Imago Clinical Training is not only a professional training. It is an invitation into a different way of seeing relationships, conflict, healing and human connection.
For this reason, attending the Getting The Love You Want Couples Workshop is a pre-requisite for the training.
We ask clinicians to attend the workshop because Imago cannot be fully understood only as a theory, a set of interventions, or a communication model. It has to be experienced from the inside. The workshop gives you the opportunity to encounter the Imago process not first as the therapist, the expert, or the observer, but as a participant in a real relational space.
This matters deeply.
In Imago, the therapist’s task is not simply to analyse the couple or interpret their dynamic. The therapist learns to hold the relational space, guide intentional dialogue, support safety, and help partners move from reactivity into connection. The training manuals describe the Imago Dialogue as the essential skill of Imago: listening, understanding and empathising. They also emphasise commitment to the relationship, commitment to change and growth, and commitment to personal responsibility as essential conditions for conscious relating.
The couples workshop gives you a lived encounter with these principles before you are asked to facilitate them for others.
The workshop gives you the model as an experience
In the workshop, you are introduced to the main pieces of Imago theory, the core skill of the Imago Dialogue, and many of the processes that help couples deepen understanding and connection. The training materials specifically note that the Getting The Love You Want Workshop gives couples a clear picture of the overall theory and skills behind the work.
That is important for trainees.
When you later enter clinical training, you will learn how to facilitate the Imago Dialogue, how to help couples move below content into affect, how to contain reactivity, how to work with frustrations, appreciations, behaviour change requests, childhood wounds, commitment, exits, and relationship vision.
But before learning to guide these processes clinically, it is invaluable to have felt the structure yourself.
- You will have sat in the chairs.
- You will have practised slowing down.
- You will have experienced the vulnerability of sending.
- You will have experienced the discipline of receiving.
- You will have felt what it takes to stay present when difference, tenderness, fear, longing or discomfort enters the space-between.
That embodied experience becomes part of your clinical integrity.
We cannot take couples where we have not been willing to go
Couples who come to Imago therapy are often being asked to do something unfamiliar and courageous. They are invited to stop blaming, stop defending, stop exiting, and begin speaking from their own inner world in a way that protects connection.
They are asked to listen when they would rather argue. They are asked to become curious when they would rather be right. They are asked to remain present when old pain is activated. They are asked to risk a new kind of contact.
As therapists, we need to know something about that from the inside.
The workshop is not about making clinicians expose private material for professional assessment. It is about helping trainees encounter the relational paradigm personally enough that their later facilitation is not merely technical. Imago is a way of being with another human being. It asks us to develop the very capacities we will later invite in our clients: presence, curiosity, differentiation, responsibility, empathy and repair.
It helps shift the clinician from expert to facilitator
Many clinicians are trained to listen carefully, interpret wisely, formulate accurately and intervene helpfully. These are valuable capacities. Imago does not discard them.
But Imago adds an important shift.
The therapist is not the centre of the couple’s healing process. The relationship is. The therapist facilitates a safe process through which partners begin to experience each other differently.
Attending the Getting The Love You Want Workshop helps trainees feel this shift directly. You begin to see why the structure matters. You begin to understand why the therapist does not rush in too quickly. You begin to experience why mirroring, validation and empathy are not merely communication tools, but a disciplined way of creating safety in the space-between.
The training materials describe all Imago sessions as being conducted under the umbrella of the Imago Dialogue, with a Sender and Receiver, mirroring, summary, and eventually validation and empathy. The workshop gives you an experiential foundation for this clinical stance.
It prepares you for the deeper work of training
Clinical Training will stretch you.
You will be learning a model, practising facilitation, receiving feedback, watching your own adaptations, and discovering your growth edges. The training materials describe this journey as more than classroom learning: trainees are invited to absorb a sense of this way of being in the world, in intimate relationships and with clients.
The workshop prepares you for that.
It gives you a relational and emotional reference point. When the training later teaches the structure, theory and clinical artistry of Imago, you are not hearing it as an abstraction. You have already met the work in a living relational context.
That makes the training deeper, more coherent and more personally integrated.
Book your workshop before training
If you are planning to begin Imago Clinical Training, your next step is to attend a Getting The Love You Want Couples Workshop.
You can book an upcoming workshop here:
Book a Getting The Love You Want Couples Workshop
Come not only to learn about Imago, but to experience the heart of the work.
Before you facilitate the Dialogue for others, allow yourself to be shaped by it. Before you guide couples into the space-between, step into that space yourself. Before you become an Imago therapist, give yourself the gift of encountering Imago as a participant in the very process you will one day offer to others.