Transformative Programs & Training

Real Dialogue:
A Training Series
with Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D.

Three women sitting on a couch in a living room, engaging in a conversation. One woman with short blonde hair and hoop earrings is speaking and holding a water bottle. Another woman with curly red hair and a black top is partially visible. The third woman with shoulder-length blonde hair in a red top is sitting in the background.

In a world where disagreement so often leads to disconnection, Real Dialogue offers another way—a path of staying present, curious, and emotionally connected, even when the stakes are high.

Whether in families, workplaces, or public conversations, many of us are seeking more skillful ways to speak and listen—especially in moments of tension or conflict. This training series introduces the core principles and practices of Real Dialogue, a powerful and practical approach that brings together mindfulness, emotional awareness, and intentional communication.

Designed for individuals and professionals alike, this series supports anyone who wants to:

  • Navigate conflict with greater clarity and self-awareness

  • Cultivate grounded presence in the face of difference

  • Foster mutual understanding in emotionally charged conversations

  • Build resilience and connection in personal and professional relationships

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Training Series Overview

Part I // Introduction to Real Dialogue:
Overview of Principles and Practice

Part II // Learning the Skill of Real Dialogue
Core Techniques and Tools for Deep Listening and Speaking

Part III // Engaging in Healthy Conflict
Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation in Emotionally Charged Moments
(Available after completion of live webinars on CE-Go.com)

Part IV // Teaching the Skill of Real Dialogue
Facilitating Growth in Others
(Available after completion of live webinars on CE-Go.com)

Through a blend of insight and accessible tools, Real Dialogue helps us move beyond polarization and toward authentic human connection.

Whether you're new to this approach or ready to deepen your practice, this series will meet you where you are—and help you grow.

Comprehensive Training for Mental Health Professionals

Polly Young-Eisendrath, Jungian analyst and author, presents: Foundational Training in Dialogue Therapy.

Break Through Projective Identification and Expand Your Skills with Dialogue Therapy

  • Enhance your effectiveness in couples therapy

  • Gain certification as a Dialogue Therapist

  • Increase Emotional Contact and Clarity in Couples Therapy

  • Recognize the role of differentiation

78 CEUs Total (26 CEs per Session)

2025 Program Schedule
Session 2:  July 17-20
Session 3:  October 30 - November 2
Location: The Trapp Family Lodge, Stowe, VT.

Dialogue Therapy is a structured, short-term approach to psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy for couples and other adult pairs. Designed to foster trust and intimacy, it helps break through projective identification and expand dialogical space.

Developed on a strong evidence base, Dialogue Therapy was created by Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D., an internationally recognized Jungian psychoanalyst, psychologist, and author. She teaches and practices psychoanalysis and mindfulness and has written extensively on Dialogue Therapy. Her works include Love Between Equals (2019) and Dialogue Therapy for Couples and Real Dialogue for Opposing Sides (co-authored with Jean Pieniadz, Ph.D., 2021).

Additional Faculty: Raymond Coppola, Ph.D., Susan Lillich, Ph.D., Margot Parker, LMFT, Leland Peterson MA, ATR-BC, and Amber Rickert, MPH, LCSW.

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CE Credit Training with CRD Faculty & Friends

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Making Deeper Contact

Polly Young-Eisendrath, renowned Jungian analyst and author, presents Making Deeper Contact—an invitation to explore life’s essential themes of life and death, joy and pain, darkness and light, and awaken to a deeper, more conscious engagement with the human experience.

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Part I // Befriending Our Imperfect, Impermanent, Impersonal World

Part 2 // Transforming Health/Illness, Purity/Disgust, Enemy-Making, and Blame

Part 3 // The Path of True Love

Part 4 // Befriending Loss, Betrayal, Decline and Death in this Imperfect World

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Expanding Your Awareness and Skills to Embrace What Life Brings

Embracing both sides of your existence -- pleasure and pain, health and illness, ease and suffering, and life and death – means truly befriending yourself and others. This deep acceptance creates an opening to both love and truth in all conditions.

