The Vibrant Relationship

A Handbook for Couples and Therapists

Kirsten Seidenfaden, Piet Draiby, Mette Marie Davidsen, Ros Draper, Mette Marie Davidsen, Ros Draper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429922701
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The book is divided into easy to grasp sections of theory and practical exercises. In the first part of the book, two of Denmark's most experienced practitioners in couples' therapy, psychologist Kirsten Seidenfaden and psychiatrist Piet Drailby, explain why we tend to get confused about love. In the exercise section of the book, they provide some simple, yet very efficient, tools to help us find out where we lost our way and how we can remain in a loving vibrant relationship for the rest of our lives.

Part
1

Introduction

Our Turning Point

Creating and sustaining a vibrant relationship is one of the most difficult challenges we come across in our lives, but when we succeed, it is the source of a truly deep and lasting happiness. To succeed, we need some tools to help us on our way.

The subject of this book is the "Dialogue of Acknowledgement", a loving but extremely efficient tool that can help you to tackle your problems and form the basis for a new way of living and ethical practice, within both your relationship as a couple and all other relationships in life.

We believe that using the Dialogue of Acknowledgement is an excellent way of learning how to interact with others, particularly your partner, with a greater degree of compassion and empathy, thus leading to greater peace of mind. This is a tool that helps us to value other people's reality and take it as seriously as we wish others to take our own. In this way, we do not merely create a more caring atmosphere for our own partner and children, but, in a modest way, we can also contribute to a better and kinder world.

This is a book about opportunities for you to begin and sustain healthy ways of being in your relationship. What we are talking about are small changes with significant effects. So, for example, instead of saying, in the time-honoured way, "My partner must change so that I can develop", we say, "When both of us change we can both develop, and we will be doing it together."

Small changes can, however, often be difficult to make, since we are actually talking about changing habits. For one reason or another, we have adopted the habits we carry in our "baggage", but, in terms of developing the relationship both of you dream about and deserve, these habits are counter-productive. It is important to realize that we have very good reasons for having developed these habits, since they have helped us to survive.

Equally important is that it is not you who will know which of these old habits stand in the way, but your partner, who will tell you. However, the way your partner draws your attention to a habit, often quite spontaneously, can have the effect of making you do it more rather than less.

We hope this book will take you into unfamiliar territory and show you how to do things you are not used to doing, and that these new tools will help you and your partner to develop the vibrant, open, and trusting relationship you want.

No Easy Solutions

There is no quick and easy way to a mature, strong, and mindful relationship. The journey consists of small steps towards creating increasing confidence as you learn to counter your old habits, survival strategies, and seemingly uncontrollable emotions. However, part of the process is also discovering the way in which differences can be enriching for your relationship, rather than threatening.

The Vibrant Relationship is not just a book that promotes marriage or relationship per se. We think it is an optimistic book about new opportunities that are just within our reach – if we are prepared to make a little effort.

Our contribution to this subject is based on a deep desire to pass on experiences from our own lives, as well as from our many conversations with couples. We use the Dialogue of Acknowledgement in our work, as well as in our personal lives, and the result is that we nearly always see any coldness and dislike dissolve, giving way to new closeness and intimacy. It is an amazing experience when couples reach that moment where, perhaps for the first time in years, they see their partners in a completely new light. At that moment, a couple begins to understand that the disturbing and destructive power struggles or the pain of disconnection can be understood, on a deeper level, as an invitation to growth.

This book is a manual in the true sense of the word. It offers practical advice and important background information for when your relationship is failing or when dreams and vitality are on standby, and can help you get back on track towards making your life together what you hoped it would be at the beginning of your relationship.

Alternatively, if your relationship seems to be functioning well and you just want some new ideas about it, or a new perspective on it, the tools described here will give you increased awareness of your opportunities.

We Have Been There

In the twenty-five years we have been together, we have spent a lot of time and effort trying to find our way in our relationship. Until almost ten years ago, we did not have an effective means for change in either our professional or our private lives, and our relationship was in crisis. We realized that we needed tools that could not only get us back on track, but also ensure that the closeness, the deep contact, and the nurturing in our relationship would not diminish as the years go by.

Then we came across "Imago Relationship Therapy", which began to influence our love life as well as our working life. We realized that this was an effective way to work with unwanted and wearying disappointments, power struggles, and misunderstandings in the relationship.

In imago relationship therapy, the role of the therapist is to support rather than to guide. This is very much in line with our beliefs about self-help and equality: the couples are the experts on their own lives. The simple tools that the therapy provides make it possible to form a new perspective on the relationship, so that the disconnection and the recurrent power struggles are replaced by a renewed affection and intimacy – in short, love.

This approach is also in line with our views on healing and treatment, since our work as therapists is not based on diagnoses or rigid descriptions of what the treatment should be, but on a nonauthoritarian, creative, and respectful way of relating based on equality, where the couples are always the experts on their own lives, and where our role is to elicit the resources which we believe all couples have.

