EVOLUTIONARY POWER INSTITUTE- about us

FOUNDER’S STORY

Julie Colwell grew up transfixed by “Can this marriage be saved?,” a column in the Ladies’ Home Journal wherein the life of some suffering couple, clearly on the brink of divorce, was highlighted in all of its misery. A therapist eventually would swoop in and apply their wondrous skills, often (not always!) snatching the couple out of the jaws of certain demise.

Heady stuff for an eleven-year-old, especially one trying to stay afloat in a family buffeted about by the upheaval of the sixties. Alternating her magazine reading with immersion in Superman comic books, it’s no wonder the idea of “therapist-as-superhero” branded itself into her unconscious.

Julie’s motivation to wrest order from chaos was born out of her personal stew of upbringing factors. Her mom’s depression, chronic health issues, suicidality, and assorted addictions must have originated in undiagnosed trauma (it was the sixties–trauma was barely on the map of psychological theory). Her dad was a classic power-over guy, barely covering his disdain for her mom’s working class origins. She was the fourth of four kids who were left to fight it out amongst themselves, so she understood the impact of hierarchy from the inside. Meanwhile, watching her parents display their main ways of coping–working hard, drinking hard, stoically powering through, while icing each other out with long periods of silence–imprinted into her as the only functional ways to exist. It was unfortunate, sure, that this set up all involved up for lives of anxiety, depression, and disconnection.

The seventies continued her early education in psychology and sociology. Women’s Lib” was all over the news, and Julie stepped out of her rule-following, Girl Scout, whitebread morality when she fell in love with her first girlfriend. She was suddenly catapulted out of simply following what she was told into this crazy world where women were burning their bras and protesting in the streets, while a previously unknown part of herself would not be quelched.

College threw Julie into a wild morass of new ideas and experiences. Women studies’ classes exposed her to classic and current theories of oppression, while the annual Michigan Womyns’ Music Festival opened her eyes to a parade of images of tough, strong, and trailblazing women. She thrilled in experimenting with being a lesbian separatist, loving the clarity of being against, anti-, rebellious. She read Starhawk’s Truth or Dare, planting the seeds of “Power Over/Power Under,” and that third possibility, “Power With.”

After abandoning a brief foray into nursing (her mother had assured her that, as a lesbian, she could at least always get a job as a nurse; Julie finally realized this would mean she could always get a job she hated) Julie took the jump and studied psychology. At the University of Michigan in 1978, this meant immersing in Freudian and psychodynamic theory, including its homophobic underpinnings. (During one lecture, the professor listed homosexuality as pathologies equivalent to pedophilia and bestiality.)

At this point, the reader could look ahead and predict how Julie was doing, emotionally. Indeed, the glee of new discoveries alternated with ongoing depression, anxiety, and self-hatred. She finally sought out personal therapy, which began a long journey of sorting out how to actually be of this world. Her mind was brimming with psychological concepts that she tried to apply to living, which vaguely helped some of the time.

Julie’s twenties were as chaotic as most. Her job as a naive white girl at a group home for adolescents from inner city Detroit was experiential education in power dynamics, racism–and a first magical moment of watching the right words in the middle of a conflict make all of the difference in bringing people back into connection. She was in long-term relationships where tried everything she knew about relationships–and tried, and tried. And was flummoxed at how what she knew didn’t actually help sort out difficulty.

Going to graduate school in Clinical Psychology at the University of Colorado in 1984 meant further immersion in psychodynamic theory, and shored up her reliance on naming what is wrong, bad, pathological as she developed her ability to diagnose psychopathology. Even within that framework, however, her old lesbian-feminist roots took hold. She learned about family therapy and systems theory, both of which were in their heyday. Serendipitously she found the writings of Judith Hermann and the Stone Center out of Wellesley College. Suddenly she was reading theorists who argued that the Western European high regard of “rugged individualism” was quite misplaced. They touted “Self-in-Relation” theory, showing how humans (and especially women) develop, not out there all alone on the prairie, but through the mutuality relationships. In other words, instead of the epidemic of “co-dependency” that others were sounding the alarm about, the Stone Center folks described healthy relationships as the vehicle for individual development.

Julie examined these presumptions more carefully with her Masters thesis and dissertation. Curious to test whether the psychodynamic concern about “lesbian fusion” was accurate, she developed an assessment tool, the Merging/Disengagement Scale, using it to compare levels of merging (ultimately defined as “anxiety around aloneness) and disengagement (“anxiety around closeness) in same-sex versus opposite-sex couples. (She found, to her surprise, that lesbians didn’t “merge” most, they “disengaged” least. In fact, gay men in her sample “merged” most.)

