Assessment In Couple Therapy

This innovative text offers a simple but comprehensive framework for couple assessment that integrates research and information on couples from a wide range of models. Using the 7 Cs as a basis for guiding assessment, chapters move through key areas of couple functioning including communication, conflict resolution, culture, commitment, caring and sex, contract, and character. An additional chapter on children also offers insights into assessment of couples who parent. Offering a broad and accessible framework that can be applied to a variety of theoretical perspectives, the book highlights how the 7 Cs can be used to inform both assessment and treatment of couples. Numerous case examples are interwoven throughout the text to demonstrate how therapists may utilize this approach to work with a diverse client base. Written in an accessible style, Assessment in Couple Therapy is an essential tool for students of marriage and family therapy and beginning therapists, as well as seasoned mental health professionals working with couples in a range of settings.

Showing how to weave assessment into all phases of therapy, this indispensable text and practitioner guide is reader friendly, straightforward, and practical. Specific strategies are provided for evaluating a wide range of clinical issues and concerns with adults, children and adolescents, families, and couples. The authors demonstrate ways to use interviewing and other techniques to understand both individual and relationship functioning, develop sound treatment plans, and monitor progress. Handy mnemonics help beginning family therapists remember what to include in assessments, and numerous case examples illustrate what the assessment principles look like in action with diverse clients. See also the authors' Essential Skills in Family Therapy, Third Edition: From the First Interview to Termination, which addresses all aspects of real-world clinical practice, and Clinician's Guide to Research Methods in Family Therapy.

More and more, therapists are intervening in marital conflicts without waiting to complete the formal assessment process. While most texts begin with theoretical roadmaps for the process of therapy, Dynamic Assessment in Couple Therapy shows therapists how to begin interventions during the process of assessment. By detailing the procedures and techniques for using their innovative Structured Initial Interview (SII), the authors have designed a practical form of intervention to handle both the complexity of the marital journey and the subtle realities of marital roadblocks. As outlined in this innvative book, SII is a creative source of interaction that will stimulate new insights and helpful new directions for therapists and their clients.

The field of family, child, and couple assessment continues to evolve and change since the first edition of this book appeared in 2004. Couple and Family Assessment, Third Edition, is a thoroughly revised and updated resource for anyone working with children, adolescents, couples, and families. It provides an in-depth description of an even larger number of clinically useful assessment tools and methods, including issue-specific tools, self-report inventories, standardized inventories, qualitative measures, and observational methods. Each chapter provides strategies for systematically utilizing these various assessment methods and measures with a wide range of family dynamics that influence couples and families. These include couples conflict, divorce, separation, mediation, premarital decisions, parenting conflicts, child abuse, family violence, custody evaluation, and child and adolescent conditions, i.e., depression, anxiety, conduct disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and learning disorders that can significantly influence family dynamics. This third edition features the latest, most common and important assessment tools and strategies for addressing problematic clinical issues related to working with families, couples, and children. Chapters 3 through 11 include matrices that summarize pertinent information on all instruments reviewed, allowing readers to instantly compare more than 130 assessment devices. Finally, the book provides extensive clinical case material that illustrates the use of these various assessment tools and strategies in a wide array of clinical situations. Couple and Family Assessment, Third Edition, will be useful to both trainees and practitioners as a ready reference on assessment measures and strategies for working with families, couples, and children.

When a couple enters therapy, both partners have either explicit or implicit understandings of what can—and, more importantly, cannot—be discussed in therapy. Even when empirically tested assessments are used to help pinpoint areas of concern and conflict, couples may choose to identify only those areas that are relatively safe and do not seriously threaten each partner’s sense of integrity and vulnerability. How is a therapist supposed to proceed when a couple comes in for a tune-up, not realizing that their entire transmission needs to be serviced? Therapists know that some relationships, like some transmissions, can continue to function on some level even without proper care—sometimes even for years—before the couple seeks therapy. If, when they come in, the therapist can help the couples to repair and regain their lost equilibrium, they’ll be more likely to seek help when the transmission next begins to slip. In its clear, precise prose, insightful case studies, and thought-provoking discussion questions, Couples in Collusion lays out guidelines for identifying, understanding, and, dealing with the unspoken agreements and collusive systems that couples build up over time. Clinicians will find each chapter replete with concrete strategies they can use in practice as well as thorough explanations of the assessment tools, suggestions on how to use them, and even advice on how to build the tools’ costs into clinicians’ limited budgets.

This book provides a theoretical framework and a practical model of intervention for distressed couples whose relationships are affected by the echoes of trauma. Combining attachment theory, trauma research, and emotionally focused therapeutic techniques, Susan M. Johnson guides the clinician in modifying the interactional patterns that maintain traumatic stress and fostering positive, healing relationships among survivors and their partners. In-depth case material brings to life the process of assessment and treatment with couples coping with the impact of different kinds of trauma, including childhood abuse, serious illness, and combat experiences. The concluding chapter features valuable advice on therapist self-care.

The definitive therapist manual for Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT)—one of the most empirically supported approaches to couple therapy. Andrew Christensen, codeveloper (along with the late Neil Jacobson) of Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy, and Brian Doss provide an essential manual for their evidence-based practice. The authors offer guidance on formulation, assessment, and feedback of couples’ distress from an IBCT perspective. They also detail techniques to achieve acceptance and deliberate change. In this updated edition of the work, readers learn about innovations to the IBCT approach in the 20+ years since the publication of the original edition—including refinements of core therapeutic techniques. Additionally, this edition provides new guidance on working with diverse couples, complex clinical issues, and integrating technology into a course of treatment.

Techniques for the Couple Therapist features many of the most prominent psychotherapists today, presenting their most effective couple therapy interventions. This book provides clinicians with a user-friendly quick reference with an array of techniques that can be quickly read and immediately used in session. The book includes over 50 chapters by experts in the field on the fundamental principles and techniques for effective couple therapy. Many of the techniques focus on common couple therapy processes such as enactments, communication, and reframing. Others focus on specific presenting problems, such as trauma, sexual issues, infidelity, intimate partner violence, and high conflict. Students, beginning therapists, and seasoned clinicians will find this pragmatic resource invaluable in their work with couples.