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Harville Hendrix Audio

Walter — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:24:33 +0000

Harville Hendrix Helen Hunt Freud to Buddha

Note from: http://gettingtheloveyouwant.com/thinktank

The Challenge of Creating Change: Freud and the Budda in Dialogue with Imago
Join Harville Hendrix for a preview of the keynote presentation at the 8th Annual Conference

I listened to it and found it quite wonderful.

Harville places connectedness as a form of consciousness akin to or surpassing enlightenment. That is quite something. It makes sense to me as there is a resonance through the cosomos, things connect.

Spotted another Harville Hendrix one there on Behaviour Change:

Harville Hendrix on BCR

Imago Couples Therapy – Thinktank Audios

Walter — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 03:23:06 +0000

http://gettingtheloveyouwant.com/thinktank

Social and cultural atom

Walter — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 22:39:52 +0000

The pattern of role relations around an individual as their focus is called his cultural atom. Every individual, just as he has a set of friends and a set of enemies, – a social atom â€“ also has a range of roles facing a range of counter-roles.
Psychodrama v. 1 p. 84

The interpsyche occurs then when the role cluster of a couple is particularly intertwined. Love. Upon investigation I imagine there would be a particular quality to the role relationships. The tele would be strong at least in some areas. The tele with the roles passed though the original social atom of each party would be strong. The mutual and positive/negative matches would outweigh the neutral?

This is a psychodramatic look at what Harville Hendrix calls the Imago. Sociometrically it can be explored in great depth.

More moreno quotes follow on the cultural atom

The use here of the word â€œatomâ€ can be justified if we consider a cultural atom as the smallest functional unit within a cultural pattern. The adjective â€œculturalâ€ can be justified when we consider roles and relationships between roles as the most significant development within any specific culture (regardless of what definition is given to culture by any school of thought). Psychodrama v. 1 p. 345

The focal pattern of role-relations around an individual is called his cultural atom. We are here coining a new term, â€œcultural atomâ€, since we know of no other which expressed this peculiar phenomenon of role relationships. Obviously, the term is selected as an analogue to the term â€œsocial atomâ€. The use of
the word â€œatomâ€ here can be justified if we consider a cultural atom as the smallest functional unit within a cultural pattern. The adjective â€œculturalâ€ can be justified when we consider roles and relationships between roles as the most significant development within any specific culture. The socio-atomic organization of a group cannot be separated from its cultural-atomic organization. The social and cultural atoms are manifestations of the same social reality.
Who Shall Survive? p. 70

The following quote sheds some light on how strong the cultural aspect is in the cultural atp

The auxiliary egos are actors who represent absentee persons as they appear in the private world of the patient. The best auxiliary egos are former patients, who have made at least a temporary recovery and professional therapeutic egos who come from a sociocultural environment similar to the patientâ€™s. if there is a choice, â€œnativeâ€ auxiliary egos are preferable to professional egos, however, well trained the latter may be.
Psychodrama v. 1 p. xvii Introduction to 4th edition

Sociodrama is introducing a new approach to anthropological and cultural problems, methods of deep action and of experimental verification. The concept underlying this approach is the recognition that man is a role-player, that every individual is characterized by a certain range of roles which dominate his behavior, and that every culture is characterized by a certain set of roles which it imposes with a varying degree o success upon its membership.
Psychodrama v. 1 pp. 354-355

INTERPSYCHE – Relationship Therapy for Couples

Walter — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:48:14 +0000

Two notes from a search on “marriage” on my Moreno texts. There is a new clarity I’m getting about the principles of working with couples psychodramatically. Thes two snippets reinforce that. Interpsyche is very close to the notion of an imago in IRT.

