Structure as a Pathway to Connection: The Imago Dialogue as Relational Practice

South Africa · CPD points & talks · Psychologists

Enhance your couples therapy practice in South Africa with the Imago Dialogue. This talk explores how its structured process fosters deeper connection, teaches essential relational capacities like regulation and attachment responsiveness, and guides therapists in facilitating transformative partner-to-partner exchange for lasting change.

This talk examines the Imago Dialogue as a structured, experiential process for shaping partner-to-partner interaction in couples therapy. The talk focuses on how therapists teach and facilitate Dialogue, what relational capacities are developed through repeated practice, and why structured partner-to-partner exchange can support regulation, attachment responsiveness, embodied awareness, and new relational experience.

Participants will explore the Dialogue as more than a communication technique: a clinical structure that organizes speaking and listening, slows automatic reactivity, supports differentiation, and helps partners engage each other with greater curiosity, empathy, and responsibility. The talk highlights how structure can create conditions for safety, connection, and relational learning in the space between partners.

Sections

• Teaching the Imago Dialogue: Building the Structure
• Relational Capacities Developed Through Dialogue
• Why Structure Supports Connection and Change

  Learning Outcomes

  By the end of this talk, participants will be able to:

  1. Describe the Imago Dialogue as a structured partner-to-partner process within couples therapy.
  2. Identify key therapist tasks involved in teaching and facilitating the Dialogue, including pacing, mirroring, turn-taking, and partner-to-partner engagement.
  3. List relational capacities developed through repeated Dialogue practice, including regulation, differentiation, curiosity, empathy, and responsibility.
  4. Describe how the Dialogue draws on clinical principles of structure, regulation, attachment responsiveness, and experiential learning to support safety, connection, and new relational experience between partners.