Manual -Working with Individuals May 2022
The manual is a comprehensive guide for Imago Professional Facilitators working with individual clients. It outlines the facilitator’s triple role (facilitator, receiver, sender), deepening tools such as sentence stems and the "Is there more?" prompt, and the structure of the first meeting—including safety, attachment, hope, consciousness, intentionality, and contract building. It details the progression of Imago Dialogue stages, subsequent session flow, and the theoretical foundations of growth and healing, covering developmental wounds, adaptive strategies, and the defensive reactivity/conscious response circle. The manual introduces the "goodbye" processes for letting go of relationships or old relational patterns, and explores the "cage" of self‑fragments (Lost, Denied, Disowned, Hidden, Social, Personal, Presentational selves). It reviews individual therapy models, the Preview‑View‑Review change cycle, resistance to growth and healing, and provides extensive supplementary material (attachment theory, food as love, agape, shadow work, projection, polarization, blind spots, and change‑back). Practical exercises, contract templates, and guidelines for when to refer to trauma‑trained therapists are included, emphasizing safety, empathy, mirroring, and intentional dialogue as core therapeutic tools.
Topics
Triple Role of the Imago Facilitator with Individuals
Defines the facilitator’s three concurrent functions: guiding the session (facilitator), mirroring and validating (receiver), and offering personal input (sender).
Deepening Dialogue: Sentence Stems and "Is there more?" Techniques
Explains how sentence stems shift clients from content to affect, bypass cognitive resistance, and invite inner knowing; includes examples and practice exercises.
Structure and Goals of the First Individual Meeting
Outlines safety, attachment, hope, consciousness, intentionality, shared responsibility, and contract creation as core objectives of the initial session.
Developmental Wounding and Adaptive Strategies Model
Presents four developmental threads (Attachment, Exploration, Identity, Competence), associated wounds, adaptive strategies, and growth edges.
Defensive Reactivity / Conscious Response Circle
Illustrates how stories we tell shape reactions, the gap between impact and intention, and methods to rewrite narratives.
Goodbye Processes: Letting Go of Relationships and Old Relational Patterns
Two protocols for grieving and releasing old relationships or entrenched ways of being, using visualizations, role‑play, and mirroring.
The Cage of Self‑Fragments: Lost, Denied, Disowned, Hidden, Social, Personal, Presentational Selves
Explains each self‑fragment, its origin in socialization, and how to integrate them through dialogue.
Preview‑View‑Review Change Cycle Applied to Imago Work
Adapts Prochaska’s stages of change into a sports‑analogy framework for planning, monitoring, and evaluating client change.