Mindfulness-Based Marriage & Couples Therapy

 

Relationships are tough, and a successful marriage requires a concerted effort on both sides to do their best to manage and resolve conflicts and emotional turmoil that may arise. It's a lifelong experience and skill, and one of the best tools to help you deal with the many emotional issues that arise in marriage and other family relationships is the skill of mindfulness.

We all tend to get stuck in patterns of habitual reactions and fixed perspectives. We all become experts in what is right and wrong, what is good and what is bad, and we impose our beliefs on each other. We have claims and expectations that we "know" to be true and impose them on our partners. But relationships do not respond to demands, expectations, or other behaviors designed to control others. Relationships develop through communication. Effective communication requires freedom and openness based on trust and compassion. The only way to achieve this quality of freedom is for each partner to take responsibility for their emotional reactions and learn how to work them out in a way that does not interfere with communication. Emotional reactions can be overwhelming and anxiety-inducing, preventing effective communication and problem-solving. We all know how important it is to deal with our emotions, but what do we do when we're scared, worried, angry, disappointed, or hurt? Mindfulness meditation therapy, whether practice or Skype session, focuses on teaching you how to work with your inner emotions and build relationships with them that promote healing, transformation, and resolution. Mindfulness is a special form of focused mindfulness that can be described as 'focused being'. Rather than avoiding or denying our inner pain, we choose to work with it. We choose to deal with our pain instead of blaming it on our partners or other external causes. Shift your focus from “Why am I angry” to “I am angry” to “I feel angry inside of me”. With each change, we begin to connect with our anger and other emotions. That's how we transform it into an object that we can identify. This is the first part of what it means to be in touch with our emotions.

His second part of "Making Contact" is learning to accept our inner pain and wounds. To be is to listen with an open heart, and to be open and quiet with the One Spirit who seeks to modify his feelings, to resist, to listen, and to recognize. It means being willing to “sit” on your emotions without doing anything else. Mindfulness is the art of listening in this way, creating a therapeutic space around inner suffering infused with natural love and compassion. When you start dealing with pain in this way, it responds accordingly, releasing it, relaxing it, and starting to lose control over you. This promotes healing and resolution of the emotional part of the problem. Repairing this will prove to be much easier to resolve the objective component of the problem.

Learning to relate to others begins with learning to relate to your inner self, the emotional entity that resides in your mind. The two cannot be separated. As you learn to love yourself, you will also learn how to love others. Mindfulness provides the skillful means to achieve both.

Visit Couples Therapy Near Me for more information about marriage & couples therapy.