INTERPSYCHE … Marriage and family therapy for instance, has to be so conducted that the â€œâ€¦â€ of the entire group is re-enacted so that all their tele-relations, their co-conscious and co-unconscious states are brought to life. Psychodrama v. 1 p. vii Introduction to 3rd edition

RESISTANCE TO DRAMATIZE … The two partners are on the stage, for instance, but refuse to enact any of the crucial situations which they have disclosed during the interviews. The director tries to get them started by shifting their attention rapidly from one plot to another. This may put their minds at comparative ease and make them willing to work. If this brings no result, he will suggest that they can pick any subject at random, or anything which they would like to tell one another at the moment. If this also is without effect, the director may suggest that they project upon the stage any of the more pleasant situations in which they may have found themselves in the past (when they were first in love), or any situation which would express how they would have wished their marriage to develop (perhaps having a baby or a large family), or a situation in the future which would express any change they might like to have in their life-situation. If these do not bring any results, there still remains the choice of symbolic situations and symbolic roles for which they may have affinity or which might be constructed for them. If all this does not have the effect of an actual start, the director does not plead or insist too strongly, but sends the subjects back to their seats. Psychodrama v. 1 pp. 338-339

TEDxTelAviv – Hedy Schleifer – The Power of Connection

Walter — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:33:56 +0000

This is an excellent talk on the nature of the relationship: This is th imago philosophy well presented.

11 November 2012 International Crossing the Bridge Day

Harville Hendrix workshop

Walter — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:43:50 +0000

More reports and reflections on the Harville Hendrix workshop for Imago practitioners in Auckland on 20 March 2011. Most of what he said was not new to me, and what I will note here is mostly what I heard him say. What was unexpected was the power of his ability to do, be in the moment with us what he was talking about. Present, connected, empathic, and making eye contact in such a way that if let at times he was talking just to me, in fact he was, totally there with me in those moments.

The Importance of Theory.
The theory allows the practitioner to know what to do beyond the application of techniques. H also mentioned the importance of research. Brian mentioned there was a swag of research quoted in Wikipedia Imago entry.

Relational Paradigm
The main theory he presented for most of the day was the relational paradigm. Summed up thus: being as relationship. Thus placing this as a shift in consciousness going beyond the philosophers of being such as Heidegger and Sartre and also Ken Wilbur, who has a heirachy of consciousness that is about individual beings.

“Being as relation, that is a revolution in thinking.”

Did Harville say Ken was stuck in the past? I think that he is as this relational thinking is deep and profound, and changes everything. This became really evident to me later in the day as H spoke about self. Self is a negative or remainder once all projection and judgment is withdrawn.

Relationship is a spiritual practice one can do any time when there is another.

“Empathy without judgment is my spiritual practice. Everyone offers you an opportunity.”

See the other as Thou

Observer Effect
H referred to quantum physics. I heard a new angle on this, not just that the observer changes that which is observed, but that the thinking the observer brings to the observed, the intention and attitude will change the situation. What power we have, for good or ill!

The medical model is challenged with this understanding. If we see people as sick, then they can’t get well. It might work with physical illness but not in the psychological world.

“It is important how we see people who come to see us.”

Empathy
How to be with people, we can’t be other than how we are. The essence of being in relationship is to be in empathy.

“Empathy is felt connection.”

When a group member suggested that Maori were a people who were in a connected state H noted that this was an earlier level of connection, more like fusion of the tribe. The empathy he spoke of was connection from a differentiated self.

“Move from the imagined connection to the felt connection and there is participation in that. Getting otherness is terrifying, you have to surrender. To abandon the world you have imagined is terrifying.”

The other person “experiences you experiencing them”. Or even further … They then experience you experiencing them experiencing you… the empathic stance:

“I’m experiencing you experiencing me having my experience. ”

Why people come to us…

“Something has punctured their ability to be connected. They are scared. Some are really scared.”

Thus we make a safe place and there is a transference to the space. ‘This is the place we feel safe, you won’t let us fight.’

“How we hold them in our mind is how they respond to us.”

“We can hold them if we are not anxious”

You can’t connect with a person you are merged with. Differentiation is a sort of birth for each. The self emerges not by saying “I am me!” It is by releasing the other, tolerating the differentiated other. Imago is a process of giving birth to the other person. I’m the mother of their birth. and this is where my birth happens as I am the remainder, what is left as I surrender.

How to be non-judgmental with violence. (( missed a lot of this discussion))
Thou.

“You are as dangerous to them as they are to you.”

“You are the co-creator of the transaction.”

Vicarious introspection

I understood this as seeing through the violence to the wounded child and reflecting that back to the person. I think of doubling as we use it in psychodrama.

