Nancy E. White, psychologist, therapist
Interviewed in Palm Spring, California. January 20th, 2007.
Born: 1935, in San Angelo, Texas
“To intensely feel pleasure or pain is to really live. Trying to block out painful or unpleasant experiences of the day or night leads to a muting of all your feelings and to distancing from life itself… Cultivate your instinctive drive to taste all of life.”
— Gayle Delaney in “Living Your Dreams,” HarperCollins, 1996, p.15
NW:
I would have to start my story in the womb.
My birth was fairly unusual in that my parents had been married for 13 years and thought they could never have children. When my mother was pregnant they were ecstatic and my father began programming me in the womb with the idea that I was brilliant. When I was born he immediately started teaching me, and before I was a year old I could hold a conversation.
My purpose was set in the womb, and my purpose was learning. That’s always been my identity. I’m interested in so many things, and my ADD contributes to that by giving me this open focus in which everything catches my attention. I want to know about everything, and I want to do it.
As I went to school I found that I didn’t function like everybody else. My learning was unique and my thoughts were unique. Luckily this was in a world before the classrooms were large and the teachers were impatient. It was before they thought teaching had to do with how well you did on a test.
I wanted to be constantly engaged and stimulated and my ADD expressed itself by my talking and interrupting. I was faster than the other kids so as soon as I was finished with something I started interrupting everybody else. They saw that as interruptive, but they didn’t see it as bad, and they didn’t think there was anything’s wrong with me. Instead, they would immediately find something else for me to do.
I went through school thinking that since I was different, and since my father had taught me to think that I was so smart, I figured there was something wrong with everybody else. Of course in today’s world people would say that something was wrong with me and it was everybody else who was OK. I was very fortunate that I missed that.
When I got to high school — my father was a perfectionist — if I brought home an “A” he’s say, “Didn’t they give A+’s?” If I brought home a score of 100 he’d say, “Didn’t they give extra credit?” Nothing was ever quite enough. Being an only child and a girl — and I had a very loving father even though he was a perfectionist — I would have done anything to please him. In retrospect, when I look back, I think he was a bit depressed. I was always looking for a way to make him feel better. I worked very hard to be class valedictorian, not so much for me but because I thought it would really please him, which it did.
My mother had made me think that after high school a woman went to college for a couple of years, found a man, got married and had children. It was back far enough ago that women didn’t really have careers, if they did they were either nurses or teachers, and certainly didn’t want to be a nurse or a teacher. I didn’t even consider a career.
I was an artist and I went to the University of Texas, at Austin with the intention of finding a husband. I met one who was a major in the Air Force and who was stationed in Waco, which is where I grew up. So I married, fulfilling exactly what I had programmed myself to do.
I married quite young because part of my programming was to think that once I was over 20 I was an old maid. I got married by 19 and had a child by the time I was 20. And then I had another child 2 years later. But then my husband was killed in a plane crash, and that wasn’t part of the program. I didn’t know how to take care of myself. So my next quest was to find another husband who would take care of me.
I had a friend who was teaching school in Houston and I said, “Hmm. This is a nice city. I think I’ll just move here.” So I went to Houston with my two little children. There I met a friend I’d gone all the way through grade school and high school with — he was kind of like a brother to me —and he said, “Oh, I have a new roommate. His wife died in childbirth, and he’s a young lawyer at Baker Botts.” Baker Botts is one of the finer, snobby law firms of the country who only takes the top graduates from law school. Because of that I knew that he was bright, and that he could support me and take care of my children. I decided to marry him before I met him! (Laughs). So I married him, and we had two more children.
LS:
Did personality play a role, or was it more a matter of willingness and convenience?
NW:
Actually, yeah it did. Bob was so bright, one of the smartest people I’ve known in my whole life. Before we married we had these wonderful conversations; that was really neat. And then we literally walked down the aisle, walked out of the church, and he never talked to me again.
His wife had died in childbirth and, 18 years later when we were doing a psychodrama weekend — he hated the world of psychology, and therapy and so forth, but he realized that I had about had it and that I was on my way out the door, so he agreed to go to this weekend with me — so he did a psychodrama in which he apologized to his dead wife for having betrayed her by getting remarried to me. That answered a whole lot of questions as to why we’d had such a strange relationship and why he wouldn’t talk to me.
I guess that was the most… I don’t know the right word… nebulous period of my life. I kept searching for things to express myself. I had been programmed that being a mother was how I was supposed to express myself.
