It is much to ask. Even doing a dialogue is much to ask. For many people it is too much to ask, and so I don’t think we should encourage them to do what they are not ready for.

Many people can intellectually learn to follow a dialogue form, but they remain adversarial. Not a good thing.

Thinking about the response the way I do above — to assist the sender — enables the therapist to assist the responder to be collaborative, to further the connectedness in the relationship.

I’m revising my thought on this since the Dan Wile workshop.

He identifies three cycles:

• Adversarial

• Withdrawn

and the one we aim to move to in a dialogue:

• Collaborative

Perhaps the best way to use psychodramatic language here then is to think of the sender and the responder as each being both protagonists and auxiliaries.

The task is to speak ones own truth in such a way that the other can hear it and is enlivened and informed by it, motivated to stay connected. Keep the other partner in mind, even the first sender can be reflective, validating and empathic.

You go on to say: But even in psychodrama the director can take on auxiliary roles. Offering lead lines (in imago language) is a form of doubling (in psychodrama language), and that is an auxiliary task.

Yes. We model what we are hoping the couple will learn from us. Having a clear idea of what a collaborative dialogue looks like we can coach this by assisting each partner with lead lines and doubling. This involves being an auxiliary ego.

You continue: Imago doesn’t refer to ‘the ego’ often. I guess that when it asks the receiver ‘to park their stuff in the parking lot’ for the duration of the dialogue, that’s leaving the ego behind?

The word ego is just too loaded with various meanings, but auxiliary ego is meaningful to me from experience on the psychodrama stage. One minute I’m there as just me, then every conflict and struggle I have in that moment is enacted by others from the group. Each one speaks as if they are me, a whole being, each one has a world view, a way of speaking. They are all me.

When I double one of the partners in couple therapy I step into their shoes and voice a truth they can’t yet voice. I ask them to correct me if I’m wrong, or to state in their words what was right about what I said. I have become them for a moment.

In that moment I have a sense I’m fully them. I’m an auxiliay ego, to use Moreno’s words. Having left my ego behind is maybe just my language but it fits.

Offering lead lines is a different technique, but it is informed by being in their shoes, bringing forth what will make the relationship more collaborative.

Warmly Adam

In psychodrama auxiliary is a bit more complex too as it is short for auxiliary ego. Imago uses the word containment, and that idea is amplified too by the double description, if we think of simply becoming the other person, crossing the bridge, leaving your own ego behind and being there as an auxiliary ego for the other.

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They seem to say that if a safe connection is established, pretty much everything else takes care of itself. Dialogue is a meditative, a spiritual practice. In quieting the self to be more open to the other, the self emerges, entering the relational space — as does the self of the other.

They mention “stretching into the needs system” of the other but are not specific about that. The intention is what matters. How you know what that is, they seem to trust, emerges in dialogues. “Conflict is change trying to happen”, they say.

As I appreciate their message, I am noticing myself warm up to faith in connection — and my own capacity to be open to meeting the needs of the other. It is not easy. It can be stormy in that relational space. Helen and Harville’s faith in this is encouraging.

One thing I like about Harville and Helen is that I find it easy not to idolise them. I thought their demonstration of a dialogue was clunky. Their claims about how wonderful their relationship is seemed shrill. Some of their assertions about how dialogues work seemed simplistic or exaggerated. I found their stories about “co-operative problem-solving” unconvincing.

At the same time, I would like to find them more credible. Sue Johnson, in her book “Hold Me Tight” claims to survey the recent explosion of research about couples but neither Hendrix nor Hunt appear in her references. Why is that?

For all this, their central message is clear and inspiring. Their plan to transform society through safe conversations is a wonderful one.

They do mention that Sue Johnson joined but then left their coalition to achieve this. Harville asserts that she will rejoin. But this smells incomplete.

I filter this through my own projections about warring parents and my own struggle with attachment. Although I come out of their talk with renewed encouragement about the possibility and power of safe connection, I also leave wanting a little more connection *with* *them*.