Mindfulness Therapy for Couples
The nuts and bolts of mindfulness at the individual level works for couples, too. Some might argue that beginning with oneself is the best place to start. That could be true. On the flip side, something is uplifting about learning mindfulness with your partner.
Instead of, or maybe in addition to, practicing with strangers, you get the benefit of working with someone you know and who knows you. You also get the gift of seeing each other heal and grow. This can increase and solidify the bond you share.
Dr. Toni Parker (2016), writing for the Gottman Institute, suggests couples learn the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. They are mindfulness of your body, feelings, mind, or consciousness, and how your mind operates.
How do you do this? Using some of the same exercises you would if you were doing it on your own – body scan, mindfulness meditation, and breathwork. These three are particularly helpful in getting you in touch with your feelings, sensations, and perceptions in the present moment.
They also help you to turn toward uncomfortable emotions and accept them. As a couple, you have an opportunity to gain empathy and understanding for each other.
Mindfulness Therapy and Depression
MBCT, DBT, and ACT all are useful in treating various levels of depression. Each combines mindfulness with observing, dissecting, accepting, and choosing alternative behaviors.
Clinicians know that emotional regulation is difficult for depressed patients. This is one of the strengths of DBT. It explicitly focuses on building this skill. But what if the patient’s responses could become more adaptive? This is what Berking and colleagues (2019) wanted to test.
They used an affect regulation training (ART) intervention and compared it against a waitlist control condition (WLC) and a condition for controlling common factors (CFC).
ART participants received instruction on,
- muscle relaxation,
- breathing relaxation,
- non-judgmental perception and description of one’s feelings,
- acceptance and tolerance of undesired feelings,
- compassionate self-support when working to cope with such feelings,
- constructive analysis of the antecedents and consequences of one’s feelings; and,
- active modification of one’s feelings toward a desired direction.
People in the treatment group learned and practiced specific skill-building exercises. They created and followed their daily training schedule, had access to CDs to guide skill-acquisition, and could receive texts with short workouts.
Training included one 180-minute session per week for six consecutive weeks. After this time, participants spent another four weeks practicing mostly on their own. A 90-minute booster happened in week eight. Training occurred in groups of four to eight people.
Their results showed that compared to the waitlist group, participation in the ART group “was associated with a greater reduction of depressive symptom severity.” The difference between ART and CFC was not statistically significant.
Based on their findings, we now have a better understanding of the role enhancing emotion regulation can play in the treatment of depression.
Using Mindfulness Therapy to Treat Anxiety
Many studies contend that mindfulness can reduce anxiety, but is this fact or fiction? Hofmann, Sawyer, Witt, and Oh (2010) reviewed thirty-nine studies and found that mindfulness-based therapy significantly improved anxiety. They are not alone in their analysis (Vøllestad, Nielsen, & Nielsen, 2012).
People suffering from mild to more extreme anxiety also experience elevated stress levels. Goyal and colleagues (2014) investigated the usefulness of mindfulness meditation for reducing stress. Their review included 47 trials with more than 3000 participants. They found:
- moderate evidence of improved anxiety and depression at eight weeks; but
- low evidence of improved stress/distress
- low evidence for mental health-related quality of life
- low evidence of no effect or insufficient evidence of any effect of meditation programs on, positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, or weight
- no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment.
That seems somewhat contradictory, but the researchers do support the potential usefulness of meditation programs. They also emphasize the need for stronger study designs in the future.
Can Mindfulness-Based Therapy Help Treat Insomnia?
Do you have trouble sleeping? Do you wake during the night and find it difficult to return to sleep? Using mindfulness meditation, Black and colleagues (2015) set out to help older adults improve their sleep. Participants had moderate sleep disturbances. Two groups were either assigned to a sleep hygiene education (SHE) or MAPs intervention. The randomized controlled trial continued for one year.
The MAPs intervention improved sleep quality at “immediate post-intervention, which was superior to a highly structured SHE intervention.” This is great news for anyone who needs better quality shuteye. The effects of poor sleep impair cognition, increase one’s waistline, and stress level.
3 Mindfulness Therapy Exercises and Games
Scour the internet, and you will find a plethora of mindfulness games and exercises. There are some for adults, teens, pre-teens, and children. Rather than give you a laundry list of sites to review, here are three exercises with three different objectives.
1. Givens
The basic idea of this exercise, borrowed from Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology, is disarmingly simple. Based on a statement from the US Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…,” clients explore their life assumptions.
They also evaluate things they believe and never need to question, or those ideas that they consider to be obvious, i.e., a given. In a clinical setting, this is homework and clients have a week to complete it.
Upon returning, the therapist leads a discussion about the person’s assumptions. What themes surface? What are the client’s fundamental assumptions about their life or circumstances? Does the therapist need to challenge some assumptions to help the client move forward?
2. Taking Care of Business with Gratitude
For this exercise, taken from Activities for Teaching Positive Psychology, participants will recall a difficult memory. The therapist gives clients advance notice so that they have time to think about the memory they want to share. Then clients receive instructions to write about it in a way that helps them gratefully reappraise the memory.
Grateful people tend to deal well with difficult circumstances (Froh & Parks, 2013). Once finished, clients check their sense of closure and the emotional impact of the memory. This activity includes suggested language and worksheets available in the book.
3. Using a Strengths Approach to Build Perspective-Taking Capacity
This small-group activity helps clients better understand strengths in themselves and others. The backdrop for this is the VIA Character Strength inventory or the Clifton StrengthsFinder. Divide the group into small groups to discuss a specific strength and how to use it in particular scenarios.
They do this from the perspective of someone possessing this strength, not as though it is one of their actual strengths. For example, if the situation is “preparing a dinner party for twenty guests,” the therapist asks the group to reflect on,
- What might be the priorities or goals of someone with your assigned strength/theme in this situation?
- Which questions might someone with your assigned strength/theme tend to ask in this situation?
- What might a person with this strength/theme do in this situation?
This activity emphasizes awareness of personal strengths, strengths in others, and self-awareness. It also shows the value of each different strength within various scenarios. This activity is also included in Activities for Teaching Positive Psychology (Froh & Parks, 2013).
What our readers think
thank you very much for offering this article in a logical and understandable format that I can share.
I am looking for mindfulness in stressful pregnancy decisions and subsequent behaviours. Something simple and straightforward within a lifetime of anxiety and now pregnancy decisions, is what I see mindfulness therapy affecting.
Barbara
Thanks for helping to weave these together in an easily coherent way for clients.to understand.
Thank you for a comprehensive overview of MBTi uses and structure. The resources and source links appreciated.