Click on the titles below to access powerful tools that can help you on your journey to the relationship of your dreams.
Appreciation Dialogue
Sharing regular appreciations with your partner will change your brain chemistry and transform the “space between” you. It will help you create a safety zone in your relationship and it will help your lower reactive brain will start to see your partner as a source of pleasure rather than of pain or conflict. And then it will be easier to share frustrations and turn conflict into connection.
Couples Dialogue
This is the core tool for everything we do in Imago Relationship Therapy. Taking time to go deeper into your thoughts and feelings helps you deal with the root issues that are blocking intimacy in your relationship . And once you learn the dialogue skills of mirroring, validating, and empathizing, you can use this powerful tool everyday to stay closely connected with your partner.
Frustration Dialogue
Buried in every frustration is a wish. By turning your frustration into a request, you empower your partner to give you what you need. This dialogue will help you share your need in a positive way that makes it safe for your partner to validate your frustration and empathize with your desire.
Four Powerful Appreciations
This tool will help you push out negativity from the space between you as a couple and rewire your brain to see each other as a source of pleasure rather than pain. The exercise uses four critical moments of each day to maximize feelings of safety and closeness in your relationship.
Caring Behaviors
This tool directs you to share with each other specifics about what your partner can do that makes you feel loved and cared about. Doing these things for each other randomly at least three times a day over the next two months will help reignite your passion for each other.
Caring Behaviors Dialogue
This tool uses the Imago Dialogue to share what makes you feel loved and cared about with your partner on a deeper level. Using this tool will help you understand why this caring behavior means so much and any connections it has with childhood.
Brief Relationship Workup
This tool used in conjunction with the next one, Your Unconscious Relationship Agenda, will help you discover how the positive and negative traits of your early caretakers formed an image in your unconscious mind that matched you with the one with whom you fell in love.
This tool will also help you discover what you are looking for in a love relationship and what your “fighting style” is based on your childhood defenses.
My Unconscious Relationship Agenda
This tool uses the information from the Brief Relationship Workup to help you discover why you chose the partner you did, what you are looking in a love relationship, and your “fighting style”.
Change Request Dialogue
Behind every frustration is a wish in disguise. The purpose of this dialogue is to turn your frustrations into requests, asking for things from your partner that will meet your unmet needs from childhood.
Parent/Child Dialogue
The purpose of this dialogue is to deepen the memories of your childhood and increase empathy for each other.
Relationship Vision
This tool will help you and your partner develop a shared vision for what you both want your relationship to be. This shared vision will work in a powerful way to help you move every day toward your dream marriage.
A Couple’s Journey
This diagram shows the journey most couples must make from the Romantic Stage through the Power Struggle Stage to Mature Love, and ultimately to making a positive World Impact.
Commitment Dialogue
The Commitment Dialogue is used to identify and close “exits”, i.e. places where you are getting your needs met outside your relationship. By closing exits you make more time and energy available for your relationship. The dialogue takes you through the steps of Mirroring, Validating, and Empathizing which are essential to create safety where vulnerability can happen. Then it ends with a commitment to talk your frustrations out rather than acting them out in ways that avoid intimacy and connection with your partner.
Zero Negativity Pledge
Nothing can happen in a relationship that is not safe. No relationship can be safe if there is negativity in the form of criticism, blaming and defensiveness. This tool helps you pledge to you rid your relationship of all negativity. And then it helps you repair the rupture when negativity does occur and so you can get back on track.