The two authors, now married to each other, know what it is like to have a relationship fail, as they both come from broken marriages. Their personal experience and their knowledge in the field of relationship psychology led them to create Imago Therapy, which is the foundation of the couples’ counselling used by thousands of therapists all over the world.
According to one of the concepts at the heart of Imago Therapy, the primary causes of a couple’s unhappiness are hidden beneath the surface. We often argue about money, children, or holidays, but we never realise that, behind all this, there is a desire shared by everyone: to find a partner who can satisfy our emotional needs that went unfulfilled in childhood, thus bringing back that sense of full vitality and connection with which we came into the world.
Most of the time, we do not realise how our unconscious mind controls our conscious behaviour. For example, a man has had a difficult but satisfying day at work and wants to go home to his wife to tell her all about it. He finds the house empty because his wife is still at work. When she gets back, he treats her with coldness and distance. It is only after a few days that he asks himself why he behaved that way: why did he get angry with his wife, who had done nothing wrong? Maybe her absence triggered the same, primal sense of abandonment he felt as a boy when he came home to an empty house because his parents were at work.
Some situations we experience in childhood are real traumas that create connections between our nerve cells: we revisit these connections, and the pain associated with them, every time we experience a triggering situation in adulthood. It does not matter if they are real traumas, like abuse or significant losses: even those who had a happy childhood, but for example had very busy parents, carry invisible scars. This happens to almost everyone, because there are no perfect parents.
However, Imago Therapy can help to minimise the turbulence caused by our past by helping us create new neural connections every time we have a positive experience. It takes time and effort, but, eventually, the old, painful connections can be replaced with new ones; it is at this point, when the past is no longer so intrusive, that we become capable of responding more appropriately to the stimuli in our romantic relationship.
