We’re one week away from the 2024 Dabrowski Congress, and it’s shaping up to be a wonderful event. If you’re a new subscriber and don’t know about this biennial conference dedicated to the theory of positive disintegration, click here for more information. It’s happening next week from July 11-13, 2024, and kicks off from the University of Denver at 1:30 pm MDT.
We’ve been too busy with our preparations to share new writing this week. But we’d like to offer the transcript from the DC2024 workshop preview we shared in Episode 58: Walking Your Talk, Defining Your Personal Values. Chris and Emma will present this workshop to the virtual audience only during next week's conference on Friday, July 12, 2024, at 8 pm MDT [Saturday, 13 July, at 12:00 pm AEST].
We are deeply grateful for our DC2024 sponsors! Please visit our sponsor page. Our sincerest thanks to the individuals and organizations who helped us make this event a reality.
Click the button below to purchase tickets and join us virtually (or in-person):
As always, this transcript has been edited for maximum readability.
Chris: Today, we are going to talk with you a little bit about the workshop that we're going to do. Before we jump into that, I thought I would just kind of give an overview of what the Congress is going to look like, the different sessions, and some basics.
The Congress will take place over three days. On the first day, we'll start in the afternoon here in the Mountain Daylight Time Zone, and there will also be a full day on Friday and a full day on Saturday. Our workshop will be on the first day and only for the virtual audience.
The keynotes and the four workshops will all be 90-minute sessions. There will also be 60-minute live sessions and 30-minute pre-recorded sessions. Those are the three formats that we're working with.
We're excited. There will be a mix of virtual and in-person sessions. With a couple of exceptions, everything will be available, whether you're attending virtually or in person. Two workshops will not be recorded: Catherine Zakoian’s and Lotte van Lith’s. I'm not sure yet about our workshop.
Emma: I think we want to provide a safe space for people to talk about their things. So, if we decide not to record it, we can always produce a video that people can follow along with and do some of the activities themselves at home.
Chris: The title of our workshop is " Walking Your Talk: Defining Your Personal Values.” I look forward to it because I feel like we've talked about it quite a lot on the podcast at this point.
Emma: Even in my videos, I'm always saying, walk your talk, make sure you're walking your talk. Which, when you think about the theory is important because it revolves around values.
Values are our principles or standards of behavior, driven by what we see as important in life. When we talk about authenticity, you have to be acting and behaving in accordance with the standards that you set out for yourself. If there's no alignment, there's no being authentic. So, it's an important component to think about—who you ought to be, what are your values and your standards of behavior, and then act in alignment with them.
Chris: Yeah, it's easier said than done, for sure. I know that you have some information prepared to help us talk about this in a concise way. So, I'm going to pass it off to you now.
Emma: Well, I do, and it's because I've been doing it with my own work and my own autopsychotherapy. This is stuff that I've been through myself. I'm a person who likes to write things down. Particularly because in my journal, with my key learnings, I like to go back and read them to make sure I really learn and absorb them, and I'm really behaving in the way I set out to do.
I brought in some skills from looking at values from a business perspective, but I've also brought in this stuff that I've done with my own inner work. The more tangible you make your values, and the more that you think about what drives them, the better grip that you're going to have cognitively of the picture of that personality ideal and who you want to be.
I thought this was a good topic for a workshop because if people have been through a disintegration, and they feel like their shit's all up in the air and they're not sure who they are, this will help them figure out who it is that they really want to be out in the world.
Chris: That sounds great. And it aligns with what I've been thinking about, too, which is how values help us move through disintegration, or they should. I've thought a lot lately about my times of unilevel disintegration, which felt like such a struggle. Luckily, I have always had some multilevel elements present, and that was what helped me. When you are, say, in a period of addiction, that’s what gets you out of the period of addiction. When you finally figure out what your values are and start living them.
When you reach a point where the higher decision for you is not to do this anymore, not to buy more drugs, not to do it again, you find ways to make that a reality and start walking your talk. But these things are tough, and change doesn't happen overnight. The values discovery and implementation process takes time.
Emma: Even when you're talking about things like trauma, behaviors that you learned through the pain that was inflicted on you through all the people—it takes time to break those habits. Whether we're talking about addictions, or we're talking about acting out of fear or acting out of hurt, those things that we've built up—particularly for those of us who aren't young anymore, and we've built these habits up over a few decades—they do take time to break and remake.
That's why it's really important to have a clear guidebook for yourself to follow, to think about circumstances, and to ask yourself if you are acting in line with my values here. Or am I acting in a way because something has triggered me, and I'm having a panic response or a fear response?