The talking cure is the listening cure.

Book: Biology of Belief, Spontaneous Evolution – culture is the petrie dish of the cell.

“all negativity causes chaos”

I am nudging, nudge nudge, nudge. It is facilitation not therapy.

Phrases Harville used in a dialogue:

Make eye contact. Feel your eyeballs and relax so your pup is will increase in size and that will relax her. Deepen your pupils by taking a deep breath.

Breathe together, set up a resonance.

Look when that happens you see a glow on her face.

Stay with the terror till it passes.

Lead lines

Am I getting a good sense of that now?

When I feel this frustration in the future I’ll …

… and the gift to our relationship is that …

Participatory Consciousness

Walter — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:26:56 +0000

“Each person is participating, is partaking of the whole meaning of the group and also taking part in in it”

David Bohm

I am reading On Dialogue. Not sure where I got that quote from though, had it hovering here in some scraps. It is central to the idea that dialogue is NOT just exchanging information but CREATING something new, that that is common to the participants.

This idea has been central my understanding ever since I first participated in groups in the early eighties. I knew something was happening that was bigger than me yet fully connected. My Psychodrama thesis tries to articulate this ideas. Now it is here well expressed by David Bohm.

Listening is not just about “getting it”, it is also about doing something more. I am thinking of the Imago dialogue as I read the passage below from the first chapter: On Communication, page 3. Imago is about getting it, and the doing the Validation step, which is still not quite what Bohm is getting at. Perhaps the “difference” does not emerge until the response?

Nevertheless, this meaning does not cover all that is signified by communication. For example, consider a dialogue. In such a dialogue, when one person says something, the other person does not in general respond with exactly the same meaning as that seen by the first person. Rather, the meanings are only similar and not identical. Thus, when the second person replies, the first person sees a difference between what he or she meant to say and what the other person understood. On considering this difference, they may then be able to see something new, which is relevant both to their own views and to those of the other person. And so it can go back and forth, with the continual emergence of a new content that is common to both participants. Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him or her. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e., creating something new together.

But of course such communication can lead to the creation of something new only if people are able freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other…

The full summary, validation & empathy steps seem important not just to exchange information, but to connect. To go beyond prejudice and trying to push an agenda requires the Imago steps.

Validation also leads to the creativity that Bohm is valuing. Validation involves making sense of the other while standing in their shoes, then facing them and saying you makes sense, and what makes sense is… seeing and experiencing how things hang together in their world. Understanding involves knowing how various things interconnect. To see the other persons world like that, and then to let them know how you see it may lead to encounter. Validation is a step towards encounter. Stepping into the other’s shoes and seeing the world differently may lead to new insights in the listener. The suspension of judgment is not to abandon ones judgment or perspective. There is an internal encounter… material for the next response.

Validation operationalises what Bohm is calling creativity – and Moreno calls encounter.

Moreno, Buber, Hendrix

Walter — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:19:06 +0000

In a recent post I quote the story of how the idea of Encounter found its way from Moreno to Martin Buber. A passage follows by Harville hendric whre he describes the roots of his idea of Validation in the dialogue process… Martin Buber.

It is no wonder then that with this sort of whakapapa, having trained in both Imago & Psychodrama that I see such connection in the approaches.

A passage from Harville Hendrix “The Evolution of Imago Relationship Therapy” in Imago Relationship Therapy: Perspectives on Theory Follows, showing how he connected with the work of Buber.

Beyond Mirroring and Validation

In 1988, when Getting the Love You Want was published, the therapeutic focus of IRT was on facilitating couples through a series of five exercises: reimaging the partner, restructuring frustrations, resolving rage, reromanticizing, and revisioning the relationship. The only therapeutic tool was mirroring. Helen suggested that I reread Buber’s I and Thou (1958), which she saw as an example of the relational paradigm and thus a resource for helping to reframe IRT and a potential resource for understanding how to help couples create an I-Thou relationship.

