The journey of transformation in Imago Relationship Therapy (IRT) returns us to the place where it all started and where life began in the experience of being and feeling connected in a new sensation of relaxation, joyful aliveness and wonder. So say the authors of IRT, Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, who tell us that this journey cannot be undertaken in darkness and that one must be willing to walk into the light. They say that if partners remain unconscious, they remain the victims of their own hidden suffering; narrow and closed. Unconscious couples interact with each other through overly intense or minimised emotion, they are triggered to react rather than stimulated to respond, and they react with no awareness of what is going on, continuing the legacy of pain that they have inherited.

Imago theory tells us that the past does not have to be a prison sentence and that it is possible to open the bars and breathe deeply the fresh air of other possibilities. A new and different energy can create a new and different consciousness. A volatile partner who is under pressure can, over time, learn to calm down and become thoughtful and caring. This is the purpose of IRT: to free people from the prison of their reactive brains and regain their natural state of open collaboration with each other. If they cannot connect to their capacity for knowing their chosen other, they have no conduit for self-knowing and, therefore, they find themselves disconnected from feeling a broader communion with everything else in life, including all of nature and the Universe.

As a couple’s therapist, when I sit with a couple, I see myself and the couple as citizens in a conscious universe in which everything is interconnected, including the partners to each other and the couple to myself. However, the couple is often not experiencing that, and that is why they are in therapy, although they may not know that explicitly. It is fairly common for couples to become disconnected from the therapeutic process and lose their connection with the therapist, which can happen to both parties but usually happens for just one half of the couple.

I’ve been rethinking my approach to this inherent risk in couples therapy as I am constantly striving to be the best therapist I can be and this necessarily involves retaining couples in therapy! Did you know that around 30% of couples drop out of therapy before the 4th session? This happens for many reasons and is a parallel process with the reasons that the relationship isn’t working optimally. Couple’s work is challenging work that triggers relational woundings and raises defences. Couples can blame each other, the therapist, or the therapy itself. Couples can suddenly disengage in a flash and, therapy can be thrown out the window by a quick email dashed off to end the therapy and all of its associated pain and call for change. When couple’s therapy is terminated without any ending or closure, thereby preventing any chance of addressing the rupture to therapeutic connection, there are implications for the couple’s relationship. Some couples go from therapist to therapist in this way, imbuing the practitioners themselves with the power to fix the relationship rather than view them as a facilitator of change that they themselves have to take responsibility for, and so perpetuating the suffering and struggling for years.

Personally, I consider this a failure on my part not to preserve the couple’s engagement and commitment to the process. I see my responsibility in this process to convey this information to couples at the outset so they can be prepared to expect a strong desire to withdraw from and resist the therapy a few sessions in. It seems to me that dedicating attention to the therapeutic relationship alongside the couple’s relationship is imperative to the therapy in about 30% of cases and is ignored at the cost of a successful outcome.

I’m always thinking about how I can improve engagement and avoid drop out and I’ve considered offering: a) a free session to specifically explore the ruptured connection, b) a session-by-session questionnaire to monitor the couple-therapist relationship, and c) a dedicated but short processing call in-between Imago sessions in order to help clients stay in therapy for the entire process. Is this really realistic, though, I ask myself? I think that the relatively low cost of psychotherapy compared to coaching really precludes this type of ‘over-and-above’ service, sadly. Clients don’t see the preparation that goes into this type of work and it is considerable. On average, I put in about 3 hours work to every 90 minutes session – sometimes it’s a lot more if it’s a special session – so “the session-fee” is really a misnomer. As a therapist in private practice, I support myself entirely on what my clients pay me and it is an impossible sum to put so much work in for the going rate – and stay sufficiently well-resourced to do the work.

To be able to offer a better service, one way that practitioners could get around the problem of dropout in couple’s therapy is to shift to a coaching approach – offering coaching as an alternative, but more effective way of working by creating a more robust container. This has financial implications for many clients that exclude them from getting the help they want because a couple’s coaching package of 12 sessions demands a lot of money up-front and can seem like too risky an outlay for many couples. As a certified sex, love and relationship VITA^TM Coach, I know that, not only can I supplement Imago dialoguing with a super-expansive array of coaching practices, but that buying a coaching package incentivises commitment and also offers the in-between session support that therapy lacks. I am certain that the more support a couple has, the more likely they are stay engaged in the therapeutic process. But couples don’t usually get this level of support in therapy alone – nor do they want it – as it’s usually enough of a challenge for busy people to make time for the therapy sessions, let alone do the therapy homework that is essential to bring about lasting change.

Despite these challenges, I have recently felt moved to do everything I can to help clients to stay engaged and connected. So, I’m moving to offering both therapy and coaching as two distinct modalities and I feel happy to be able to offer this work to couples in different circumstances – be that time, money or other resources. We work with what we’ve got right? By the way, if you are reading this as a couple without funds for therapy, the marriage guidance book for couples called, Getting the Love You Want, can be profoundly transformative in itself – even without the aid of a therapist and there are many videos on YouTube of how to do Imago Dialogue.

As Imago authors say, Connecting is Being, so reconnecting ruptured connections with significant others is vital to our being. Although imagined for reconnecting couples, the conditions created by them for restoring connection, could also be mined for restoration of the therapeutic relationship. These include:

1. creating and sustaining a safe environment

2. identifying earlier life challenges and becoming empathic

3. learning how defence is developed as a result of negative exchanges

4. removing all negativity from all interactions

5. reconnecting to the person who both embodies one’s challenges and has the power to help transform them

6. connecting with each other in safety and non-judgement through Imago dialogue

7. stretching to transform frustrations into requests for changed behaviours

8. exchanging positive energy through giving and receiving appreciation and humour several times daily

9. becoming an advocate for and celebrating each other’s differences

10. practising presence and resonance whenever engaged with each other.

I am very motivated to understand and employ Imago processes to help rewire broken connections and for the healing and conscious connection that I imagine more couples will benefit from when they are able to be held in such a strong container for alchemical transformation. It really is such a privilege to participate in the great ongoing work of the Universe to co-create coherence that is the source of our resonance with others and of our harmony and joyful aliveness.

I believe that when couples lose their connecting with each other, they lose this awareness of connecting to the larger whole – to the very Cosmos, in fact – and that it is my responsibility when couples come to me for help to facilitate the restoration of connecting. As implied above, the challenge for me is to keep couples in therapy in order to do this. I know that this three-way therapeutic relationship will be mutually impactful and so I do everything I can to enhance the couple’s awareness of their connection to each other and to be in conscious partnership. The couple’s connection to each other is the conduit to sustaining their connection to everything, and anything that can enhance the couple’s awareness of their connection to each other will increase their connection to me, the therapy, and the Transformation that is inherent in Imago.

One final thought is that any sense of disconnection we might feel in our relationships – with our partner, our therapist or with other human beings could be profoundly illusory. In Imago metatheory, we are connecting so intrinsically that we know each other and impact each other beyond our conscious awareness, even when we are not physically proximate to each other. The Imago authors are very clear on this – that we can lose awareness of connecting, but not lose connecting itself. Awareness of connecting is usually lost locally, in early unattuned and intimate relationships, but its effect is felt cosmically. Our feelings of personal alienation tend to make the whole universe unfriendly. Our reaction is to blame, withdraw, resist and become angry and anxious. In reality, our mutual interconnectedness with all human beings and all other existences is as fundamental as the relationship between the brain and body, a particle and a wave, the moon and the tide, and people and stars.

To request a free consultation or make a booking

email: hello@frayazellawolf.com