Remember Mike and Genevieve from the last blog?  Here they are again talking about an idea developed by marriage and relationship therapists Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt.  They are the co-founders of Imago Relationship Therapy, and one of the foundations of this model is the idea that we carry an unconscious image or “imago”, that is an amalgamation of the positive and negative attributes of our parents or primary caregivers.  The story goes that we are unconsciously attracted to people who match up with the positives list in our “imago” and this is what pulls us into falling in love, only to find, as the rosy glow of early romance fades, that our lover also has a bunch of really annoying habits that match the negatives in our unconscious “imago”.

I like the saying “A theory is an idea in search of the truth”.  Imago theory and the idea of our partners being an “imago match” seems to hold up a lot of the time with the couples I work with.

Here are Mike and Genevieve talking about The Imago Match