Mindfulness Centered Couples Therapy: Applying Mindfulness and the Wisdom of the Body to Couples Therapy

This short workshop will provide maps and tools to work effectively with couples, utilizing mindfulness and experiential exercises. Covering both assessment and intervention, you will learn how to identify and change a couple’s negative interactive cycles, as well as the underlying emotional wounds that cause them.

Couples communicate with each other in a fast, non-verbal way (using tone of voice, eye gaze, body posture, quality of touch etc.). Learning to track these somatic cues enables the therapist to notice the subtle messages each partner communicates to the other directly from their unconscious which shape the way they relate to each other.

Mindfulness is one of the most powerful tools in couples counseling. It allows clients to “act in” instead of “acting out” with each other.  It assists them to gently access and talk about deep levels of delicate material that underlie the repetitive patterns in which they become mired. They can step out of adversarial and into more vulnerable and collaborative interactions.

Working experientially and somatically adds significant depth, impact and aliveness for therapist and client alike. Instead of simply talking about things, couples experience them directly and therefore gain deeper insight as well as tools for change.

In this workshop you will learn the principles and practical interventions that use present moment experience. This is a hands-on workshop in which you will practice everything you learn. For therapists new to couples therapy this workshop will provide grounding in theory and skills for working with couples. For therapists who have been working with couples for a while, this workshop will refine your skills and will give you additional experiential and mindfulness tools to dramatically improve your current work.

Topics covered include: 

• couple’s assessment 
• most common couples patterns 
• how to access unconscious material through the body  
• working with present time experience 
• how to explore defenses by supporting them 
• working with gestures, posture and tensions 
• the use of touch in couples therapy
• detrancing the transference through the body, and 
• using physical metaphors for interactional sequences.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn how to use mindfulness to explore couples systemic and intrapsychic issues
• Learn how to use present time experience to access implicit belief and underlying emotional injuries that govern couples interactions.
• Become familiar with a simple psychodynamic/systemic method of assessment

Instructor Bio

Rob Fisher, M.F.T. (License # MT 22886),  is the author of Experiential Psychotherapy With Couples, A Guide for the Creative Pragmatist and of a number of book chapters and articles published internationally on couples therapy and the pyschodynamic use of mindfulness for publications such as the Psychotherapy Networker, The Therapist, The Journal Of Couples Therapy, The USA Body Psychotherapy Journal and others.  He is the founder of Mindfulness Centered Couples Therapy.

An advocate of the use of mindfulness and present experience in psychotherapy, he has been an adjunct professor at JFK University. As the Co-Developer of the Mindfulness and Compassion in Psychotherapy Certificate Program at CIIS, he has brought together many of the leaders in the realms of mindfulness and psychotherapy in one of the only programs in the US that teaches, not just the skills of psychotherapy, but helps participants develop their internal state as well. 

He is a speaker at conferences and workshops around the US such as CAMFT, USABP, The Psychotherapy Networker, The Couples Conference, and The Relationship Council where he presents as a peer, master or keynote speaker.  Teaching internationally, he is a Hakomi Mindfulness Based Experiential Psychotherapy Senior Trainer on the California faculty and a director of Hakomi Institute of China.

He writes poetry, fiction and music from his old farmhouse in the Green Mountains of Vermont.