After revisiting Buber’s thought, I became aware of the need to go beyond teaching communication exercises as a therapeutic tool. Mirroring clarified the message of the other, but it often led to further polarization. Stretching to meet one’s partner’s needs offered an opportunity to grow, but it was often a purely cognitive decision motivated by the hope for change in one’s partner, and it lacked an emotional component. What seemed needed, in addition, was an altered perception, attitude, and affect toward one’s partner. To achieve that degree of change would require a deeper level of contact. Buber clarified for me that a “Thou” relationship with others required honoring their “otherness” as an “I” distinct from me and any concepts I might have of them. This required a willingness to look at the world of another through his or her eyes.

In addition, the constructivist’s view that there is no such thing as pure perception and that every percept is a construct, and the relativist’s view that all aspects of reality are intrinsically related and that there is no absolute position, contributed to clarifying that there is no position from which one could possibly perceive an “objective” world, free from interpretation. Thus all perceptions are relative to the perceiver. From these sources I finally put together the concept of validation as the necessary second step in …

28 IMAGO RELATIONSHIP THERAPY

the dialogical process. Validation requires one to look through the eyes of the other, to see the other’s world as it appears to him or her, and to understand the logic of the other’s point of view. Furthermore, it requires suspending judgment about the sensibility of the other’s world and the accuracy of his or her logic, and accepting that the other’s perception of the world is as valid as one’s own.

Mirroring and validation made the world of the other accessible as information and demonstrated the logic in each partner’s perspective, thus creating equality, but the process still lacked affect and compassion. To address this I recalled my earlier years of empathy training based on Carl Rogers’s work (1961) and that of his students Truax and Carkhuff (1967), as well as other students of empathy, such as Heinz Kohut (1977, 1978) and Martin Hoffman (1990). The concepts of cognitive and participatory empathy helped the third step in the three-part process fall into place.

The Dance

Walter — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:14:05 +0000

I’ve been overdoing my exploration about the “relational paradigm”. I’ve been reading, writing, integrating & putting into practice Imago & Psychodrama ideas about systems and the locus of therapy.

So I thought I’d give myself a break and read a thriller.

Blinded by Stephen White, who I have read before & enjoyed.

I am only a few minutes into it and there are passages that stimulate me right back into my work passion, no rest!

I will quote them here and share my reflections.

I’d first met Gibbs and her husband, Sterling, when they came to see my clinical psychology partner, Diane Estevez, and me for therapy for their troubled relationship. Diane and I saw them conjointly—a quaint, almost anachronistic therapeutic modality that involved pairing a couple of patients with a couple of therapists in the same room at the same time—for only three sessions. Ironically, with therapy fees being what they are and managed care being what it is, Diane and I hadn’t done a conjoint case together since that final session with Gibbs and Sterling Storey.

Quaint? Perhaps the two therapists mode is but the conjoint word also applies to simply seeing people together. This is the “locus of therapy” that is on my mind. There is a lot of conjoint therapy done in that sense. What is not so common is seeing the relationship as the ‘protagonist’ and also as the therapeutic agentp in therocess. That is a two fold meaning of the phrase “locus of therapy”.

I didn’t need copious notes to remind me
5

that Diane and I hadn’t been all that helpful to Gibbs and Sterling.
Couples therapy is not individual therapy with two people. It is a whole different animal, more closely akin to group therapy with a radioactive dyad. Issues within couples aren’t subjected to the simple arithmetic of doubling; problems seem to be susceptible to the more severe forces of logarithmic multiplication. Therapeutic resistance in couples work, especially conjoint couples work, isn’t just the familiar dance between therapist and patient. Instead, a well- choreographed routine between husband and wife takes place alongside every interaction between either client and either therapist. Each marital partner knows his or her steps like an experienced member of a ballroom dancing pair. She retreats as he aggresses. He surely demurs as she swoons.
A couples therapist needs to learn everyone’s moves before he or she can be maximally effective.

I like this phrase a lot:

“It is a whole different animal, more closely akin to group therapy with a
radioactive dyad.”

This shows he is seeing the group nature of a couple, but also seeing that there is a qualitative difference in the relationship when it is a “committed loving relationship” marriage or de-facto marriage.

This has been on my mid a lot as I have been reading Moreno – he often (but not always) thinks of relationship therapy as a group process, involving all significant others. This is quite distinct from Imago, where the relationship is seen as a covenant of interlocking character traits, an unconscious dynamic which is both the source of pain and healing.