For anyone who's been through disintegration in any way, or if they've got some kind of trauma or gifted trauma, or whatever it is, it's really good to have your own guidebook that you can look to. It's materializing your inner compass so that you can implement that on a daily basis. And it's harder than it sounds.
Chris: It is harder than it sounds. I just had an image in my mind of when I was younger. I went through multiple periods where I would go to my journal and say, okay, I need to develop a new mission statement for myself. Where am I going? What am I doing? I would flesh out:
What is important to me?
What am I doing right now that isn't important to me?
Am I stuck?
Am I in a rut?
What is going on?
When I was younger, I had a really hard time with task initiation—getting myself to do the things that I needed to do. Now, I'm in my 50s, and it's not such a problem anymore. I do things when I need to do them. For the most part, I am not a procrastinator [anymore], but it's taken a long time to get to this point where I am now.
I'm not perfect. I do still make mistakes and not get the things done that I wish I could get done. But when I was young, it was totally different. It was this kind of values work that brought me some clarity.
Emma: As you alluded to before, creating that hierarchy of values is a key element in any disintegration journey. It's one of the key dynamisms. So, I'm hoping that this workshop will help people see values in a clearer, less theoretical way and then help them define their own value statements.
The one thing I want to kick off with in these workshops is looking at the definitions of values and understanding what they are from that standpoint. Touching on the values stack, which we presented for the first time at the Gift-a-Palooza session.
Your values, when we say they're driven by what you see as important in life, are driven by your beliefs, moral and spiritual, and also what you believe to be true about reality. What you know and what you've experienced—they're also driven by your priorities. Literally what you see as important in life. What's the most important thing to you?
Then you've got the standards of behavior driven by that, and that's your values. These standards are your principles. Your actual behavior coming out the other side is you walking your talk. So, it's a four-part stack of what you believe and know, and based on that, what is important to you. Based on both those things, how do you want to behave and what are your standards gonna be. And then making sure that those align with your actual actions. I want to look at understanding those components, and then we're going to go from a bottom-up approach.
Chris: While you were talking about it and describing it, I had in mind the third factor [dynamism]. Accepting and affirming the parts of yourself representing who you want to be and the things that are important to you that you value, and rejecting the aspects of yourself that aren't a part of this value stack anymore. Getting to the actual “walking your talk” part.
Emma: Looking at all those components is also important because when we think particularly about unilevel disintegration, it's often triggered by a disruption at the bottom of the value stack. So, what do I know to be true? When you get new information or have a new experience, sometimes that can challenge your beliefs. Or how you feel about the world, how you feel about yourself, or how you feel about other people.
I think it's a good exercise to look at all those components and not just think about behaviors and values at the top level, because this is all fundamental to positive disintegration. Particularly when we talk about the loosening of values. Where do they start to loosen? Not just at the values level, they can actually loosen right down in your beliefs.
Chris: If you're experiencing unilevel disintegration, sometimes it manifests somatically in your body. So, until you have this conscious awareness, it's hard to make progress. Because if you have something that's going on within you and you're struggling without having awareness of the conflict that's going on, then it's really hard to do anything about it and make progress through it.
I think doing this kind of values work—examining your values, interrogating yourself, and asking yourself questions—helps you increase your self-awareness and figure out what you think and believe.
If you don't have clarity around your beliefs, it’s hard to get anywhere. For me, a big function of my journaling is helping me figure that out. I'm the kind of person who thinks through writing, and so it helps me.
In this values workshop, one of the things we hope to do is help people develop a personal practice around this kind of work.
Emma: I'm glad you said all that because after we looked at the values stack, the next thing I wanted to do, which I did myself, was go through some questions and prompts that help us think about what we believe and what is important to us.
I've got a bunch of exercises that I did myself way back when that helped me think about what was important to me. What did I believe in? We go through all these questions, and you then start to see patterns emerge.
When I did it for me, the one thing that started to emerge was that I placed a lot of importance on people and helping people. The people that I admired had the quality in common of being caring and loving. It could be different for anyone. I've seen this happen where people come up with the environment, animals, and the world around them in that way.
So, it's gonna be different for everyone, but I'm hoping to prompt people to think in that direction so they can figure out, what do I believe? What's important to me?
Also, where their passions are and what's gonna drive them as people.
What are you champing at the bit to do in life?
If we can help people to think about some of those things, we can then use that and the patterns we identify to think about, okay, what are our values from there? If this is the kind of person that we really wanna be and what's important to us, what values and standards of behavior do we need to have in place in order to make that person come into reality?
