What Conscious Partners Know (con’t)
Numbers 6-8 from Doing Imago Relationship Therapy in the Space-Between
- They have complimentary defenses that are natural, and they accept that fact about each other, without judgment.
- They can reconstruct the memory their partner has of them by expressing new behaviours with intensity.
- They are different from each other and will never be the same. Similarity is as good as it gets.
- They have complimentary defenses that are natural, and they accept that fact about each other, without judgment.
I think first of the turtle and hailstorm analogy. Over millions of years, nature has learned there is a better chance to survive if you explode energy outwards, the fight or flight responses, or constrict energy inwards, the freeze response. Often couples with these opposite coping mechanisms marry each other and if there is an issue one person tends to be on the side of: talk to me, talk to me, talk to me, while their partner is often on the side of: leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone. These are simply natural responses each partner has learned, neither being right nor wrong.
However, when the use of these different responses remains unconscious, it becomes one of the causes of the power struggle. While the defenses are natural, in a conscious relationship, there is no judgment. Couples simply learn to adapt these natural responses in a more intentional way. In the Imago system it is by using the Imago Dialogue, which creates safety and facilitates connecting. (Number two I talked about last week.)
- They can reconstruct the memory their partner has of them by expressing new behaviours with intensity.
Here is my take on number 7. I am oversimplifying here but will use my wife and myself as examples. It will be different for you but see if this makes sense. Growing up in a military boarding school, I didn’t learn how to express feelings very well. In those first fifteen years of our relationship, her memory of me was – someone who doesn’t know how to show feelings. As we started doing the Imago work, and as I became more conscious and more intentional, I learned to express my feelings a little more easily. Her memory of me then has shifted to someone who can actually show some feeling. The key here is to express the new behaviours. If you have broken trust, for example, you need to express trusting behaviours, and as Harville says, with intensity, and the memory can change.
- They are different from each other and will never be the same. Similarity is as good as it gets.
I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.
Harville contends that most of the world’s ills result from “objection to difference”. Black/white, male/female, gay/straight, etc. Difference, however, is the hallmark of creation. Nothing is exactly the same; but rather than make difference wrong, it just is. In the romantic love phase of a relationship, sometimes folks see their partner almost as another self: we like the same things, we can finish each other’s sentences, we are just like each other, etc. No. In a conscious relationship partners know “they are different from each other and will never be the same” that is as good as it gets. And that is OK.
