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.

As therapists we expect a little chaos. However, there are couples who just seem to challenge us every step of the way. Even when resistance and reactivity center on the dialogue itself, we can track energy with skill, empathy and compassion, moving couples toward connection, replacing negativity with positivity and affirmation. Through the use of video clips, role plays, demonstrations and didactic material we will create an interactive, fun and dynamic space to focus on our own inner attunement and ability to connect, thereby deepening our work.

From an Imago perspective, anxiety is at the core of all relational challenges. Anxiety causes clients to react to their partner in unconscious, hurtful, and destructive ways, and it causes clients to be very resistant to the counseling process. Anxiety in the therapist also causes unconscious reactivity and resistance to the counseling process. This course challenges the traditional understanding of resistance and reframes it as an indication of something much deeper—Terror. Taught from the perspective of the relational paradigm and Imago Relationship Theory, this course employs a combination of interactive lectures, personal writing exercises, role play, and demonstrations.