What Julie was learning from books and theories were nothing compared to her real-life challenges in her intimate relationship, as well as her relationship with herself. Upon graduation, and setting out to build her career, she continued to apply what she learned about relationships growing up. Power struggles were rampant. Whether she won or lost those battles seemed to result in the same outcome: feeling terrible. Not all the time for sure–so long as she could sustain a sense of romance and idealization (of herself, her partner, her career) she could swim over her anxiety, guilt, depression. But it was waiting for her to plunge back into.

More psychotherapy helped. And then, one day she stumbled on a book, Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-commitment, by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. It was the subtitle that got her: “A way to be fully together without giving up yourself.” This was what she was trying to sort out in her dissertation. She savored the Hendricks words, and started trying out their concepts with her clients. It was the fateful day with her partner, though, that made her a convert. Stuck in another power struggle, sitting across from each other on the floor, arms mutually crossed, Julie’s partner picked up Conscious Loving and started asking questions:

How do you feel? [Easy. ANGRY]

What do you want? [FOR YOU TO STOP BEING A JERK]

What are you getting out of staying stuck? [Whaaaaat?? Hmmm? WHAT? Now that’s interesting…]

Suddenly a whole new world opened up. The world of the unconscious, but in a way that Julie could touch with her curiosity.

She knew she had to find these people.

Julie’s first experience with Gay and Katie Hendricks was an eight-day “Conscious Relationship” training at a beautiful retreat center in Wilsonville, Oregon. Gay and Katie called their work “Body-Centered Transformation.” Julie breathed, she moved, she learned about speaking the unarguable, “microscopic” truth. This strange new world of being in her body stunned her. She felt increasingly alive and happy and expanded. Her existential doubts and anxious ruminations receded behind a great wave of connection, vitality, and passion. She woke up (and in fact, was barely sleeping by the end of the training, whereupon she “upper-limited” and got laryngitis).

She felt GREAT. And she realized she wanted to feel that way all the time.

Reentry was jagged. Julie extolled her amazing experiences to her partner and friends, even gathering them with newsprint and easel, trying to communicate her miraculous experience. Of course, her loved ones had not a clue what she was trying to describe (in retrospect, she wondered if they thought she’d joined a cult). Her excitement dulled down in the following couple of weeks, leaving her to wonder if she had simply experienced a “workshop high.”

But it was too good to give up on. So Julie signed up for the next Hendricks workshop she could find. And felt it again, like the sun reemerging after a long, dark winter. She vowed to herself to find a way to live this way, and to have playmates who would challenge her to stay awake. Learning about intentions and commitments, Julie made her lifetime commitment: To create conscious community.

Julie continued to see clients while training intensively with the Hendricks, now with the challenge of integrating the pathology-based theories she’d been immersed in during graduate school with her life-changing experiences of Body-centered Transformation. Meanwhile, Julie was absorbing the ideas of other theorists during the nineties and aughts. Trauma theory finally burst forth, which started bringing the actual body into psychotherapy. She found David Hawkins “Map of Consciousness,” highlighting Hawkins delineation of “power,” which was a connection to expanded states (e.g., love and joy) and “force” which was an expression of reactive states (e.g., anger and fear). She learned about interfacing and working with energetic fields of nature through her teacher, Ethel Greene. She discovered Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, which proved to be complementary with Hawkins’ map.

The early nineties were also a dark time for LGBT issues. Amendment Two, a statewide referendum legalizing discrimination against lesbians and gay men, was passed in Colorado. Julie joined the local anti-oppression group, Valuing Diversity, and worked to bring understanding to targeted outgroups. She started “Enhancing the Dance,” workshops that taught the Hendricks’ tools for conscious relationships, to provide gays and lesbians extra support.

All of these pieces began coming together into a tapestry of a new model of transformation. Harkening back to Starhawk’s description of “Power Over/Power Under/Power With” that she’d encountered back in the 70’s, Julie built a new framework of human functioning and how people change. She began building her own Inner Map, synthesizing Hawkins, Porges’, the Hendricks with the work of Marc Bekoff and Temple Grandin, who focused on the inner world of mammals. She theorized that all mammals experience the same range of states, from the most expanded to the most contracted, and that each of these states is adaptive, that maladaptation results from being unable to shift out of those states (a difficulty that is a mostly human characteristic due to our use of language).

While developing these concepts with clients and students, Julie founded and directed a nonprofit called “the Boulder Center for Conscious Community” making good on her commitment of creating conscious community. The community at the BC3 proved to be an excellent place to test out the ideas that eventually grew into the development of her own body of work Julie calls “Evolutionary Power.”