 98033
425.968.3400
www.saybrook.edu/lios
l i o s g r a d u a t e c o l l e g e mission
LIOS Graduate College of Saybrook University
promotes healthy, just and sustainable
human systems by educating people
to live and lead with integrity.
l i o s g r a d u a t e c o l l e g e vision
LIOS Graduate School is globally
recognized for its commitment to leadership
development through education that transforms
and engages the community in ways that
heal, strengthen and inspire individuals
and the systems they inhabit.
Saybrook Graduate School/LIOS is 501 (c) 3, nonprofit, equal opportunity institutions. They do not discriminate in matters of employment or participation
in programs, services or benefits on the basis of gender, race, color, religion, national origin, age or sexual orientation, disability or veteran status. Programs,
services and facilities are accessible to disabled individuals. Please contact us in advance if you require special accommodation due to disability.