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This month we are bombarded with ideals of romance. Grand gestures, extravagant displays of affection and expensive dinners seem to be the way to share your love. But is that what really fuels LOVE in our relationships for the rest of the year? Over our 30 years of working with couples, we have a different…
The third step of the Safe Conversation Process is empathy – getting in touch with the sender’s feelings. Empathy is the communication to another person that you hear and understand his or her feelings and that they make sense. It is really a guess at what they are feeling. I might say, “You seem angry”,…
“To make somebody feel valued as a person, or feel that his or her ideas or opinions are worthwhile … is precisely what the second step of Imago Dialogue, validation, is meant to do. Very simply, it sends the message from the receiver to the sender, ‘You make sense, and what makes sense is …”(p.206)…
The authors make a strong case for what they perceive to be the dominant form of dialogue for centuries – the monologue. “For eons, monologue and its vertical structure have predominated not only intimate partnerships but also in virtually every other kind of human relationship – king and subject, lord and servant, father and son,…
This week, we’re exploring the Developmental Challenges of Connecting. In the two earlier editions of Getting the Love You Want, Harville and Helen used the term “wounded” to describe how we all come out of childhood. l never liked the term. I certainly didn’t feel wounded and most of the folks who come into my…
It’s a brand new year, a great time to reexamine your relationship. Before going on to Chapter 8, let’s take a look at what conscious couples know. If you are in a relationship, check off the ones that are already a part of your ingrained knowing. The authors state: “Based on the practices conscious couples…
The last part of Chapter 6 The Imago; the Search for Original Connecting deals with what happens between partners when they are locked in the power struggle. Our brain has a negativity bias. This makes sense if you think of our history as humans. For thousands of years, our primal brain was on the lookout…
This week, we will explore the 3 characteristics of Imago. “Why does the Imago have such sway over our lives and, specifically, whom we love and how we love them? To get a handle on this elusive force operating outside our awareness and without our permission, let us review how it evolved and what it…
In the last part of Chapter 5 The Human Problem, the authors explain that deficits in nurturing can and do happen throughout the 6 developmental stages children go through. They characterize the six stages as: connecting (birth-18 months), exploration (18-36 months), identity (3-4 years), competence (4-7 years), social (7-13 years), and intimacy (13 years-adulthood). Children…