Imago Couples
Therapy
As someone who specializes in working with couples, I've always been struck by a paradox: the person you fall in love with and promise your life to is often the very same person you end up in a power struggle with - someone who can start to feel more like an enemy than a best friend.
In 1994 I discovered Imago Therapy, and everything started to make sense. That power struggle isn't a malfunction - it's meant to happen, and you can count on it happening. Why is our partner able to trigger us in ways no one else can? And why do the very things that first attracted us become the things that make us most crazy later on?
If you resonate with the idea that things happen FOR us, not TO us, you can start to see your partner as a gift. They're holding up a mirror, showing you exactly where you're unconscious and reactive in your communication.
Some of us, when we're upset, follow our partner from room to room - we can't rest until connection is restored. Others withdraw and shut down. Some amp up, get loud and critical, reach for a lot of words. Others ice their partner out completely. Whichever pattern is ours, it's painful - both to us and to our partner.
This is where Imago starts to make sense of the struggle. As we say in Imago work, if you're in a power struggle with your partner, you're probably with exactly the right person - someone sent to help you grow up and heal. And working through these very places of upset, in the Imago process, is what builds the bridge back to safe, joyful connection with your partner.
Imago Therapy Process
Before I became an Imago therapist in 1994, I used to feel that if I could just get couples to feel empathic towards their partner, they could have a willingness to be vulnerable and reconnect. Couples would tell me “We do great when we are in your office, but we have to take you home with us”.
What I love about the Imago therapy process is that it teaches a structured communication technique the couple learns right away and takes home with them. The couple become experts in creating safe communication.
The Imago dialogue is a communication process that right away brings containment of reactivity, non-harming communication, and empathy to our difficult conversations. It softens our defenses so we are available and safe for our partner and they for us. Most of my couples describe it as a type of magic.
Imago is the best system I have known in my 35 years of working with couples - both in my own marriage, and as a therapist. I would love to coach you in the Imago way of talking and listening that will reestablish the beauty of your connection.