Despite the prevalence of infidelity and the serious harm it causes relationships, scarce clinical literature exists about how to use trauma-informed approaches to help couples in conjoint therapy. Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) have been empirically proven in their own right to be effective in the treatment of trauma and couples, respectively, and were utilized conjointly in this article as a means to heal trauma related to infidelity in couple therapy. The combined EFT-EMDR approach consists of using EMDR as an intervention within specific stages of EFT. A case example is presented to illustrate use of the integrated approach. Suggestions from this article may help couple therapists understand the role that trauma plays in maintaining the attachment injury of infidelity and to adequately attend to the traumatic impact of infidelity on both partners.
In the last three decades, mindfulness and resilience have received extensive scholarly attention. Research has burgeoned and they have both become “buzz words” in the social sciences and mental health fields. That said, they are often presented as unrelated qualities, skills, or states, and few studies and texts have examined their linkages and/or how they complement each other. Masten’s (2001, 2009) seminal papers and subsequent book (2014) that presented resilience as “ordinary magic” have had large impacts on resilience scholarship, bringing forth that resilience is much more of a common human occurrence and proclivity than previously considered. In this paper, we explore the potential for mindfulness to be a potentially overlooked and ubiquitous protective factor in the development and maintenance of resilience. To achieve this, we propose that mindfulness is fundamental to resilience by investigating linkages between mindfulness and resilience yet to be thoroughly explored in the literature, and discuss how mindfulness is logically connected to resilience. Likewise, we suggest that the complementary interplay between mindfulness and resilience is readily applicable and highly germane, as mindfulness may beget resilience and vice versa.
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