Category: Relationships

Relationships

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Harville Hendrix workshop

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 Self is a negative or remainder once all projection and judgment is withdrawn.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 (Bruce Lipton) – culture is the petrie dish of the cell.

Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here) – Kindle edition by Bruce Lipton. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks

“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 …

Reference

Lipton, Bruce (2009), Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here) – Kindle edition. Hay House. Amazon

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Harville Hendrix 3 questions

I just read Maya’s three questions she asks before commencing relationship therapy.

How do they compare with Harville Hendrix’s ones we just heard in the Auckland workshop?

1. What do you want in this relationship when you finish with me?

2. What have you done to prevent this from happening? (You, not the other partner)

3. What has to be taken out? What has to be put in? What will you take out, put in?

If you have the power to make it this bad, you have the power to make it good.

This couple could be creative and take self responsibility”

Just compared them and you can see who taught her!!

Maya’s three questions : https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2009/three-relationship-questions/

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Helen LaKelly Hunt

Radio New Zealand National : Programmes A-Z : Saturday Morning with Kim Hill : 2011 03 12:

Helen LaKelly Hunt Author and activist, and founder of Women Moving Millions, an initiative for the advancement of women’s lives through a massive change in giving to girls and women. She also co-founded the Institute for Imago Relationship Therapy and has co-authored several bestsellers with her husband, Harville Hendrix. (duration: 34′59″) Download: Ogg Vorbis MP3

Interesting, and interesting how well she puts the idea in my previous post on relationships being the healing force. (Of course I learnt it via Imago… but it is not just an idea, we have expereiice in common about this stuff)

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Relationship and Attachment

How Do Attachment Issues Impact Adult Relationships?
Around twenty years ago we started turning our attention to the attachment system in regards to adult
relationships. Hazan and Shaver were two of the first researchers who postulated that attachment patterns play
out in adult romantic relationships. They developed a series of questions designed to isolate behaviours in adults
that mimic attachment styles in infants; secure, avoidant, ambivalent, dismissive, disorganised and reactive.
What they found was that not only were adults similar to infants in the way that these behaviours played out in
relationships, but that there was a direct correlation between the style in which someone was parented and the
attachment that person would develop later in life. Hazan and Shaver’s research was pivotal for the way that we
see relationships today, and their work ultimately led to the development of many assessment tools attempting to
gauge attachment styles in adults. One of the more popular tools today is the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)
developed by Mary Main. Yet the field of studying attachment in adults is still vastly unexplored, and this leaves
many adults searching for answers and therapy that would address their issues.
Attachment disruption is one of the hardest problems to address by parents and professionals due to the fact
that solutions are often counter intuitive and that the symptoms often go unrecognised. Below I have compiled a
list of characteristics I often see in both children and adults with attachment issues. This is by no means a
comprehensive list, rather a cluster of symptoms to look out for when treating a client with identified attachment
problems originating from the first three years of their life.

This is a quote from Mark Coen’s paper presented at the NZAP conference this year (I was not there, but just found it on the website, here.) Copy: TheAttachmentContinuum.pdf

The quote is in line with my experience as a therapist, and he goes on the describe the various relationship styles, useful.

The guidelines for treatment, I’ve just checked again to be sure, do not mention couple therapy explicitly and there are no guidelines there for relationship psychotherapy.

This prompts me to present a relationship therapy paper, it is so essential that the relational paradigm is presented. And a paper won’t quite meet my other principle, that experiential learning is the way to make this case, not really papers. Maybe both would be best.

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Zeitgeist

I just watched the movie Zeitgeist: Addenda Here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912#

I got to it because I saw in Google news that the movie is showing in Christchurch tonight. What I like about the movie is that it shows the end is night. It shows the nature of the problem, essentially the crumbling of the US empire.

It does it quite well! It shows the power of the IMF and World bank, the corporations, and shows really well how the US conducts its empire. It is holistic in many ways, drawing on people from a lot of fields for their opinion.

Critique and and a link follow, and a pdf:

Continue reading “Zeitgeist”

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Information Age?

This essay makes good sense to me, digitalisation will not of itself foster feminism, liberation, equality or revolution.  However there is something missing in this piece too.  What IS the impact of the information … er, revolution?  is there a shift in the relationships of production?  Is whatever it is significant at all when it comes to a Marxist conception of history.  Has anyone really examined this fully, I bet they have. 

It is important to be able to see all of history as a history of class struggle, makes sense to me.  Of course there is ajso a history of the relationships of reproduction (perhaps what the essay below is about.) And there are cultural forces, racial, religious and generational forces.  The art is to be able to see what, at any time is “primary”.  Even if the history if information from language to the Internet is not “primary” what is its nature?  The distribution of the means of information, the ability to have mass peer to peer communication… what does it all mean. 

Interesting (see previous post) where Trotsky notes that the revolution in Russia was won by the group that had dialectical materialism, not just bombs.  It is important to get all this right.

Class, the Digital, and (Immaterial) Feminism:

Immaterial feminisms have emerged as part of the digital movements of “new economy” and “network society” in order to help capital eliminate old ideological fetters of gender that stand in the way of the expansion of capitalist production and the intensification of the exploitation of labor for profit. By “immaterial feminisms” I mean the network of feminisms—from “cyberfeminism,” to feminist theories of “immaterial labor,” “(im)materiality,” and “new materiality,” to “network feminisms,” “digital feminism” and “technofeminism”—which, as a species of new economy theory, ideologically displace the relation of gender to class, labor, exploitation, and the social relations of production in capitalism by positing a constitutive change in the wage-labor/capital relation brought on by the innovations of “new technologies,” the growth of the service industries and of “knowledge work” (i.e., “immaterial labor”). This is another way of saying that the role of immaterial feminisms in history is to represent as “radical,” “innovative” and as “progress” for women toward human freedom what capital is economically compelled to do to temporarily stave off declines in profit.

