“I want you to close your eyes and imagine you are in an elevator. You press the button marked ‘-5’, the doors close and you start to go down slowly…”
She counted off the levels one by one.
“…The doors open and you are in a big, beautiful, fertile garden with lush grass and exotic blooms. You see a bench in the garden and you sit down on it…”
“…You see your mother in the distance and you call to her. She comes to you…”
It was the third day of my sex-therapist training and we were being given a practical introduction to the principles of Imago Relationship Therapy, the idea that we carry an imprint of the positive and negative traits of our childhood carers with us in our subconscious, and that in our choice of partner, we tend to seek out someone who matches those traits. The purpose of this exercise was to try and find out what our individual traits might be.
The garden in my mind’s eye was about 15 feet across, surrounded by a high wall and consisted mostly of gravel and straggly weeds. My mother was a thin, grey, almost hollow figure and she had no face. No matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t conjure up her face. When I called to her she did not hear.
I wonder if this means something?
pieces
1 day ago
2 comments:
If there is a relationship between what you imagined and who you chose as a partner, I can't figure it out.
You'll follow-up on this one, won't you?
Nitebyrd: Me neither. I'll have to take that one up with the therapist. OK, it wasn't a deep therapy session as such, just an example of how the technique is applied. It was pretty heavy stuff, however; there were a few tears shed that morning.
I knew already that I have had a rather strained relationship with my parents in the past and I'm OK with that now. It's her that has the problem, not me.
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