Relationship Garden Blog

In Imago Relationship Therapy we often speak of creating intentional relationships.  I am often asked what this really means.  In it’s simplist sense an intentional relationship is one in which we are conscious of the many forces that are motivating and driving us and we make conscious choices about how to speak and act so that we may create the very best relationship we can.  What this means on a day to day basis is quite simple:

1.  Recognize and accept that you and your partner are different and experience the world differently.

2.  Take 100% responsibility for your own feelings, behaviors and choices.

3.  Do no harm in word or deed.

4.  Stretch yourself to try to understand your partner’s “world” and to meet their needs.

5.  Let go of trying to control the outcome of your conversations and trust the love and strength of your commitment to each other.

While it is not easy at first to act with intentionality, the more you do so the easier it becomes and you will begin to experience the rewards of greater trust, intimacy and growth as your relaitonship blossoms.

Thank you to my sister, Lucinda, for the beautiful quote below on what it means to embrace life with all our hearts.:

“So.  That’s how I resolved the question about what I wished to become notorious for at fifty.  Let it be for nothing more than harboring a wild amazement at life.  Let it be for choking up at poetry and the sight of human faces.  For falling into easy rapture over lilies and all the other run-of-the-mill marvels that make up life.  Let me become notorious for going around with my bridal veil tossed back and my mouth saying I do.  Renewing my vows with life.  Every day.  A hundred times a day.”
From “Firstlight” by Sue Monk Kidd

As I was buying a wreath today for our extremely interfaith household the saleswoman wished me a merry Christmas, and I found myself smiling at what struck me as such an archaic term.  Merry.  It conjures up images of belly laughs and lighthearted enjoyment.  These days it seems that we talk a lot more about being stressed than we do about being merry.  Perhaps if we could invite a wee bit more merriment into our lives we would shed some of the conflict and stress that seems to surround us.  So, in this time of darkness, I wish you joy and merriment in your heart, loving friends and family, tranquility of soul, and most of all peace throughout our troubled world to all humankind, whatever their faith, wherever they live, whatever their hopes and dreams may be.  May you be merry and of good cheer this holy - day season.  Laura Marshall, Director

As I approach my 50th birthday I am increasingly aware of my body’s transitions - more aches and pains, more worried looks from my doctor, more “routine tests” and I find myself thinking, “what happened?”  I was 17 only a few months ago.  And I’m aware of feeling some grief - grief for chances I didn’t take, grief for friendships I let slip, most of all grief for moments with my children that I didn’t notice because I was too busy worrying about the future.  Recently I wake up each day with the resolution that today will be one day that I will not allow to pass unoticed, one day that I will experience as fully as I possibly can, and if with grace I am allowed some joy I will treasure it will a full heart. 

 Into the midst of these musings I received the following poem from my childhood friend Sydney Tanner Nosker, and with her permission share it with you.  Thanks “old” friend:

 Content

I am Content

My face is changing.
I am getting old.
I have laugh lines
etched deeply by my eyes.
My porcelain skin
is now ruddy
from being in the sun
and having children.
Gravity is pulling my cheeks.
Pores are changing
at my chin line.
I look like my grandmother.
I am content.

Sydney Tanner Nosker

Thank you to my colleague Joe Kort for this beautiful poem that reflects the complexity and depth of mature love.

Sonnet 17

by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or tapaz,

or the arrow of carnations the first shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved.in secret,

between the shadow and the soul.  I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. I love you without knowing how,

 or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

So I love you because I know no other way.  but this,

where I do not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

I’ve been reading a relatively new book by two of my favorite relationship authors, Pat Love and Steven Stosney with an intriguing premise.  In their book “How to improve your marriage without talking about it,” they suggest that behind much relationship conflict lurks a primal difference in the male and female psyches.  They suggest that women are programed to be more sensitive to danger and to have a quicker fear reflex than men do, and that this fear reflex is particularly triggered when women believe that their connection to those they love is in some way endangered.  Men on the other hand, according to Love and Stosney, are more prone to feelings of shame and react more strongly to the perception that they are being criticized or in some way found to be less than adequate.  What happens when men and women get together is that the woman’s fear reflex is triggered by something the man does (not calling, driving too fast, ignoring her) and she responds with criticism to calm her fear, which then triggers the man’s shame response and he responds with withdrawal or attack which then triggers the woman’s fears once more.

