You can spend years in graduate school, internship, and clinical practice. You can learn to skillfully conceptualize cases and structure interventions for your clients. You can have every skill and advantage as a therapist, but if you want to make the most of every session, both you and your client need to show up in the therapy room. Really show up. And this kind of mindful presence can be a lot harder than it sounds.

Mindfulness for Two is a practical and theoretical guide to the role mindfulness plays in psychotherapy, specifically acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). In the book, author Kelly Wilson carefully defines mindfulness from an ACT perspective and explores its relationship to the six ACT processes and to the therapeutic relationship itself. With unprecedented clarity, he explains the principles that anchor the ACT model to basic behavioral science. The latter half of the book is a practical guide to observing and fostering mindfulness in...

Troy DuFrene is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area who specializes in psychology. He is coauthor of Coping with OCD; Mindfulness for Two; Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong; Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Eating Disorders; and Mindfulness and Acceptance for Bulimia.