The Dialogue of Acknowledgement

Through the Dialogue of Acknowledgement, we gained a completely new understanding of how we could approach our differences with curiosity instead of with scepticism or irritation. Most importantly, it became evident to us that behind every critique and every frustrated wish there is always a constant yearning for something better. Becoming aware of the causes of our frustration has created an entirely new way for us of being together, where we have begun to explore safely the constant challenges to ourselves as individuals and to our shared life.

For these reasons, we undertook additional training in therapy for couples, and this became one of the best and most active experiences in our professional lives in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Based on our experiences, and inspired by Imago Therapy, we developed the tool we call the "Dialogue of Acknowledgement". It has been adapted to Danish culture and mentality, and consists of conversations that generate new contact and understanding; in other words, of the fulfilling communication we all aspire to and can master.

The Dialogue of Acknowledgement is strongly influenced and informed by:

• Carl Rogers' work on the significance of the unconditional positive regard
• knowledge about the significance of our early attachment patterns
• new brain research, which explores how the brain works, and how emotions are generated
• systemic and narrative thought.

The Dialogue of Acknowledgement is based on the following elements, which will be described in detail in the second part of the book, where practical issues are dealt with:

• acknowledgement
• turn-taking – we take turns in telling our stories
• patient listening
• curiosity and transparency
• re-visioning the future of the relationship.

We have chosen to call our approach the Dialogue of Acknowledgement because acknowledgement and appreciation are the central concepts in our therapeutic work. By acknowledgement, we mean a fundamental approach in which we are able to put ourselves in our partner's shoes and see the world as he or she sees it; by appreciation, we mean affirming the other person's view. Acknowledging requires the capacity to respect the fact that our partner has versions of reality that differ from our own in radical ways. Being different does not mean being wrong. Acknowledging has a fantastic effect: it stimulates and supports further personal growth and development. When your partner acknowledges you, you feel seen, heard, understood, and respected as the person you are. The feeling of peace and security that acknowledgement creates will empower you and your partner to take on the challenge of change in your relationship. Needless to say, your partner's transformation also furthers your own development.

Using the Dialogue of Acknowledgement is not just a temporary process. Once it becomes second nature, it can open the door to a completely new way of being together, not just as a couple, but also with children, friends, and colleagues. We hope it will become a new habit. Seeing, acknowledging, and appreciating the world in this way leads to – if you like – a new ethics of respecting differences, which could be a rich and fruitful soil in which to grow your relationships with the people you hold dear.

In powerful and simple ways, the Dialogue of Acknowledgement, being a reciprocal and caring process, creates a space for the underlying, often painful, stories to emerge, so that we can begin to deal with the effect they have of blocking the joy and vitality that characterize the thriving relationship.

In this book, we would like to share our optimism and demonstrate the opportunities available to couples who want to create understanding and change in their relationships. We wrote it because, now more than ever, we feel and experience our relationship in ways that break through the barriers to love and intimacy. We are certain that we have found the tools to enable us to liberate our own relationship in such a way that our shared life will thrive.

It is our hope that this book will help to introduce you to a shared life of openness, curiosity, acknowledgement, appreciation, and recognition. We want the book to help you learn how to converse and to listen, so that it will be possible for you to explore yourselves and each other in new ways.

This book is for all couples who are looking for new ideas, as well as for couples who feel their relationships are not working, but who, nevertheless, have the desire and the courage to fight for their love in order to get the life we all long for.

Stop the Vicious Circle

We believe that by using this book, couples who are struggling in their relationship can create better conditions for their children.

We often forget that the well-being of the parents is paramount to the well-being of the entire family. The emotional atmosphere between the father and the mother is the air that the children have to breathe. If the pain of the parents pollutes the space, the children have to learn survival strategies in the unsafe, loveless atmosphere.

When parents come to us with a child who is not thriving, we often see symptoms of psychological strain, which are the result of the parents' difficulties. So, children's psychological difficulties are often expressions of tensions and stress in the parental relationship and in the wider family.

Owing to the parents' unresolved problems, the children will not get the necessary help from them to develop beyond the limits which they, the parents, are struggling to overcome. The parents' own development is a decisive factor in the support of their children's development, and we see how many children's symptoms can change if the parents get qualified help to move on in life.

We found that by taking an interest in the love, presence, conflicts, and power struggles in our relationship, we were also caring for our children and their children by not passing on our neglect and painful patterns, which were the consequences of our own parents' neglect.

Kirsten Seidenfaden
and Piet Draiby

OUR RELATIONSHIP IS NOT A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED. IT IS AN ADVENTURE TO BE LIVED

- HEDY SCHLEIFER -

It is Never Too Late to Have a Good Relationship

Why do we suddenly focus our energy on the children, the computer, or our work, instead of developing our relationship with our partner? Why does the loving, sensual woman you knew gradually change into a bad-tempered shrew? Why does the considerate man you knew turn into a bore, a withdrawn uncommunicative caveman who is never at home? And why do we constantly run into the same problems and power struggles in our relationships, no matter how many partners we attempt to settle down with?

There are many different answers to these questions. The most useful one is that w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• PART 1
• PART 2
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• THE RELATIONSHIP THERAPY CENTRE
• POSTSCRIPT AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS