Victorian State Conference

VIC STATE CONFERENCE   AUGUST 2011   The presenter was Natalie Glaser.

Session Title - ACT with Love - Enriching and strengthening relationships with Acceptance and Commitment Training

‘ACT with Love’ was the title of the Victorian State Conference held on 6^th August 2011. ACT is Acceptance and Commitment Training for couples and it has been shown to be a powerful way to improve couple satisfaction. The section of the day that resonated with me was the exploration of ‘values’ and separating values from needs, goals, wants, and rules. Natalie Glaser the presenter made this a very experiential session, which educators’ enjoy. It was also a practical exercise which could be done in a group of couples or with a couple on their own. The essence of the exercise was to ask us to nominate the values that were important to us in our lives. Natalie provided an extensive list. Then we were to explore why that value was so important and meaningful to us in life and to communicate that to another person.

So often couples don’t come at their relationships this way – there are often different values that are important to the individuals and without exploration and curiosity there can be misunderstanding. The other point about this exercise was to be able to ‘walk it’ not just ‘talk it’ and in this way to become more ‘mindful’ of the other.

A couple of photos of our day with Natalie