Author Your Life

What is Life Authoring?

People generally know what authoring is, as for example authoring a book. Can one author one’s life?

While this sounds somewhat queer and pretentious, I have done it and can say it works as a serious self-coaching method that facilitates overcoming child trauma and sexual frustrations, resolving a ‘rejection complex’ or liquidating a stagnant Oedipus Complex; and it helps realizing unused talents, virgin potential, or an ‘old dream’.

There are three concise elements or techniques in life authoring. None of them was invented by myself, but I have developed them into elements of a coherent system of tools, or method.

The Life Authoring Manual
by Pierre F. Walter
ISBN 978-1-453718-32-2

Published at Amazon.com. See all of Pierre’s Amazon Publications.

Read Online (Scribd)

Story Writing

You write not only your life story, but you write also short stories about certain themes, answering key questions or describing symbols. You write not in a normal writing style but in what is called stream-of-consciousness writing, which is writing without thinking, letting your unconscious directly express itself through your fingers. It’s a technique that you can learn.

Creative Prayer

Joseph Murphy was the main propagator of this technique that originally was invented in 1927 by Ernest Holmes, author of the The Science of Mind (1938/1998).

Voice Dialogue and Spontaneous Art

What is Voice Dialogue or Inner Dialogue?

The inner dialogue is a technique to get in touch with our inner selves through relaxation or self-hypnosis and subsequent dialogues with one or several of our inner selves, in a state of light trance. The state of light trance can be self-induced, with no facilitator needed, and outside of a psychotherapy. The inner dialogue should ideally be fixated on paper, at least in the beginning, because the voices that come up, are very soft and writing down the dialogues helps to keep focus.

The technique is also called voice dialogue, for example by Stone & Stone, in their book Embracing Our Selves (1982). However, the expression could mislead novice users as the ‘voices’ are not really voices of course, as they are not to be heard with our ears, but something like intuitions, or flashes of insights, or sudden precisely formulated thoughts that seem to come ‘from nowhere’.

Inner selves are energies in our psyche that form part of our total and integral wholeness. In the ideal case, they should be balanced and in harmony with each other. This means that all inner selves ideally should work in synch, as a sort of inner team. It is essential that all members of this inner team are fully awake and communicate with each other.

In most people’s psyche, however, the inner child is somnolent or asleep, and either the inner parent or the inner adult are hypertrophied and dominate the psyche. While the truth about our inner selves goes back to Antiquity, the insight in modern times has been made fruitful for psychiatry through Eric Berne in 1950, the founder of Transactional Analysis (TA). Eric Berne recognized three essential inner selves: Inner Child, Inner Parent and Inner Adult.

In my own research and work with the inner dialogue during an Erickson hypnotherapy, I encountered the presence of additional entities such as the Inner Controller or Inner Critic as the instance in the psyche that represents the societal, cultural and moral values that we have internalized through education and conditioning. If the Inner Controller hijacks the psyche, we are unable to realize our love desires.

In addition to these inner selves, I encountered an entity of superior wisdom that I called Lux and a shadow entity I called Sad King, which embodied repressed emotions that had turned into sadistic drives.

Inner Child

The inner child is a psychic entity, part-personality, or psychic energy, created between our 7th and 14th year of life, and that is part of our inner triangle. Positively, the inner child energy is primarily emotional and wistful, predominantly creative. It is the motor of every human being’s creativity. It can be said to be the creative motor, the very source energy in humans that makes that we can be spontaneous, creative and sometimes a little mad, to go beyond the limiting framework of the rational and repetitive mind. Negatively, the inner child is either mute or cataleptic so that its energy cannot manifest, or else its energy is turned upside-down which makes an inner child that is rebellious, capricious, willful or overbearing, producing the ‘clochard’ personality, the ‘hippie’, the ‘anarchist’, the ‘eternal student’ and abuser of the social system.

Inner Adult

The inner adult is a psychic entity, part-personality or psychic energy that represents our logical thinking, our reason, our maturity. Positively, it makes for our balanced decisions, our down-to-earth attitude and our sense for daily responsibilities. Negatively, the inner adult manifests as the intellectual nerd or through emotional frigidity, cynicism or an obsession to measure human relations on a scale of reasonableness or straightness without considering the emotional dimension. The hypertrophied inner adult energy plays a major role in modern education where it results in devastating damage on the next generations’ emotional integrity. The hypertrophied inner adult also produces the ‘professional skeptic’, the obnoxious ‘total rationalist’ who considers ten percent of the human nature as predominantly important, flushing the other ninety percent down the toilet!

Inner Parent

The inner parent is a psychic entity, part-personality or psychic energy that represents our inner value standards, our moral attitudes, our caring for self and others, but negatively also our judging others, our I-know-better attitude or blunt interference into the lives of others without regard for their privacy. The hypertrophied inner parent energy plays a dominant role in tyrannical and persecutory societal, religious and political systems.