Course Description

Come explore your shadow, how it works in relationships, and how we can integrate our missing selves in order to reclaim our full aliveness. This course is designed to go deeply into the ways your defenses and your character structure affect others. Another purpose is to grow your container so you can be big enough to hold all that life hands you and to help you rock between the joy and the sorrow of life.

In the role of therapist, we have a gift of distance. We care about the pain we see in others and we have the experience of being in the role of “the good parent.” We are rarely aware of the parts of yourself that reside in the shadow.

We try to accept our clients as they are. Although we can be challenged at times to accept specific traits or behaviors in our clients, it is much easier than accepting our partners, our children, our friends, and our colleagues. How bewildering it is to be loving, conscious, and empathic with clients and unconsciously mean-spirited to those we are closest! The parts of us that hide in the shadow and specifically in our role as therapist will deeply impact our personal relationships and at times painfully challenge our professional abilities.

This training is intended for Imago Therapists, Imago Professional Facilitators and therapists in general at the intermediate level.

Learning Objectives

In this course, participants will learn to…

• Apply insights regarding childhood adaptations to facilitate emotional growth and healing in the client population
• Summarize and define self-defeating patterns of behavior that challenge personal growth
• Explain specific skills for increasing attunement capacity in therapy sessions
• Demonstrate and apply exercises that clarify counter-productive patterns
• Create new neural pathways for personal and clinical application
• Practice Integrating shadow parts of self
• Create awareness of defensive structure
• Define characterological adaptations and how they affect relationships
• Review how to link self-defeating patterns of behavior to the unmet needs of childhood.
• Formulate forgiveness structure and plan
• Describe awareness of hidden self
• Construct a personal vision statement for self-growth
• Tell how to develop and accept disowned self traits
• Identify denied traits and discover positive aspects
• Discuss how to build and expand sentence stem vocabulary for use with couples