“Issues within couples aren’t subjected to the simple arithmetic of doubling; problems seem to be susceptible to the more severe forces of logarithmic multiplication. ”

Quite right. It is a breeze working with one person or persons not entangled radioactively.

“A couples therapist needs to learn everyone’s moves before he or
she can be maximally effective.”

Not quite. This is where it is vital to place the locus of therapy back in the couple, in the sense of trusting that the healing process will unfold in their dance. Not to try to do their dance for them, one step ahead.

The Locus of Therapy – Moreno

Walter — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 06:26:57 +0000

When I was a social worker in the early ’80s and a person was waiting in the waiting room to see me, the receptionist would ring me and jokingly say your client system is here to see you.

Social Work has had a strong sense for a long time that the individual is always part of a system. This same systems theory was taught to me as being central to Psychodrama, specifically through an article by Lynette Clayton.

Recently I have read some good material in Imago Relationship Therapy : Perspectives on Theory, particularly by Randall C. Mason, Ph.D. who talks about the Relational Paradigm, and sees it as distinct from systems thinking.

I have been wanting to tie all this together, and Moreno’s contribution is significant. I love the way he sees the origin of our thinking of individual psyche ties in with the body as being the locus of treatment in medicine. What a fallacy it has been to continue to think like that in psychotherapy!

The opening of the Chapter on Sociometry in Psychodrama Volume one follows.

315

SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATIONS OF GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY

The late arrival of group psychiatry and group psychotherapy has a plausible explanation when we consider the development of modern psychiatry out of somatic medicine. The premise of scientific medicine has been since its origin that the locus of physical ailment is an individual organism. Therefore treatment is applied to the locus of the ailment as designated by diagnosis. The physical disease with which an individual A is afflicted does not require the collateral treatment of A’s wife, his children and friends. If A suffers from an appendicitis and an appendectomy is indicated, the appendix only of A is removed, no one thinks of the removal of the appendix of A’s wife and children too. When in budding psychiatry scientific methods began to be used, axioms gained from physical diagnosis and treatment were automatically applied to mental disorders as well. Extra-individual influence as animal magnetism and hypnotism was pushed aside as mythical superstition and folklore. In psychoanalysis—at the beginning of this century the most advanced development of psychological psychiatry—the idea of a specific individual organism as the locus of psychic ailment attained its most triumphant confirmation. The “group” was implicitly considered by Freud as an epiphenomenon of the individual psyche. The implication was that if one hundred individuals of both sexes were psychoanalyzed, each by a different analyst with satisfactory results, and were to be put together into a group, a smooth social organization would result; the sexual, social, economic, political and cultural relations evolving would offer no unsurmountable obstacle to them. The premise prevailed that there is no locus of ailment beyond the individual, that there is, for instance, no group situation which requires special diagnosis and treatment. The alternative, however, is that one hundred cured psychoanalysands might produce a societal bedlam together.

Although, during the first quarter of our century, there was occasional disapproval of this exclusive, individualistic point of view, it was more silent than vocal, coming from anthropologists and sociologists particularly. But they had nothing to offer in contrast with the specific and tangible demon-

316 PSYCHODRAMA

strations of psychoanalysis, except large generalities like culture, class and societal hierarchy. The decisive turn came with the development of sociorn. etric and psychodramatic methodology.*

The change in locus of therapy which the latter initiated means literall a revolution in what was always considered appropriate medicalpracticeY Husband and wife, mother and child, are treated as a combine, often facing one another and not separate (because separate from one another they may not have any tangible mental ailment). But that facing one another deprives them of that elusive thing which is commonly called “privacy.” What remains “private” between husband and wife, mother and daughter, is the abode where some of the trouble between them may blossom, secrets, deceit, suspicion and delusion. Therefore the loss of personal privacy means loss of face and that is why people, intimately bound up in a situation fear to see one another in the light of face to face analysis. (They prefer individual treatment.) It is obvious that once privacy is lifted (as a postulate of individual psyche) for one person involved in the situation, it is a matter of degree for how many persons the curtain should go up. In a psychodramatic session therefore, Mr. A, the husband, may permit that besides his wife, his partner in the sickness, the other man (her lover) is present, later his daughter and son, and some day perhaps, they would not object (in fact they would invite it), that other husbands and wives who have a similar problem, sit in the audience and look on as their predicaments are enacted and learn from the latter how to treat or prevent their own. It is clear that the Hippocratic oath will have to be reformulated to protect a group of subjects involved in the same therapeutic situation. The stigma coming from unpleasant ailment and treatment is far harder to control if a group of persons are treated than if it were only one person.

