The method involves: 1) Having couples fill out a 200-page book together chronicling the history and evolution of their relationship season-by-season. 2) Encouraging exploration of emotions and meaning through adding photos, memories and discussions. 3) Using the book as a "third element" in therapy alongside input from other relationship experts to provide new perspectives. The goal is to facilitate open dialogue between partners to deepen understanding and potentially reposition themselves and their relationship. A case study example is provided where reading about oxytocin helped a distressed couple reconnect.

1. Open Dialogical Practice in Relationship therapy
Writing our Book of Love
Yves Dingens and Leo Bormans
2nd International Conference on Dialogical Practices – 7 – 9 maart 2013

2. Love

3. New dialogues
New definitions of Love
Re-new-ed-
identity

4. European chairman Van Rompuy &
Leo Bormans
Kofi Annan (Nobel Peace prize)
& Leo Bormans

6.  A book with 200 empty pages
 2 pages for each season
 starting 1 year before the relation
 today + 3 years empty pages

7. Timeline: Double page Season by Season
Top of the page: partner A / Bottom: Partner B
Colour strip: each partner can give colour to felt emotions

8. Open – end dreams
Imagination
Create hope

9. Rational Level
Objective data e.g.
official date of cohabition, date of marriage, date of birth
children, relocation, job change,
objective frame >> grip for involved people in the
dialogue (e.g. parents, friends, children,…)

10. Awareness of the systemic approach

11. … hearing all voices

12. Timeline + strip of feelings + data

13. What do these partners feel,
now that they are face to face
with the history of their relation
?

14. Second Level: emotion driven.
add old pictures, remembrances,…
to explore the meaning of Love

15. Making a new story out of
•Highlights
•Important moments
What do they actually feel in this moment?

16. What is IN the picture?

17. What is IN the picture?

18. What is IN the picture?

19. Repositioning of the self in relationship
and
Repositioning the relationship itself.

20. A dialogical space arises
City of Words, Lithograph by Vito Acconci, image via Wikipedia

21. Investigation
100 PhD’s >> everyone has his own perspective, something
the researcher is looking for, when he does an investigation
100 PhD’s>> each with his own interpretation of the
results
100 PhD’s:>> their own story must have been involved
Conclusion:>> the Worldbook of Love are 100
interpretations about Love in a multicultural perspective

22. First element>> the clients
Second element>> the dialogue
between the cliënt(s) and the therapist
Third element>> the Worldbook
a multiplicity of voices of the
World outside
Peter Lenaerts, third element, Systeemtheoretisch Bulletin 2009, n°3

23. Romantic Compassionate
Love Love
Companionate Attachment
Love Love
PhD Ellen S. Berscheid
University of Minnesota

24. Research documents that no 2 individuals use
the word in exactly the same way
The meaning of the word Love not only is
likely to differ among individuals…
..but even for a single individual, the word
may carry different meanings as it is used in
different relationships
Ph D Ellen S. Berscheid
University of Minnesota

25. Even in a single relationship, the meaning of
the word ‘Love’ may vary each time the
individual uses it.
Ph D Ellen S. Berscheid
University of Minnesota

26. Romantic Love:
passionate Love – erotic Love – being in Love
Companionate Love: friendship Love
strong liking
Compassionate Love: caregiving
Love - altruistic Love – selfless Love
Attachment Love: depends on
a long familiarity – receiving
comfort and protection

27. Writing our Book of Love:
continuous search for meaning of Love in an
ongoing dialogue with couple and therapist
and the third element

28. Facilitate continuous
dialogue
To deepen dialogical
approach
View
through the grid of
• Romantic Love
• Companionate Love
• Compassionate Love
• Attachment

29. Facilitate continuous
dialogue
To deepen dialogical
approach
Using the 100
narratives
about Love as a
third element

31. Texts of the
Outer World
Representations validated
by a worldwide community

32. Love is the life force,
the soul, the idea.
There is no dialogical relation
without love,
just as there is no love in isolation.
Love is dialogic.
(Patterson, D. 1998) Literature and spirit: Essay on
Bakhtin and his contemporaries, 142)

33. Non-verbal dialogue
and language skills
Less linguisticly proficient partners
modeling clay, paint, paper-mache,
….
The advantage of working with
mondeling clay and other materials is
that there can be more bodily felt
emotions. The hands, in contact with
structures as clay, draperie, cloth,
etc… can create even better
dialogues about feelings. Going into
dialog through shaping clay and
offering the form to the partner to
reform and bring changes, can open
bodily felt dialogues as an continuing
meaning-shaping story.

34. Non-verbal dialogue
and language skills
Pictures, drawings and puppets may
help to define emotions
Putting puppets in intersubjective
placings - adjust the placing as they
would do in a verbal dialogue and
certain experiences, believes,
sitations can be taken in dialogue.
People can “talk” with/through the
puppets, expres feelings, etc..
Use of pictures
partners can find pictures to go in
dialogue with each other
about the meaning of the aspects of
love, they can show what is
important for them.

35. Case
A couple, both have 2 children from a former relationship.
Each of the children need extra caregiving because of
different problems they are facing.
The parents did receive an autism diagnose for one boy,
another one has a serious mental retardation, one daughter
with high sensitivity etc..
The woman was incapacitated because of of a chronic
fatigue syndrome.
There is a lot of hassle in the house.
Each parent loses itself in loyalty for their own children

36. it’s difficult to persist rules,
they are blaming each other.
Man and wife are not interested in each other anymore.
Intimicy is completely gone.
They barely speak with each other, except to reproach.
He was disappointed about a lack of intimacy and sexuality.
When her partner talked about this topic, the women started to cry.
However they want to stay together because, so they say,
they feel love for each other.
In therapy, each week again >> negative – negative.

37. Text of Ph D Zak about oxytocine came into the conversations.
They were interested in it. We talked about what Ph D Zak discovered, the
so-called Love-hormone.
They were surprised. We talked together about the positive sense of touch.
The text became a third element in our dialogues.
It did shape enough distance and safety to talk about intimacy,
it was not a diagnose about their problem, nor an advice.
They could re-member fine feelings.
The fine feeling of touching was becoming a member of their memory
again.
The next days they had planned a weekend with only the 2 of them,
in Luxembourg.

38. One week later, I received this postcard.
The devil escaped !
Oxytocine has
worked!
