ABSTRACT
Development - Your hurt inner child (for two adults) For an intimate long-term relationship to be successful, both parties need to be genuinely interested in their partner’s history and feel compassionate towards the pain in their past. Without this, that pain can surface in the relationship again and again in destructive ways.
Working on their own, each person takes ten minutes to draw images from their partner’s past. They can draw what they have been told about the lovely times and the painful times. They work in silence. At the end of the time, they take it in turns to share with their partner what they have drawn. During the telling, the other person must listen in silence. At the end they give feedback. Ask them to say when they felt moved, empathised with, understood, misunderstood. The other person’s picture now belongs to them, so they can change anything on that picture to make it a more accurate representation of their past. They should do the changes in front of each other.
