Rupture Repair and Mindfulness
摘要
This chapter looks at rupture repair through the lens of mindfulness. We briefly review the mechanisms of mindfulness and highlight the significance of mindful attention for updating habitual and potentially maladaptive expectations. We then go on to explore the relevance of mindfulness to interpersonal conflict and introduce the notion of mindfulness in the context of psychotherapy as “therapeutic presence.” We show how mindfulness has influenced Safran and Muran’s pioneering integrative model of rupture resolution (Safran and Muran, 2000; Muran & Eubanks, 2020), including their notion of “mindfulness-in-relationship,” as articulated in Negotiating the Therapeutic Alliance and Therapist Performance Under Pressure: Negotiating Emotion, Difference, and Rupture. Finally, we introduce a novel way of bringing formal mindfulness practices into therapy to support awareness of ruptures and the possibility of turning these into therapeutic opportunities. This consists of a “Relational Mindfulness Protocol” at the beginning and end of sessions which aims to increase compassionate awareness of relational difficulties in therapy at the same time as supporting mindful communication about any difficulties and re-connection. We illustrate with a clinical example.