Professional
Development
Advanced Training in Imago Therapy
Characterological Growth: Parts Work for Relationships
Come explore your shadow, how it works in relationships, and how we can integrate our missing selves to reclaim our full aliveness. This course is designed to go deeply into the ways your defenses and your character structure affect others. Another purpose is to grow your container so you can be big enough to hold all that life hands you and to help you rock between the joy and the sorrow of life.
In the role of therapist, we have a gift of distance. We care about the pain we see in others, and we have the experience of being in the role of “the good parent.” We try to accept our clients as they are. We are rarely aware of the parts of ourselves that reside in the shadows. Although we can be challenged at times to accept specific traits or behaviors in our clients, it is much easier than accepting our partners, our children, our friends, and our colleagues. How bewildering it is to be loving, conscious, and empathic with clients and unconsciously mean-spirited to those we are closest! The parts of us that hide in the shadow and specifically in our role as therapist will deeply impact our personal relationships and at times painfully challenge our professional abilities.
Couples, individuals, and professionals in the Imago community are welcome to attend this course. No previous Imago training is required. This is a required course for all Advanced Imago Certifications.
DC Area – Dates TBD CEUs- 24 (additional charge)
The Singles Training: Preparation for Committed Relationship
Working with Individuals from the Relational Paradigm
An intensive 4-day training for Imago therapists who want to take Imago’s relational theory into their work with singles, individuals, and groups. There is a strong emphasis on understanding and working with character adaptations as they appear in our lives as therapists, our couples and individual clients desiring healthy partnerships. Participants will learn how to run a 10-week group for Singles using Imago skills and exercises.
DC Area- Dates TBD CEUs – 35 (additional charge)
The Attuned Therapist: Working with Reactivity and Resistance
As therapists we expect a little chaos. However, there are couples who seem to challenge us every step of the way. This course is designed to teach therapists how to use their own centered, embodied, and attuned presence to meet a couple or client where they are and bring the structure to them in an attuned, safe way.
Even when resistance and reactivity center on the dialogue itself, we can track energy with skill, empathy, and compassion, moving couples toward connection, replacing negativity with positivity and affirmation. Using video clips, role plays, demonstrations, and didactic material we will create an interactive, fun, and dynamic space to focus on our own inner attunement and ability to connect, thereby deepening our work. From an Imago perspective, anxiety is at the core of all relational challenges. Anxiety causes clients to react to their partner in unconscious, hurtful, and destructive ways, and it causes clients to be very resistant to the counseling process. Anxiety in the therapist also causes unconscious reactivity and resistance to the counseling process. This course challenges the traditional understanding of resistance and reframes it as an indication of something much deeper—Terror. Taught from the perspective of the relational paradigm and Imago Relationship Theory, this course employs a combination of interactive lectures, personal writing exercises, role play, and demonstrations. This course challenges the participants to identify their reactivity. It explores when and how that shows up in the counseling session sabotaging the entire counseling process. Course participants learn skills to determine their countertransference and stay consciously present with themselves and consciously attuned to their clients in session. This course explains the participant to model and teaches attunement, compassion, validation, and empathy in the therapy session to empower highly reactive couples to be their wounded healers and step into loving long-lasting, fulfilling love relationships. This course employs findings from research in neurosciences, attachment theory, mindfulness, and Imago Relationship Theory.
IMAGO and APA CEUs- 24 (additional charge)
Brilliant At the Basics: Deepening the Theoretical
Brilliant at the Basics is a lively and interactive course of delving deeper into building our skills and deepening our processes of Dialogue. Stuck not using the Parent Child Dialogue (and all those other great processes?) … time to get unstuck! Our goal is that you leave this training with an expanded understanding of how and why to use different interventions at various times, and to support you in being creative within the structure of the dialogue process. We will sharpen your use of sentence stems and doubling to increase connection, safety, and forward movement with your couples. Together we will clarify and deepen the essential theory pieces that help keep you calm and connected to your couples…yes, all your couples! As you master the Imago ‘Basics’ we will now add the skills to become ‘Brilliant’ and trust the depth of the Dialogue process even more. Please Join Us!
DC Area/Remote- Dates: May 4-7, 2023 IMAGO and APA CEUs- 24 (additional charge)
Giving and Receiving Love: Living Wholeheartedly
The fundamental dilemma of all human relationships is this: Why is it so hard to give and receive love when we need to feel connected? Our survival directive is to cooperate and maintain our attachments. To better understand both the dilemma and the solution, we will explore the “software” for both survival and connection with which we are born. The pulse of both giving and receiving is vital to the experience of connection. If we block this in either direction, we become isolated and lose the experience of connection.
IMAGO and APA CEUs- 24 (additional charge)
From Despair to Repair: Working Through Betrayal
In the face of a couple’s crisis, there are three different perspectives for the therapist to consider: The first perspective works for, and from, the ‘between’ of the relationship – the focus is on the interpersonal; the second, use relational neuroscience as a map for inner attunement; and the third, helps the therapist with his/her countertransference and use of “self.” The end point of all three perspectives is to provide the therapist with skills to assist couples in moving from Despair and Rupture to Repair and Connection. Using the principles of interpersonal and interpersonal attunement will give a map to working with couples in crisis. Having a clear navigational system that includes exploring countertransference reactions will enable us to effectively help couples heal and grow through crisis.
IMAGO and APA CEUs- 24 (additional charge)
Workshop Presenters Training
This course provides Advanced Clinicians with the knowledge and skills to present the Getting the Love You Want workshop. The course is devoted to personal growth work to help the participants move beyond their blocks and limitations to become the most present and connected presenters. It will consist of sharing the theory, illustrating with personal stories, doing brilliant demonstrations, and handling the many challenges of being a first-class Imago workshop presenter. Take your Imago knowledge and experience to a whole new level and experience the joy of presenting this material to couples in a way that inspires them and makes them even more available to take this work home.
This training is about learning the structure of the workshops, lectures, demonstrations, etc., but to discover more of your magnificence as a human being and as a healer. Some Imago therapists have taken this training simply to deepen their understanding of the theory and to grow more into themselves.
Goal of Workshop Presenter Training:
This course is designed to prepare the Certified Imago Therapist to present the “Getting the Love You Want” couples workshops. It begins with a five-day personal growth segment designed to help the clinician actualize their full potential as a presenter. The participant then offers a small Getting the Love You Want™ workshop between Modules 1 and 2, and 2 and 3, to clients from their practice, which they record and bring to each of the following WP Training 3-day segments.
Certification Permissions
Graduates of the WP Training may:
- Represent themselves publicly as Certified Getting the Love You Want™ Workshop Presenters.
- Have their workshops listed on the IRW and their ILO website.
- Present up to one day seminars or lectures on Imago Relationship Therapy for education and/or marketing purposes
- Present one day seminars or lectures to professionals on Imago Relationship Therapy for educational and/or marketing purposes if it is clear in all promotional material that the seminar or lecture is educational and is not considered a training or a certification program.
- Receive information from the inquiry database for their ILO to market their Workshops and have workshops listed on their ILO website.
- Have use of Imago Relationship Worldwide’s logo to market the Getting the Love You Want™
Admission Requirements
Applicants must have practiced Imago Relationship Therapy as an Imago Relationship Therapist for a minimum of two years post certification. A minimum requirement regarding advanced training is attendance at Characterological Growth plus two of the other four Core Advanced Trainings (Brilliant at the Basics, Giving and Receiving, From Despair to Repair, The Attuned Therapist). Once the WP Training has been completed, the therapist will, if not already, also automatically be an Advanced Clinician.