Even when one partner change, the dynamic of the relationship change, which leads to a valuable growth and healing for both partners.

Imago Relationship Therapy

• • Imago Relationship Therapy is a relationship counseling modality for marriage and couples therapy which integrates leading western psychological methodologies, behavioral sciences, and spirituality into a theory of love and intimate relationship. Imago Therapy is effective and easy as it helps individuals understand and recognize the unconscious factors (The Imago) in the choice of their intimate partner. It reveals the emotional dynamics that are being replayed from early age and it instructs couples how to relate to each other and themselves, in a more nurturing, loving and healthy way.
  • Imago couples counseling equipped couples with concepts and tools to achieve safety and deep intimacy as well experience fulfillment and aliveness. It improve communication, moving toward positive dynamics while expressing care and love to transform the relationship into healing personal and spiritual growth. Imago Relationship Therapy helped many couples heals childhood wounds while moving it from an unconscious to a conscious level creating the foundation for empowerment and love.
  • Imago teaches you how to engage with one another by using a effective communication skills (“Imago Dialogue”), which helps you learn more about each other need and perspective. It also makes couples understand what lies underneath their relationship conflict, while adapting healthy and constructive ways to resolve it.
  • Imago addresses challenges on the emotional, rational, and behavioral levels. A clear understanding of each other’s feelings and experiences is a key factor to being able to understand, empathize and relate to each other. In addition, we emphasize the need to change our behaviors to give and get what we really want. Even when only one partner change, the change leads to valuable growth and healing for both parties. We find that our partner’s requests for change often challenge us to grow into untapped part of our Self.

The basic premises of Imago Therapy

• • We were wounded during the early childhood and socializing stages of development by our primary caretakers (usually not purposely).
  • Our unconscious mind contains the positive and negative traits of our primary care takers. This is called the IMAGO. It is like a blue print of the partner we need to “complete” us in an intimate relationship.
  • We look for someone who matches up with the composite image of our primary caretakers (called IMAGO Match). This is important for us as we look to heal and finish the “unfinished business” of our childhood. Our parents are the ones who wounded us and through our Imago Match we reenact our childhood situation to heal ourselves.
  • Romantic Love (“being in love’) is the initial attraction or the door opening that lead us to committed relationship and is a natural way of connecting us with the “perfect partner” toward the ultimate healing.
  • Following the romantic stage, once we become more committed, we move into a power struggle. The power struggle is a necessary stage in the healing and growth process as it lies in the internal struggle to heal ourselves. It is the struggle to change our partner (“to fix him/her”) and to change ourselves. The above two stages (“romantic love” and the “power struggle,”) are engaged in at an unconscious level for the purpose of healing our childhood wounds.
  • Inevitably our love partner is incompatible with us and least able to meet our needs and most able to wound us all over again. As such, the goal of Imago Relationship Therapy is to integrate our conscious mind with the agenda of the unconscious mind to assist clients in developing conscious, intimate, committed relationships.

The practice of Imago Couples Therapy

• • Imago gives you insight into the dynamics of your own relationship and empowers you to do your own work together in a safe, supportive and positive environment.
  • Imago Relationship Therapy helps align our conscious mind with the agenda (needs) of the unconscious mind with the goal of enabling the clients to develop conscious, intimate, and committed relationships.
  • Imago provides structured communication skills (Couple’s Dialogue) in a safe environment to help couples to engage in a constructive conversation. The dialogue consists of Mirroring (repeating) each statement, Summarization, Validation (“That makes sense because…”) and Empathy (“I imagine that makes you feel …”). This enables each partner to extend themselves to understand the experience of the other as different from their own. The Imago dialogue shifts the conversation away from blame, shame and criticism, into mutual support, understanding and proactivity.
  • Imago addresses the roots of the conflict rather just trying to solve it in a surface way. Imago helps couples learn more about their partner’s emotional history, and what the underlying reasons are for things which show up in their disagreements. They begin to understand why their partner is really upset, and why what they are saying really makes sense in the context of their past. As such, Imago turns this conflict on its head. The conflict isn’t the problem, it’s the answer. The result is transformation of conflict into opportunities for deeper intimacy and connection. It teaches couples how learn how to better meet each other’s needs.
  • As partners help each other to heal, they are also helping themselves to grow, moving them both closer to becoming whole and complete. When individuals learn to be proactive and become a source of pleasure for the other partner and perform small changes, it makes the biggest difference in terms of happiness and fulfillment as individuals and as a couple.
  • Imago integrates couples workshops with coaching and therapy to create fast improvement in your relationship to make it fulfilling, alive, passionate, fun, transforming and source of increasing wholeness.
  • This transition toward healing cannot take place through insight alone. Specific skills and processes are necessary that need to be practiced daily to shift us from having an unconscious marriage or relationship to a conscious marriage or relationship.
  • It takes two to five years of on-going work although not necessarily therapy, to develop a conscious healthy marriage/couplehood, which is safe and passion.
  • Imago Therapy has shown successful results in helping couples to change unhealthy patterns of behaviour. By utiizing Imago therapy, spiral2grow efforts are focused on helping clients break their disruptive, negative patterns and cycles so they become more resilient, cope better with relationship challenges and enjoy greater relationsip and life satisfaction.