Power Couple – Power Choices
An Interview with Dr. Brenda Wade & Gerald Harris
Interviewed by Ellie Weiser and Stanley
Stefancic
May/June, 2006
 Dr.
Brenda Wade is a San Francisco-based clinical psychologist, author,
and well-known television personality. Gerald Harris is a senior business
consultant with Global Business Network. His non-profit work includes
community development, regionalism, environmental policy, and education.
Dr. Wade serves on the Hoffman Institute Advisory Council while Mr.
Harris, her husband, serves on the board of directors. Both are graduates
of the Hoffman Process.
Ellie Weiser: You’ve each been on a path
of spiritual growth and personal healing for some time. What influence
did the Process have on your personal development?
Gerald Harris: In my life there’s “before
the Process” and “after the Process.” There was
a point some years ago where I saw enough of the rest of the world
to challenge some of my own personal assumptions. Then I did the
Process, which not only gave me a chance to look at patterns, but
also at relationships, and at ways to build change and really get
on the path of transformation in a more direct way.
Brenda Wade: I like to say I had done everything
known to humankind before I came to the Process. When I came to
the Process I thought, “Well, this will be nice, but probably
isn’t going to pop me through to any new space.” The
truth is that it did, much to my amazement. I didn’t walk
out feeling “I have been transformed,” but six months
later I realized I was doing things in my life that I had never
been able, or willing, to do. I got to another level of self-worth
by confronting my patterns, confronting my parents, the feelings
of abuse from my childhood – my anger and hurt. By confronting
more I cleared more space. That space filled up with self-love and
self-esteem, which allowed me to stop waiting for permission to
work at a higher level.
GH: As you clear out the scar tissue, it gets
replaced with something better, and that becomes empowering and
enabling.
Stanley Stefancic: How has your personal development and healing
affected your relationship with each other?
GH: It was critical that we both did the Process
prior to getting married.
BW: I’m sorry, Honey, but the real story
is I told Gerald I wouldn’t marry him unless he did the Process!
Lucky for me, he’s a really open person because when I described
what the Process is, his exact words were – and I will never
forget them – “That sounds like my idea of hell!”
(Laughter)
GH: Brenda said it was like nine years of therapy
squeezed into a week. I thought, “Who the hell wants that?”
One hour of therapy is enough, much less nine years squeezed into
a week.
BW: I loved his answer. It was perfect –
“Sounds like my idea of hell!”
GH: Fortunately, it was not. The Process empowered
us as individuals and gave us a new language, and skills that help
us get through tough times and understand each other on a deeper
level.
BW: We call ourselves a “two-Hoffman family.”
It’s been a breakthrough because we can turn to each other
and say, “Oh yes, that’s the mother pattern coming up,”
because we have mothers who were very similar. We can identify the
symptoms when those patterns are triggered, so we know what we’re
dealing with.
EW: You have four children, ages 13 to 23. How
did your work at the Process affect your relationships with them?
BW: I’m a lot less anxious about my children
because I know that if I did anything to screw them up, I can send
them to the Hoffman Process. (Laughter)
GH: Just by instinct and by being human, you
tend to parent the way your parents parented. When I took a hard
look at my mother and significant caregivers, I saw the negative
aspects of that parenting and it immediately changed me. It was
a revolution in me because there was tons of stuff that I immediately
dropped. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I used to say
that fear was a legitimate tool in parenting. That’s because
that’s how I was raised. I now parent from a perspective of
love, openness, communication, and possibility versus dominance.
It opened up a lot more space for the kids to be themselves, for
us to communicate on a deeper level.
BW: Using fear as a tool in parenting goes way
back and is an epidemic pattern in the African American community
because it’s a slavery pattern.
EW: Many ethnic groups – African-Americans,
Native-Americans, and Jews – have suffered atrocities. Because
our ancestors were traumatized, oppressed, or victimized, they handed
down painful emotional legacies from one generation to the next.
Brenda, you have studied and written about the emotional legacy
that African-Americans experience as a result of slavery and racism.
What can be done to heal people’s lives and our world?
