Family Therapy for Couples

■ Behavioral couples therapy has been the most researched.
o Attempts to reduce substance abuse directly and through restructuring the dysfunctional couple interactions that frequently help sustain it

■ Integrative Couples therapy addresses some of the limitations of behavioral couples therapy.
o Helps couples to make arguments less harmful by teaching partners accept their differences.
o Therapy based on the importance of how a couple fights, not whether they fight or not.

■ Insight Oriented couples therapy and emotionally focused couples therapy have also been subjected to clinical trail investigations and found to be superior to no treatment.
o Is a combination of behavioral therapy and helping couples understand power struggles, defense mechanisms, and other negative behaviors.

■ Emotionally focused couples therapy maintains that relationship difficulties stem from the disowning of feelings and attachment needs, creating negative Interactional cycles and ineffective communication patterns.
o It has shown greater efficacy than no-treatment await-list controls.
o Enables couples to identify and break free of their destructive emotional cycles such as when one person criticizes and the other withdraws.
o The therapy helps couples build trust in each other.

■ Evidence for the use of Strategic therapy techniques in the context of couples therapy found an integrated systemic therapy model was equally effective as emotionally focused couples therapy and more effective than await-list control in alleviating relationship distress and improving target complaints and conflict resolutions.


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