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

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

• Strategies to tame criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling with couples
• Use mindfulness to deescalate and get your clients to relax
• Live demonstrations incorporating mindfulness with strategies from EFT, Gottman Therapy and IMAGO

Do you want to be more effective with couples in your practice? Would you like to know how to get couples in crisis to relax, build trust, and deescalate more easily?

Mindfulness is known for being a powerful way to relieve stress, but most couples in distress don’t visit a therapist to learn how to meditate. This seminar shows you how to use mindfulness strategically (without meditation) to disarm criticism and negativity in a relationship without scaring away your couples. As a direct result of applying the techniques of mindfulness taught in this seminar, your clients can experience the pleasure of discovering new capacities within themselves and hope in the midst of struggle in their relationship.

Watch this recording and learn the core skills of mindfulness that most readily translate into a clear conceptual framework for therapy interventions with couples. You will be introduced to easy to learn elements from the most popular couples therapy treatments today and offer practical steps to blend mindfulness with strategies from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), The Gottman Method couples therapy, and IMAGO Relationship Therapy.

Keith Miller’s engaging, interactive presentation includes demonstrations and video. You’ll leave with a clear understanding of how and when to use mindfulness techniques that bring relief and healing to couples.

1. Assess when to use implicit or explicit mindfulness with couples.
2. Recognize how mindfulness can have both attachment and differentiation effects.
3. Demonstrate how to use mindfulness to de-escalate partners in conflict.
4. Describe the trade-offs between using solution-focused and mindfulness techniques.
5. Explain how mindfulness can help you troubleshoot client-resistance to common evidenced-based couples therapy interventions.
6. Integrate concepts of natural multiplicity (parts work) with couples.
7. Apply core mindfulness practices to your personal and professional life.

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

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