This certainly resonates with my experience, both personally and clinically and is congruent with Imago Relationship Therapy’s concern with creating relationship safety.

What do you think?

In honor of all who died on September 11th, and in honor of all who have died since in acts of hatetred and senseless violence whether on the streets of Baghdad, or the mountains of Afghanistan, or on the campus of Virginia Tech, with my heart full of sorrow and compassion and hope, I share the following thought by author Howard Zinn (as shared by my colleague Jim Wells) :

 To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.
It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty,but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
If we remember those times and places - and there are so many -
where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act,
and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world
in a different direction.  

And if we do act, in however small a way,
we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now
as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us,is itself a marvelous victory.
–Howard Zinn

(You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A personal history of our times, p. 208)

With wishes of comfort and peace to all who read this.  Laura Marshall, Director

As my husband and I struggle to find the right parenting approach to help our sons navigate the rather rocky road from teenage life to adulthood we often remind each other to take things “one day at a time,” and to remember that todays reality will frequently morph into something totally different by tomorrow.  It’s particularly important to me to try to find a way to appreciate what is happening here and now - not to always be living in the “well someday we’ll be able to mode…” even when the here and now is not so easy.  This morning I rediscovered a wonderful quote by the poet Rainer Marie Rilke that inspired me when I first read it and which touched my heart once again today:

“I beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer…”

I think this wisdom also applies to couples as we struggle to build healthy relationships - sometimes we need to sit with the questions and the differences and even the disagreements and see what’s really under the surface rather than rushing to find quick compromises that maybe miss the essence of the issue…and through patience and sitting and asking questions we can reach a deeper, more profound connection.

Imago Couples Dialogue is a very practical tool for couples to connect and communicate.  Like may of my colleauges, however, I also view Imago Dialogue as a spiritual path - as a grassroots approach to healing and growth that can begin to heal some of the pain that permeates our world.  I was deeply moved recently by this post written by my colleague and mentor Dr. Sophie Slade (Canada and the UK) on the spiritual implications of Imago dialogue.  Please read on:

Like many, including Harville (Hendrix) and Helen (LaKelly Hunt), I have long believed that the Imago Dialogue is a Spiritual Practice.  I have described it as being akin to prayer or meditation, requiring the kind of focused attention that meditation requires.  I was therefore very interested to read the following comments of (Elizabeth Gilbert in her book “Eat Pray and Love”): “Meditation is both the anchor and the wings of Yoga.  Meditation is the way. There’s a difference between meditation and prayer, though both practices seek communion with the divine.  I’ve heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening.”  Reading this it suddenly struck me that Imago Dialogue is the union of prayer and meditation.  The roles of Sender and Receiver show us the way of communion with the divine, in ourselves and in our partner, through both talking and listening!  When we send it is like praying, when we receive it is like meditating. It is the both/and that combines the two most widely used spiritual practices of east and west.

Now I’m no expert on prayer, but it seems to me that when we Send, in a sense like when we pray, we have the responsibility to share ourselves with the other, to open our hearts honestly and let the other in - or more accurately let ourselves out - hiding nothing from ourselves (as Janis Ian sings “Ain’t no place for a face to hide from God and the FBI”).  In relation to God, if we are frustrated and hurting we often use prayer to ask for what we want.  I believe most of us avoid, even when angry, the type of grandiosity and symbiosis that I have at times been guilty of with (my husband) David, where I give him the message “It’s you that’s not OK and have to change” when I have a need that is not being met.  We ask God to grant to us whatever it is we want but with the proviso “They will, not mine, be done”.  Translating this into Imago, I think of the Behaviour Change Request Dialogue – a one-way send in which we share our frustration and hurt, take responsibility for it through linking it with our own story and our own desire, and then clearly and specifically ask for what we want.  The final step for the Sender is to hand it over to the will of the partner – the gift has to come from the willingness of the partner, from their free will.  As the supplicant (Oh hardest step of all!) I must then give up all efforts to force, bargain or coerce my partner into giving me what I want, whilst opening my heart to receive with gratitude if I get it.

