2-Day Intensives for Interracial Couples with Yael & Paula
In the Interracial Intensive, Yael & Paula draw on their extensive personal and professional experience to guide you in re-establishing and strengthening your connection and partnership, opening your eyes to the previously unseen and unfolding possibilities in your relationship for:
- Shifting from coping alone to living in connection
- Deepening an already good connection
- Communicating across racial differences
- Preparing for interracial marriage/raising biracial children
- Emancipating each other from social and cultural messages and biases around race
- Healing racial trauma and white fragility
Interracial marriages and relationships have undergone tremendous growth within the last few decades. Interracial couples regularly navigate racial reality in ways that are universal for all romantic partners and in other ways unique and uncharted.
The historical adversity that intermarrying couples have endured, from the illegalization of interracial marriage to the residual public scrutiny by romantic partners who cross-the-color-line, continues today, illustrating that race matters—and race will be continually injected into the social, psychological, spiritual and emotional landscape of interracial relationships.
Objection to difference is embedded within us. Who we date and who we marry are among the most personal decisions we can make, yet strangely enough, nothing elicits such outcry of objection as when we date or marry outside our cultural, ethnic or racial groups. Suddenly the private boundaries disappear and our personal lives seem to become fair game for friends, co-workers and family alike. Intermarrying can still bring on unexpected and sometimes disturbing lessons in racial intolerance.
Still interracial couples are just like any others couple joining for mutual support and seeking ways of making their personal interactions and parenting skills work in harmony. Whereas any new relationship typically takes shape around new and shared experiences, the presence of intermarrying coupling adds unique consideration and necessitates something special for partners who join each other on this courageous journey.
Why Imago Intensives for Interracial Couples
Imago Relationship Therapy (IRT) is unlike traditional couples therapy in that it not based in pathology or diagnosis. Rather it is founded on the principle that we are born “whole” and we each accept our own basic humanity and the basic humanity of all other people. When we fall in love, it is enough for us to see, think, or even dream about our beloved for that chemical of falling in love to be triggered. Therefore, we might see a Black woman dating a white Jewish man. Or a Muslim left-brain computer software geek dating a Bi-racial, right-brain artist. While some aspects of society may recoil from such unions, another major piece of the Imago puzzle and one of its core principles is that opposites attract. We fall in love with someone who is not only different, but with someone with the right chemistry.
The “something special” that the Imago intensive offers interracial couples is the opportunity, through a safe, structured process called Imago Dialogue, to emancipate each other from the social and cultural messages and biases around race that frequently lead to violence and daily micro-aggressions. The aim of the intensive is to allow interracial couples the opportunity to create a dialogic dynamic where they grow and allow each other to be different.
Communicating Differences with Love & Respect
The intensive invites interracial couples to experience “Dialogue,” a powerful positive communication process that enables them to really see each other–beyond their fears, cultural conditioning and projections. Dialogue provides a safe and fertile context for each person to see, hear, and understand their partner’s perspective and gain deeper insight into him or herself. Experiencing Dialogue connects partners across differences that are commonly known to create deep divides and polarization.
Dialogue helps to:
- Put feelings into words
- Connect experience to meaning
- Identify what triggers anxiety
- Integrate what you are thinking with what you are feeling
The power of the Dialogue extends beyond what’s being said, down into the feelings that convey the emotional truths of what is being said. Both partners pay attention, not only to the words being said, but also to the body language that goes with the words.
The Dream: Interracial Couples Separate AND Equal Together
In Imago, partners accept each other’s absolute separateness as individuals, each other’s unique way of perceiving reality, and the sacredness of each other’s inner world. Each partner’s identity is confirmed and strengthened by the partnership based on respect, mutuality and unconditional love. Imago provides deep insights and experiences that can help interracial couples create unlimited possibilities for love.
The palpable differences between partners can become a positive force and a unique distinction that contributes to personal growth, relational expansion and ultimately, transformation of society by helping people create intimate partnerships that are structures of healing. Interracial couples can become a conduit of universal love that connects us all on the journey of a thriving and relational society.
Interracial Intensive Scheduling
The Interracial Intensive is scheduled during the week or weekend for 2 consecutive days, at a time that works with your schedule and Yael & Paula’s.
Who Can an Intensive Help?
- Married and Unmarried Couples
- Engaged Couples
- Couples Seeking a Check-Up or To Reconnect
- Couples On the Brink of Divorce or in High Emotional Distress
- Couples Who Filed for Divorce and/or Considering Getting Back Together
Couples Not Suited for the Intensive — Any of the following conditions need to be discussed with us first: physical abuse, threat/fear of violence, history of harm to self/other, suicidal/homicidal thoughts, an ongoing current affair.