For those of you new to validation, this is what we call the second main step in a dialogue. First you would mirror your partner, carefully repeating back what you had heard. And then you “Validate”, which doesn’t mean any form of clerical processing, but just simply saying “You make sense, and the reason you make sense is…”
In a time when marriages are experiencing increased stress from financial worries, many divorce firms are reporting that couples are waiting to move forwards with their divorces, because they can’t afford to separate. It used to be that financing a divorce was easy, selling property to free up surplus equity. Now couples might find that one partner is unemployed, their house difficult to sell, and even if they could, they don’t have the funds to establish two homes.
That’s why the workshop/therapy combination can work quickly (two-days for a big change), be lower-cost (you would need a lot of therapy sessions to cover the workshop material), and more effective (the therapy helps re-inforce the workshop).
My wife follows my blog, and asked me the other day if I felt we needed relationship help. “It sure sounds it from the way you write your posts” she said. “Is everything OK?”
Tara Parker-Pope writing in the New York Times today notes that the very nature of marriage is shifting. That’s also a central theme from Dr. Harville Hendrix, Imago co-founder, who believes that the statistics of marriage breakdown simply indicate a shift to a new model of marriage, and a new role for marriage in society
Imago Dialogue for couples is something quite specific and quite structured. At least, its best for it to be structured when you are just learning it, and whenever the subject is hard. Oh! We’re talking about the field of intimate relationships- the subject has a tendency to be quite tricky, don’t you find?!
Weiner travelled to the world’s happiest places and told WorldHum that “Many countries around the world seem to grasp this notion that happiness is relational—that we derive much of our joy from our connections to other people
The Michelangelo phenomenon views each of us like a block of marble, and inside is our ideal self, just waiting to be fully revealed. If you recall Michelangelo said that the sculpture already existed inside the marble, and his job was just to make it visible. Like Michelangelo, our partners can help shape us so that it is this ideal self that emerges in all its fullness and aliveness. That’s interesting to me because its another way of looking at the goals of Imago marriage counseling
Science supports relationship help as a way to strengthen marriages