BW: The first step is to recognize the patterns,
to recognize that there really is a legacy. When we wrote What Momma
Couldn’t Tell Us About Love, we couldn’t get any Black
publishers to publish the book because they all said, “Slavery?
Are you kidding? Slavery has nothing to do with me.”
The woman who published our book at HarperCollins Publishers is
Jewish. She called me and said, “I want you to know why I
am buying this book. I’m Jewish. My family went through the
Holocaust. This is the story of my family.”
It was so powerful to see before me the universality of what we
were talking about. The patterns we carry from centuries of oppression
are not the birthright of any one race, religious, or ethnic group
– they are shared by many.
GH: There is a chapter in my book that I’m
working on, called Black to the Future, that is really on this point.
I think I’ve identified at least two patterns that if Black
Americans don’t get over, it’s going to be really tough
for us in the future. One of those is seeing oneself as a helpless
victim. It has its roots in slavery. But if you stay stuck on that,
then it becomes very debilitating.
The second pattern is self-righteousness. It’s a way of
saying, “Okay, I see myself as being right about history.
And therefore, if I’m in that position of knowing, I can now
attack you. I can completely emotionally disconnect from you because
I am ‘right’.” The self-righteousness that comes
out of that is also quite debilitating.
SS: A lot of self-righteous anger gets repressed and turns into
depression, doesn’t it?
BW: The helpless victim being depressed is supported
by the statistic that about 80 percent of African American women
are estimated to suffer from one or more periods of depression in
their lifetime. I don’t think it’s a conscious pattern
that people see themselves as helpless victims – it’s
under the surface. Once people are aware of feeling like a victim,
that’s the beginning, I think, of an awareness that leads
people out of it. I don’t think we can walk up to someone
on the street and say, “Do you feel like a helpless victim?”
to see if they do. Most people would say, “I feel frustrated;
I feel angry.”
EW: You are both “change agents”
who give generously to educational and non-profit organizations.
What motivates you and what do you hope to accomplish?
BW: I think being a change-agent is one of the
things that can happen when you come from a childhood where there
was a lot of striving to overcome challenges. The striving can lead
to an understanding that the striving isn’t just for me.
GH: I’m going to be bold and say that it
is Brenda’s and my purpose in coming together, being born
at this time, to be one of the couples/people/groups that makes
a contribution that begins the evolution of the Black community
to its next level of community growth and consciousness.
The extent that the Black community makes this evolution, it will
make contributions to the world community at large. I believe we’re
going to be called upon in the future to do that.
BW: I totally agree. I owned maybe 20 years ago
that my life is about being of service to the world. I remember
once having someone ‘put me down’ by saying, “You
know what’s wrong with you? You want to save the whole world.”
And I said, “Well, yes! What’s wrong with that? That
is what I want.”
At the mystical level, we are all one. Any community that achieves
deep healing and transformation connects that community with every
other community. I think the journey of any oppressed person is
the same journey. The tough part is to not get stuck feeling that
only my community needs healing. Only my community suffers. We need
enough open heartedness to recognize the suffering of all people,
and that all people deserve to be lifted out of it.
EW: According to society’s standards, both
of you are very “successful.” Success, however, means
different things to different people. How do you define success
today, and how has your definition changed since doing the Process?
GH: Years ago I told my son that I thought success
was getting a good job. Now I see success as living a life where
I can create and contribute my gift to the world in a way that I
most enjoy and simultaneously generate the kind of economic resources
I need. In realizing that, I changed my professional life so that
I can primarily work for myself.
BW: Regarding success, I have this question that
I use as my yardstick: “How far will the light from this endeavor
travel?” When I’m making decisions about what projects
to take on, or speaking engagements, I ask myself that question.
GH: The only thing that I’m going to add
is that success is also about building relationships. To the extent
that I am trying to reach my highest level, I’m assisting
someone else in doing that. It’s not just about me. It’s
how I contribute to others and how we contribute to each other.
So success to me is really building a set of relationships that
has that kind of flow. If I have a friend who is working on Jewish
issues, how can I contribute to that, or working on educational
issues, how can I contribute to that? I believe that if I’m
contributing to others, then they’ll contribute to me, and
that positive flow is what really enables success. It’s not
about money, or my thing versus everybody else’s.
