Fundamentals / 2-Day Introduction
R2,500Experience the Imago Clinical training firsthand. Learn the core concepts, meet the facilitators, and decide whether the training is right for you with zero pressure to continue.
Detailed training page
Imago Clinical Training curriculum, registration, and pricing.
This training gives clinicians a clear, structured pathway into Imago Relationship Therapy: from the foundations of the relational paradigm, to the clinical use of Imago Dialogue, to the deeper therapeutic processes that help couples move from rupture, reactivity, and disconnection toward safety, empathy, repair, and conscious connection.
Upcoming intakes: September 2026 clinical intake and October 2026 facilitator cohort (exact dates to be confirmed). Hybrid attendance is available online or face to face in Pretoria.
Registration and pricing
Simple package options.
Early bird pricing ends 29 July. Choose the training only, add the required supervision and qualifying video, or include the couples workshop pathway in one complete package.
Full registration
R24,500Normal price: R26,950
Includes the Introduction plus the two 5-day training modules. This is the simplest option if you are ready to commit to the training now.
Certification support package
R30,250Normal total: R34,150
Early bird: R24,500 training + 6 x R750 supervision + R1,250 qualifying video.
Normal: R26,950 training + 6 x R950 supervision + R1,500 qualifying video.
Training + supervision + couples workshop
R37,750Normal total: R44,150
Early bird package adds the couples workshop at R7,500.
Normal package adds the couples workshop at R10,000.
Curriculum overview
Three progressive modules.
The curriculum moves from foundations into deep clinical application and then into advanced integration, reactivity, commitment, and certification preparation.
Days 1-2
The Fundamentals
Foundations of Imago Relationship Therapy.
The Relational Paradigm
You will explore the shift from seeing distress as located only inside each partner to understanding the relationship itself as a living field of interaction. This includes learning how rupture, safety, contact, and connection shape the couple's experience.
Core Imago Theory
You will be introduced to the unconscious purpose of committed partnership, the movement from romantic love into the power struggle, and the possibility of conscious relationship.
The Role of the Imago Therapist
You will learn what it means to work as a facilitator of connection rather than as the central interpreter or referee. The therapist's alliance is with the relationship.
The Imago Dialogue
You will begin learning the core structure of Imago Dialogue: mirroring, validation, and empathy. This is the central clinical process used throughout the training.
Appreciations and Positive Connection
You will learn how to use appreciation as a clinical doorway into safety, connection, and relational possibility.
The Seamless Flow of an Imago Session
You will begin to see how theory, structure, process, and clinical presence come together in the flow of an Imago session.
Days 3-7
Module 2
Deepening, development, and core clinical processes.
Removing Negativity and Creating Safety
You will learn how negativity ruptures connection and how to help couples replace blame, criticism, shame, and reactive expression with safer forms of contact, repair, appreciation, requests, and dialogue.
Deepening the Dialogue
You will learn how to help couples move beyond surface content into the affective experience underneath using sentence stems, focusing, doubling, silence, and other deepening tools.
Shallowing and Containment
You will learn how to help partners return from intense affect when they become overwhelmed, so emotional depth remains connected rather than flooding the couple.
The Initial Imago Session
You will learn how to begin Imago therapy with a couple, structure the first session, introduce the process, establish safety, and orient the couple toward relational work.
The Psychological Journey
You will study how childhood experiences of attachment, exploration, identity, and competence shape adult relational patterns.
The Parent-Child Dialogue
You will learn how to facilitate dialogue that helps partners understand the childhood origins of unmet relational needs and how those needs reappear in adult partnership.
Partner Selection and the Power Struggle
You will learn how romantic attraction, developmental wounding, complementary defenses, and unconscious longing contribute to partner selection and later conflict.
The Relationship Vision
You will learn how to help couples create a shared vision and use that vision as a guide for therapy, behavior change, and relational growth.
Re-Romanticizing the Relationship
You will learn clinical processes that help couples increase positive energy, including caring behaviors, fun, surprises, dating, and positive flooding.
The Behavior Change Request Dialogue
You will learn how to help partners transform frustration into specific, doable, growth-producing requests.
Clinical Supervision and Practice
You will begin integrating the theory through facilitated practice, feedback, tape supervision, and attention to your own growth edge as a relational clinician.
Days 8-12
Module 3
Advanced integration, reactivity, commitment, and clinical practice.
The Conscious Relationship
You will revisit original wholeness, rupture in connection, adaptations and defenses, the development of the Imago, the power struggle, and the path toward conscious relationship.
The Five Transformative Processes
You will integrate re-imaging, re-structuring frustrations, removing negativity, re-romanticizing, and re-visioning.
The Missing Self
You will study how parts of the self become lost, hidden, denied, disowned, or overdeveloped through childhood socialization and relational adaptation.
Closing Exits and Deepening Commitment
You will learn how couples use exits to avoid or discharge relational anxiety, including subtle exits and catastrophic exits such as affairs and addictions.
The Commitment Dialogue
You will learn how to facilitate dialogue around exits, commitment, and the choice to bring energy back into the relationship.
The Holding Exercise
You will learn the Holding Exercise as a process for deepening empathy, tenderness, and connection around sadness, hurt, and vulnerable emotional memory.
Working with High Reactivity
You will learn how to work with anger, rage, escalation, shutdown, and defensive intensity through containment, safety, and restored connection.
Sex and Physical Intimacy
You will explore sex and physical intimacy from a developmental and relational perspective.
The Use of Touch in Imago Therapy
You will consider the careful, clinically responsible use of touch within Imago processes, always in service of safety, consent, connection, and therapeutic purpose.
The Seamless Flow of Imago Therapy
You will refine your ability to move among Imago theory, dialogue structure, affective deepening, containment, process choice, and clinical presence.
Building an Imago Practice and Certification Preparation
You will review practice-building considerations, written evaluations, supervision requirements, and the pathway toward certification as an Imago Relationship Therapist.
What clinicians leave with
A working map and a structured clinical method.
By the end of the training, clinicians will have a practical map of Imago Relationship Therapy and a structured clinical method for helping couples move from reactive monologue into intentional dialogue.
- Facilitate the Imago Dialogue with confidence
- Track the space-between rather than becoming absorbed in individual content alone
- Help couples create safety when reactivity is high
- Understand conflict as a doorway into unmet needs and growth
- Use structure without becoming mechanical
- Work with developmental history while keeping the couple in connection
- Translate frustration into requests, repair, empathy, and relational growth
- Support couples in building a conscious, intentional, connected relationship
Ready to begin?
Register for the Introduction or ask about the full program.
This training is for clinicians who want more than communication techniques. It offers a disciplined clinical pathway for transforming the quality of the relationship itself.