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Language of life

NVC Non-Violent Communication, how to identify needs in self and others and how to speak without shaming, blaming and criticising is one of the four or five disciplines that I’d like everyone in the world to know how to do.

Language is important, but as Moreno said:

The analysis of language, useful as it is in itself. does not lead to any change in behavior. It has to be followed up by methods of action learning which train the pupil to think and act below and beyond the boundaries of language.

That’s why I think there are four or five disciplines, but none of them sufficient alone.

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Making sense of psyche – ref John Locke

The quote from Locke below describes an idea I have long held.  I did not know till today that John Locke had it 100s of years ago.  It is relevant to me as I work with the psyche, or spirit as he calls it, as the main stuff of my day to day work.  The psyche is, in his words, “abstruse”, and there is no way to talk of it other than through forms that reflect ultimately “sensible ideas” ie idea that relate to things we can experience with our senses. 

Hence we use dramatic terms like Oedipus complex, and geographical terms like depression. Talk of the psyche is form of poetry and metaphor to describe the inner side of action, make sense of action. 

Locke ECHU BOOK III Chapter I Of Words or Language in General:

Continue reading “Making sense of psyche – ref John Locke”

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Fluid form

Edge: THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman:

(JOHN GOTTMAN:) I look at relationships. What’s different about what I do, compared with most psychologists, is that for me the relationship is the unit, rather than the person. What I focus on is a very ephemeral thing, which is what happens between people when they interact. It’s not either person, it’s something that happens when they’re together. It is like a structure that they’re building by the way they interact. And I think of it that way, almost like a fleeting architectural fluid form that people are creating as they talk to each other, as they smile, as they move.

So Gottman too! The relationship is the unit, the locus of the therapy not the individual people.

~

I expect a heap of posts will automatically appear below so no need to say more!

Later But they didn’t, not as I expected. This quote is related to an earlier post of mine: https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2010/people-myth/

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There is no such thing as a person

Winnicott famously said “there is no such thing as a baby.” (reference?) meaning of course there is always a baby and someone. Jacob Moreno’s notion of a social and cultural atom (reference?) is similar and more startling. There is a minimum set of roles (interactions) that need to be present for survival. In other words there is no such thing as a mother either, there is always a mother and a father (absent or not). The reference to role systems and dynamics is important here. We are not talking about people but relationships and ways of relating. People who don’t do anything are dead. Primacy of the relationship is not an uncommon idea in psychotherapy, even when the word ‘object’ is used in some schools of therapy, it is the ‘object relations’ that are important. For all that it is a big mind-shift to go from the every-day world of things and entities into the psychological world of dynamics.

The physical body, physical reality, so easily belies psychologically potent reality. Psychodrama has the power to reveal all the subtle bodies usually invisible, the use of the term surplus reality facilitates this. But even in psychodrama the mind-shift can be hard to make. Imagine a group of people, with their bodies invisible, see them as three dimensional movie programs of archetypal dramas, developmental processes and graphical depictions of experience of ecstasy & trauma in the cellular memory. The current state of warm-up is the movie that is playing right now. At any moment other movies could grab the screen, all the programs are networked. The body does not betray the soul, but it can fool us into thinking there is no soul. No wonder we have the idea of the eternal soul, it is collective, unconscious and interconnected back to the big bang.

The implications for psychotherapy are well known but difficult to fully implement. One potent central idea, is that the therapeutic relationship is the source of healing. Even that one, well established idea, standard in most definitions of psychotherapy, is always under threat by talk of dependency, measurable evidence, behaviour, genes, chemicals, brains. And of course the demand for reports and videos introduce more elements into the relationship. The third eye kills the dyad and creates a group. This may not be a bad thing if it were consciously embraced. If we said there is no such thing as a dyad, however it often advocated that the third presence should be ignored. “After a while we forget there is a video camera in the room.” Denial of surplus reality. In the face of all these onslaughts psychotherapy has survived, and the healing power of relationship is constantly experienced and valued.

Social atom repair is the essence of therapy. In therapy all too often people warm-up to working on the relationship with the mother, and then later the father. As a psychodramatist I work, even in one-to-one settings with the idea of repairing the social atom. Whatever the medical mental health diagnosis people come with, it is, at the the core ,relationship difficulties. DSM style diagnosis are always blind to the psychological as they are totally fooled by and perpetuates the idea individual people. Those difficulties are present in the parental dyad in some form. An investigation of the role system in the parental dyad often sheds light on the current relationships. The most successful work I have done is where the “parents” enacted by the client, come to relationship psychotherapy. The client then, in the regressed state of the child, experiences their renewed parents. A new social and cultural atom is available to them.

This is similar to the TA idea or “re-parenting the parent”,  but taken to a relational level.

Couple therapy, working directly with a relationship follows from the fundamental idea of a dynamic psyche. Yet therapists often talk of individual work as needed for a healthy relationship. Harville Hendrix’s Imago therapy, and Moreno and psychodrama before it, as well as all forms of family therapy with a systemic approach are more in tune with the psychological reality. Making the ‘imago’, the unconscious images operating in the relationship, the unit of therapy is a major breakthrough in psychotherapy. Hendrix’s phrase “The purpose of marriage is to heal childhood wounds.” (reference?) is profound. If we, in the psychotherapy field, embraced this we would use the healing potential in the couple relationship rather than the therapeutic relationship for psychological repair far more than we do.

Individuals are a myth. What is significant is ‘surplus’ to the physical entities, it is imaginal, relational and systemic.

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