INTRODUCING DAVID E. SANFORD...
THE OLD SAGE
David E. Sanford PhD is a clinical member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. For over thirty years, he had a thriving private therapy practice working mainly with couples. At the same he was a columnist for the then largest Sunday newspaper in northern New England. He is the author of five books on love, marriage, and relationships.
Dr. Sanford is also an old sage. A sage is a wise person—someone who has become wise through learning, self-reflection, and broad experience. Dr. Sanford’s whole adult life has been about leaning how to love and sharing his knowledge with others. His success working with hundred of couples attests to his skill and experience.
Dr. Sanford is personally knowledgable about relationship success. He has been married to Joyce Willson-Sanford for thirty-seven years. When they first met in Springfield, Illinois, David was a single parent raising three young children by himself and Joyce, also a single parent, was raising two even younger children by herself. On their first date, they had five children. The youngest was then eighteen months old and the oldest was six. Theirs remains a successful blended family.
MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE
From my first real job on I have always been a teacher. I started as an elementary school teacher and worked with 10 and 11-year-olds for more than six years. After that I got a PhD in Education from Johns Hopkins University and became a teacher of teachers. I was an assistant professor of education for seven years at a state college in New York. Later on I got an additional degree at the University of Illinois and became a psychotherapist.
I feel called to do what I can to make ours a peaceful and loving world. To me, “love” is a verb. It has many complementary facets; e.g., interest in others, tolerance, generosity, and compassion. I remain deeply interested in the transformative power of love. My set of books about books about love, marriage, and couple relationships, embodies that interest.
SPIRITUALITY
When I was a teenager I was active in one of our town’s Protestant churches. I served as an acolyte at the altar Sundays. I was also the head of the church youth group. I remember sensing that the then minister was saying what he believed to be true about God, but without any direct knowledge of its truthfulness.
One day he went into his garage, ran a pipe from his car’s exhaust into his mouth, started the car, and took his own life. His suicide was for me a profound crisis of belief. How could somebody who claimed to speak for God take his own life?
It seems to me now that this tragedy was the occasion of my beginning to care less about religious belief and a great deal more about spiritual experience, particularly spiritual experience that would inform my life and help me to become a loving person. It was because of this quest for spiritual experience that I explored Zen Buddhism, and Christian and Islamic mysticism. I have meditated periodically over the years and do so faithfully now.
FAMILY
I was born in 1935, the elder of two boys. I grew up in a small town south of Boston, Massachusetts. My parents married late in life. They were caring people. However, I experienced my father as emotionally distant, especially from me. He had no hellion in himself, at least none that I ever experienced. And by the time I was a teenager, I had plenty of hellion in me.
I experienced the atmosphere in our home as often tense, particularly after my mother’s parents moved in with us. I was curious kid. I was particularly curious about what could not be talked about when the family gathered for dinner at night. There were no conversations at our dinner table. People made statements to the air, as it seemed to me.
One of my elders would say something about the weather. Someone else remarked about how vegetables were growing in the garden.
Why were there no conversations? Was it that some of the people present did not like one another? I probed. My method was to ask forbidden questions in order to see what would happen. What happened was that I was frequently sent to my room to eat alone. I grew up with a powerful drive to be accepted as myself and with a lasting curiosity about relationships and their occasional secrets.
In my early 30s, my first wife and I married. Neither of us knew much about building a collaborative relationship. We were always “you and me”… never “we.” The marriage lasted seven years. Eventually my wife moved to an ashram in India, and I raised our three children for seven years by myself, without the benefit of child support payments. The oldest was about 6, and the twins about 4 when our saga began. I became an always-working single parent, doing my best to give my kids love, while earning a living.
Our first of several moves took us to a spiritual community in Northern California. This community spoke to my spiritual needs and provided a loving “family” for the children while I commuted an hour each way daily to a teacher-training center, where I was the co-director.
The four of us lived in a wonderfully primitive (no electricity, no plumbing) little house in the woods that I bought when we moved to the community. Less than year later our house and the houses of many others in the community were destroyed in a forest fire. Eventually we left the community and moved closer to my university job.
Several years later I met my wife, Joyce in Springfield, Illinois where I was an Assistant Professor of Education at the state university there. Joyce lived a few blocks away from my house, with her two children, both younger than mine. Her husband had left her as my wife left me.
On our first date we had five children less than six years apart in age, and the youngest was only two. Eventually we moved to New England and got married.
What I gained during this odyssey was a step-family that continues to be largely close and a wife of 37 years whom I love deeply. Last but not least, I have acquired an essential flexibility and a dogged determination never to give up no matter what
My Spiritual Journey
David shares the path of his spiritual development over a lifetime and its importance to him and to our world.