New Research Begins on Imago Therapy

Over the past two decades, Imago Relationship Therapy has become a worldwide leader in the field of marriage counseling, with over 1,000 Certified Imago Therapists helping couples in over 25 countries. Now, the practice of Imago therapy is about to take another big leap forward, as a group of researchers plans to study Imago's effectiveness through quantitative research with couples across the United States.

The goal of the research is to establish Imago as an evidence-based practice. In the field of mental health, evidence-based practices are those that have demonstrated, through clinical trials, their effectiveness in helping people. “The managed care movement has spawned an atmosphere of outcomes and assessments. We can no longer say any therapy works just because we see what seems like improvement. We have to empirically validate what we do,” says Wade Luquet, Ph.D, an Imago therapist and Associate Professor of Sociology and Human Services at Gwnedd-Mercy College.

In August, the Imago Relationships International (IRI) research team met on Orcas Island, WA at the home of relationship researchers Drs. John and Julie Gottman, to consult about upcoming research projects. “As we move towards establishing Imago as an evidenced-based practice, it’s invaluable to us to learn from the Gottmans and their experience conducting their own research,” says Imago Center DC’s Nathan Gehlert, Ph.D., who participated in the meeting. Gehlert is in initial stages of planning a study of Imago therapy at The Imago Center of DC. He is also collaborating with the Imago research team and principal investigator Theresa Beeton-Clark, Ph.D., on another clinical trial involving Imago faculty.

The collaboration between IRI and other leading relationship clinicians and researchers began in 2010, when Imago co-founder Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. and his wife Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D. hosted the Gottmans, Dan Siegal, M.D., Marion Solomon, Ph.D., Drs. Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, Michele Weiner-Davis, M.S.W.,Jeffrey Zeig, Ph.D., Lilian Borges Zeig, Ph.D., Sue Johnson, Ph.D., and Jette Simon and Rich Simon, Ph.D., for a weekend at their home.

According to Hendrix, “the invitation was to explore how we might collaborate and extend our therapy systems into a couples' education project that might become a movement at the national and global level.” After two more meetings, the group has informally become the Couples Education Think Tank (CETT). “We have clarified that our mission is to impact cultural consciousness with the fact that healthy couples are indispensable for a healthy society so that supporting healthy couples becomes a primary cultural value,” says Hendrix. Part of CETT’s goal in supporting couples is to become a repository of scientific information on relationships and perhaps vet programs that have proven effectiveness.

“Harville and John and Julie share the primary vision of helping couples,” says Gehlert. “That is more important than enrolling couples in their own workshops or selling more of their books.”

To Tani Strain, M.A., chair of the Imago Research Planning Committee, the future seems bright for research into the clinical effectiveness of Imago therapy. “I see the strengths of our research team as a number of people with a common passion to research Imago, who bring many skill sets to the process. I see a future of possibilities,” she says.

This article is cross-posted at http://www.imagocenterdc.com/blog/2011/10/09/new-research-begins-imago-therapy

9 Tips for Surviving the Stress of Engagement & Dealing with Cold Feet

Two of my ideas made it onto this list of 9 Tips for Surviving the Stress of Engagement. Here's one:

Set Aside Time to Talk

Even when you’re deep into the wedding planning process, set aside a time each week to talk about how your relationship is going, says Professional Counselor Nathan Gehlert. You’ll be spending a lot of time focusing on the wedding, and it’s important to have this time to be able to check in with each other about your connection.

Read the article at The Plunge Project to see the rest of the list.

10 Great Fall Date Ideas

When couples participate in the Imago Getting the Love You Want Workshop, the group spends time brainstorming about fun date ideas. Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s usually the women who have lots of ideas and there are usually chuckles from the guys about many of the ideas. Do I really want to get a pedicure as a date? Not really.

Here are 10 man-friendly great fall date ideas from artofmanliness.com. Autumn is my favorite time of year and it’s a great time to get outside and do something special together.

8 Tips to Feel Happier

Broadly speaking, there are two components to therapy: talking and doing. Both stages lead to feeling different and increasing levels of well-being. The talking stage involves developing understanding of the issue at hand and strategies for dealing with it. The doing stage involves practicing change and actually changing. Typically, people will only feel slightly better as a result of talking about their issues. Beginning to "do" can be a big hurdle for some people, but it's only when we do that we can really beginning to feel better.

Gretchen Rubin, author of the bestselling book The Happiness Project, shares 8 tips for beginning to feel happier about yourself. The key is doing activities that help us feel more worthy of our own respect.

Do you have to be crazy to be a reality TV star?

I was interviewed yesterday by Liane Bonin Starr at Hitfix about the prevalence of narcissistic traits in people on many reality TV shows. Here's an exerpt of the article:

The suicide of "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" husband Russell Armstrong has spurred a lot of talk about the nature of reality television, with one L.A. Times journalist suggesting "at this point, the willingness to appear on a situational reality show should be classified as a symptom of emotional instability, if not a mental illness in itself." While television critic Mary McNamara might have been engaging in hyperbole for humor's sake, it's hard to deny she has a point.

While she was speaking specifically of "The Real Housewives" franchise, you also have to wonder about the sanity of anyone who would appear on, say, shows like "Flavor of Love" or "Teen Moms." Still, though it's easy enough to dismiss reality TV fame hounds as unstable, to what degree are we talking about? Are these people just big personalities harmlessly chasing their fifteen minutes, or is something actually amiss? I talked to Nathan Gehlert, PhD, LPC of the Imago Center in Washington D.C. and Judith Orloff MD, Assistant Clinical Professor Psychiatry at UCLA and author of "Emotional Freedom" and "Second Sight." The answer is a little more complicated than you might think, but let's just say McNamara might be onto something. Read the rest of the article here.