The Attuned Therapist
Working with Reactivity and Resistance
Core Imago Advanced Course.
10th-12th May 2025, London
Presented by Wendy Patterson and Kalanit Ben-Ari
Learn to use the skills of the Imago Dialogue to more effectively facilitate connection based on the developmental stages of the couples.
This course is designed to teach therapists how to use their own centred, embodied, and attuned presence to meet a couple or client where they are and bring the structure to them in an attuned, safe way.
As therapists we expect a little chaos. However, there are couples who just seem to challenge us every step of the way. Even when resistance and reactivity centre on the dialogue itself, we can track energy with skill, empathy and compassion, moving couples toward connection, replacing negativity with positivity and affirmation. Through the use of 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.
Course Description
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 counselling process. Anxiety in the therapist also causes unconscious reactivity and resistance to the counselling 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 counselling session sabotaging the entire counselling 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 the research in neurosciences, attachment theory, mindfulness, and Imago Relationship Theory.
Main Points:
-> Learn to use the skills of dialogue to more effectively facilitate connection based on the developmental stages of the couple.
-> Explore how the adaptive self or Self-of-The-Therapist can make certain couples more challenging for the therapist to remain attuned.
-> Expand the use of the Parent-Child dialogue, deepening of the Appreciation dialogue, and understand how to work with the Core Scene.
-> Recognise those couples who present a personal ‘challenge’ and how to use inner attunement and embodied presence, to stay present and available when challenged.
-> Explore skills and interventions to assist couples to move toward each other to co-regulate, moving into greater safety and joy.
In this course, participants will learn to...
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Define and recognise couples who present a clinical challenge
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Define attunement and its clinical implications
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Explain the significance of anxiety
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Define the Relational Paradigm
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Review the unique role of the Imago therapist
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Identify their own personal reactive behaviours both inside & outside the office
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Review the importance of interacting dialogically with their couples
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Discuss and learn new and different applications of the validation step of the dialogue
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Name the role anxiety plays in the therapist and learn clinical skills for staying present when anxious
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Discuss and illustrate the importance of being the lead energy or leading with “empathic authority”
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Identify couples at the first four developmental stages
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Identify and review the developmental needs and how they present in adult intimate relationships
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Plan how to use clinical attunement skills learned to target these relational needs of couples
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Review the psychological journey’s importance in the relational paradigm
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List five interventions to support safe sending and five interventions to support attuned and connected receiving
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Utilize sentence stems that support positive, forward moving growth with couples
