Imago Relationship Therapy

Relationships can be deadly. No-one teaches us how to get through them whole and happy. We charge in and battle it out, each of us thinking we’re right.

We think of ourselves as rational beings, but it’s often our most primitive selves that react, instructing us to relate to our partners as enemies.

Johanri Engelbrecht conducts virtual therapy on allaboutlove. For the sake of love, she sets out to make all our relationships better, and to create relationships that make better people of us.

She provides insight into those alien beings, our partners, and into the even stranger creatures – ourselves. Our brains work in mysterious ways. Here’s the user’s guide – to relationships and to our emotional selves.

Johanri Engelbrecht is a Clinical Psychologist who has specialised in Imago Relationship Therapy. She is based in Johannesburg.

What is Imago Relationship Therapy ?

“We are born in connection, hurt in disconnection and healed in reconnection….”

“We don’t communicate. We don’t hear each other.”

If therapists got a buck every time they heard those words, they’d be the richest profession. Instead, it’s the lawyers that are raking it in for the resulting divorces.

Every committed relationship, no matter how strong, has its frustrations. In therapy, these most commonly present as “a lack of communication”.Typically, one partner reaches out when difficulties emerge, while the other withdraws.

Imago Relationship Therapy tries not to blame either partner. Instead of spending a lot of time trying to see whose fault it is, this approach tries to get both partners to understand how they operate – individually and as a couple. They discover how their partners work in relation to them.

We try to work with their different styles of communication, so that each of them understands how they communicate during the good times, and when they hit problems. Through this, they can recognise how and where their frustrations began, and also how they developed. They can go back to the root of their problems.

Imago helps couples appreciate that each frustration, as it occurs and recurs (sometimes over and over again), can become an opportunity for growth and healing. Far from harming their relationship, if tackled the right way, these frustrations can strengthen their bond. Imago provides couples with the practical communication tools to restore and deepen the connection between them.

Couples need to understand how crucial it is for them to be safe within their relationships. Their newly-learnt communication skills will allow them to change their “reactive” behaviour. This means they will no longer react in a purely instinctive way to protect themselves, when trouble looms. They can develop “intentional” behaviour. They recognise their instinctive urge to fight or flee, but take the intentional and rational route of listening to their partner – even if they may not agree.

This increases their feeling of safety with each other and can rekindle their passion. This usually means that couples will develop the skills to continue their work on their relationship outside of therapy.

This type of therapy reveals the underlying reasons why couples choose each other – couples begin to understand that opposites attract for very important reasons. It highlights the different factors that influence their choice of partner. We all carry a picture, within us, of “familiar love (our Imago or image.) This picture informs our choice of partner. So we tend to choose someone in order to recreate a similar atmosphere to what we remember from childhood..

Imago also helps couples to make sense of the natural course of all relationships. For example, romantic love is always followed, inevitably, by a power struggle as couples tussle to maintain their identity within the relationship.

We believe that all couples, not only those in “crisis”, can benefit from Imago. Couples can enhance a new or secure relationship through learning to function together well, as individuals and as a unit. It can also transform a difficult one – and create a depth of understanding, which can rekindle the feelings that have been buried beneath the problems .

Johanri Engelbrecht
Clinical Psychologist Registered Imago Relationship Therapist and Workshop Presenter
082 448 0271