Getting the Love You What

If you need to heal your relationship, you might see a marriage counselor trained, as I have been, in Imago Therapy. There aren’t as many as there were twenty years ago, in its brief hey-day, but they’re still around. Mostly, therapists use their version of the method without subscribing to most of the theory.

Imago Therapy is the brainchild of Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, a married couple who developed it to save their own fractious marriage. Harville was a regular on the Oprah Show, shilling their popular book, Getting the Love You Want. Regular people got the book and their therapists followed, getting training in the theory and the method. Harville and Helen seem to have slowed down as they aged and Imago Therapy fell off the radar screen. I still use it, though, as do many others, seldom in its pure form.

What is the theory and method, and why do therapists still use it?

The Theory

The theory stems from the strange word in its name, Imago, which is the Latin word for image. It’s the image you have of the first people who loved you, whether they did it well or badly. We carry the memory of those brief moments of satisfaction and nurturance or abandonment and betrayal into adulthood, embedded in our expectations, if not our conscious memories. It’s natural to come out of childhood expecting other people to love you and hurt you the same way your caretakers did when you were small.

Imago Therapy believes you will be drawn to people who match your Imago in some way. The child of a parent who is too busy to pay attention will fall in love with an inattentive partner. Hendricks and Hunt believe that you have an unconscious project to work out issues with your partner that you couldn’t with your parents. You will work them out, that is, if you do not get frustrated and quit first, only to go on to find another partner just like the one you left. In Imago Therapy, working out your issues means identifying the childhood need and asking for it in a way that enables your partner to satisfy it.

If this clicks for you, then bless you. You will have no problems with Imago Therapy. But many people go, huh? What they hear is the Imago therapist saying they married their mother. They’re scandalized and point to all the ways it couldn’t possibly be true. They also find the unconscious project stuff a stretch. Fortunately, we don’t need to go there. I think pure Imago Therapy overstates this point and gets too reductive about the source of marital problems. We don’t need that part of the theory to make it work.

I’ve found it’s better to ask what you’d want to keep or change about your childhood. Those are the needs Imago Therapy is getting at. When you formed your own family, you hoped to be able to execute those intentions and needed someone with the same thing in mind. Trouble arises when you don’t ask for it and get mad when you don’t get it.

The second part of the theory is why partners fight. You fight with your partner when you’ve forgotten that a relationship involves two people, and you aren’t both of them. We tend to treat others, family especially, as extensions of ourselves. Let me explain what I mean. The computer, phone, or tablet you are reading this on is an extension of you. It’s a tool that enables you to do more than you can do on your own. It acquires and retains information better than you can without it. As long as you turn it on and it’s working properly, things you say to that tool will be transmitted and preserved faithfully.

Compare that to the way one partners will start speaking to the other at home without checking to see whether he’s listening, then get angry when he hasn’t paid attention. Your partner is not like your phone, ready to receive information whenever you want to give it. Furthermore, your partner won’t store the information the same way you imparted it. He will only store his take on it. Your phone will do just what you tell it to do. Your partner will do what he wants.

According to Imago Therapy, every fight is about you believing you have lost the connection. You haven’t. You just can’t get your partner to do, or not do what you want him to do. The reason is either you have not asked him, you asked him in a way he couldn’t hear, he understood it differently, or he has his own ideas on the subject. Imago Therapy has a method by which you can painstakingly ask for what you want and be sure he gets it. He’ll still do what he wants, but he’ll better understand your view on the matter.

The third part of the theory goes beyond being a psychological theory, into the metaphysical. The smallest indivisible unit of human existence is not the person, it’s the couple. Individuals cannot survive on their own. You have a vast support network ranging from the guy in Honduras who picks your bananas, down to your partner. Even couples who fight all the time and split their homes like North and South Korea are still a couple, affecting one another in ways they never planned. We are too focused on the individual, the self.

Imago Therapy is influenced by the philosopher, Martin Buber. Buber distinguished between two ways of relating, I-Thou versus I-It. Imago Therapy encourages couples to move from an I-It relationship, where they objectify or distance themselves from each other, treating each other as tools, to an I-Thou relationship, which is a genuine and reciprocal connection, where each person is fully seen and acknowledged by the other. This concept is central to Imago Therapy, which aims to foster deep understanding between partners. However, Buber didn’t think we could train people to have I-Thou relationships. Hendricks and Hunt set about to prove him wrong.

