Couples Connecting: Prerequisites of Intimacy

Help clients grow into loving commitment!Making and keeping commitments is more difficult today than ever. About half of all marriages end in divorce, and serial monogamy is not uncommon. Couples Connecting: Prerequisites of Intimacy identifies the cultural and personal attitudes that impede commitment and impair intimacy, and it gives you the therapeutic tools to work with clients who don't know how to build a lasting love.Couples Connecting examines why past theories of self-actualization are now failing. Because our culture emphasizes individualistic values, people do not learn how to create and share bonds with others. Therapists must become developmental partners for clients who need to overcome failures of maturation in order to have successful, loving relationships with their partner. This essential guide offers you practical techniques and case studies, as well the theoretical underpinnings to deal with this crisis of intimacy. Couples Connecting provides specific, insightful studies on overcoming obstacles to genuine commitment, including:

• identifying patterns of anger in distressed and nondistressed couples
• ways to help engaged couples overcome the fear of following negative family patterns
• using family systems theory and psychodynamics to understand developmental issues in marriage
• suggestions for clinical practice with couples who fear intimacy
• implications of ten essential factors in intimacyCouples Connecting will help you design and use techniques to promote personal growth and bridge gaps between clients to help couples achieve satisfying and intimate relationships.

Barbara Jo Brothers, MSW, BCD, a Diplomate in Clinical Social Work, National Association of Social Workers, is in private practice in New Orleans. She received her BA from the University of Texas and her MSW from Tulane University, where she is currently on the faculty. She was Editor of The Newsletter of the American Academy of Psychotherapists from 1976 to 1985, and was Associate Editor of Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy from 1979 to 1989. She has 30 years of experience, in both the public and private sectors, helping people to form skills that will enable them to connect emotionally. The author of numerous articles and book chapters on authenticity in human relating, she has advocated healthy, congruent communication that builds intimacy as opposed to destructive, incongruent communication which blocks intimacy. In addition to her many years of direct work with couples and families, Ms. Brothers has led numerous workshops on teaching communication in families and has also played an integral role in the development of training programs in family therapy for mental health workers throughout the Louisiana state mental health system. She is a board member of the Institute for International Connections, a non-profit organization for cross-cultural professional development focused on training and cross-cultural exchange with psychotherapists in Russia, republics once part of what used to be the Soviet Union, and other Eastern European countries.