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Bringing THE ENCHANTED SELF to the Public
by Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein
Dear Readers,
I thought you might enjoy some of the history of THE ENCHANTED SELF and the Enchanted Self newsletters. There was an ENCHANTED SELF paper newsletter that made it around the world and many other Enchanted Self projects prior to Enchantment in An E-mail. What follows are excerpts, with updates, from a talk I gave at the American Psychological Association several years ago. I hope you enjoy it! I would love to hear from you. Please send questions, thoughts and reactions to me at encself@aol.com
Sincerely, Dr.Barbara Becker Holstein
When did I first start to have my love affair with the public? Was it when I had accumulated enough wounds listening to negative news day after day without any relief in sight? Was it when I had collected enough of a hole in my own heart feeling that something was missing in our mental health system from ways that we’ve perceived each other were not helping me as a client nor me as a therapist or you as the client or therapist feel as whole or as optimistic an enhanced about life as we could. Was it when I decided to interview women who were not in my practice and see how the various messages we received in childhood affected us often? These negative and critical messages from parents, from others, from teachers?
Or was it when the women I interviewed surprised me and forced me into one of those truly “Aha!” moments when I saw the resilency within these women no matter what they had absorbed in childhood, that they had places in their hearts and in their ways of being for living what I later termed “an enchanted life.” That they had ways of accessing a sense of well being, a purpose, of doing things they enjoyed, of giving back to the world in a positive way. Their only limitation was that they often were so dismissive of what they could offer the world and themselves!
Was it when I finally put all of this together and developed a paradigm shift which I was able to bring into my treatment room where I was able to finally access in a determined fashion more of my clients’ lost potential, my clients’ strengths and abilities and help them to recognize and claim and applaud these parts of themselves. I’m not sure when the moment came. Maybe it was even more simple. Maybe it was the moment that I remembered, that as a child, I had always loved to travel and dreamed of having pen pals and knowing different people from different parts of the world and decided that I could do that now, as an adult and that a good way to do it would be send out a newsletter. I knew it should be a newsletter of well being that would connect me to others in positive ways!
The first ENCHANTED SELF newsletter was birthed with the help of my collaborator at the time, Doreen Laperdon-Addison. We put together on paper a four page newsletter and ultimately an eight to twelve page newsletter. We published and distributed and did whatever we could to get it to the public. We left it in libraries, on trains, in coffee shops and bookstores. I developed a mailing list of anyone and everyone I met whether it was at a meeting, vacation, etc. We sent most of these newsletters for free although on occasion, people did subscribe. At one point, we actually had 90 paying customers. However the drive to engage the public in positive thought and action was much stronger within me than the drive to commercially make any profits on this newsletter.
We published the newsletter approximately six times a year at our own expense. Later we dropped it to four times and ultimately stopped although I have paper newsletters to send to you, just send me a note requesting a sample!
About eight years ago, with the help of a very creative writer and artist that I met on a summer vacation, my web page started – http://www.enchantedself.com/ This has been ongoing ever since with several metamorphoses. If you haven't come to my site, please do come as it is full of learning opportunities, excerpts from my books, stories, all the archives from e-mail newsletters, special enchanted self products and books and lots of audio clips to listen to.
This e-mail newsletter which you are reading is the golden stepchild of the original, paper newsletter. Much of the skills for putting out an e-mail newsletter I learned in Ben Dean’s coaching course which I took several years ago. I love reaching you via this e-mail newsletter, which has been less costly, and in some ways, even more fun than the paper newsletter. I now have over 2000 subscribers! Instantaneously, twice a month, I can share some positive teachings and I can bring some magic to my love affair with the public through incorporating in this newsletter my personal style: a blessing, a recipe for enchantment, an inspirational quote. This is fun!
Currently I have moved to the state-of-the-art technology "my blog". Join me at: http://www.enchantedself.typepad.com/
My love affair with the public has probably has been most intense for me around my radio and television work. I think back as a child, spending hours and hours looking at the back of our radio on Howard Avenue in New Haven and looking and even taking out those tubes from the back, that looked like little light bulbs. As a child I wondered how in the world do these tubes permit us to hear all these stories and people talking and comedies that we listened to all week long on the radio. I was amazed and I fell in love, really in love, with the radio and its powers. Just the idea of somehow, of the notion of sound waves going out forever and ever, sending positive messages instead of negative to people around the world is still unbelievable and wonderful to me. And now, with the computer capacities to archive the voice, my shows, THE ENCHANTRESS WITHIN, can be heard 24/7 by going to http://www.ladybuglive.com/ or coming to my site, http://www.enchantedself.com/. This is worldwide! I am still in awe, thinking of the lady having tea, listening to me in India after the children are in bed!
My love affair has even taken me to television! My television opportunities actually started at an APA conference when I met Jean Cirillo who is a nationally known media psychologist. She invited me on a show she had been co-hosting for years, Prime Time Life, Uniquely You Now. This led to me being a monthly guest and ultimately when she left the show, because she became so busy in terms of media work, I made a decision to become one of the permanent hosts. My show cycles in the month with other mind body spirit shows. My show, THE ENCHANTED SELF is aired on Manhattan Neighborhood on the third Wednesday of each month at 5:30 P.M. I then get to bring in down to Monmouth County where I live and it airs every weekat 10:00 P.M. on Cablevision.
In terms of my love affair with the public, the passion has had to come from within myself. It is my believe in the positive potential of the media, the potential of sending good news out, that gives me solace when I don’t receive direct feedback. When no one responds to what I throw out into the universe-whether it is an e-radio show or an e-mail newsletter I have to pull from deep within myself. I listen to that deep inner voice that reminds me, “Share the knowledge. Don’t give up.” I think that this compulsion comes from the self-pain, the agony that I have experienced at times in a negative world. It also comes from an intuitive awareness that effort and even more effort will eventually have impact. And in this case one and one will someday make more than two. There is a slow magnification of truth. There is a persuasive level that is eventually reached. There is a 'tipping point' at which time your ideas are finally part of the public ethos.
Let me summarize by saying that what I do day to day in the treatment room is to teach people how to find their potential and their own uniqueness. And that is exactly what I have done in going to the media. I am teaching people I may never meet how to develop hope and live out their dreams. I hope people feel uplifted and proud of themselves after listening to me or reading my materials. I hope you are feeling a surge of positive energy and go forward in life with a bounce in your step and with optimism about your own life.
Yes, I get filled up in positive ways sharing with you. So in fact, it’s been a very successful love affair! I wish everyone a chance to have this type of wonderful love affair. It hurts no one and helps everyone!
Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein, originator of THE ENCHANTED SELF®, a method of bringing delight and meaning into everyday living, invites you to view her new line of ENCHANTED WOMAN products, downloadable e-books, and free gifts at http://www.enchantedself.com.
Visit her BLOG at : http://www.enchantedself.typepad.com/
THE ENCHANTED SELF® is a registered trademark of Dr. Barbara Becker Holstein.