Experts tell us that time is speeding up and that everything is moving faster, knowledge is doubling every few months and I am already out of breath just writing this. For us as Coaches and Therapists we have to keep up with all the new coaching and Therapeutic techniques. One of these was developed during the last few years is Imago Therapy.
Imago (rhymes with cargo) relationship therapy was developed by Harville Hendrix, PhD, and his wife Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD. They took many ideas from a broad range of psychological theory and therapeutic practice, and put them together in a unique way that emphasizes the mutuality of intimate relationships. According to Imago theory, you are created in a state of connection and joy, whole and complete. It is inevitable that your childhood carers will fail to perfectly meet your needs, and you will adapt to those experiences. The word 'adapt' here means that some parts of your psyche will over develop and some will be underdevelop and you will display limiting behaviours and beliefs which will influence your life and relationships one day as an adult. If you had for instance very strict religious parents chances are that you will be more of a introvert and the flamboyant outgoing part of your psyche will be repressed. When falling in love you will fall in love with this shadow part of your psyche (Falboyant and extrovert) and in a relationship this is what can cause conflict. Or else you might become rebelious and then you will attract the opposite into your life again. Someone who is introvert and follow rules to the extreme; driving you nuts!
So, we always attract partners who is our opposite match and it is a attempt of the unconscious mind to complete the childhood.
What then is the Purpose Of Romantic Love
Why do you fall in love then with particular people? According to Imago theory, you seek to recreate the conditions of your childhood so that you can use your adult competance to complete your developmental tasks and grow up - in other words, to finish your childhood. As Ben Hecht said, “Love is the magician that pulls a man out of his own hat.”
Three things make you fall in love:
1. You are driven to recreate the relational conditions of your childhood by bonding with someone who is sufficiently similar to your childhood carers – an Imago match. You will tend to fall in love with someone who matches an unconscious profile made up of positive and negative characteristics of your childhood carers. This profile is the “imago” (Latin for image, in the sense of likeness or resemblance).
2. You tend to fall in love with someone who has the same wound1 but a different defence – the fundamental need is the same, but one will openly acknowledge it while the other will deny it. Imago therapists often find couples who are in some significant way complementary – introversion and extroversion, blame and guilt, anger and sadness, control and submission, anxiety and stoicism, or logic and intuition.
3.You tend to be attracted to partners who exhibit aspects of your lost selves, the innate aspects of your personality of which you are not conscious. If you have a partner who carries the lost parts of your self, you are effectively reclaiming your lost parts by proxy.
Generally, one partner will be a minimizer, holding their energy in to deal with anxiety by themselves (predominantly using the avoider, isolator, compulsive controller, or competitor adaptations), and the other will be a maximizer, directing their energy outwards to deal with anxiety through contact with others (predominantly using the clinger, pursuer, diffuser, or compromiser adaptations). With adaptations from the latter stages of development (concern and intimacy), things are more fluid. For instance, it is not uncommon to find a couple in which the rebel is the maximiser and the conformist is the minimiser. Within such a relationship, the partners may frequently swap those roles between them – if the rebel conforms the conformist may rebel.
If you are a maximizer, you need to learn to be able to do something that minimizers can do (turn your energy inward to deal with anxiety by yourself), and vice versa.
For instance, a girl reacted to her parents’ arbitrary and unjust authority by protesting and rebelling (maximizer), and a boy reacted to his parents’ similar authority by withdrawing into himself and containing his resentment (minimizer). When they fell in love with each other as adults, they each offered the other an example of a different adaptation, which if integrated, could offer them both choice in how to deal with anxiety and disappointment, and therefore may bring liberation from rigid adaptations. If you and your partner can do this, you can each complete a developmental stage.
Typically, you and your partner will be seeking to complete the same stage (or adjacent stages), so you may be an avoider holding off a clinger, a distancer running from a pursuer, a controller dominating a diffuser, or a competitor trying to outdo a compromiser.
If you and your partner drive each other nuts, you are probably made for each other! (Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?)
So next time you are charged wioth something your partner is doing, is most probably is a unhealed part of yourself. Find and heal the part and the judgement an charge will disappear.
We fall in love to complete ourselves. And love is about growing, how painful it migh be. Every conflict is a chance to grow. You have a choice. Step in and grow or judge and repeat the old childhood pattern. To read a bit more, click here: http://www.ernestfrostnlp.co.za/discuss_comments.php?t_id=24062011082752

