Gene Ciancio and Lisa

GRADUATE PROFILE

Gene Ciancio, an attorney and municipal court judge in Colorado, originally did the Basic Training in order to fix his wife, Lisa. “I thought it was a brilliant plan,” recalls Gene.“I really was anticipating that I could get her fixed."

At first, Lisa, who had recently suffered the loss of her hair from an illness called alopecia areata, was completely closed to doing the training for several reasons. For one thing, she sensed Gene’s motives, and “I was more or less against anything Gene had to offer at that point. Also, given how I was raised, I was not open to anything in the self-awareness realm. My family just thought those things were ridiculous. So I automatically said ‘It won't work and I'm not going.' Plus, I had just lost all of my hair because of alopecia. I knew that someone would want to hug me and my wig would fall off. I had not really dealt with the hair loss yet. I was in a major depression about it. I thought this training would be too confrontive. I was a professional victim.I wasn't open at all to the idea that you could possibly be responsible for your life."

“We had gone to a marriage counselor after we started living together,” Gene explains, “because right on top of our brand new relationship entered my fourteen-year-old daughter who moved in with us. I was thirty-five, Lisa was twenty-five, and Cindy was fourteen-all in the same household. We decided early on that if we were ever going to make our relationship work we had to get some assistance with how to communicate around the issues, mainly about Cindy."

“Our marriage was really at a turning point,” continues Lisa.“We knew that we either had to do something fast or it wasn't going to last. I knew in my heart that something had to change. And it was me, not Gene. No one else in my life could be responsible for me.I was seeing a great therapist about the alopecia. But that psychological path was really about delving into the past and telling stories about my life and talking about my parents; there was some movement there, but it wasn't really supporting me in taking responsibility for my own life.I knew that I had to make some changes. I knew that I had wallowed in self-pity about losing all my hair for long enough.

“I didn't want to go to the Guest Event with Gene, but I basically had to. We have this numbering system where you assign a number between one and ten for how important something is to you. If it is below a five, the other person has the option to decline. But if it is a five or higher, it's pretty much hands down, you do it. You have to be honest about it. You can't say six if it's really only a three. So I asked Gene what number this Guest Event was and he said it was about a nine. So I went.

“As soon as we got to the Guest Event,and I heard the speaker, I knew I was going to do the training. I was back at the table signing up at the first chance, I think even before Gene.'

“We both signed up,” Gene said, “and that night, we had one of the worst fights we had ever had. Everything just started flushing up."

Lisa and Gene started the Basic Training about a week later. Lisa was immediately moved."It was an amazing training for me. I had the best time I think I've ever had in my life. My life changed the first night. It was the little push I needed to move off of self-pity and look at where I was going. Thursday night I realized I had spent my whole life depressed and neurotic and guilty.

“I had no direction in life.I was bored in my paralegal position,I hated being a stepmother, our marriage was rocky,I had lost all my hair. My biggest goal was to acknowledge to myself and others that I was bald now. I didn't have my looks to hang onto, and knew that I might have to use my vulnerability in the world.

“During one exercise on Saturday morning,I told my partner that all I really wanted was to take my wig off. She's one of my best friends now, but not knowing about the alopecia at the time she thought I was crazy. She said ‘You want to what?' I told her the story really fast, and she said ‘So, take it off.' So, I did. I looked around. She wasn’t throwing up, nobody around me was going into convulsions. I felt pretty comfortable. Then we put the chairs back in theater style and the trainer asked if anyone had anything to share. Well,I was pretty bashful, but I raised my hand. I said that for the first time I had dealt with my disease of hair loss. The whole experience had such a cleansing impact on me, I will never forget it. Since then, I have gone out in public bald.

“It turned my whole life around. Now I am an alopecia support group leader in Colorado, and a National Board member. All because I did the training. I've found major direction in my life with alopecia. I've personally helped hundreds of people."

Gene, meanwhile, remembers that "I was analytical through the Basic. I figured that this would be fine for most people, and I was glad that Lisa was getting fixed. For the most part,I was pretty much the observer,the supportive husband.I was being honest in small groups, but I was still pretty reserved. I was just there to help Lisa get fixed. I had heard almost everything in the Basic in other contexts. There wasn't anything in there that came as a total shock to me-responsibility and all that. I had literally read fifty books about that sort of philosophy; none of it was totally foreign to me intellectually. But the experiential parts of the trainings were great. That is where I really got most value.I saw how I was not using my talents and education.I was wimping out."