Here I have four children by this time, and I’m raised as an only child so I’m really confused. It’s chaotic to have four children, especially when you’ve grown up in an absolutely quiet household as an only child. I needed some way to express myself so I took up sewing and I made beautiful clothes: designer-type finish work. That didn’t quite do it, so I decided to go back and start painting again. I had only gotten two years of an undergraduate degree…
LS:
Why only two years?
NW:
Because I got married; that was part of the program! I only intended to do two years! (Laughs) My father made such a deal about my grades and all, but nobody ever said it was important to do anything. I was just supposed to excel so that I could talk about it.
So I said to Bob one day — at this point my youngest child was about 12 or so — “You know, I think I’ll go back to school and get my degree.” And he looked at me and said, “Well, in my experience people who talk about things never do them.” That was the end of that conversation. But I did go back to school, I went to the University of Houston and by this time I had gotten into therapy and was fortunate to have phenomenally talented mentors.
I was in a lot of emotional pain with the chaos of my life, so I heard about this therapist that did Rolfing. (Rolfing is a usually painful “deep-message” technique that works to restructure both the body and the mind. – Ed.) I went to him and he did Rolfing and training, he was a clinical psychologist and he taught psychology at the University of Houston but he was bored with it, and he got bored with his patients, so he would train you to be a therapist, or he would Rolf you. I did 10 Rolfings in two and a half weeks and that was about all that I could take! (Laughs) I thought, “OK, I’ll get the training.” I was just fascinated with therapy.
He was one of these people — this was back in the 1970’s — who was way beyond his time: he was always talking about quantum physics, and quoting passages from the book “Seven Arrows” (by Hyemeyohsts Storm), and it was just an amazing opening for me. He is still probably my biggest influence as a therapist.
One of the things he taught me was, “Never block process. Never block process. Then you get pathology.” That is one of the reasons that I’m so adamant about medication, because medication blocks process, and then people become stuck and never fully come all the way through. And this is now beginning to come out in the literature.
I went through the training programming in gestalt therapy and then thought I’d better get my “war paint” (Laughs) I’d better get the credentials. That was when I started back to school. Bob was not very supportive. He looked down his nose as if I was entertaining myself. I did 66 hours in 16 months and everybody said, “What is your hurry!?” It was like, “I don’t know!” It was like a compulsion.
I was about 6 weeks from graduating with my undergraduate degree when Bob, my husband — a very healthy, 47 year old man who’d run marathons — went into convulsions and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He lived 11 months. I suppose that intuitively this was my hurry. I immediately went to graduate school and started a Masters degree in behavioral science with a focus on art therapy. In the middle of my first year in graduate school Bob died. There I was, this spoiled little — no, cancel that — I wasn’t spoiled. I was Daddy’s little girl who’d been taken care of. But suddenly I was the matriarch of all these people; it was a surprise.
LS:
What people?
NW:
Four children and my mother, because my father was dying also, at the same time as my husband was dying. So here the two men that had taken care of me most of my life were leaving. That left me alone.
For about a year after I graduated, maybe two years, I worked toward getting some sanity back into my life. I come from a very addictive family so I had four teenagers on drugs and alcohol.
I opened a little office and started doing marriage and family therapy. Then two years later I was having lunch with a friend and he said, “Oh, I’m going to go start a doctoral program next Wednesday.” I said, “That sounds interesting, where are you going and what are you going to do?” He said, “I’m going to Union Graduate School.” I said, “I think I’ll go too!” (Laughs)
I went back to my office, that was on Thursday afternoon, called Union Graduate School and said, “I’d like to get into the Doctoral program.” And they were like, “What! There’s a lot to do to apply to a Doctoral program. We have all these papers and stuff to fill out.” I said, “Can’t you overnight them to me?” Overnighting something was a big deal back then but they did it. I spent the weekend writing my life’s story, filling out all these papers, and sent it back on Monday. They OK’ed it and on Tuesday they called me to say, “You can come tomorrow.” That’s how I got into my doctoral program.
People come to me and say, “I don’t have any goals!” And I say, “Uhh… I’ve never had any goals either!” (Laughs) If I had goals they would have acted like blinders and I wouldn’t have noticed what was going on. I just notice what’s happening around me and if it interests me I go after it, and if doesn’t I walk on past. That’s kind of the way I’ve handled life.
LS:
You wait until you get to an exit before deciding
whether you’ll take it.
NW:
That’s right! Which ever direction looks
the most interesting! (Laughs) I went to that graduate school and found it
absolutely so rewarding.
LS:
What happened to the kids?
