Imago Relationship Therapy

I engage in IMAGO relationship therapy often with couples to help them connect, attach, and communicate more effectively.

This is a specific kind of relationship therapy that is designed to help conflict within relationships. We learn about the individual's own past wounds and how it maybe affecting their parter/relationship. Through this process we learn about personal triggers that are impacting the relationship.

I work with couples using the couples dialogue, helping them to feel heard and understood, with the goal of engaging in healthy conflict and having a strengthened relationship.

Imago relationship therapy (IRT) aims to equip couples with the tools necessary to relate to each other in healthier ways and reveal the emotional pathway formed in childhood that led them to their current situation. This form of therapy combines spiritual and behavioral techniques with Western psychological methodologies in order to assist couples in unveiling their unconscious components.

When your partner REALLY listens to you, a disagreement need not become a fight. We'll use Harville & Helen Hendrix's communication techniques to listen to understand, rather than just waiting to fire back a rebuttal. So often, we aren't even fighting about the same thing. Having help to slow down and stay on the same track has made all the difference for couples' relationships. I have heard "I just wish we'd done this sooner," as I work with couples to re-build connection.

While I do use other modalities for relationship therapy, such as Gottman and EFT, I find the techniques and exercises used in Imago therapy, which is best suited for helping clients take more control of their own healing process.

My couples and relationship work pulls from the leading experts in the field, including Stan Tatkin's PACT model, Sue Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapy, Ellyn Bader's developmental model of differentiation, and research by the Gottmans. However, I have a special liking for Harville Hendrix and Kelly LaHunt's Imago therapy.

Imago Therapy teaches couples Imago Dialogue to help them listen to, and validate each other. Imago Dialogue is extremely powerful. Through Imago, couples trace current patterns back to childhood experiences. This process heals childhood wounds and in turn, fixes problems in current relationships. We provide individual couples counseling sessions using Imago Therapy.

Imago therapy was developed with the goal to help partners reconnect, heal, and grow in their relationships. Imago hones in on partners' childhood wounds and helps them repair and grow past them within the relationship. It offers partners very practical and concrete interventions, such as formal appreciations, mirroring, validating, and empathizing. Clients can immediately apply interventions their daily lives to improve their relationships through the fostering of safety and security.

Imago relationship therapy is a form of couples therapy that helps those in committed relationships work out their misunderstandings, reduce conflict, and rediscover ways to bond, create joy, communicate effectively, and find common ground by learning to recognize how early childhood relationship experiences affect how we communicate, behave, and respond to others in adult relationships. By engaging into a structured dialogue to be truly appreciated, heard and understood by your partner.

I have been a certified Imago Couples Therapist for the last 16 years and find this method very effective to work with couples and teach them effective communication strategies. I also use imago fo address sexual issues that my clients have- and find it equally helpful for that purpose as well.

Imago therapy will help you discover how to connect deeper to create the healthy and happy relationships you've always dreamed of having.

There is a link between frustrations in adult relationships and our experiences growing up. Childhood feelings of abandonment, suppression or neglect will often arise in an intimate relationship. When partners meet wounds with defensiveness and reactivity it can overshadow the positives in a relationship and lead to feelings of disconnection, pain and dis-empowerment. Imago Relationship Therapy aims to help couples learn to shift out of the power struggle and into loving connection.

Imago Relationship Therapy provides couples and families with a safe structure to co-create a healthy, loving and mature relationship where all parties feel heard and understood. Imago is unique in several ways; it provides a dialogical process that you will continually use to connect and heal.