What was different about Lisa and Gene after they did the trainings? They agree that it's probably easier for them to describe the dramatic changes in each other than in themselves.“Gene," Lisa begins,“showed up. He’s always been a wonderfully compassionate teddy bear, but after he did the training,I started seeing joy. Before the training, it was not uncommon to have 'an hour-long conversation with Gene and have his mind be on Mars for all but five minutes of it. That used to be my biggest complaint. His clients would say the same thing when I would deal with them between the time they met with Gene until their case went to trial. They would ask if something was wrong with him. He was so laid back, his business partners thought he was lazy. Other people just thought he was comatose. And all of a sudden,after the training, people were saying about Gene ‘What a caring guy,I really get that he cares about me.

“Now, Gene will say funny things from the bench. One guy called him a stupid son of a bitch and Gene looked down and said:‘If I'm so stupid, how come I'm going to Hawaii next week and you're going to jail?' He is really being innovative and making a big difference with people in his court. He has kids who have been habitual criminals since they were twelve. He has them write four or five pages about what they want out of life and out of their relationships with people. We get letters years later from people who Gene has sentenced saying what a difference that made for them. He asked one man when he was going to start loving himself. Gene talked with him about how that was stopping him and how his life would turn around when he started loving himself. Months later, that guy wrote us a letter saying: ‘Thanks. You should be a judge the rest of your life. I stopped. I am responsible. I love myself now and I have a girlfriend. I have a car and a job as a dishwasher. And I am happy.''

Gene says that what changed for him was that "I lightened up. I had been bored with everything. I woke up and came alive again. In the training they say life is not a dress rehearsal, but I had been living my life like that proverbial dress rehearsal. I really saw how much I sit back and criticize instead of being involved. That began a process for me of deciding to access my leadership abilities. The biggest turn for me was to realize that if you decide to be a leader and you're half-assed about it, that's the way the people you're leading will be. In that respect, I saw what I had created with the people in my law office, which wasn't much. I have come a long way in turning that around by caring about other people, serving people, and being responsible.

“Like I said, before the Basic I'd read a lot of the books and knew all of the jargon and the philosophies about responsibility and service and all that. The training gave me a language to translate that into words that I could really understand and put into action, and words that, in turn,I can communicate to others and have them understand. In my court we get a lot of small cases, shoplifting and stuff like that, so my court is the most likely place in the entire judicial system where the average person will see a judge. My purpose in being a judge is to translate a lot of those ideas about how to have life work to the public in a judicial form.

“After doing the training, I thought of this new procedure for a lot of kids I get in my court for shoplifting. The kids that come in front of me don't ever focus their attention outside themselves for even a fraction of a minute. They are self-centered literally all the time. Instead of just fining them and having them go to class, I've begun having them complete twenty hours of community service on their own. The key is that they have to go find a place to serve other people in the community. We used to have a program where we would have them go clean up the school or something, but they did it just because the court made them. Here, they have to go find it for themselves. One girl went to an animal shelter. Her mom's not too thrilled because she has brought home about five dogs, but when she came back to me after having completed her ten hours she was glowing. Her eyes were on fire.She said it was the most wonderful thing she had ever done, she loved it and was going to keep volunteering. Another guy came in with the same kind of spark in his eye. He had called the Head Start program in his county because he had read about it in the newspaper and asked if they had anything he could do. He was only fifteen and didn't think he could do anything for them. They told him to come on down, they had the perfect thing. They let him be the big brother to a four-year-old kid who had no brothers and sisters. That was it for this boy. Now, he takes this kid everywhere. Instead of going and hanging out around the drive-in or whatever he used to do, he's taking this little kid to the movies. His whole life has changed out of that. I rule that these kids have to spend ten or twenty hours in service, and they end up doing it for weeks or more. Three or four nonprofit agencies have written asking about the program, praising the kids. Creating this program comes directly out of what I personally picked up through Lifespring.”

