You wouldn’t fight with your marriage counselor would you? It turns out that actually most of us do just that.  It’s a subtle and unconscious fight.  Couples therapists call it resistance.  It’s actually a natural and unavoidable part of the marriage counseling process.  I go and see a stranger, and the plan is to tell [...]

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.

Scott Stanley pointed out that much of the research published recently appears to be reaching completely different conclusions. Just last week I wrote a blog post “Is Marriage bad for Couples Therapists” about British survey that showed how cohabitation with the arch-enemy of long-term relationships, and pointing out the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) didn’t necessarily agree. Then just yesterday the CDC released a report picked by USA today: “Cohabiting has little effect on couple’s success in marriage”.

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).

Ah! Valentine’s Day – once dedicated to the patron saint of love, but it seems that the patron saint of greed might be elbowing his way in. Ever had that experience? Well, here’s another approach from Imago.

With so many relationship problems in the world, we could do without a new one. But according to Leslie Kaufman writing in the New York Times saving the planet might mean ditching your relationship.

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

The latest Marriage Advice from France is that infidelity may help your marriage. In Imago we love to consider all perspectives, so let’s take a moment to look at what France’s leading psychologist Maryse Vaillant is saying.