With Catriona Lightfoot
Affairs can bring couples into therapy in acute distress, with shock, trauma, anger, grief, shame and uncertainty all present at once. For relationship therapists, this work can feel intense, complex and high-stakes. In this presentation, Catriona will share her framework for working with infidelity, relational trauma and the difficult repair process that may follow.
Drawing on her Move Beyond the Affair Program which has helped 100’s of couples and individuals move beyond the pain of infidelity, Catriona offers therapists practical guidance for working with the betrayed, the one who had the affair and the space between them. The presentation is designed to help clinicians move beyond containing crisis, toward offering structured, compassionate and clinically grounded support.
Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of affairs, some answers to common therapeutic challenges, trauma-informed considerations and practical interventions they can bring into their work with couples.
With Orli Wahrman
Drawing from clinical work with couples, I examine the profound healing potential of relational connection, while also questioning whether connection, in and of itself, is sufficient. Inspired by recent developments in Imago theory, particularly Harville Hendrix’s Imago Relationship in the Space Between, which emphasizes the relational field over the individual self, I offer a gentle and respectful inquiry into this shift. Through clinical material, I illuminate how early wounds often live simultaneously within the relational space and within the individual psyche, raising the question of whether a purely relational focus may overlook essential dimensions of intrapsychic experience, that might subotage the relational work
Rather than positioning self-work and relational work as competing paradigms, this keynote proposes a “both/and” perspective. I suggest that healing may require an integration of the internal and the relational, where connection becomes transformative not in isolation, but in dialogue with the individual’s inner world. Through clinical examples, I will demonstrate how couples can move toward deeper connection when both partners are supported in encountering not only each other, but also their own internal absences, longings, and developmental wounds. This integrative stance invites a rethinking of Imago practice as a space where the self and the relationship are not mutually exclusive, but mutually constitutive in the healing process.
You’ve learned the theory. Now practise it.
Imago therapists know the theory. We speak the language of the Space-Between, quote quantum field principles, and teach that connecting is being. But here is the harder question: does our clinical practice actually live in that paradigm — or do we default, session after session, to treating two individuals who happen to share a couch?
This keynote challenges the gap between what Imago teaches and what Imago does. The relational paradigm is not a poetic frame we apply to individual work. It is a fundamental reorientation of where transformation occurs, who the client is, and what the therapist’s role actually demands. When we assess partners separately, process feelings as individual property, and measure therapeutic progress by personal insight rather than relational field quality, we are practising in a paradigm we claim to have left behind.
The future of Imago depends on closing that gap — not with better dialogue scripts, but with a coherent shift in clinical identity. What does it look like to hold the dyad as the unit of transformation in every intervention, every moment of facilitation, every measure of progress? What shifts when we stop working on individuals in relationship and start working in the Space-Between itself?
This session draws on three decades of clinical practice and current thinking in relational paradigm implementation to offer concrete, practical direction for the next chapter of Imago therapy — for individual clinicians and for the movement as a whole.
With Hayley Hoffman
This presentation explores what happens when we apply the polyvagal premise that humans are wired to thrive in safety and connection, yet spend much of our lives surviving in familiar patterns defend and protect. We will explore the fundamental premise of Imago-healing in connection together with Polyvagal Theory’s map of the nervous system to show why survival is often our most practiced pathway—and why we will choose familiar over the healing, every time, until we feels safe enough to do something new and then repeat it. Learn how to work directly with nervous system states in the Imago frame so that partners can begin to create a new familiar pathway: one where their nervous systems remember the way home to connection, and the “space between” becomes a reliable, warm and consistent place of co-regulation.