A person traveled for many days to the Himalayas to seek ‘The True Meaning of Life’. He went to a sage, meditating in a cave. Tired from his journey, but eager and expectant that the ‘ultimate mystery of life’ is going to be revealed to him in the next moment, he asked the sage, “What is the meaning of life?” After a long pause, the sage said, “Life is a fountain.” “What do you mean life is a fountain?” barked the questioner. “I have just traveled thousands of miles to hear your words, and all you have to tell me is that? That's ridiculous.” The sage then looked up from the floor of the cave and said, “You mean it's not a fountain?”
Working with clients who often have lost their meaning of life; this is an interesting question. I almost feel that when one asks this question, the 'meaning' has already disappeared into the sand. We as adults can learn a lot from children who spend most of their time in the present moment who would very seldom ask this question. It is when our attention is not focused on what we are doing and having in the now; that the meaning also begin to fade out. One of the simplest meditations is: Just…….. This means just eat, or just sit, or just breath or drink or drive your car. Bringing one's attention to the moment and really experiencing it fully. Then drinking a cup of tea becomes a unbelievable experience or a walk in the park or just going t the toilet. Just ……
Having completed another NLP Coaching Practitioner Course, and hopefully making a difference in the lifes of the delegates attending, I would like to share something special from this course. During a demonstration with the technique called: 'Logical levels of alignment', the delegate in the demonstration came to a major insight on the level of 'Purpose'. The technique consists of various levels and the client is slowly walked through the different levels, starting with the Environment, then onto Behaviour, Skills, Values and Beliefs, Mission/Purpose, Vision and Spirit. It was on the level of Purpose where the penny dropped for her. The questions asked on this level is: What makes your life meaningful? Why are you here? The challenge she was working with was an eagerness to take to much responsibility and taking her attention away from her primary life focus. “I am a brilliant therapist, and that is what I should devote most of my time to. It gives my life meaning, makes me come alive.” She realised that there was a deep unconscious belief from her childhood which was still influencing her life in the present. It was about whatever you or anyone else do; it must be done properly. This belief which was stated to her over and over by her father since she was a child, led to an over involvement into other people's lives as an adult, like unnecessary administration and not focusing on her primary life purpose. Always making sure that everything is done properly. With a change in the submodalities of the limiting belief it was changed to a belief which was serving her.
Walking in a park recently I met two elderly women who were excited by their new project of cleaning up the lakes in the park from water hyacinths. Their eyes were excited while telling me about their venture. Finding meaning always means to devote some time to something bigger than just you. A cause outide of your life which takes your attention to something more than just your life context. Most of our problems come from taking ourselves much to seriously and not focusing our attention on the world outside of us. And then being fully in the moment when doing that.
If you feel that life's meaning is alluding you or has watered down recently: get up go and drink a glass of water and just drink and then just breath and then find a cause outside of you life to focus on and making a difference in this world. In his book: Healing without Freud or Prozac: Dr David Servan-Schreiber tells how he had prescribed very different remedies when patients left the psychiatric unit. Instead of more 'drugs' and medicine he would write on the prescription: get a pet or a plant, something to care for; which caused a lot of criticism amongst his peers.
We find meaning in life by doing the 'right' actions and not by thinking on the sideline 'about' life. And the 'right' actions are by bringing your attention to even the most mundane everyday tasks. Then we don't need that: One day when……. and If only I can ………… You only have this breath: enjoy it and if you want to do it properly, focus all your attention and awareness on it…… right now.
Whenever you want to experience this technique as described in this article or learn more about NLP, please visit: www.ernestfrostnlp.co.za

I am one of those people who has books stack next to my bed, and if I could have eaten it, I probably would. It was late one night when I was depply struck by something I read. In his book The Art of of possibility, Benjamin Zander makes the statement: “There is no music making, without risk taking.” Working with people from all walks of life, one of the problems which surface most frequently is people feeling 'stuck'. Their soul sounds are not coming out. Part of coaching is helping them to discover their unique sound. However, finding that sound requires some input and few people are willing to take that 'risk', because our neurology are always wavering towards safety and security, the known.
In the movie As it is in Heavena conducter, Daniel Daréus is a successful and renowned international conductor whose life aspiration is to create music that will open people's hearts. His own heart, however, is in bad shape. After suffering a heart attack on stage at the end of a performance, he retires indefinitely to Norrland in the far north of Sweden, to the village where he endured a terrible childhood of bullying. He start a choir and he helps the 'simple' people from the village to each find their unique sound and note in the choir. On a more universal level, finding the unique note is also a uplifting and cathartic experience. This is beautifully demonstrated with one of the women in the choir, Lena, who lives in marriage where she is physically abused find her unique sound; her beautiful voice sound, and also ther internal sound of her soul. Finding her note meant also finding her inner inner power again, and eventually helps her to become free from the marriage. The final scene where the choir attends the competition Let the peoples sing in Austria, is for me one of the most moving scenes ever.
Lena's crystal clear voice rising above the choir with the song which the conducter, Daniel Dareus, has written specially for her. Here is a few lines from the song:
Fly away,
Take my hand.
Spread your wings, reach the sky.
I can make you believe.
Life is rich, rich within me.
So fly away
Hold my hand.
Feel the wind.
Take the sky.
Love will find, find a way
I believe in you.
Mmmh … Fly with me.
Without giving away the end of movie for those who haven't seen it yet, the conductor also finds his inner music for the first time in the last scene, when he really forgive and let go old pain from his childhood.
We can't leave this earth without finding our unique sound. Then life has purpose and meaning. And life becomes worth living to the full. And then you begin to feel the connection between everything which is love. It reminds me of another book which was forced upon me as a child which still have some truths. There is a passage in a book called Corinthians which also brings in sound. It reads: “If I speak with the languages of men and of angels, but don’t have love, I have become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.”
What is your sound? And if you haven't found it yet, remember: “There is no music making, without risk taking”.

Whatever you believe will always manifest as 'true' in your life. Limiting Beliefs are nothing else than descisons taken when in an unresourceful state. As an NLP and EMDR therapist working with clients on a daily basis I realize again how powerful beliefs are. And more than often it is these unconscious beliefs which limits us in so many ways. A woman came to see me about having to make a choice about her career. One part wanted to live more carefree and open, while the other part wanted the professional security, status, money and everything what goes with it. Working with this part (wanting status and security) on its own we discovered that it came from old childhood wounding of being compared to the rest of her brothers and sisters. As a young child she adopted the belief that she was just 'never good enough'! It sabotaged her life in may ways; like not completing projects, attracting the 'wrong' men and so on. Whatever is being held or believed in the unconscious will always manifest consciously. With some EMDR and time line work we cleared the event which was the root cause as well other related and similar  events during the early part of her life.  If you want more information on NLP or EMDR, please contact me anytime: info@ernestfrostnlp.co.za