Each time I listened to one of these women s stories I

was offered a great gift: the gift of her experience, joys

sorrows,and successes. I could see my life in their

stories--what I had done differently, what I may or may not

do in the future. I saw the support and encouragement we can

receive from one another.

Taking the risk of following your inner voice while listen-

ing to your heart and intuition is the theme that runs through-

out this book. These are stories of women who live their

truths. Trusting themselves has not always been easy, and

many times they have doubted, been afraid, and been criti-

cized. But they have still nmved forward, through adversity

into healing, for themselves and others.

Virginia Satir, often called the "Columbus of Family

Therapy," was one of the first therapists to reach across years

of conventional practice by simply touching her client s hand,

using a gesture of human warmth as a way to heal. She again

breached conventional rules by involving the family in an

individual s therapy. She knew that the family environment af-

fected her clients.

Following her instincts, Claudia Black began to invite the

adult children of her alcoholic clients into her office. Nobody

had done that before. People invited the spouses of the alco-

holic, and perhaps the children living at home, but not the

adult children. She" began ,to see behavioral similarities in

these adult children, and out of that developed a therapeutic

philosophy for this previously ignored population.

As a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago, Elisabeth

Kubler-Ross began a series of lectures on death and dying. To

the chagrin of ninny of her colleagues, she began to ask how

dying clients felt. From her work with the terminally ill she