Imago therapy is a relational paradigm that, instead of looking at you as an individual or the family system from which you have come, focuses instead on the "relationship" as a unit. The rupture of connection becomes the diagnosis for all marital conflict, with the goal of therapy being to facilitate the restoration of connection. Healing is a process that occurs within your relationship with your partner.

The therapeutic method of healing is the “dialogue process” taught by the therapist to the couple for the purpose of creating a “bridge” into the world of their partner. Couples therapy is healing work constructed in such a way where each partner is invited for a visit in the "internal country" of the other. With appropriate preparation and a willingness to temporarily suspend one’s reality, each person enters the other’s internal world to learn about the partner’s experience and how the present experience is often, under another disguise, reminiscent of earlier experiences. There is a high probability that the impasse or conflict with our partners, likely trigger in us a reenactment of earlier hurts, vulnerabilities or wounds. In earlier times, if we did not live up to our parent's, our teacher's, and/or coach's expectations, we may have painfully experienced the caretakers as withdrawing approval, showing disappointment, withholding attention or affection, punishing, judging, criticizing, blaming, lecturing or devaluing our sense of a solid and separate self.

Though there may be no conscious recollection of the effects of disconnection from the parent/caretaker, as children our young brains were immature and did not have the capacity to effectively judge a situation in which the parent acted or looked displeased, disapproving or angry in response to something we did or did not do. This experience of “disconnection” from the parent/caretaker produced, at times, intolerable anxiety and was experienced psychologically as life threatening. To insure survival and restore connection, we developed ways to get along and thus deny some of our natural impulses and free expression of our feelings and our thoughts. Because those impulses evoked a perceived negative reaction in the parent, we altered, changed or buried them.

Dr. Harville Hendrix states: "It matters less what I say or how much I “discharge” for healing to occur". Healing and connection come from the EXPERIENCE OF BEING LISTENED TO WITHOUT JUDGMENT AND WITH OPEN CURIOSITY. This is called "empathic resonance": We are tuned in to each other, we are on the same wavelength and we are able to literally share in the experience of the other. If my partner shows up with an empathic presence, anxiety will relax. If this empathic listening is predictable and reliable, the defenses will relax. The power of healing is in what occurs in the context of the relationship in that it is similar to the one in which the original wounding occurred. This helps couples to begin the process of becoming healing agents in their journey to wholeness. Thus there is a bigger purpose to the committed relationship/marriage.