Chris: Another part of that is giving thought to your ideal. What's your personality ideal?
Who do you look up to regarding values and who do you want to be? Even though your ideal should be self-chosen, this is something that you are figuring out for yourself. You’ve got to start somewhere.
I know that it was important for me to have models of the kind of behavior that I wanted to have as a parent, as a social worker, and as a scholar. In the roles I had along the way, there were people who were mentors to me, people I looked up to as researchers or in the literature. Then there were people I looked up to as parents where I was like, wow, I wish I could parent like you. What could I bring into my parenting practice that I could improve on?
Honestly, that's one of the places where I'm most dissatisfied with myself—how hard it is to be a good parent. It's interesting to me how much easier it's been to develop aspects of myself professionally compared to the messier role that I have as a parent.
Emma: The people who inspire you can be models for that, and you can look at them and say, well how do they behave? What standards and ethics do they reflect that I can take? Really what you're doing is sketching out and then fleshing out your personality ideal.
Then, once you've got that in place, you can think about your standards and behaviors. And this is where I took from the business world of how do we write a tangible value or a standard of behavior that is meaningful and can be operationalized?
I was once listening to Simon Sinek, and he was talking about writing business values. In any workplace, they might have values, and they might be wishy-washy ones, like integrity. What does that mean to your staff? How are they supposed to follow that? You can instead say something like, “We will always speak the truth and act honestly.”
This is a principle I tried to apply when we were writing the Dabrowski Center values. Let's make these actionable, tangible statements that we can follow because that then leads to guiding those behaviors.
So, we'll do an exercise about what a good value looks like when it's written down. And once we have that captured, we can think about the steps.
How do I get from point A to point B?
How do I get from where I am now to being the person I know I ought to be, who lives these values?
And that's what we can then take away with us and give some more thought to—what am I gonna do now to make a change plan to get from, here are the behaviors I'm doing now that I need to break, to here are the new behaviors that I want to have out in the real world?
In my own journal, all my values have a whole page dedicated to them.
What does this look like in practice?
Who do I want to be out in the world?
That helped me realize what changes I need to make in my life. So, I was actually walking my talk.
Chris: One of the most important things to remember when it comes to changing behavior and implementing your practice—walking your talk—is that it takes time. This is not a fast process. I think you're setting yourself up for failure to think that this is something that you can do overnight.
Sometimes, it's more incremental changes that you're making, but you can shift your mindset around things. You can start working harder to think thoughts that will help you get on the path and stay there. There are so many aspects of this, and I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to flesh it out in the workshop.
Emma: I'm excited to pass on some of the skill sets that I've brought in from various parts of my life and be able to give them to other people and say, here's a practical way and how you can get it done. Because I think sometimes, when we think about positive disintegration, we get so wrapped up in theory. It's good to have language and theory to help us make sense of our experiences, but at the pointy end of the day, when you start working on yourself, sometimes you need a plan of action to follow.
I know Dabrowski said that everybody's autopsychotherapy is going to look a little different, but when it comes to values, as you've said, this is a key thing for being able to move through it. Hopefully, the people in our workshop will find this useful, and it can be a practical thing that will help them in their daily lives.
Chris: It's going to be good. We hope to see you there!
Emma: We'd love to see you.
I’ve just read this piece, a month and a half after the Dabrowski Congress. 😹 Yet, seriously, it’s like a cosmic Easter egg that’s lain dormant, waiting for me to be ready to discover it.
Right now, on this very day, it has been insightful and helpful to read this transcript. As you note, these processes take time to gestate and develop in conjunction with our own particular ways of engaging with them (or avoiding engaging with them!). I am struggling with sorting through and executing some profoundly foundational changes I've made to my life. They have been initiated, though still far from a place I would call completion. This piece has helped provide a beginning for a framework (I love flexible frameworks vs. strictly regimented and dictated "plans") for putting these changes, which feel quite daunting at times, into a context that can be meaningful and provide a way through this phase of feeling quite "lost in the forest."
I'm sorry I missed the live workshop, yet I also know that at the time, I was not ready to process it. All things in their time.
Chris noted, "Who do you look up to regarding values and who do you want to be?" That's a great question in general. And specifically, I want to say that both of you are doing work in the context of the Dabrowski Center that is inspirational and powerful in ways that I know I want to emulate in whatever I devise for the next phase of my life. It's important to express this, not only for me, but also because I suspect it's true for many others. Thank you.