Image of Love

A few years ago, my wife and I went on this amazing weekend course called IMAGO, which means Image of Love. It was an intense and fascinating 2 day, 7am-7pm kind of thing which had a massive effect on us and our relationship.

IMAGO is an area of psychology which deals with our perception of what love means, as passed to us by our parents primarily but also influenced by our environment…the whole nature and nurture thing.

At the time, we were both about 24 years old and the youngest there by at least 15 years. If fact, most couples that were there were either divorced, separated or pretty close to it and so we did feel pretty uncomfortable initially because unlike everyone else, we were coming there very happy in our relationship, but looking for further ways to enhance our lives together. All of the other couples, seemed to be there as a last resort to somehow get that spark going again.

I’ll start with the results first, at the end of the weekend, all the couples that were separated and even divorced actually got back together. Nuff said!

So what makes the course so amazing and why would doing it bring you closer together? Well, it all has to do with your parents….Whether we like it or not, our perceptual image of love, money, sex, men, women, religion and other racial groups are heavily controlled by the way we were raised. Ever read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki? It’s the same idea but with reference to money and how the rich stay rich because of how they think about money and how the poor stay poor, as well, due to how they think about money.

Now the image that our parents give us about love and what it means in this world has an enormous bearing on not just the rest of our lives, but also every aspect of our lives. Much more so than anything else. Why? It’s because for the first 18-25 (or sometimes even longer) years of our life, our entire mental picture of what it means for two people to be in love is entirely contained by the way that our parents love or don’t love each other. Above this though, the way they act towards each other in terms of how they speak and behave and under which scenarios and contexts also shapes everything we think and believe about love.

Have you ever found it interesting that:

• The child who was beaten, often beats his own children.
• The person who always picks the bad boy/girl, continues to do so and never gets why they keep getting hurt.
• The child whose parents got divorced when they were young, has serious commitment issues as an adult.
• The child whose parents were known adulterers, often becomes one as an adult.
• The child whose parents were together forever, often has no trouble committing to one person for life.

Now if these examples seem stereotypical or even clichéd, then we need to ask ourselves, why are they stereotypical? Is there some truth to them that makes them so common in society? I know people from each of these example and the amazing thing is that every single one of them conforms to the cliché. It’s not really a hard mental step to grasp really, what you see as a child, you believe as an adult. Whether you believe it or not.

So how this specific IMAGO course tackles this is by making you confront each and every issue that you have with your parents in a manner of highly engaging role playing and powerful psychological tools. It forces you to bring up, acknowledge and discuss things from the trivial to the most serious. The role playing is difficult but powerful. To give you an example of how it works…At one point, my wife and I had to sit on the floor together facing each other, we had to look straight into each other’s eyes and remain that way for the entire duration of the exercise. We took turns being the others parent and in doing so we had to give answers to concerns around a specific issue that the “child” was asking.

The whole idea behind this is to firstly get answers for and then have closure on why something is as it was. If you think you have no issues with your parents, wait till you do this. Let me assure you that every person ends up in tears, it is very traumatic and very healing.

There are many different psychological exercises that you will do with your partner to unearth everything related to how love was represented to you by your parents.

Over the course of the weekend you begin to really, truly understands who your partner is and why they do what they do, from leaving their clothes on the floor to the need for a boys/girls night out to issues such as cheating, children and life.

The reason why those couples got back together at the end of everything is that for the first time in their lives, they understood each other and why they do things. In most cases as well, if one partner was continually doing something that was unintentionally sabotaging their relationship, they also realised, probably for the first time, what they were doing and why they were doing it. In realising all of that, they now know how to stop doing it.

This makes all the difference.