The Method

The method of Imago Therapy arises directly out of the theory. Since the smallest unit of human existence is the couple, the true-blue Imago Therapist will only see couples, never individuals. She will never say, as many therapists do, that individuals must be healthy to have healthy relationships. She takes it the other way around. Relationships must be healthy for individuals to be healthy. She’ll have the couple speak to each other, not to her. She’ll teach them a very structured way of having a conversation about serious matters. It should go like this:

Person #1 will ask person #2 if this is a good time to talk.
If #2 says yes, then #1 will briefly say what’s on his mind.
When #1 is done, #2 will start a summary by saying, “Let me see if I got that. You’re saying…” This is called mirroring.
If #2 summarized correctly, then she will say, “Is there more?”
If there is more #1 wants to say, then he will say it and #2 will again check to see if he got it right and ask if there’s more.
When #1 has nothing more to say, then #2 will summarize the whole thing, followed by, “That makes sense to me. What makes sense is…. Did I get it right?” This is called validating.
If #2 got it right, #2 will follow with, “I can imagine how you might feel. You might feel…. Did I get your feeling right?” This is called empathizing.
If #2 got the feeling right, then they switch and #2 says what he wants to say, with #1 mirroring, validating, and empathizing.

As canned and artificial as this script seems, it’s often the only way couples can speak and really hear one another. The Imago method forces them to talk about their issues slowly and deliberately. It can help them stay on track when things get hairy. Hendricks and Hunt don’t like anyone to get too creative with the script and change the sentence stems, but they have developed variations for verbalizing appreciation and asking for unmet needs.

An Imago Therapist using this method is not providing therapy as much as she is teaching couples to use it. The actual therapy is done by the partners with each other. The hope is that couples will go on to use the script on their own next time they have something difficult to discuss. I have found that’s a lot to ask. There’s a strong impulse to color outside the lines, especially when in the throes of an emotion.

Does Imago Therapy Work?

Does Imago Therapy match the image we have for effective couple’s counseling? A randomized controlled study of distressed couples participating in twelve sessions of Imago Therapy showed greater relationship satisfaction than a control group while they were going to therapy, but their gains were lost after they completed the sessions.

What goes wrong? By now, I’ve used the method with scores of clients, so I think I know many of the ways it can go wrong. Here are the most frequent:

Person #1 starts to talk without asking whether it’s a good time to talk. Not every time or place is optimal for having difficult conversations.
It’s never a good time to talk. You must keep appointments with each other.
Person #1 says what’s on his mind, but he doesn’t keep it brief. He goes on and on. The longer he talks, the less likely #2 can get the entirety of what #1 is trying to say. Person #1 gets frustrated, believing #2 didn’t listen. #2 gets frustrated when he can’t get it right.
Person #2 uses a caustic tone, makes editorial comments, snippy remarks, dismissive gestures, or launches into a diatribe without ever checking to see if she got what #1 was trying to say.
The couple learn the method in the therapist’s office, but never try it at home.
They try it at home, but never practice long enough on easier topics for it to become second nature when it’s time to talk about the hard ones.
One or more partners goes through the motions and sticks to the script, but his attitude doesn’t change. He still thinks he’s the only one who counts in the relationship and treats his partner as an extension of himself.

This brings us to the question of whether the method will work without subscribing to parts of the theory. Was Buber right? Are we unable to teach people to love?

There are some parts of the theory I can buy, and others I don’t. I think it’s interesting how good and bad childhood experiences can lead to unmet needs in adulthood, but people often get lost when they try to trace them back. It’s enough to know that these are closely held desires. That’s the hard part. It’s not an easy matter to sort out what you need, versus what you want, or what you’ve been told to get. This is where individual counseling comes in. It must be a private session with the therapist, so the person is free to explore without benign or manipulative interference. Therefore, I don’t agree that I will only work with couples.

As for the metaphysical part, I can see the point that our culture insists on treating people as individuals and ignores interpersonal interactions. When it comes to I-It or I-Thou, we should probably pay more attention to the hyphen. But breaking the human species down to individuals is so ingrained in us that it’s impossible to ban. Even the originators of Imago have, in their method, individual partners expressing their individual appreciation and needs.

I think it’s much more likely that sometimes you are an individual and sometimes you’re a pair, in the same way that physicists say that light can be thought of as a particle or a wave. Indeed, that’s the crux of the problem, the reason couples fight. Sometimes you’re an individual, and sometimes you’re a pair, you just can’t agree on being one or the other at the same time.

One thing is certain, though. You don’t run the whole show in your relationship. You have another person in it. Don’t ever forget it.

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Keith R Wilson is a mental health counselor in private practice and the author of three self-help books, three novels, and innumerable articles.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.