Redefining a "Defining Moment":
A Personal Story

By Betsy Bergquist, Imago Therapist

The basic skill of dialogue which we teach as the centerpiece of our workshops and in my practice helps access and ferret out important childhood memories, especially the ones that seem so benign yet for some reason persist - those "defining moments."

By allowing us the space to be curious and to seek out the meanings we attach to these memories, the structure of the couple's dialogue leads both to understanding and healing of the wounds they may so subtly embed.

To illustrate, here's a memory I have as a 4-year-old. I've always been curious about this experience because it has long played out in my mind as if it happened yesterday. As I tell it now, it's both a memory of what happened and a memory of my thoughts and reactions at the time - the various meanings, assumptions, and inferences connected to it.

One afternoon my mother discovered that a $10 bill was missing from on top of her dresser. (Back then that was a lot of money.) Apparently she decided I had taken it, and having decided I was the one who took it, she set up a situation where she could question me intently. I don't remember her as being angry but as definitely concerned. I imagine now that she may well have thought that I didn't know what real money looked like and was using it as play money.

So she put me up on her bed with my two older sisters on either side and proceeded to ask me where the money was. I told her over and over again that I had not taken it, but my words fell on deaf ears and, in fact, when I kept on telling her that I had not taken the money, I remember her becoming more and more annoyed - I wasn't to be heard or believed or trusted. All she wanted to hear was where the $10 bill was.

So I began making up places where the money might be. I would say "under the leaves next to the cellar window" and then my mother would send one of my sisters to look there and she would of course return having found no money. Then I would make up another place and a sister would again go off and look there for the money. The money of course never showed up. It seemed as if this interrogation went on for a long time.

That is all I remember about that day. Whether the money ever showed up I don't know but if it did I never heard about it. The subject was dropped and I never recall any explanation, let alone any validation for the ordeal or a processing of the experience with me.

Interestingly, the only subsequent processing of this memory with my family came many years later (even this was at least 20 years ago), when I shared it with my mother and my sisters. Then, no one remembered it or for that matter even seemed to want to hear about it. It was as if even years later my perspective was not worth listening to, not important, or believable. What I remembered was being met with "How ridiculous!" and "You always were overly sensitive."

Thankfully, in the safety of the dialogue process, I have been gradually satisfying my curiosity about the persistence of this memory, exploring the meaning I attached and continued to attach to it, exploring why that little girl continued to cooperate with the accusations which she knew were not true, and exploring the feelings and implications it continued until recently to have on my life and relationship both with myself and with Bruce.

How I have come to see that I adapted to the situation was this: If my mom was sure I took the money then I told myself that maybe I had actually taken the money and then just forgot about it. After all she was my "everything" and I trusted her. Even though, in retrospect, I know I needed at that stage in my development to be able to trust myself and my truth, no one was able to validate that need, so I adapted to the interrogation by distrusting myself and in the moment started naming familiar places outside for my mom and sisters to check out, hoping the money would show up.

In the fragility of such moments life-shaping beliefs are born.

From the seed sown in this childhood experience grew over time the broader belief that everyone knew more than I did and that what I did know was not important. I could never trust myself that what I knew was worthy and valid.

For a long time, this carried over into school and in my life, reinforced by, in particular, my status as the youngest member of the family, so that it became the basis for automatic response to much of what I experienced in all of my roles as a student, parent, marriage partner, friend, family member - in all my affiliations and interactions.

So I am extremely grateful to the dialogue process and the structure that has been the catalyst for enabling me to explore this memory fully and safely, to redefine this "defining moment" that was for so long the seed of a limiting lifetime belief, achieve a new meaning and understanding, and thus come to ask for what I need from Bruce to help heal the wound embedded in the memory.

Without this process, I am certain I would not have had the confidence to take my life in all its current positive directions (including writing this article!) and to have the energy and passion to do it.