Imago Therapy Resource Center

"... it's in relationship that we will be healed."

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There's a revolutionary theory abounding today that states that marriage, or the committed relationship, holds the greatest potential for psychological healing and spiritual growth.

Is that what we're looking for when we fall in love? Not exactly. We're looking for the person who can always make us feel loved and safe and meet all our needs. We want the continuous high of the romantic phase, we feel like we've found the person we can always feel loved by, feel safe with-- live  " happily ever after", where all the books and movies end. Consciously, we all want to feel happy, but our unconscious mind has another agenda-- and that's to grow up, finish childhood, and stop reacting with those same unconscious patterns that we've always used to deal with pain.

Yes, our unconscious mind wants us to become whole and healed. So we're going to pick just the right person who's going to trigger us in some very specific and concrete ways and wound us in places that we were wounded as a child. In this way, we face the places of old pains and unmet needs and learn to face that pain and respond differently. For example, if you're a "distancer" and tend to back away from your partner's need for togetherness, you're probably going to pick someone who wants a lot of togetherness, and who better to do that with than someone who's got the opposite coping mechanisms? This is why your partner can upset you in ways that no one else can. Consciously we want to feel good and be happy, but our unconscious mind understands that we are choosing someone who is going to make sure that we do become whole. This is now considered the deeper purpose of relationships.

 
Understanding that the power struggle is meant to happen gives us a context for pain with our partners. So often when the power struggle emerges, we start thinking that maybe we chose the wrong person, only to find the same or similar struggle coming up with a new person. This has led to the revolutionary new theory that the power struggle follows the romantic phase like night follows day. When we use the power struggle as bridge for healing, not a reason for leaving, we get to an even deeper type of love that we experience than in the romantic phase. We are meant to learn to heal that struggle. And the beauty of Imago Relationship Theory is that it is not just a theory, but a set of specific processes that are designed to bring empathy and healing of those places of pain.

When you think of all the love and all the promise we feel when we commit with somebody and then we can't heal our power struggle, how can we expect to have it happen on a larger scale. Gary Zu kav, who wrote "The Seat of the Soul", said "There's no difference between couples warring and countries warring, it's the same energy." In the power struggle we become allies in escalation and warring and making each other suffer. We need to begin a journey of becoming allies and bringing in safety and communion. Learning the techniques of Imago can, I believe, bring us to that place of happily ever after that we yearn for, and perhaps help heal the planet one person at a time.