SS: Gerald, as a futurist and strategic planner, what importance
do you place on new educational models, such as the Hoffman Process,
in giving us access to a better future?
GH: It’s on the cutting edge. Education
is at a point where the old models don’t work any more. “I’m
the expert teacher at the front of the room, you’re the dumb
resource sitting in the chair, and I’m going to pour this
into your head and you’re going to become smarter.”
That model has been completely broken down from many angles. Models
where we begin to see a human being who’s learning from all
different parts of their humanity – spiritual, emotional,
physical, intellectual – in addition to learning a different
approach to the mind, is critical. I don’t believe we’ll
get to the next level of education without that kind of transformation.
Models like the Hoffman Process, that enable the connection between
emotions and spirit, can open up more space, heal scars, depression,
and low self-esteem that are very damaging to learning. I see Hoffman
and other models that deal with the whole person as critical in
education; in fact, without it, public education as we know it will
collapse from the center.
BW: I work with a lot of teachers in my classes
and private practice. Everybody in my family – my mother,
my great-grandfather, my sisters, and my daughter – are all
educators. What we’re finding is that if you go into the classroom
with your patterns, you’re going to act them out and project
them onto the students. Education is being delivered by human beings
that need healing. That’s where the Process can transform,
at a systemic level, by opening a space for people not to project
onto their students; or if you’re an administrator, not to
project onto the teachers; or if you’re a superintendent,
not to project onto the people in the district. We have human beings
at every level bringing their patterns. Look at this country!
EW: Brenda, please tell us about your new book,
Power Choices: 7 Signposts on Your Journey to Wholeness, Love, Joy
and Peace. How did you come to write it and who is it for?
BW: This is my first book post-Process, and I
think that if you compare it to my last two, you’ll notice
that I’ve had a breakthrough and I returned to my own roots.
I wove mythology, classical myths, and stories into the book. I’ve
always had a great love of those stories because I think the hero’s
journey is a wonderful metaphor for what each of us is doing in
our lives. But one of the things that is different in this book
is that for the first time I talk openly about the abuse in my family
without feeling so much shame and embarrassment. I think that’s
a gift from the Process. That was hard because my mother’s
still alive. My sisters are still a big part of my life, and to
“out” everybody in the book was tough. But I really
felt that this was the time to talk about it. Part of my journey
is overcoming all that.
The book is based on the idea that at any given moment, if we’re
conscious of the choices we’re making – and that’s
a very deeply layered process – then where we are on our life’s
journey will make sense.
The signpost idea is that if we understand the steps to the journey,
the journey makes sense. It’s like having a map on any journey.
If you know where you’re going, it’s easier to take
the next step.
EW: Brenda, you just hosted a PBS pledge special
based on Power Choices – please tell us about it.
BW: The exciting thing for Gerald and me is that
we were able to create the “Power Choices” PBS special
together. Around the country the special aired, and will air, in
35 markets, so we are touching a lot of people. One of the history-making
parts of this deal is that I’m the first woman of color to
ever host a national PBS pledge special.
EW: What other Light-driven work or activities
might we see from each of you in the future?
BW: Gerald’s new book will be released
at the end of 2006 or early next year, and there’s a television
series in development that will go with his book that is being cheered
on and supported by Harry Belafonte.
I think the most important thing to say about our work is what
the Hoffman Process says, that life is a process, and it just keeps
unfolding.
GH: I just really want to support the growth
and expansion of the Hoffman Institute because I think it has such
tremendous potential to contribute to the world as a whole. I’m
honored to be a part of it and I want to see it grow and expand.
I admire everyone who is involved in it. I think Raz and Liza Ingrasci
are Light beings and that what they and others are doing at Hoffman
is critical to the world.
BW: I couldn’t say it better. I’m
honored that you considered talking to us. The Process is such a
worthy institution. The more people who get out of their own way,
I think that’s going to bring about world peace.
EW: Thank you both for all you do and for sharing
your Light and Love with the Hoffman community in this way.
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