David McCann, PhD, RP
Certified Imago Relationship Therapists
I am a Certified Imago Therapist, Workshop Presenter, and Advanced Clinician because Imago saved my relationship with my wife, Janis, over twenty years ago! Having fallen into love, and believing that our relationship was made in Heaven, we were shocked, disillusioned, and on the brink of separating, when we attended the Imago workshop for couples, Getting the Love You Want.
What we learned in that workshop is what we now pass on to couples in our own workshops: how to talk to each other, but more importantly, how to listen to each other so that the two of us could move into a whole new ERA of our marriage—E standing for Empathy, R for Respect, and A for Authenticity. With these three principles guiding us, and now having had many, many hours of supervised training in guiding couples through the basic Imago dialogues (communication skills that we believe are second to none in the world of relationship therapy), we embarked on our own journey of helping couples transform the relationship of their nightmares into the one of their dreams.
Both of us had two Ph.D. degrees when we came to Imago: Janis in Social-Clinical Psychology, and in Psychoanalytic Child Psychotherapy; David in Language & Literature, and also in Psychoanalytic Child Psychotherapy (we trained together at the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center in LA in the late 70s-early 80s). We mention the degrees here, not to impress, but to impress upon the world that you can be highly educated and trained in-depth psychotherapy with individuals, but not know what to do with your own relationship when it is in trouble, not to speak of helping your clients when they are in the throes of power struggles and have lost their intimacy. We believe that one of the ways to change the world is to change one relationship at a time—as Dr. Hendrix, the founder of Imago, has famously stated.
Valencia
(805) 794-8208