Marriage problems?

When a relationship fails it is painful. But there is hope. Imago Therapy can help.

The Imago theory is that in most situations where we get upset, 90% of the emotion is triggered by events from the past that hurt us, yet were never resolved.

Based on the best-selling book "Getting The Love You Want", by Harville Hendrix, PhD who co-founded Imago Relationships International together with his partner, Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD. What follows is a summary of Hendrix’s introduction to Imago:

FROM CONFLICT TO HOPE

Why do we fall in love?
What is really happening when we fall in--and out of--love? What's really going on when couples fight?

I believe we are creatures of nature, and that we all begin life in a state of relaxed and joyful bliss. If our caretakers are attuned to our wants and needs, ready and able to meet these needs, our feelings of aliveness and well-being are sustained. We remain whole.

But even in the best of circumstances, no parent is perfect. Tired, angry, depressed, busy, ill, distracted, afraid--our parents fail to sustain our feelings of security and comfort.

Every unmet need causes fear and pain. In response, we adopt primitive coping mechanisms ranging from constant crying to get attention to withdrawing and denying that we even have needs. Meanwhile, during childhood, we are also being socialized, moulded by our caretakers and communities to fit into society. Quickly we learn what to do to gain love and acceptance. This often means repressing the parts of ourselves that society finds ‘unlovable’. Our sense of "allrightness" diminishes, and we end up as shadows of our whole, true selves.

 With “good enough” caretakers; we do all right. Some of us didn’t fare so well, and our lives are handicapped by deep hurts. All of us were wounded in childhood to some extent. We then go on to cope as best we can in the world and in our relationships, but parts of our true nature are locked in the unconscious. We look grown up--we have jobs and responsibilities--but we are walking wounded, trying to live life fully while unconsciously hoping to restore the sense of joy we are born with.

When we fall in love, we believe we've found it! We feel whole, we feel like ourselves. Finally we feel safe, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Then the wheels fall off. The veil of illusion falls away, and it seems that our partners are not who we thought they were. It turns out they have qualities we can't bear; often those we once admired. Old hurts flare up as we realize that our partners cannot or will not love and care for us as they promised. Our dream shatters.

Disillusionment turns to anger, fuelled by a fear that we won't survive without the love and safety that is now slipping away. Since our mate is no longer willing to give us what we need, we change tactics, trying to manoeuvre our partners into caring--through anger, crying, withdrawal, shame, intimidation, criticism--whatever works. We will make them love us. Or we may negotiate for time, love, chores or gifts.

The power struggle has begun, and may go on for many years, until we split or settle into an uneasy truce.

What is going on here? Apparently you have found an Imago partner. Someone, I'm afraid, who is uniquely unqualified (at the moment), to give you the love you want.

And strangely enough, this is what's supposed to happen! We all think we have freedom of choice when it comes to selecting our partners. But regardless of what it is we think we're looking for in a mate, our unconscious has its own agenda.

Our primitive "old" brain is COMPELLED to restore the feeling of wholeness that we came into the world with. To accomplish this it must repair the damage done in childhood as a result of unmet needs, and the way it does that is to find a partner who can give us what our caretakers failed to provide.

You'd think, then, that we would choose someone who has what our caretakers lacked. But no! The old brain has a mind of its own, and a checklist of desired qualities. It is carrying around its own image of the perfect partner, a complex web of qualities formed in reaction to the way our caretakers responded to our needs. Every childhood pleasure or pain has left its mark on us, and these collective impressions form an unconscious picture we're always trying to replicate as we scan our environment for a suitable mate.

This image of "the person who can make me whole again" I call the Imago.

Though we consciously seek only the positive traits, the negative ones of our caretakers are more indelibly imprinted in our Imago picture. Unconsciously we look for someone with the same deficits of care and attention that hurt us in the first place.

So when bells ring and we fall in love, our old brain is telling us that we've found someone with whom we can finally get our needs met. Unfortunately, since we don't understand what's going on, we're shocked when the awful truth of our beloved surfaces, and our first impulse is to run screaming in the opposite direction.