This four-part course (consisting of 16 video classes) offers a new way of perceiving and encountering your existence – to refuse nothing and to learn from everything. The course is guaranteed to change your mind about everything.

(Suitable for personal skills development, life coaches, executive coaches, and therapists for expanding awareness and insight about both contractive and expansive dimensions of our lives and relationships.)

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Each Tuesday at 1PM, the Center for Real Dialogue offers a very affordable way to participate in a LIVE discussion with Polly Young-Eisendrath and Peggy Dippen. For only $20 per month, you can ask us ANYTHING about speaking for yourself, listening mindfully and remaining curious. Our wonderful AMA members (who come from all over the world) talk together about polarization, bias, and stereotypes, and how to overcome them through speaking and listening. You will learn about yourself, your relationships and what being human means and does not mean.

Join us every Tuesday for amazing adventures in learning about the Skill of Real Dialogue.

Real Dialogue Training with Polly Young-Eisendrath

Free Public Education

Welcoming
Disagreement and Difference: Introducing
the Skill of Real Dialogue

Are you tired of painful disagreements in which others don’t get your point, regardless of your tone or language? Do you avoid conflicts because you don’t learn from them? Are you dealing with estrangement, divorce, or alienation in your family? Do you get discouraged by endless disputes at work? Do you feel hopeless about political polarizations?

In this two hour didactic and experiential introduction, you will learn about human emotions and our tendency to develop and confirm bias and stereotypes, as well as how to work with your own emotional triggering during conflict in order to become a more authentic speaker and a better listener.

Free Workshops in Vermont
2025 Dates and Locations TBA:

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Riding the Waves: Training in the Skill of Real Dialogue

Learn How to Thrive in Disagreement, Differences, and Conflicts

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If you want to get the most out of Real Dialogue — learn the skill, teach the skill, become a specialist and learn how to coach and facilitate difficult conversations in your own family and business — this is the course for you!

For as little as $150 per day (six hours of training with two teachers) in five two-day weekends, you can learn to master the skill, teach it to others, and become a facilitator of difficult conversations and a Real Dialogue Specialist.

Each session is taught in person by Polly Young-Eisendrath and another Real Dialogue Specialist.

Dates and location for 2025 trainings TBA.

All Programs

Foundational Training in Dialogue Therapy
from $1,000.00
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Real Dialogue The Skill E-Books (3 Volumes)
$14.99
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Weekly AMA Group for The Skill of Real Dialogue
$20.00 every month
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Podcasts

A white dove holding an olive branch, with a red prohibition symbol behind it, underneath the words 'Enemies: From War to Wisdom'.

Enemies: From War to Wisdom

Why do we need enemies? From intimate relationships to politics, tribalism, and community, we cannot seem to stop dehumanizing each other. Are chronic conflicts in our families, societies, and nations inevitable? In this podcast, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D. and Eleanor Johnson analyze human hostilities from the most mundane to the most sophisticated as we apply psychology, psychoanalysis, art, spirituality, and relational theory in conversations about belonging and othering in our relationships and ideologies. Each program will reach for a fresh wisdom that shows us how to step back from creating enemies in our lives.

An artistic depiction of a Buddha's face with the phrase 'Waking Up Is Not Enough' across the top, featuring two layers: a realistic representation of the Buddha's head and a stylized line drawing connected by a network of black lines on a yellow background.

Waking Up
is Not Enough

When you wake up to the cosmic unity of existence and feel the love and inspiration of awakening, what happens next? Whether it’s through meditation, spiritual practice, Near-Death Experience (NDE), ingesting a mind-altering substance, or being born again, you don’t get a map for improving your messy life. In this podcast, Polly Young-Eisendrath and Michael Berger draw on expertise in science, psychology, adult development, psychedelics, NDEs, dreams, and Buddhist practice in conversations about compassion, resilience, responsibility, kindness, and development after awakening. You will learn how to chart a new path for flourishing in the human space in which waking up is important, but not enough, and growing up is never finished.