NW:
By this time my youngest was 16 or 17, they were a bit of a mess and I couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I was totally powerless. My youngest son just told me last week, “Mom, when you thought you could take over and tell us what to do when Dad died, there was no way that was going to happen.” So I had four of them against me, they were basically doing their own thing, and I had very little influence.
At Union I went to seminars and colloquiums, and did a lot of work and reporting. Virginia Satir and Jean Houston were on my doctoral committee as well as other highly creative, amazing people. I was able to explore all of these wonderful things that interested me.
The stuff they were doing at Union was just so incredibly interesting and engaging that it was like such an opportunity. I loved that and worked really hard. I was working full time and going to school full time. I would work all day, then I would go home and do all the things I was planning to do for school, and then I would go to bed at around 2 in the morning, and get up the next day and do it all again.
LS:
Are you normally such a hyper-energetic person?
NW:
No. I said to myself at the time, “I have really abused my body, I hope it will forgive me.” I said that about a month before I graduated. I’d had a lump in my right groin, but I didn’t have time to be bothered with it. After I graduated, like the next week, I went to a doctor and he said, “Oh my god, you’ve got to go right to the hospital.” And I said, “Ehh, it’s just a blocked lymph node.” And he said, “No, you’ve got to go to the hospital.”
They took the lump out. I was really picky. I wouldn’t let them give me a general anesthetic; they had to do it under a local. I made them put nice music on. (Laughs) Then the doctor came in and he said, “I have bad news. It was malignant and it metastasized from somewhere else. We think it was from your uterus,” which they had removed several years before.
I’d been through this same kind of ordeal with my husband, and I’d gotten very interested in the Simonton’s and their cancer counseling center in Fort Worth. (The Cancer Counseling and Research Center of Fort Worth – Ed.) Carl Simonton was at the beginning of the mind-body approach that used imagery to heal. I had some pretty strong ideas about treating cancer and I wasn’t about to let them destroy me.
LS:
But the cancer was gone and so was the source of it. What were they proposing to do?
NW:
They wanted to shred all of my lymph nodes in my lower abdomen, right groin, and upper right thigh. And I said, “I don’t think so!” So I went to an immunology clinic in San Diego and really changed my life overnight. I became a vegetarian, I became very conscious of health and the mind-body connection. That was a real gift.
When I was in graduate school, when Bob had the cancer, I wrote a thesis on Cancer as a Socially Accepted Suicide. I ended that saying that cancer could be a gift for growth if one would allow it to be.
When I was diagnosed with metastasized lymphatic cancer — which is usually extremely serious — I just thought, “OK, this doesn’t fit for me. I think I have to go by what I wrote.” That’s what I did.
LS:
So at this point you were 32, right?
NW:
No (Laughs) at this point I was old. I’d been married 18 years with my second husband. I was 43. I went back to school at 40 and then I went to Union,… I think I went into my doctoral program when I was 50.
I graduated and got my Ph.D. and practiced for a few more years just in my little office all by myself. I was noticing that when I worked with couples that they would come in very, very angry and — if I had long enough to work with them — there was a moment in time where something just shifted. After that they were in rapport and they were fine. And I thought, “This is amazing. How can I possibly create this and measure this.” The only thing I could think of was an EEG. (Electroencephalograph, a machine that measures electrical fields originating in the brain. – Ed.)
I didn’t even know what an EEG was, except that it had something to do with the brain. That’s all I knew! (Laughs) So I went around telling everybody, “I’ve got to have an EEG! I’ve got to have an EGG!” And they were saying, “An EEG doesn’t do anything! It’s not that accurate. What are you going to do with an EEG?” But when I get a thought in my head, that’s what I’m going to do.
I got this big, white elephant EEG machine for $13,500 from Autogenics and my friends were right: it didn’t do anything! (Laughs) I just knew you could do something with an EEG, but there was nobody else using them.
LS:
Did you keep at it?
NW:
The damn thing wasn’t even working. We eventually discovered that the reason it wouldn’t work — computers were pretty new at this time — was because in shipping a bunch of chips had come loose. I had all of these people trying to get it to work, but it wouldn’t work.
A year after I’d gotten this white elephant I was in Atlanta, Georgia at the American Psychological Association Convention. I found the Autogenics booth and I was raising hell when I looked across the aisle of the exhibit hall and here was this color monitor — this was 1987 — and I went, “Ahhhh! What’s this!?” And he said, “Well, that’s brain synchrony.” I said, “Maybe that’s what I’m looking for!” (Laughs)
I started talking to this guy, who later turned out to be Adam Crane (R. Adam Crane is the founder of many important neurofeedback organizations – Ed.) and he was telling me about research that had just come out where this fellow named Penniston, at the Fort Lyon Colorado VA Hospital, worked with alcoholics and had great success and published his research. I said, “Ahhhh! That’s probably what I want to do!” He said, “We’re working on hardware and software for that which should be out right away.” I said, “I want to do it.”
