This book reviews the research and philosophical foundations for using mindfulness, acceptance, and Buddhist psychology in couple and family therapy. It also provides a detailed and practical approach for putting these ideas into action in the therapy room, including a mindful approach to therapeutic relationships, case conceptualization, treatment planning, teaching meditation, and intervention.

Mindfulness for your marriage is a tool book to be used by couples who want to gain the skill of relationship wellness. Each chapter offers evidence-based, and therapist verified techniques to gain insight into yourself and your partners world. Mindfulness for your marriage offers skills-based interventions that draw upon the fields of mindfulness and behavioral psychology, both recognized as pathways to enrichment. Each segment of this text builds upon the previous in an effort to lead the reader toward a mastery of relationship wellness. Divorce, separation, or disconnection do not always need to be the solution, a new approach to your problems will empower your path to reconnection. Prepare to break down specific methods of mindfulness and apply them during each chapter’s exercises as you practice to enhance your relationship. Each segment ends with practical exercises to do together or independently. In this unique text, you are offered thoughtful meditations that make relationship improvement understandable and easy. The writer houses an intimate understanding of human emotions and connections that she intersects in a meaningful way. It is not necessary to wait to improve your love until it is ailing, but here and now, relationship enhancement is offered as a preventative strategy in the attainment of interconnected wellbeing.

Relationships take work. In this much-anticipated book, best-selling author Matthew McKay and psychologist Avigail Lev present the ten most common relationship schemas, and provide an evidence-based acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) treatment protocol for professionals to help clients overcome the barriers that hold them back in their relationships. Romantic relationships are a huge challenge for many of us, as evidenced by our high divorce rates. But what is it that causes so much pain and discord in many relationships? In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Couples, Matthew McKay and Avigail Lev provide the first ACT-based treatment protocol for couples that identifies the ten most common relationship schemas—and the coping behaviors they drive—to help you guide clients through their pain and toward solutions that reflect the needs and values of the couple. Rather than working to stop relationship schemas from being triggered or to reduce schema pain, you’ll be able to help your clients observe and name what triggers their rigid coping behaviors when their schemas are activated. And by learning new skills when they’re triggered, your clients will be able to replace avoidant and coping behaviors with values-based action for the betterment of the relationship. By making your clients’ avoidant behavior the target of treatment— as opposed to their thoughts and beliefs—this skills-based guide provides the tools you need to help your clients change how they respond to their partner.

All of us want to be fully accepted in our relationships, yet it can be difficult to fully accept our partners for who they are. This insightful guide for couples is based on a simple concept: Act out of kindness, love, and acceptance, and you will open your relationship for the creation of greater kindness, love, and acceptance. With strategies drawn from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a powerful therapeutic approach, this book will help you identify your core values and discover, as a couple, the beauty that is available to you and your partner when you bring greater awareness and values-guided behavior to your relationship. Each chapter explores a key issue, such as passion, fidelity, and the balance between dependence and independence, and includes specific practices you can do alone or with your partner to help you build a vital relationship.

This authoritative reference assembles prominent international experts from psychology, social work, and counseling to summarize the current state of couple and family therapy knowledge in a clear A-Z format. Its sweeping range of entries covers major concepts, theories, models, approaches, intervention strategies, and prominent contributors associated with couple and family therapy. The Encyclopedia provides family and couple context for treating varied problems and disorders, understanding special client populations, and approaching emerging issues in the field, consolidating this wide array of knowledge into a useful resource for clinicians and therapists across clinical settings, theoretical orientations, and specialties. A sampling of topics included in the Encyclopedia: Acceptance versus behavior change in couple and family therapy Collaborative and dialogic therapy with couples and families Integrative treatment for infidelity Live supervision in couple and family therapy Postmodern approaches in the use of genograms Split alliance in couple and family therapy Transgender couples and families The first comprehensive reference work of its kind, the Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy incorporates seven decades of innovative developments in the fields of couple and family therapy into one convenient resource. It is a definitive reference for therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and counselors, whether couple and family therapy is their main field or one of many modalities used in practice.

This volume examines the role of mindfulness principles and practices in a range of well-established cognitive and behavioral treatment approaches. Leading scientist-practitioners describe how their respective modalities incorporate such nontraditional themes as mindfulness, acceptance, values, spirituality, being in relationship, focusing on the present moment, and emotional deepening. Coverage includes acceptance and commitment therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, integrative behavioral couple therapy, behavioral activation, and functional analytic psychotherapy. In every chapter, the authors describe their clinical methods and goals, articulate their theoretical models, and examine similarities to and differences from other approaches both inside and outside behavior therapy.

It is a truism among therapists in most mental health disciplines that the most important aspects of clinical practice are learned only after one has left graduate school and entered “the real world.” While many of the basics could be covered in graduate school, supervisors of new therapists often feel that the fundamentals are only addressed in detail after a therapist has been employed. In response to this predicament, Odell and Campbell offer The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy: Things My Training Supervisor Never Told Me as a useful daily guide for graduate students and beginning marriage and family therapists that will ease the transition from learner to practicing professional in the clinical domain. Written in a refreshing and unpretentious style, much the way a caring seasoned professional would mentor a novice practitioner, The Practical Practice of Marriage and Family Therapy covers the major areas that typical graduate programs don’t have time to address, including how to: integrate theoretical training with pragmatic clinical practice to maximize therapeutic effectiveness face the practical problems involving the financial elements of clinical work become a thoroughly credentialed professional develop an approach to becoming specialized uncover the motivation for being a professional marriage and family therapist increase one’s ability to maintain high-level practice over a lifetime of work by developing coping strategies and methods of safeguarding one’s own mental health Addressing the unique approach of their book, Odell and Campbell explain, “Whereas most texts are handbooks on the actual theories and techniques used with couples and families, this book is designed to be a guide to the beginning professional as s/he leaves the graduate training environment and enters the mental health field as it exists in contemporary America. Our hope is that this book would be one of those chosen by the novice practicing professional if s/he could only take two or three with them into the field, as it contains material that is most useful for everyday work in clinical settings.”