In yesterday's post I discussed the first three of Andrew Christensen's "five principles" of a "Unified protocol for couple therapy". Today I'd like to talk about his fourth and fifth principles - foster productive communication (develop more adaptive communication skills) and emphasize strengths and encourage positive behavior. The five principles are illustrated in the following diagram (downloadable both as a PDF file and as a Powerpoint slide): 

I've already written a series of seven blog posts on this year's BABCP conference.  What are the key points I want to take away? I think they centre around four areas. Most important for me is what's been triggered by Michael Lambert's presentation on "Supershrinks and pseudoshrinks" . Secondly, a major theme (more so than at any other conference I've been to) was couple therapy. I spent a lot of time listening to a whole series of couples experts - what do I want to do with this information now? Thirdly there are the implications from the Dodo bird panel on depression treatments. Lastly there's a bits and bobs category.

Taking these in reverse order:

The British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) encourages the formation of Special Interest Groups (SIG's) in areas that members want to particularly focus on.  There has been discussion recently about a possible SIG on Compassion.  If you're a member of the BABCP and you would like to be involved, do please let me know (if you haven't done so already).  I've made some suggestions about the kind of territory a Compassion SIG might cover (see below), but I very much understand that people who are interested in the SIG, may well not be interested in all the areas I've suggested ... and they may have additional suggestions to add.  The aim would be discuss all this further once we see if there at least 15 of us who would like to support the SIG's establishment.

May's edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology contains three articles on trust that got me thinking a bit.  It's been said that the qualities that attract you to a potential partner (or friend) may well end up being the very issues that become most problematic in the relationship.  So, for example, one's partner's ability to be spontaneous, emotional, let their hair down & have a great time may later become a real issue over their drinking, extra-marital affairs, and irresponsibility with money.  Or from the other end of the personality spectrum, their reliability and conscientiousness may become a real strain because they later seem over-cautious and kill-joys.  Anyway here's three additional contributions to this debate:

(this blog post is downloadable as a Word doc or as a PDF file)