After volunteering for Troma at the Cannes film festival, I can now fully appreciate how difficult it is to make your voice heard at a film festival such as Cannes. The fact that Troma is relentless and shows up every year and makes every attempt possible to disrupt the goings on is admirable. It is certainly hard work, and by the end everyone is tired and frustrated, but Troma is persistent. This documentary is brutally honest, and is absolutely wonderful. The volunteers are enthusiastic, which is necessary. The fact that the volunteers are not paid, and must pay for their own flights and food shows that they themselves are doing it because they love Troma. How many major companies have that sort of fan base? True, they harass everyone and cause tons of trouble, but they are doing it for something they truly love. Troma gets noticed because of the volunteers. By having people pay attention to Troma, more attention is paid to independent cinema. Down with Hollywood! The truth is, you may not like Troma, but you will never forget Troma.
In the world of relationship counselling today there are three big players, these are Imago Relationship Therapy developed by Harville Hendrix and his wife, Helen Kelly Le Hunt; Emotionally Focused Therapy, developed by Sue Johnson and Les Greenberg and male masturbator Gottman method therapy developed by John and Julie Gottman. As a specialist marriage and relationship counsellor I have personally trained in all three of these relationship counselling approaches and am often asked by people contemplating training my thoughts on which approach I would recommend; or by practitioners of a particular approach for my endorsement of their particular model. From my perspective I see each of these approaches as having particular strengths and weaknesses and in an ideal world everyone would train in all three of them. What I would like to do in this article is to highlight what particular strengths and weaknesses I see in these approaches, male masturbator with a view to informing others trying to make their choice. I should say by way of full disclosure that I am significantly more trained in Imago Relationship Therapy.
When I think about what I like most about imago relationship counselling it has to be the dialogue. The story goes that Harville and his second wife Helen were engaged in conflict and Helen told Harville that they should take turns speaking and listening. They must have been a relatively OCD couple because they took this very literally and literally repeated every single word that their partner said word for word. And what they discovered was that something magical happened in their connection when they did this. This approach has been strongly validated by a series of findings in neuroscience which showed that the close gaze and mirroring activates mirror neurons in the brain. These mirror neurons are widely considered to be the basis of the human/mammalian capacity for empathy. Other findings indicate that seasoned practitioners of dialogue experience a brain state that is similar to meditation. All of our team have some training in Imago Relationship Therapy.
For a large number of clients, they may experience this in the first session of couples therapy. The core feature of the typical imago session is a sense of peace and calm stillness and deep listening. For a lot of clients this is incredibly powerful because it is a powerful counterbalance to the fear that they had coming into counselling that it would simply be an emotional boxing match. In my experience imago practitioners tend to be very passionate about the work they have done and it does seem to be work that they use practically in their own life. This has certainly been my own experience. It’s also noticeable that even clients who just are mirroring in the client sessions and don’t practice their homework, still notice a significant improvement in their ability to listen more deeply to each other. The question that remains because of the lack of research is how long this effect lasts for.
It should be noted that this is a weakness present in all of the main models of couples counselling book which is a significant relapse rate among couples. The weaknesses of the Imago. Imago is a lot easier for avoidant clients (often males) because the emotional intensity is lower it tends to help avoiders reduce their flooding and arousal (getting upset). This can be a strength of the model as the maximiser is so grateful to see the minimizer relax and opening up that they will cope with what they find difficult about the model. For maximisers, or insecurely attached ambivalent clients, they often find it difficult to manage this slower pace brought on by the need to mirror every word. A skilled imago practitioner can often handle that extremely adeptly and help the couple see the payoff for persisting, however there is a group of clients in my experience about 15 to 20% who simply do not love or enjoy the imago dialogue in my experience the most common reason for this is having highly intellectual or cognitive clients who don’t understand why they need to repeat word for word and so it’s possible to get into a bit of a power struggle or male sex toys to have someone checking out because they simply don’t understand why they are mirroring word for word. Th is data was written with GSA Content Ge nerator DEMO!