What is MCD Therapy?
Mindful Compassionate Dialogue Therapy (MCDT) is rooted in the transformative practices of mindfulness, somatic awareness, experiential exploration, and compassionate communication. It offers therapists and clients a shared map & framework to navigate the healing journey—both within the therapeutic setting and beyond.
This is a revolution in therapy!
Cultivate your own skill and capacity to ground in love, care, and power-with dynamics. From this consciousness and with the support of the MCD system, you will discover a path to thriving in relationships.
There is a map to thriving relationships, we want you to have it!
A clear path to healing and growth.
Mindfulness & Present-Moment Exploration: Through guided mindfulness and in the moment exploration clients foster deeper self-awareness of internal beliefs, and tender core needs as well as underlying relational patterns. And can then explore, in the moment, new ways of engaging that foster the quality of connection desired. Clients are empowered with 12 specific and doable relationship competencies and with healing support for 9 aspects of foundational wellbeing.
What makes this approach unique?
The most innovative thing that we're offering couples therapy is client empowerment. We want to take the therapist out of the position of doing it all behind the curtain and becoming the become the magician in the room who is able to help get the clients to a new and wanted experience. MCD Therapists bring transparency to the process, we're empowering our clients to learn the map of their own psyche, their own relationship, their own skills, and especially their own resources. Therapists and clients receive:
12 Relationship Competencies for thriving relationships: skills that help couples navigate conflict, improve communication, and build stronger, more collaborative relationships based on loving presence and shared power - Appreciation, Empathy, Honest Expression, Self Empathy, Recognizing Reactivity, Managing Reactivity, Needs-based Negotiations, Live-serving Boundaries, Thriving and Resilience, Relationship Repair, Emotional Security, and Healthy Differentiation
9 Foundations for personal wellbeing: key areas of physiological and psychological wellbeing - Attunement, Warmth, Security, Awareness of self, Health, Regulation, Equanimity, Clarity, and Concentration. As these foundations grow stronger, you’ll be better able to utilize the relationship skills when you need them the most.
Clear, actionable steps for navigating complex dynamics.
The Guiding Principle of MCDT
The Life-Serving Intention refers to a purpose or motivation that aligns with nurturing growth, well-being, connection, and the flourishing of life in ourselves and others. It’s an inner orientation where actions, words, and thoughts are guided by values like compassion, nonviolence, care, and wisdom.
When we hold a life-serving intention, we act in ways that promote healing rather than harm, build bridges instead of walls, and foster collaboration rather than division. This mindset can be especially significant in how we approach intimate relationships, resolve conflicts, and make decisions.
A life-serving intention often involves pausing to ask: What is truly needed here? How can I contribute to creating something life-serving for myself and my partner?
Our Life-Serving Intention is expressed as love, care, & power-with dynamics.
The MCD system of transformation and relating is only useful to the extent that we are occupying a deep trust that caring for the quality of connection opens the door to a thriving life. Our Life-Serving Intention brings us into resonance with the truth that at the depth of our being we are intimately connected in the web of life and on a path of realizing that connection ever more fully. At our core humans have the capacity for compassion, curiosity, and collaboration. From the Life-Serving Intention, we serve and respond to life in whatever the present moment calls for with greater access to skill, compassion, wisdom, & agency.
In other terms, we can say that we are expressing from a consciousness of connection. This is what we are dedicated to tracking first and foremost: the quality of connection within ourselves, in relationship with others, and with life.
Enacting this life-serving intention arises from the following qualities of consciousness: loving presence, mindfulness, respect for interdependence, holistic empowerment, & nonviolence.
The roots of MCDT
The system of MCD is founded on teachings and practices of mindfulness, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and Hakomi. Originally developed by Elia Paz, MCD has been shared with the public through Wise Heart and has contributed to the growth and healing of countless participants.
Mindful Compassionate Dialogue Therapy (MCDT) was created by Ava Frank in collaboration with Elia Paz to provide therapists with a clear and practical framework for integrating MCD into their practice. MCDT therapists skillfully guide clients toward greater self-awareness, emotional healing, and empowered learning of the skills needing for thriving relationships.
MCD Therapy Supports Collective Human Evolution
Love is a communion of souls powered by continuous communication. Those blessed with a loving relationship naturally contribute to others. This is the progression; once we reach a critical mass of building personal trust with significant others, we reach out from that security and can work with others at our highest collective level.
The MCD community of Guides & Therapists feel a solidarity of purpose as we seek to inspire and uplift the potential in all human hearts.