When I was in my late 20s/early 30s, I taught an Introduction to Philosophy class at a community college. One of my students was in her early 40s, and back in school because she was going through a divorce and retooling. In a class discussion about dialogue and argument structures one day, she said wistfully, “It’s never about the pork chops.”
Though I had no idea why she and her husband got a divorce, and was still years away from my own, I knew exactly what she was talking about. Our marital spats about pork chops, the proper way to load the dishwasher, and (in a more contemporary context) mistakes on the Google calendar, are often more about the things left unsaid than those spoken aloud. Indeed, no one gets divorced over burnt pork chops; these things are proxies for deeper issues.
For this reason, sometimes when I try to recount an argument that I’ve had with my current partner, I can’t remember the details or the impetus behind it. Instead, what I remember is the form the argument took, the strategies each of us employed to either “win” or make the argument end, and the feelings that I came away with. Again, the details are easily forgotten because they don’t really matter. Yesterday, for example, we got into an argument that was ostensibly about the fact that I tried to hand them an adapter when they asked for an extension cord.
When we first started couples therapy around a year ago to try to figure out why we were having the same fights over and over, we took the traditional talk therapy route. We sat week after week and laid out where we hit up against friction in our relationship, and what triggers we both have from our respective pasts that amplified these points of contention. Doing this initial work was very helpful in understanding our dynamic and its underlying cause. We all know, though, that while self-knowledge is an important first step, it isn’t enough on its own to effect change. If it were, we wouldn’t need New Year’s resolutions — we would all already be sticking to our budgets and exercising several times a week.
When our couples therapist went on leave, they suggested that we connect with a therapist that does a particular kind of relational therapy: Imago. Imago therapy was developed in the 1980s. The word “imago” means image in Latin, and it is the therapy’s namesake because the founders believed that we are all motivated by our unconscious images of familial love that we internalized as children. In other words, when we are fighting with our spouse about pork chops, we bring the weight of our childhood wounds into the discussion.
The theory behind Imago is less important here than what it actually looks like in practice. Imago therapists walk the couple through pre-scripted dialogues with set “stems” that each person completes, one at a time. There is a sender and a receiver, and the individuals within the couple take turns occupying each role. For example, in the case of the burnt pork chop, the sender may get prompts like:
- One thing I want you to know about our conflict is…
- The thoughts I have about this are…
- The feelings I have about this are…
- This reminds me of my past when…
The received will listen to all of their partner’s thoughts and feelings in this format and then mirror back what was said, using stems like this:
- What I heard you say was…
- This makes sense to me because…
Now when I first heard about this practice, I was skeptical. I have an almost kneejerk reaction to scripts, or for that matter, to being told how to do anything. This should be no surprise, you don’t become a sex writer by following all of the rules. But I’m also pretty open to giving things a try, regardless of my initial misgivings.
In practice, my ADHD mind moves quickly, and I found it almost painful to be on the receiving end — especially when I had to wait my turn to talk — suppressing my inclination to interrupt them with my own thoughts and feelings. It reminded me of being in elementary school and having my teacher tell me to put my hands down because I already talked, and having to sit on my hands in order to fight my own impulses.
But then a funny thing happened. While practice (at least so far) doesn’t make perfect, it certainly does make things better. Learning to wait my turn and hear my partner out (or at least making that a goal), before interjecting with my own point of view shifts the dynamics in a way that allows us to get to the deeper issues behind the argument. Certainly when the underlying argument is about not feeling heard or paid attention to, defending the reason why I thought the adapter was an extension cord is a waste of time and energy. It does nothing to get at the feelings that lay just under the surface.
What’s more, because these dialogues have a structure that is always the same, and where the receiver always has to tell the sender why what they are saying makes sense, there is a way that it has trained me to work to understand my partner’s point of view. I had an aha moment during one of our sessions when our therapist said offhandedly about both of our perspectives, “What both of you are saying makes sense because we all make sense.”
Certainly, this shouldn’t have been the first time that I considered that perhaps, according to their own internal logic, history, and values, all of my partner’s feelings and perspectives make sense, even the ones that I disagree with. But humans are funny creatures, quicker to defend our own points of view than to try to understand that of others. Of course, what she is saying is right, we all do make sense in our own context. Learning to shift focus from my context to my partner’s, and live in that for a little while before returning to my own, has been the most useful thing I’ve gotten from this practice.
While these fights still come up, we have had incredible moments that have changed the way we relate to one another — for the better. Take yesterday as an example. I got a text from my partner after our argument that said, “I just miss you, I should have said that instead of getting mad about the extension cord.” Taking time to think about how our partner feels, it turns out, also gets us closer to our own feelings. It’s never about the pork chops, and I needed to hear that because I missed them too.
You can find Jessie on her website or her socials: X: @sapiotextual & Instagram: @curvaceous_sage.
