In a complicated world, what could be more important than learning to nourish and enrich your primary relationship? Long-term relationships are difficult to maintain and even more difficult to make great. Mindful Mates was chosen for the title because the goal is to get back to basics with your partner. Mindfulness offers you an opportunity to remember simple rules of thumb for relating to your life partner. Traci has been using a collection of similar assignments, resources, and interventions as the ones you'll find in this book for years in an effort to 're-calibrate' couples. This book strives to provide professionals that want to enter, re-enter, or persevere in the minefield of couples counseling with a procedure that pulls together strategies from what the research says works. It aims to be a starter kit or foundation of sorts - one of the first systematic handbooks of how-to-do couples therapy that is GSD competent. This book also serves as a self-help tool for couples that are not able to or choose not to enter couples therapy. It can also be used effectively by individuals 'chipping away' alone at relational problems.