Couples Communication Specialist Certificate

1. Identify concepts in attachment theory that facilitate effective couple therapy.  
2. Identify broad themes that have been shown to be foundational to effective, research-based couple therapy. 
3. Label common negative interactive cycles as identified by EFCT and help couples create healthier patterns. 
4. Change communication for couples in conflict to be successful by teaching them to regularly maintain at least five positive to one negative communication or interaction.
5. Use mentalization-based therapy questions to assess partners in their current relationship.
6. Develop a mentalization-based therapy style case formulation with the couple.
7. Use Gottman’s four horsemen to assess divorce risk and the limitations of this finding. 
8. Restructure partners’ awareness of sensations, thoughts, emotions, and actions to facilitate healthier communication and connection.
9. Use EFCT-style interventions to facilitate emotionally-connected communication to improve relationship satisfaction.
10. Identify ways in which neuroscientific findings can be used to regulate affect and facilitate more effective communication between partners.
11. Facilitate the communication of empathy and compassion in partners to increase emotional intimacy.  
12. Choose interventions for unresponsive partners whose defensiveness impedes treatment.
13. Evaluate how communication in person as compared to in virtual sessions may affect therapy effectiveness. 

The Role of Communication in Good Couple Therapy

• Empirical foundations of couple therapy
• Understand the attachment narrative
• The role of mentalizing in creating emotional intimacy
• Use communication to facilitate secure relationships

Shape Healthy Relationships with Communication

• Attachment theory and the influence of protective communication habits
• Understand how attachment and mentalization are fundamental to change
• Identify communication patterns for attachment styles
• Recognize pursuit—withdrawal dynamics
• Assess EFCT’s negative interaction cycles
• Build safety and safeness systems of social mentalities theory
• Use Gottman ratios to build safety and safeness
• Research, risks and limitations

Get Started: Assess Communication Patterns and Attachment Styles

• Structure the evaluation
• Develop a mentalization-based therapy style case formulation
• The four horsemen as predictors of divorce
• Reduce tension and build harmony
• Integrate Gottman’s Sound Relationship House theory

Building the Therapeutic Alliance

• Create an effective therapeutic alliance guided by attachment theory
• Monitor and titrate arousal
• Heightening 5 domains of awareness (STEAM)

Communication Coaching: Teach Clients to Use Soft Start-Ups, Listen without Defending, Have Hard Conversations and More

• Coach active listening
• Initiate difficult conversations with Gottman’s soft start-up and other tools
• Teach guidelines for problem-solving conversations
• Nurture and communicate empathy to process differences
• Lessons from neuroscience in developing secure relationships
• How neuroscience-based tools can help facilitate affect regulation
• Use Polyvagal theory to facilitate affect regulation
• Facilitate biobehavioral synchrony to improve coregulation

Make Expressing Empathy and Compassion the Norm: Clinical Tools for Co-regulation and Connection

• Identify and nurture essential components of empathy and compassion
• Address fears of giving and receiving compassion
• Compassion Focused Therapy interventions for fears, blocks, and resistances
• Transform attachment relationships by addressing childhood communication patterns
• Coach partners in healing trauma reactions

Rupture Repair Toolkit: Help Partners Make Repairs that Stick and Sustain Connection

• Develop scripts to facilitate collaborative communication
• Use Gottman-style repairs to reconnect
• Facilitate effective communication with “unresponsive’ partners
• Teach Gottman tools: Bids for affection and magic 5 hours to sustain connection
• Develop Emotionally Focused Couple therapy attachment rituals
• Guide partners through Imago-inspired sharing the love exercise

Managing Risks, Complications, and  Termination

• Guidance for naming, discussing, and addressing complications
• Four EFCT interventions for identifying, highlighting, and expressing growth from therapy
• Guide couple in discussing their readiness for termination
• Coach couple in planning for the future
• Develop a termination plan to help sustain treatment benefits

• Counselors
• Marriage and Family Therapists
• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Registered Psychotherapists
• Addiction Counselors
• Case Managers
• Other Professionals Who Work Within the Mental Health Fields