The Couples Paradox

About the Book

Bill and Robin Shearer have specialized in working with couples for four decades. They are dedicated to helping couples overcome relational difficulties and move beyond stress, anxiety, anger, fear, and depression to deeply satisfying connection. Together, they have developed Mindful Choices Couples Therapy for a lasting relational transformation.

Mindful Choices Couples Therapy was created out of the Shearers’ recognition that relational well-being and thriving are multifaceted and rooted in awareness, choice, and healthy habit development. When mindful awareness is coupled with making great choices, and systematically practicing those choices to the point of powerful and enduring lifelong habits, relational well-being and thriving result. It’s transformative, and Mindful Choices Couples Therapy is designed to systematically bring about that transformation.

This book is about the application of Mindful Choices Couples Therapy to helping couples resolve “The Couples Paradox. If you are like most people, you have a natural tendency to respond when emotionally triggered in ways that are unhelpful to the relationship — even though being connected and securely attached is your biggest need.

The heart of Mindful Choices Couples Therapy is an incremental, step-by-step mastery of 10 Mindful Choice areas, all interconnected and all having great impact on couple well-being. The focus is on assessment-based awareness and systematic and focused practice using knowledge derived from neuroscience as well as many other powerful tools for change. We call our systematic habit development “Habitualizing.”

For the past 10 years, the Shearers have used Mindful Choices Couples Therapy with hundreds of couples. The results far exceed anything they and their clients experienced when the focus was on merely reducing conflict and relational stress utilizing traditional approaches.

About the Author

Bill and Robin Shearer are couples therapists with decades of training and experience, culminating in an impressive track record working with couples.

Bill has been a licensed California psychologist for 46 years, specializing in couples therapy and helping over a thousand couples tackle tough relationship issues. He has taught couples therapy to decades of graduate psychology and MFT students.

Robin Shearer, a Marriage and Family Therapist, specializes in women’s issues, parenting, and couple relationships.

The Shearers also specialize in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Additionally, they specialize in treating stress and anxiety disorders such as panic disorder.

They are passionate about helping couples thrive, helping them join together as a relational team rather than struggling as individuals who are not getting what they need from their relationship, and are feeling frustrated, discouraged, and not understood.

The Shearers see each couple as a neurobiological interpersonal system. Their client is the relationship, “the space between,” and they look for destructive patterns in the relationship. They see their job as getting two partners to fully understand destructive relational patterns and work together to build a great relationship.

Within each relationship, both partners need to be working on self-awareness and self-management (emotional self-regulation), and co-regulation, with a focus on bringing the best version of themselves to the relationship.

The essence of a great relationship is both parties becoming masterful at being self-aware and remembering love. The shearers help couples become highly skilled at working together as a team to quickly repair disconnection and grow toward a great relationship.