Imago Relationship Therapy provides you with a toolbox of dialogues and exercises which any couple can learn to integrate into everyday living situations, eventually without the coaching and support of a therapist.
Imago dialogues are effective, common-sense communication skills which can very quickly create a feeling of safety. Many couples immediately experience an opportunity to connect more deeply with their partners as they learn to communicate about what each needs to feel loved, connected, and safe.
During Imago Therapy there is no blame, shame or criticism. Instead of continuing hurtful power struggles or withdrawing into quiet isolation, both partners learn to validate each other, to listen with open hearts and to empathize with each other’s vulnerabilities. Each learns how unmet needs from childhood tend to emerge in their intimate relationships and sabotage genuine growth, love, and closeness.
My goals for my work with you are connection, consciousness, compassion, and containment.
I want couples and individuals to learn to connect with themselves, their histories, their feelings, deepest meanings and goals. I support them to connect with one another as real people, to build genuine bonds and communicate in authentic and healing ways.
Imago work helps build skills of compassion for yourself and one another, to see beyond your adaptations and defensive patterns to the hurts underneath and to show compassion in ways that the other can feel validated, comforted, and empowered to grow. What one person experiences as standing up for him or herself, the other often feels as an attack, so I have to help make room for each other and find new ways of self-care that include care for the other.
I want to help develop the ability to contain the old brain’s patterns of reactivity, to put automatic responses “into the back pockets” when interacting with your partner. Once old reactions “get out of the way,” you can grow toward new behaviours that are love-enhancing for your partner and for yourself.
Imago Relationship Theory results in consciousness of your own thoughts, feelings and behaviours, their roots in old beliefs and interpretations, childhood sorrows and adaptation to these unmet needs. Consciousness is about waking up, staying alert to conditioned responses and seeing the possibilities of making new choices that build healthy relationships.
Through Imago Relationship Therapy couples will
- understand why they have chosen the partner they are with
- understand why most conflicts keep emerging around the same “core” themes
- restore safety, trust and passion by learning to navigate these conflicts constructively.
Results
You develop
- greater awareness of who you are
- increased empathy for yourself and others
- the ability to nurture yourself and others
- the ability to recognize the strengths as well as the risks of your specific relationship
- skills to solve existing conflicts and to prevent new ones
- communication skills to create a loving and passionate erotic connection
- skills to create a nurturing home atmosphere for yourself and your children
- the ability to serve as role models for healthy relating for your children
- the relationships in which you can get the love you want
Who can engage in Imago dialogues?
- Couples
- Parents (whether together or apart)
- Mother or father and a teenager (son or daughter)
- Adults with either their father or their mother (dialogue between generations)
- Siblings
- Friends
- Work teams
- Work colleagues
- Individuals*
*For individuals, Imago Therapy is helpful in identifying and understanding relationship patterns in order to become better able to trust and connect.
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