I was one of the first in the nation and I got one of the first machines with this software. We were trained by Gene Penniston in Philadelphia and started doing the Penniston Protocol. (Which uses EEG-based neurofeedback to train alcoholics to get over their addiction – Ed.) We thought that since we had this great thing the world was going to knock the doors down to try to get to us. Wrong! (Laughs) Wrong!
LS:
But that was for alcoholics. How were you using it?
NW:
Well, I had intended to use it for alcoholics except that the city of Houston is probably the most conservative medical and 12-step city on the planet. (Referring to the 12-Step method of Alcoholics Anonymous – Ed.) The 12-step people think that all you need is 12 steps. They wouldn’t even talk about anything else, and alcoholics don’t really want to get sober anyway! (Laughs) When you say to alcoholics, “Here’s an expensive program, don’t you want to be sober and have your life working?” They say, “No, I want to decide for the next 24 hours what I want to do!”
At that time I had my office in the same building as my friend Frank, who was a psychiatrist and who knew about and believed in the Penniston work. When he had a patient that he didn’t know what else to do with, he would send them to me. I got patients with all of these wonderful different diagnoses.
One guy was referred with a panic disorder. Frank had tried all these medications and nothing had helped so he said, “Nancy, see what you can do.” This guy had to drop out of college because he had Epstein-Barr virus. Three quarters of his way through his Alpha-Theta program the Epstein-Barr virus disappeared. Alpha-Theta training seems to be great for the immune system. His panic disorder disappeared too. It just kind of evolved: we had this one, and other patients would come in with different disorders.
LS:
What were you doing at this point? The Penniston Protocol on these guys?
NW:
Uh huh! Oh, the Penniston Protocol will really do a lot more than people think it will do.
LS:
Did you know that, or were you just doing it because
that’s what you had?
NW:
I was doing it because these were the people who came in, and that’s what I had. (Laughs)
LS:
There’s sort of a kind of courage in that, isn’t there?
NW:
Well, uh, yeah! The amazing thing was that we had remarkable successes with the first few people. It gave us lots of courage that we could do anything.
About a year later I heard that they were creating software for ADD. I didn’t even know what ADD was but I said, “We’ve got a machine so why not do that too?” So, being a responsible person, I went to Barnes & Noble to look for a book on ADD to figure out what it is. They had one little tiny book, a tiny little thing, on ADD. I bought it, went home, and after about 3 or 4 pages I wanted to put it down and cry because there was my entire family: me, my father, my children. It answered so many questions! (Laughs) So I started treating ADD, and it’s evolved from there.
Basically, I created a wellness model. We have multitudes of things in our office and we were busy creating this thing that’s become the whole field of neurofeedback. I was in this field before it was a field. There were the original researchers — as well as Margaret Ayres out in California — and there was Nancy (Laughs).
LS:
Did knowing that you were on the forefront of something
contribute to your enthusiasm? Or, when you look back, was it just something
you enjoyed doing?
NW:
I always am on the forefront of something (Laughs); it’s not unusual. I’ve often said that I feel like I’m going across the country in my covered wagon, and the Indians are shooting arrows at my back, and I get to California and I discover that everybody’s in the pool at the Hyatt Regency!
I remember the first or second AAPB Conference I ever went to (AAPB is the Association for Applied Psychiatry and Biofeedback – Ed.). Chuck Strobel — whose brain synchrony I’d seen on the color monitor — came up to me in the exhibit hall and said, “You know Nancy, you and I have a big responsibility.” “What’s that?” He said, “Well, we’re really the pioneers of the field. We are the foundation. That’s a big responsibility.” And I’m thinking, “Who, me? I don’t even have a clue what I’m doing!” (Laughs) “How can I be responsible for anything!?”
It’s been a remarkable journey and it’s still a struggle. It’s always been a struggle. I remember right after we started working with the EEG I was invited to this fancy dinner party. I was seated across the table from this man who was a doctor, probably in his mid-80’s. He said, “And what do you do, my dear?” And I started explaining how I trained brains. He looked across the table, tilted his head down and looked over his glasses and said, “Poppy-cock my dear. Nobody can train brains.” That was kind of the attitude that I was confronted with out there in the world. But I wouldn’t give up. I have wandered along and lost tons of money, but I just wouldn’t quit. I wouldn’t quit because it was fascinating and it was my passion.
