FOREWORD (SEPTEMBER 2004)When, at an Evergreen Foundation seminar in Salt Lake City in 1990, I heard Jeff Konrad describe how he was healed from a life of aberrant sexual behavior by being taught healthy ways to connect with other people and finally achieve the friendship he had always craved, I was deeply moved. Like Jeff, I had grown up not knowing how to make friends. When the other boys rode off on their bicycles together after school, I stood there miserably lonely, not knowing how to join them. Although I had not strayed onto the sexual deviance path that he had, I understood very well the crucial lack that lay behind it.Starting in 1963, 1 had learned from Virginia Satir how to use family therapy to help my psychiatric patients learn the missing functions they needed for healing. My life changed in 1967 when I realized that I needed to learn these skills as much as they did. I began to see that the most helpful learning always involved becoming more consciously connected with one’s own body, more structurally integrated. In 19691 received the ten-series from Ed Maupin. In 1971, the year I turned 41 and met my present wife Bonnie, the bright light of real friendship entered my life, the payoff from the previous eight years of seeking. That same year I received my training from Ida Rolf; words cannot convey the depth of change this brought to me.Working with Ida deepened what I had already learned from Virginia: that what people need for healing is already within them, as a potential to be activated by whatever healing method is used. Becoming a Rolfer (a lifelong process) enabled me to feel at home inside the human body, unafraid of intense feeling. Part of Ida’s vision was that there is a wisdom in our intended structure that far surpasses any practitioner’s cleverness. I saw that, likewise, what makes good men good is already within them, part of their original design, and can be brought to light by proper lessons. I knew that the standard treatment of sex offenders aimed in an utterly different direction, and I became fired up to show that the principles I had been learning would work much better, which they did.My disappointment was that not one of the other sex offender therapists in Oregon, some of whom were my friends, took an interest in this work, even after I presented it at meetings and they knew it was working. I guess that preparing for this kind of work came more from being a Rolfer than from my extensive mental health credential program training.The following article is presented exactly as it was written in 1993 for publication in a professional journal for sex offender therapists. The name “Internal Correlate” was invented by me on the advice of a colleague who said that, for my work, to be taken seriously by other mental health professionals, it needed a name. So I made one up. My article was refused by each of the three editors to whom I offered it. The one editor who gave a reason said that his editorial board of academics rejected it on the grounds that it did not reflect a standard research format. Similarly, when the local director of probation and parole prohibited further offenders from working with me, he told me he feared that someone might criticize him for allowing those under his supervision to be treated by a method that did not come from published scientific research. Which indeed it did not.
