Couples of Mixed HIV Status: Clinical Issues and Interventions

Examine the unique emotional challenges and issues that face couples of mixed HIV status today!

Previous books on this subjectmostly written in the days when HIV/AIDS was considered a fatal rather than a chronic diseasefocused on end-of-life issues. However, Couples of Mixed HIV Status: Clinical Issues and Interventions addresses the unique emotional challenges facing today’s couples of mixed HIV status and provides a conceptual framework for assessment and intervention. The book offers examples of how to apply emotionally focused couple therapy to help them work through issues including disclosure, the fear of HIV transmission, shifts in emotional intimacy, family planning, betrayal, mistrust, and uncertainty. This unique work, its knowledge base, and the interventions you'll find inside, are applicable to any practitioner who provides couple and family therapyas well as any practitioner who counsels around issues of chronic illness.

Couples of Mixed HIV Status provides therapists with a range of theoretical approaches to help mixed HIV status couples deal with their issues and concerns. It includes applications of couple therapy approaches that have proved to be particularly effective as well as case studies that demonstrate how different relationship variables may affect therapy. The book presents the findings of a research study involving 44 mixed HIV status couples in the Northeast and is generously illustrated with tables that make complex research results easy to access and understand.

Topics covered in Couples of Mixed HIV Status include:

• various approaches to couples therapy
  
• the historical context of HIV/AIDS
  
• HIV transmission
  
• family planning and HIV/AIDS
  
• emotionally focused couple therapy
  
• disclosure issues
  
• attachment theory
  
• and much more!

Couples of Mixed HIV Status: Clinical Issues and Interventions is a valuable resource for therapists and other mental health counselors working with today’s couples of mixed HIV status as well as for students of counseling and health related services. Readers who may be in a mixed HIV status relationship or those who are friends and family members of couples living with HIV will also find this book helpful.

R Dennis Shelby