Keith Miller – Integrate Mindfulness with Couples Therapy: Practical Tools to Help Couples in Crisis

Outline

The Perfect Partners: Mindfulness and Couples Therapy

• Five core principles of mindfulness in action: video case review
• Brain, love, and how mindfulness heals both
• Reduce contempt, criticism, stonewalling and defensiveness
• Self-compassion and authentic selflessness
• Differentiation/integration between partners
• “Sacred” space, creativity, play

Five Key Skills to Mindfulness Couples Therapy

• Attachment and Differentiation
• Natural multiplicity (parts) to make sense of “irrational” feelings
• Courageous leadership from the center
• Respect the stress response
• The “inside-out” therapist

How to Use Mindfulness with Couples

• Three indicators for using meditative (explicit) mindfulness
• Conversational vs. strategic mindfulness
• MindLESS mindfulness and how to respond when mindfulness flops
• Experiential Exercise #1: Listening to your inner family of parts

Mindfulness Techniques for Couples

• Tracking the cycle
• You-turn
• Courageous communication
• Role playing
• Awareness and compassion for stress
• Self-soothing

State Awareness Techniques: Welcoming Complexity

• Differentiating parts from the whole
• Active observers of experience without automatic responding
• Six qualities of mindful awareness
• Guided imagery

Integrating Strategies from Couples Therapy Models with Mindfulness

• Imago Relationship Therapy
  • Demonstration: Using couples dialogue technique with mindfulness
• Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
  • Demonstration: Mindfulness with primary and secondary emotions
• Gottman Method Couples Therapy
  • Demonstration: Friendship-building exercise with mindfulness

Essential Attitudes of the Mindful Couples Therapist

• “Three R’s:” Respect, Restore and Resource
• Accepts leadership role of mediator with polarities
• Monitors self for stress and fear reactions to couple
• Relaxes self-judgment and fear
• Experiential Exercise #2: Using the 3 R’s when you’re frustrated with the couple