But there’s more bad news. Another powerful component of our Imago is that we seek the qualities missing in ourselves that got lost in the shuffle of socialization. If we are shy, we seek someone outgoing; if we’re disorganized, we’re attracted to someone cool and rational. But eventually, when our own feelings—our repressed exuberance or anger—are stirred, we are uncomfortable, and criticize our partners for being too outgoing, too coldly rational, too temperamental.

Yet, when we understand that we have chosen our partners to heal certain painful experiences, and that the healing of those experiences is the key to the end of longing, we have taken the first step on the journey to real love.

 Accept it. Conflict is meant to happen. This is as nature intended it: Everything in nature is in conflict. Conflict is a sign that the psyche is trying to survive, to get its needs met and become whole. It's only without this knowledge that conflict is destructive.

Divorce does not solve the problems of relationship. We may get rid of our partners, but we keep our problems, carting them into the next relationship.

Romantic love is supposed to end. It is the glue that initially bonds two incompatible people together so that they will do what needs to be done to heal themselves.

The good news is that although many couples become hopelessly locked in the power struggle, it too is supposed to end.

Regardless of what we may believe, relationships are not born of love, but of need; real love is born in relationships, as a result of understanding what they are about and doing what is necessary to have them.

If you believe you have found your dream partner, then all it means is that at the moment, he or she is in disguise--and, like you, in pain. A Conscious Relationship itself is the practice you need to restore your sense of aliveness. The goal of Imago is to change the power struggle and set you both on the path of real love.

 Many couples' problems are rooted in misunderstood, manipulated, or avoided communications. To correct this, we use the Imago Dialogue. With this effective communications technique, you can restructure the way you talk to each other, so that what you say to each other is mirrored back to you, is validated, and empathized with. You can use the Imago Dialogue to tell each other all about your childhoods, to state your frustrations clearly, and to articulate exactly what you need from each other in order to heal.

Clear communication is a window into the world of your partner and truly being heard is a powerful aphrodisiac. The Dialogue ultimately says to the other, “I respect your otherness; I want to learn from it. And I want to share mine with you.”

One of the greatest learnings of Dialogue is the discovery of two distinct realities. Whenever two people are involved, there are always two realities. You will always have differences, no matter what. And the reality of the other person can be understood, accepted, valued, and even loved but not made to be identical to our own.

To find true love though, the dialogue must also be turned into action: we give our partners what they need, and not just what is easy to give. This is a radical idea. Conventional wisdom says that people don’t change, that we should simply learn to accept each other as we are. But without change, there is no growth; we will stay stuck in our unhappiness.

Change is the catalyst for healing. In changing to give our partners what they need, we heal our own painful experiences. Our own behaviour was born in response to our particular deprivations; it is our adaptation to loss. In giving our partners what is hardest for us to give, we have to bring our hidden selves out into the light, owning the buried parts of ourselves. When we change our behaviour in response to our mate, we heal our partner and ourselves.

This process of ‘stretching’ calls for us to conquer our fears and do what comes unnaturally. Any resistance shows where we have built defences. Often we may feel that we're losing ourselves but we are not ourselves now! It is only in changing that we find our true selves.

Over time, as our partners demonstrate their love for us, as they learn about and accept our hidden selves, and as we stretch to love our partners, our pain and self-absorption diminishes. We restore our empathic feelings for our partners, and our feelings of connection to the other that were lost in the pain of our childhood. Finally we learn to see our partners for themselves, with their own private world of personal meaning, their own ideas and dreams, and not merely as extensions of ourselves, or as we wish they were. We no longer say, "You liked that awful movie?" but rather "Tell me why you liked that movie. I want to know how you think."

Finally, we can relax; everything is all right.

A conscious relationship is a spiritual path which leads us home again, to joy and aliveness, to the feeling of oneness we started out with. In stretching to give our partner what they need, we learn to love. The transformation of our relationships may not be accomplished easily or quickly; we are setting off on a lifelong journey.

For more information, please visit http://gettingtheloveyouwant.com.
Although Imago has practitioners located in most major centres worldwide, there are none in the Middle East although DVDs and books can be ordered from the Imago online shop.