Treating Difficult Couples

This essential handbook describes effective treatments for a particularly challenging clinical population: couples struggling with both relationship distress and individual mental health difficulties. Distinguished scientist-practitioners provide detailed accounts of their respective approaches, reviewing conceptual and empirical foundations as well as clinical procedures. Included are well-established treatments for couples in which one or both partners has anxiety, mood disorders, schizophrenia, substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, or physical aggression. Also covered are emerging couple-based approaches to managing personality disorders, PTSD, difficulties related to aging and physical illness, and other problems. Following a standard format to facilitate comparison across treatments, each chapter is illustrated with detailed case material. Provided are powerful insights and tools for couple and family therapists, clinicians providing individual therapy, and students in any mental health discipline.

Keeping Couples in Treatment provides the theory and practice tools for the beginning to seasoned individual or couple therapist striving to keep couples in couple treatment and needing an in-depth method of assessment and treatment to accomplish the task.

A Volume in the Jossey-Bass Library of Current Clinical Technique Therapists who want to work skillfully with couples are often confronted with a confusing array of theories, techniques, and myths. Treating Couples creatively addresses many of these challenging issues while shining a light to help therapists navigate through this confusing maze. --Ellyn Bader, Ph.D., co-director, The Couples Institute, Menlo Park, California Treating Couples weeds through the treatment trAnds?and presents a rational framework for assessing which methods will most effectively meet clients' needs and expectations. This is an accessible guide for the wide range of professionals who practice couples therapy. Treating Couples promotes the clinical functions of evaluation, assessment, judgment, and hypothesis-formation and testing and will serve as an invaluable resource for determining which approaches are the most ethical, flexible, and creative for the effective treatment of couples.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This third edition of Couples in Treatment helps readers conceptualize and treat couples from multiple perspectives and with a multitude of techniques. The authors do not advocate any single approach to couple therapy and instead present basic principles and techniques with wide-ranging applicability and the power to invite change, making this the most useful text on integrative, systemic couple therapy. Throughout the book the authors consider the individual, interactional, and intergenerational systems of any case. Gerald Weeks’ Intersystems Model, a comprehensive, integrative, and contextual meta framework, can be superimposed over existing therapy approaches. It emphasizes principles of therapy and can facilitate assessing, conceptualizing couples’ problems, and providing helpful interventions. Couple therapists are encouraged to utilize the principles in this book to enhance their therapeutic process and fit their approach to the client, rather than forcing the client to fit their theory.

First published in 1996. This books presents a problem-solving model of marriage and couples therapy called the Intersystem Model, which assesses and treats couples' problems from individual, interactional, and intergenerational perspectives. The authors address problems of commitment, intimacy, anger, and conflict, and the complexities relating to the treatment of depression: addictions and extramarital sexuality, marital adjustments to aging, and problems of inhibited sexual desire. They suggest techniques therapists can use to resolve problems that may occur in couples therapy and ways couple can move toward a higher level of functioning and personal growth.

Keeping Couples in Treatment provides the theory and practice tools for the beginning to seasoned individual or couple therapist striving to keep couples in couple treatment and needing an in-depth method of assessment and treatment to accomplish the task.

Close relationships and mental health are two key ingredients to living a meaningful, fulfilled life. These two domains are the central focus of Treating Relationship Distress and Psychopathology in Couples: A Cognitive-Behavioural Approach. As expert clinicians, trainers, and researchers in the field of cognitive-behavioural couple therapy and couple-based interventions for psychopathology, the authors offer a highly accessible volume for experienced clinicians and trainees alike. This book details the most recent innovations in CBCT, a principle-based, flexible treatment approach for couples with a wide range of relationship concerns, circumstances, and stages of life. Based on a clear conceptual framework, readers learn how to address individual and couple functioning in an integrated, comprehensive manner and how to apply principle-based interventions that directly flow from this framework. Treating Relationship Distress and Psychopathology in Couples was written by a team of five authors, born in four different countries and working together as a team for a number of years, providing a cohesive framework based on work in a variety of contexts. While staying close to research findings that inform treatment, they provide a text for clinicians at all levels of training and experience in working with couples.