Now,here's what Gene has to say about Lisa:"The change in Lisa is phenomenal. When I met her, she was a paralegal. She used to take caffeine pills and other stimulants every morning to pump herself up in order to be able to type a thousand words a minute and make it through the day. That only accentuated her already energetic personality. At the end of the night, she'd be so wound up that it was like seeing somebody ready to explode. Plus, she was very involved with her physical problems; female things,headaches,backaches,knee problems. One of the things our relationship was based on in the beginning was her illnesses and my willingness to support her in them, getting her to the doctor, and so forth. Any mention by me that there could possibly be a mental component to her physical conditions was like asking to have my throat slit. The transformation in her life about feeling good and being ready to take on any project without having sickness be a concern is incredible. There is no question about it that the training is where that happened."

Lisa adds:“I got a lot of attention that way. Negative attention. I didn't understand it at the time, but I do now. I figured out in the training that whatever was going on with me was partly created by me. I fully take responsibility for my alopecia. It has given me a purpose in life. I had a nice, comfy job, and I was good at it, but so what? Where was I going? What was next for me? I know that this disease was brought into my life because (a) I needed to learn something very valuable, and, (b) I needed a purpose. I needed to be serving people. I think the alopecia happened to me because I have the ability to rise above it. My family has always been in shock of me and in awe of all of my ‘drama,’ but I have a survival kind of nature. I can handle this, and I can serve other people in learning how to deal with it.

“I took over the alopecia support group in Colorado and turned the whole thing around. The first meeting I went to had six people and was a doom and disaster convention. Everyone would tell their stories about how their lives had fallen apart since they got alopecia. ‘What a tragedy,it's the worst thing that ever happened to me, I don't want to live, it's so sad.' And on and on. Now, I have sixty people attending meetings and 350 members. We talk about how to work with hair pieces and how to wear scarves. People walk out feeling good. We talk about the stages of loss-it's a lot like losing someone close to you. We make it okay for people to experience whatever stage they're in and then move on. Moving on is the key and it was totally missing from this group before I got there. All of a sudden my life has a purpose and I know that it's as a result of doing the training. Without the training, I never would have moved past my own self-pity."

What was it like for Gene to go through his wife's alopecia?"Here I am, somebody who married this beautiful young woman. Full of hair everywhere it was supposed to be. Blonde, of course. The lesson that came into my life through this was about what beauty really is. I went through exactly the same stages she went through. The problem was, we went through them at different times; there were times when she was in the stage of being angry when I was just depressed-and the last thing I wanted to see was some bald angry woman. There would be times when I was angry and she was in denial. I was pretty good at hiding it, but it was big for me. What I came out of it with was being totally committed to the relationship.

“Commitment is one of the things I learned the most about in the trainings. I had one particular experience that was probably the most important few minutes of my life as far as relationships. Lisa and I had stood up to share something about our relationship. We were complaining about something or other in our marriage. The trainer asked us to please go and find the place where it promises that you're going to be happy every minute in a relationship. It was no big deal and I'm sure some people were bored by the whole interaction, but it hit me hard. You mean we're not going to be happy all the time and our marriage can still work? From that day on we have had some royal battles, but there has never been one question in my mind about this commitment.

“We have both enrolled a lot of people in the training, but the best one was my daughter, Cindy. She had just turned eighteen when she did it. She has made such an incredible shift. Her life is just amazing. She was flunking school, skipping classes,smoking dope, wrecking cars. You name it, she did it. She used to climb out the window at night. When we first did the training and started talking to her about keeping her word she hated it. When she did the Basic Training, it was like night and day. She started at an alternative school and was the absolute head of the class in every respect; her attendance was excellent, she was getting good grades, and was being a leader with the other students. Now she's holding down a full-time job and going to school-and doing a great job in both."

Doing the trainings transformed the relationship between Lisa and Cindy."We had been arch rivals, both vying for Gene's attention. Since doing the trainings, we have become best friends. She acknowledged that I was there supporting her and Gene, even when the going got tough. I recognized that a lot of the things about her I had trouble with were things I was desperately fighting against in myself. All three of us having done the trainings hasn't just transformed each of our individual lives, but has dramatically improved the quality of our family life together."

Gene concludes: “Cindy pretty much sums it up for all of us. She got it loud and clear that she is responsible for her own life. She can't blame things on the world, on her parents' divorce, on her mean stepmother, or whatever. She got that it's up to her if she wants to be happy, and she did something about it."