New Zealand psychologists, explore the Imago Dialogue as a powerful tool for couples therapy. This talk delves into how structured communication fosters regulation, attachment, and meaning-making, creating pathways to genuine connection. Gain practical skills in facilitating this relational practice to help couples build healthier, more responsive relationships.
This presentation examines the Imago Dialogue as a structured, experiential process for shaping partner-to-partner interaction in couples therapy. The video focuses on how therapists teach and facilitate Dialogue, what relational capacities are developed through repeated practice, and why structured exchange can support regulation, attachment responsiveness, embodied awareness, meaning-making, and new relational experience.
Participants will explore the Dialogue as more than a communication technique: a clinical structure that organises speaking and listening, slows automatic reactivity, supports differentiation, and helps partners engage each other with greater curiosity, empathy, and responsibility. Through teaching, clinical examples, and reflection, the presentation offers a practical framework for understanding how repeated Dialogue practice can help couples develop new patterns of relational interaction.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Describe practical methods for teaching and facilitating the Imago Dialogue, including the use of session rituals, clear roles, mirroring, summary, validation, and empathy.
2. Identify key relational capacities developed through structured partner-to-partner dialogue, including regulation, delayed reactivity, curiosity, differentiation, validation without agreement, empathy, and relational responsibility.
3. Explain how structured Dialogue supports relational change, including its role in pacing exchanges, slowing automatic reactivity, and creating conditions for new relational experience.
4. Apply Dialogue-based facilitation principles to clinical practice, including coaching the receiver, supporting the sender in moving from blame toward vulnerability, and tracking the quality of the interaction between partners.
Structure as a Pathway to Connection: The Imago Dialogue as Relational Practice