Every time I see anything that I think could help mankind progress a little more than the shit-hole that it’s in (Laughs) I want to go do that too, so that I can do it for other people. I think you would say I’m a risk taker. I’m not sure I ever analyze consequences, I just do it. You know: if it feels right I do it. Then I look back and I say, “Ohhhh shit.” (Laughs)
LS:
How do you develop this confidence in what feels right?
NW:
I think I’ve always had a lot of intuition. I really attribute a great deal to my father and his programming. As you astutely could see, it was all for him, it wasn’t for me. But as a child I had no clue that it was for him and not me. I really thought that his obsession about training me was all about me. It wasn’t at all, but it had its positive effect. He taught me a confidence and a willingness to think that I could do anything. So here I am.
LS:
What do you feel were your rewards?
NW:
Learning in and of itself is my reward. Learning, being able to apply what I learn, and then — as I got older — being able to help others with what I’ve learned. Initially it was just learning for learning’s sake, but it’s evolved into something a little more altruistic.
LS:
Can you give me an example of the kind of rewarding
experience that a young person could see as a goal.
NW:
I can’t in the way you’re asking that question because I don’t function that way. When you ask me for an experience, what popped into my head was one of those “Ah ha!” moments.
I was sitting on the floor in upper New York State where I had been for a very intense two -week seminar with Jean Houston, who’s the quintessential teacher. I remember her lecturing and she said, “The next frontier of evolution is… the mind.” This was in the 70’s and that, to me, was one of the most exciting things I’d ever heard, “Wow!” And I knew there was this other world somewhere out there. Those kinds of moments have inspired me and kept me going.
LS:
I think many people are daunted. They don’t pursue dreams because they think, “What could I do? How could I get there.”
NW:
I don’t even think that way.
LS:
Is that part of your “act first, think later”…
NW:
Yeah!
LS:
Do you see that as a strength, something that people
should have?
NW:
I think it’s very helpful, and yet I think one also has to do one’s own work. You can’t just foolishly and impulsively go out and act in the world. You’ve got to have some kind of background, some education. I’ve been responsible in the way I’ve done it, I think. When I want to learn something I’ll go learn from the master that created it.
LS:
How do you do that?
NW:
I seek them out, I find them. I hear about something, I find out who created it, and I call them on the telephone.
I think I’m driven by something innate that I don’t even know. I remember when I went up to New York three summers in a row. This was the summer that Bob was dying, the summer when he died, and the summer after that. I had just met Jean Houston before Bob went into convulsions, and when she started talking about her seminars in New York I thought, “I’ve got to go!” I’d never really done anything like that before in my life but I committed myself: I was going to Jean Houston’s thing.
But then when my husband went into convulsions and it was difficult. It was like, “How the hell am I going to leave a dying husband!?” Then I decided that he was going to die whether I stayed or didn’t stay (Laughs), so I decided I was going.
The 3rd summer I was there — this was after he had died — I went through 2 weeks of these very intense things that Jean does. It was over and everybody was packing up to leave and I was laying on the floor sobbing. This guy who I was kind of dating came over and said, “What’s the matter!” And I said, “I don’t know! I have something very important to do and I don’t know what it is!” (Laughs) It was like my heart was broken; it was just so heavy and so big.
Whatever that is, it’s part of what drives me, and I can’t put my finger on it because I don’t know what it is. Every now and then I’ll have a client who will tell me, “I don’t have a purpose, I don’t have this or I don’t have that.” And I will say to them, “My sense is that what you’re now training to get ready for what you need to do. You don’t know what it is yet, and I don’t know what it is, but you need to get ready. I think you’re here to do something very important.”
LS:
Are you still sobbing at some level? Or was the sobbing just part of your realization?
NW:
I think it was part of a phase that’s still happening, and I think part of the
sobbing was realizing there was something going on, and not understanding it
— not that I can say that I understand it now. Now I’m more able to just
wait to see. What is it that I’m being called to do? I don’t know.
Every now and then I think we become one of the chosen people, not because we’re special, but because we hear someone say, “We need your help.” and we volunteer our help. I’ve said that to just a scattering of people, of clients, through the years.
I don’t know where it’s all going but I really have this feeling that sometime within our lifetime, and maybe very soon in the very next few years, there’s going to be a huge shift in reality as we know it. I think another reality will arise, but I have no idea what that reality will be.
LS:
Do you think it will be better?
NW:
I think it’s a toss up. My opinion is that it’s going to be better, but it could be a whole lot worse. Or it could be a whole lot worse before it gets better.
