Imago Relationship Therapy

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I use Imago therapy to help couples and families to lean into each other for their needs like comfort and reassurance. We begin by finding the ways that our partner has been there for us during the week. Then during session, a couple finds a way to both experiment and to experience having their partner open up and have their needs met in the moment.

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.

I now offer a nine-week online psychoeducational program that serves both as a self-study program for those couples who wish to work on their relationship at home, working at their own pace, as well as an introduction to couples counseling, teaching the skills and tools needed to make couples counseling really beneficial and successful. I particularly enjoy working with couples from different cultural backgrounds. Inter-cultural relationships offer unique challenges to couples.

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.

Imago Couples Therapy is based on the idea that we each carry an image of what love should feel like, shaped by early experiences. This image influences our romantic relationships, often complicating them with past and present issues. Imago therapy aims to build empathy, understanding, appreciation, and connection between partners. Imago therapy can help you: ​ Reinvigorate your relationships. Transform conflict into connection. Embrace new possibilities for deeper relationships.

I was introduced to Imago when I began counseling work in 2019. Since then, I have used it consistently in my practice. Understanding the process of mirroring, validation, and empathy not only gives me direction as a therapist in session, it also provides a useful guide for a couple to get to know themselves in relation. This method is great for cultivating listening skills by asking one to consider how to reflect back the content, as well as imagining the experience, from what another says.

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.