Imago Clinical Training Will Help You:

• Feel more competent, confident, relaxed, and joyful in your work with couples.
• Understand the unconscious dynamics behind why couples are drawn to each other — and why conflict naturally arises.
• Guide couples to uncover the root patterns fueling disconnection and repeated conflict.
• Teach couples to communicate safely and consciously, reducing blame, shame, and criticism.
• Help couples heal together, strengthen their connection, and work as a team.
• Expand their relational skills so they can create the relationship they’ve always longed for.
• Deepen your own self-awareness of your core relationship patterns.

Level One: Core Clinical Training

• An intensive, interactive experience grounded in Imago theory and practice.

• A lively, supportive learning community with plenty of encouragement and connection.

• Hands-on practice to integrate theory and master key Imago skills.

• Engaging learning materials: videos, live demonstrations, readings, and real-life dialogue practice.

• Tuition: $3,000 (payment plans and scholarships available)

• CEUs available.

Level Two: Supervision & Certification

• Six monthly group consultation/supervision sessions to help you integrate your new clinical skills ($100 each; $600 total).

• Requirement to prepare and pass a final videotape of your work ($195).

• Completion of Level Two qualifies you to become a Certified Imago Therapist!

Standardized Learning Objectives for Imago Clinical Training, Module 1

Lesson 1

1. View, conceptualize and discuss their clients and couples through the lens of the relational paradigm.
2. Explain why an increase in positive exchanges between committed partners is important.
3. Identify needs that underlie a partner’s current frustrations with one another.
4. Facilitate partner’s understanding of how the past influences the present.

Lesson 2

1. Discuss the specific steps of the Imago Dialogue and explain the rationale for structuring a couples’ interpersonal dialogue process.
2. Facilitate a dialogical process between partners.
3. Define and discuss the role of healthy differentiation in a committed, intimate partnership.
4. Describe and explain how the rupture and repair of the emotional bond between partners strengthens resilience.

Lesson 3

1. Manage the challenges that arise when couples resist a structured listening process.
2. Use sentence stems to maintain an atmosphere of safety during the dialogue process.
3. Distinguish between the reptilian brain, the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex and be able to describe the role the brain plays in emotional co-regulation between partners.
4. Discuss the role of mindfulness in conscious, intimate and committed partnerships.

Lesson 4

1. Describe the importance of intentional romantic behavior and pleasurable activities in marital outcomes.
2. Describe the necessity of right brain, non-verbal communication in adult love relationships
3. Explain the role of human touch in a securely attached marital relationship.
4. Explain and discuss the role of playfulness and spontaneous play behavior in restoring safe, emotional bonds.

Lesson 5

1. Assess a couple through a developmental lens, identifying each partners’ core wound and adaptive style.
2. Identify how developmental wounds and childhood adaptations impact marital dynamics.
3. Describe how a corrective emotional experience between partners helps marital/individual health and satisfaction.
4. Explain why the dialogue process is a corrective emotional experience.

Lesson 6

1. Name two ways that children are wounded in childhood.
2. Describe how the socialization process in childhood influences adaptation and mate selection.
3. Explain why partners’ unmet needs provide clues to a blueprint for growth.
4. Discuss and illustrate how to transform marital power struggles.

Lesson 7

1. Define and explain re-imaging and why it is an initial task in couples’ therapy.
2. Describe and direct a process of revisioning the relationship.
3. Name 7 tasks of a conscious love relationship.
4. Explain why commitment between partners may be essential to marital improvement and happiness.

Lesson 8

1. Explain why frustration between partners is an important effect to address between partners.
2. Demonstrate how couples can translate their frustrations into small, specific requests for change.
3. Give an illustration of “stretching” and how stretching facilitates a sense of greater wholeness and aliveness.
4. Describe how and why change happens in small, specific and behavioral actions.

Standardized Agenda for each 4-hour lesson:

0:00 – 0:50 lecture of the day

0:50 – 1:00 Q & A

1:00 – 2:00 small groups of 3 to 4 in break out rooms

2:00 – 3:00 reading and viewing video

3:00 – 4:00 taking a quiz, answering discussion questions and journaling.