Couple therapy and relational body psychotherapy: Healing childhood wounds

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to healing childhood wounds through the use of Imago relationship couple therapy in conjunction with relational body psychotherapy. Working with couples in crisis arouses powerful and confusing questions regarding the transference and counter-transference tensions within all aspects of the therapeutic triangle: intra-subjective in each member of the couple, their inter-subjective space, their interaction with the therapist and within the therapist herself. One of the ways of coping with these multifaceted dyads is the use of somatic cues in all three members of the triad. The paper provides three clinical vignettes, which illustrate some of the advantages of the combination of the two theories in relational couple therapy.