But the change of locus of therapy has other unpleasant consequences. It revolutionizes also the agent of therapy. The agent of therapy has usually been a single person, a doctor, a healer. Faith in him, rapport (Mesmer), transference (Freud) towards him, is usually considered as indispensable to the patient-physician relation. But sociometric methods have radically changed this situation. In a particular group a subject may be used as an instrument to diagnose and as a therapeutic agent to treat the other subjects. The doctor and healer as the final source of mental therapeusis has fallen.

______

*Sociatry is applied sociometry. The group psychotherapies are subfields of soci3,_1173′ as the latter comprises also the application of sociometric knowledge to groups distance”, to inter-group relations and to mankind as a total unit.

SOCIODRAMA 317
Sociometric methods have demonstrated that therapeutic values (tele) are scattered throughout the membership of the group, one patient can treat the other. The role of the healer has changed from the owner and actor of therapy to its assigner and trustee.

But as long as the agent of psychotherapy was a particular, special individual, a doctor or a priest, besides being considered the source or the catalyzer of healing power—because of his personal magnetism, his skill as a hypnotist or as a psychoanalyst—the consequence was that he himself was also the medium of therapy, the stimulus from which all psychotherapeutic effect emanated, or at least, by which they were stimulated. It was always his actions, the elegance of his logic, the brilliancy of his lecture, the depth of his emotions, the power of his hypnosis, the lucidity of his analytic interpretation, in other words, he, the psychiatrist was always the medium to which the subject responded and who in the last analysis, determined the mental status which the patient had attained. It was, therefore, quite a revolutionary change, after disrobing the therapist of his uniqueness, showing for instance that in a group of 100 individuals every individual participant can be made a therapeutic agent of one or the other in the group and even to the therapist himself, to go one step further and to disrobe all the group therapeutic agents themselves of being the media through which the therapeutic effects are attained. By means of a production on the stage a third element is introduced besides the healer and the patient-members of the group; it becomes the medium through which therapeutic measures are channelized. (This is the point where I went with psychodramatic methods beyond the methods I had used previously in group psychotherapy, even in its most systematic form—the group psychotherapies based on sociometric procedures and sociometric analysis.) In psychodramatic methods the medium is to a degree separated from the agent. The medium may be as simple and amorphous as a still or moving light, a single sound repeated, or more complex, a puppet or a doll, a still or a motion picture, a dance or music production, finally reaching out to the most elaborated forms of psychodrama by means of a staff consisting of a director and auxiliary egos, calling to their command all the arts and
all the means of production. The staff of egos on the stage are usually not patients themselves, but only the medium through which the treatment is directed. The psychiatrist as well as the audience of patients are often left outside of the medium.

318 PSYCHODRAMA

When the locus of therapy changed from the individual to the group, the group became the new subject (first step). When the group vvt” broken up into its individual little therapists and they became the agents of therapy, the chief therapist became a part of the group (second step) and finally, the medium of therapy was separated from the healer as well as the group therapeutic agents (third step). Due to the transition from individual psychotherapy to group psychotherapy, group psychotherapy includes individual psychotherapy; due to the transition from group psychotherapy to psychodrama, psychodrama includes and envelops group Psychotherapy as well as individual psychotherapy.

The three principles, subject, agent and medium of therapy can be used as points of reference for constructing a table of polar categories of group psychotherapies. I have differentiated here eight pairs Of categories: amorphous vs. structured, loco nascendi vs. secondary situations, causal vs. symptomatic, therapist vs. group centered, spontaneous vs. rehearsed, lectura] vs. dramatic, conserved vs. creative, and face to face vs. from a distance. With these eight sets of pairs, a classification of every type of group psychotherapy can be made.

(pages 318 – 319 Illustrate such a table)