Alexis mumford

Bio

Hi I am Alexis Mumford. I am currently taking ethics of the free world at California State University Channel Islands as a freshman. Making a Wikipedia article is a part of a class experiment, and I decided on taking up the Imago therapy article.

Week 4 (2015-02-09): Using sources and choosing articles

I have no idea what to choose. I want to pick something I can closely relate to as a psychology major.

Proposal

My focus for my article is to bring a better understanding of imago therapy, and that there is still a stage from childhood that needs to be done in adulthood in order to progress as a person and in relationships. Currently on the page there is some unreliable information, and does not create the image of what imago therapy is all about. I plan on researching different articles to accurately explain what imago therapy is, what the goals are, and a brief understanding of the background knowledge on why this approach focuses on the relationship rather than the individual.

Research Log

Imago Therapy

• Field: Psychology. communications, and business

• Keywords: love, Imago therapy, imago, attachment theory, partner, conversation, healing, couples, childhood

• Journals: Discovering Imago Relationship Therapy (J. Zeilinski,1999) and ADHD Couple and Family Relatonships Enhancing Communication and Understanding Through Imago Relationship Therapy (C. Robbins, 2005)

Searched From Channel Islands database

February 20, 2015

Could not find anything I needed under communications or business. There is hardly any specific research on Imago Therapy in Channel Islands database, I should look into the theories that construct the finding for this therapeutic practice perhaps.

February 21, 2015

Today I looked at the Imago website. I have yet to print the articles I have found to begin my research; however, I am familiarizing myself with the topic. I have found that the current article on Wikipedia does not correctly explain imago therapy, and could possibly be inaccurate.

• Purchased Hendrix and Hunt's workbook on amazon to see what couples are actually doing in their therapy.

February 26, 2015

The ADHD Couple and Family Relatonships article I found will not be used in my article; however, it has brought me a better understanding on how the practice functions, with it's use of real life sessions.

March 2, 2015

• M.T. Hannah, W. Luquet, J McCormack

Compass As A Measure of the Efficacy of Couples Therapy

I went on the imago website, and found journal sources that can be used for my research. Two of the articles that I found from Channel Islands database were one the page. Then I decided to look up the Compass As A Measure of the Efficacy of Couples Therapy on Channel Islands library database, and they had it. I will be basing my scholarly articles off of the Imago website to digest the research for myself.

http://pro.imagorelationships.org/RESEARCHLIBRARY/JournalofImagoStudies.aspx

March 7, 2015

Compass As A Measure of the Efficacy of Couples Therapy

I am not really interested in this article. Overall it is trying to show the before and after of couples in Imago Therapy. It was said that this experiment may not be able to replicate, so it is so far generalized. I will not be using this in my research

Getting the Love You Want

Today I began reading to workbook to see what couples actually must go through in this therapy. Imago therapy is at least a 12 week or more program, and they ask couples to not consider that time for think about divorce until after the session. Each partner is required to have one these workbooks so they do exercises, and understand the process they are going through. The book explains the unconsciousness of a person's brain to how they pick their partner. It says that damage done to us in childhood by caretaker will be resolved with our future partner because the brain wants to seek healing. The brain creates an image of a person's ideal partner based on similar characteristics of the one who damaged you. It explains three different dialogue process: intentional couple's dialogue, parent child dialogue, and behavioral change dialogue.

March 12, 2015

Discovering Imago Therapy 

• Zelinski is putting the connection to the formation of Imago Therapy through theories and approaches

1. psychoanalysis
2. ego psychology
3. attachment theory
4. self psychology
5. transactional analysis
6. gestalt therapy
7. psychodynamic approaches
8. cognitive behavioral technique

• believes it is of the unconscious how we pick out partners. Which is why it focuses on psychoanalysis and other characteristics of it
• childhood wounds and character adaptations assumed to affect all human beings (Hendrix 1994).Participants are asked to see their partner as emotionally wounded, so they could seek to heal them, which it is trying to do for both partners.

ADHD Couple and Family Relatonships

• discusses how effective Imago therapy can be for people in relationships or in families who struggle to communicate well with their loved ones who have ADHD, and it help them understand both sides struggle to be heard
• it shows a mother son relationship and how they struggle to get along because the son does not like when his mom constantly reminds him of things he has to do, and how the mom feels she needs to constantly remind him so he does not mess up. This damages their relationship because as a son he feels incompetent about completing simple tasks on his own, and as a mother it is hard for her to see her son struggle with disorder and she wants to be there with him. They do a receiving and sender approach to show each side. Only one person is allowed to talk at a time so both voices can be heard and understood.
• another story was a heterosexual couple and the man had ADHD. Their relationship was quite complex. The man had ADHD and childhood wounds with his father, and his partner to had childhood wounds from her father. They had difficulty communicating with each other. It was not much of communicating as it was yelling. For the man it was difficult to show his sympathetic side. The woman was willing to try for their relationship, and opened up about how she felt. Overall, they ended up stop going to session because they could not find common ground together.
• I will not be using this paper for my draft, but it created an image for me on how the conversations should go.