I do also like to hold in my awareness the caution to “Beware what you ask for, you might get it”.  Gilbert tells of a friend of hers who prayed over and over for God to open his heart and ended up on the operating table having open heart surgery.  My version is that I shared with David a desire to have more music in my life.  We recently moved into a new apartment only to realize that it is right beside a Karaoke bar which stays open till 3 a.m.!   I think this teaches us to be very clear and specific in our requests, as we coach in the BCR Dialogue.  I think many prayers could well benefit from such specificity rather than the assumption that God knows without our having to tell him/her.

Receiving is more like the practice of meditating – not that I know much about that either!  The first commitment is to be present and available to listen to the Sender.  Gilbert writes “There’s a reason they call God a presence – because God is right here, right now.”  Receiving requires presence.  She goes on to say “But to stay in the present moment requires dedicated one-pointed focus…” Mantras are one way on helping to achieve this.  “Mantra has a dual function.  For one thing, it gives the mind something to do. … Whenever your attention gets pulled into a cross-current of thought, just return to the mantra, climb back into the boat and keep going.  The great Sanskrit mantras are said to contain unimaginable powers, the ability to row you, if you can stay with one, all the way to the shorelines of divinity.”  I see mirroring as having the function in Dialogue that the mantra has in solitary meditation.  It helps you stay focused on a single point – your partner.  It gives your mind something to do to keep it from jumping all over the place (what the Buddhists call the “monkey mind”).  Gilbert’s description of the use of the mantra to “climb back into the boat and keep going” reminds me so much of Harville’s article on Staying in the Canoe, recently shared on the Imago list serve, where he exhorts us to keep paddling when we are in reactivity, to get back in the canoe and start mirroring.  And I believe that like a Sanskrit mantra, presence combined with empathic, attuned mirroring with dedicated one-pointed focus has the ability to row you to the shorelines of divinity, where you get to live for increasing periods of time in the paradise of conscious relating.

I’m now just reading the part where Gilbert talks about Vipassana meditation – what she calls the “Extreme Sports version of transcendence”!  It is a very orthodox, intensive Buddhist meditation  technique that requires gruelling hours of just sitting without even a mantra.  What is resonating for me in this is her exploration of the concept of detachment – requiring both a being with one’s experience and a simultaneous detachment from it, being aware of one’s own discomfort but just being with it in stillness.  Of her own short experiment with Vipassana she says “… in my thirty-four years on earth I have never not slapped at a mosquito when it was biting me.  I’ve been a puppet to this and to millions of other small and large signals of pain or pleasure throughout my life.  Whenever something happens, I always react.  But here I was – disregarding the reflex.”  That kind of aware detachment, to not react reflexively but to be with our experience in stillness represents the kind of containment required in Receiving.  As the partner sends, like an onslaught of little mosquito bites, we have our own reactions, hurts, thoughts, etc.  Conscious receiving requires being able to be with those in stillness, detach, not reflexively react.  When I am able to achieve that, I have found that like Gilbert whose mosquito bites had diminished within half an hour, all the hurts and reactions go away, everything goes away – except the connection.   Dr. Sophie Slade, June 2007

One of the most difficult relationship skills to master is speaking what is true for us in a conscious, intentional way.  This seems to be particularly true for many women.  I find it interesting that women who are articulate and self aware when we are speaking privately often have a very difficult time expressing the same feelings and thoughts in a powerful way once their partners are present.  We human beings are oh so complex and there are of course many reasons why it may be difficult for us to express what is real for us effectively.  Perhaps we fear rejection, or believe that it is not ok for us to want things - that it is selfish to ask to have our needs met.  Perhaps we feel helpless or hopeless and decide before we even speak that nothing will change and so we “pull our punches” and speak in a whiny, indirect or otherwise ineffectual way.  Or perhaps we feel shame that we should even have needs and desires at all.  Whatever the reason, when we fail to express ourselves clearly we not only reduce the chance that we will get our needs met, we also do our partners a disservice by not giving them a chance to succeed.  If you find that you often feel that no one is listening to you or taking you seriously this may be part of the problem.  I am so intrigued by how common this phenomenon is that I have decided to use it as the focus of the first of this year’s “Understanding the Self in Relationship” Women’s retreats.  If you are intrigued there’s more information about the upcoming September 8th retreat in the Workshop Section of the Relationshipgarden web page.