Treating Marital Stress Support-Based Approaches

• Acknowledgments
• The Importance of Support
• Chapter 1. The Role of Support in Marriage
• The Overwhelmed Spouse of Contemporary Marriage
• The Literature on Social Support
• The Five Patterns of Marital Distress
• Specific Support-Focused Marital Therapy Interventions
• The Treatment Manual
• Chapter 2. Session One: Using Empathy and Probes to Understand the Perspective of Each Partner
• The Therapist's Goals
• What Are Your Concerns? Working Empathically with One Spouse and Then the Other
• What Do You Want to Achieve? Establishing a Preliminary Therapeutic Alliance with Regard to Goals
• Describing How You Will Work Together: Establishing the Therapeutic Alliance with Regard to Tasks
• Closing the First Session by Handling Administrative Matters
• Chapter 3. Session Two: Processing Interactions and Presenting Patterns
• The Therapist's Goals
• “Processing” Conflicts and Interactions
• Processing Mary and Pete's Conflict
• Presenting Mary and Pete's Pattern
• The Therapist As Relationship Instructor
• Preparing the Couple for Individual Sessions
• Chapter 4. Sessions Three, Four, and Five: Deepening the Therapist's Understanding Through Individual Sessions and Reorientation
• The Therapist's Goals
• Increasing the Emotional Connection
• Obtaining the Marital History
• Obtaining the Developmental History
• Session Five: Reorienting the Couple After the Individual Sessions
• Chapter 5. Working to Increase Support in Subsequent Sessions
• Assigning Tasks and Helping Spouses Get What They Want
• Understanding and Reframing the Inner Emotional Obstacles to Carrying Out Assignments
• Reframing the Obstacles to Providing Support
• Following Up on Previous Homework Assignments
• Identifying the Dismissive Attitude Pattern
• Identifying the Unilateral Attempt to Prevail Pattern: “Winning the Battle but Losing the War”
• Using Support Lists to Structure the Therapy Around the Issue of Support
• Keeping the Support Issue on the Table and Monitoring Progress
• Chapter 6. Dealing with Triangulation Patterns in Subsequent Sessions
• The Parenting Triangle
• Working As a Team and Problem Solving
• The Work or Hobby Triangle
• Chapter 7. Dealing with Anger Management, Derogation, and Negative Escalation in Subsequent Sessions
• Calming the Angry System: The Therapist As Gatekeeper
• Teaching the Couple to Avoid Negative Escalation
• Framing the Issue As Anger Management
• Framing Inappropriate Anger Management As a Function of Marital Deterioration
• Dealing with the Emotional Obstacles to Anger Management and the Inhibition of Criticism
• Chapter 8. Dealing with Communication Avoidance in Subsequent Sessions
• What Is Direct Communication?
• Indirect Communication and Conflict Avoidance
• Describing the Communication Avoidance Pattern
• Dealing with Obstacles to Direct Communication
• Chapter 9. Encouraging Companionship, Affection, and Sexual Intimacy in Subsequent Sessions
• Using the Here and Now to Enact Affectionate Behavior
• Encouraging Companionship
• Encouraging Nonsexual Touching and Sexual Intimacy
• Chapter 10. Accepting Partner Differences and Limitations
• Differences As an Irritant
• Learning to Accept Differences and Limitations
• Accepting Gender Differences
• A Case History
• Chapter 11. The Marriage of Sam and Diane
• Introduction
• Sessions One Through Eighteen
• Subsequent Sessions
• The Outcome Research
• Chapter 12. Assessing the Effectiveness of Support-Focused Marital Therapy
• Study One: The Support-Focused Marital Therapy Waitlist-Control Comparison
• Study Two: Correlations Among Support, Anger, Marital Satisfaction, and Change in Marital Satisfaction
• Afterword
• References
• Index

Biography

Robert P. Rugel