March 24, 2015

Discovering Imago Therapy

• the imago approach actively teaches couples specific skills in listening and communication and how to apply these skills directly to the dyadic interaction

Effective listening (Intentional Couples Dialogue)

1. mirroring
2. validation
3. empathy

• mirroring is replaying or paraphrasing what your partner said to show you were paying attention and you understand
• validation is for the receiver to acknowledge their point of view and that it makes sense to them and why they feel the way that they do
• empathy is when the receiver tries to feel what the sender feels and then reflect on it

^switch roles

• the goal in dialogue is for each partner to hear or see the other's world, specifically regarding himself or herself through the partners eyes

Parent Child Dialogue

• current issues are experienced by each partner through their respective childhood filters, formed around conflicted attachment
• you repeat the sender and receiver roles between partners, but your partner is taking the role of the parent /caretaker that wounded you
• the sender is the parent who is asking questions to the receiver who is their wounded childhood self answering present form

1. What is it like living with me?
2. the worst frustration and deepest hurt with the childhood parent?
3. As your parent, what do you most need from me that would heal all of it?

• then after that sender is in normal partner interaction then asks: What can I do to heal all of that?

April 1, 2015

Today I read The Evolution of Imago Relationship Therapy: A Personal and Professional Journey, a journal by Harville Hendrix. I gained insight from how Imago Therapy came about. It is a powerful process of achieving personal growth in healing as a person and in a relationship. He hypothesized in 1975, that, "it appears that we tend to marry people who are similar to our parents, with whom we struggle over issues, that were unfinished in childhood" ( I need to figure out how to get it do [1]). His journal revealed the genealogy on how each step and procedure came to place; furthermore, the relevance of his own journey with love made his findings seem more plausible because you can empathize with the connection he makes.

April 7, 2015

Adding my sources to support my claims in my sandbox, and I still cannot figure out how to get it do [1] without creating a whole other citation. Now I am questioning if it is even possible. I will only being using Getting the love you want as my source because I am just trying to accurately explain Imago Therapy, because there is no background information. I would have used Zelinski, but his paper was more on the research behind Imago Relationship theory, and I wanted to explain what it is, and how we pick our partners.

Annotated Biliography

Discovering Imago Therapy by J. Zelinski

It starts off the conversation by identifying who established Imago therapy which was Harville Hendrix. Then identifies the theories and approaches that make up the idea for Imago therapy. The focus then turns into the three primary dialogues: intentional couple's dialogue, parent-child dialogue, and behavior change request. Each dialogue will be completed in that order, but not at a specific rate. Couples must advance from each stage, and learn how to healthily communicate with one another. Then the rest of the paper goes in depth to explain each dialogue and the behaviors necessary to complete this therapy.

ADHD Couple and Family Relationships: Enhancing Communications and Understanding Through Imago Relationship Therapy C.A.Robbins

This gave more background on how Imago Relationship Therapy is for more than just people in a romantic committed relationship, but also for people who have relationships like mother to child and so on. It gave more incite to how the conversations should operate when in therapy. It also showed the struggle for those who have ADHD, and how it affect their relationship with people who they are close too.

Getting the Love you Want Workbook by Hendrix and Hunt

This gave a lot of incite to what couples actually go through, and the work they have to put in when in therapy. It also easily explains the unconscious of the mind that creates the image for our ideal match. It also builds comfort for couples who take this form of therapy because it creates hope for the couple, and treats them as equal. Each phase they must both give themselves to each practice in order to move forward. It fully establishes that this a relationship approach and not just individual in therapy.

Compass As A Measure of the Efficacy of Couples Therapy

This article measure the before and after Imago therapy between heterosexual couples. They are trying to identify whether or not the imago practice is beneficial. They are measuring in terms of family, health, intimacy, social life, and self management. The imago sessions were cut to six meetings for the research. They found that there was a good difference between the before and after imago therapy; however, it is to be expected that the result would be beneficial because more often after therapy couples release the stress they tend to carry. Also it states that it is unlikely that these results would be similar if the research was repeated.