Imago Reality
Decades ago a therapist developed an Imago path to help couples overcome their inability to hear each other and grow together. My therapist had recommended this to me a few years ago as a way to be heard in the relationship. This image of “the person who can make me whole again” is what is called the Imago. I tucked that information away in my mental file even thought I tried it in many forms.
Then a woman and her grandchildren rented the LaLa and in a conversation she spontaneously confessed that she had just come from an Imago retreat with her husband of many years. “It wasn’t what you’d expect,” she told me, “I learned more about myself than him during that time.
I didn’t go to a Imago retreat even thought it did interest me, instead I sought more conventional means to be heard when I felt I wasn’t being heard. But similarly, I found that in the throes of that effort, I began to hear myself as if for the first time. And I heard what was being said with such clarity that I had many a ha moments. It was the gift of hearing that I gained, something that seems to have been lost on me for quite some time.
So last night, as I was watching the episodes in In Treatment, with Tin in bed early and asleep by 7, I watched with deep interest as Paul and Kate went through Imago therapy and how it was playing out with them – not good, let me say. Then suddenly I heard thump thump thump – footsteps that were pretty loud and so I jumped up, thinking it was Tin out of bed, and started down the hall to his bedroom, but I stood there confused when I didn’t see him. Thump thump thump.
For a moment I almost thought the footsteps were haunts and I froze in place until I heard a car pulling out of my driveway. I looked outside and saw a decorative package at the doorstep and I reached out of the door to get it. I opened the box inside and found a colored glass object with a tag on it that said, Fruit Fly Trap.
Hmmm, I wondered. What does a fruit fly trap gift mean? Reality gets distorted when you are with someone and trying to be heard but things are so murky you can’t even hear yourself. But to be alone and witness a mysterious gift of a fruit fly trap turns reality into itself, with no echo, no other voice to wonder why this has arrived, at your doorstep, and why now.