Presents three models for implementing marriage and family counseling training: community counseling, interdisciplinary, and Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP). Identifies and discusses related conceptual and pragmatic issues. Concludes by presenting implications for counselor educators. (Author/NB)

Reviews and gives an overview of counseling techniques covering 10 topic areas related to marriage and family functioning that are used in assessment and diagnosis. Examines assessment and its relationship to diagnosis, with special reference to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual series. (JPS)

A case study of Relationship Enhancement (RE) therapy with a couple, in which the woman was identified as having vaginismus, is presented including excerpts of transcripts from the therapy sessions. RE's effectiveness at improving communication skills and providing structure in which the couple could discuss the intimate issues affecting the…

Describes the experiences of six marriage and family therapy (MFT) interns who worked with 27 families in their homes. A model of the interns' transition from clinic-based to home-based therapy is discussed and applied to working with Head Start families. The framework is expanded to conceptualizing larger systems and community-based…

Identifies and operationalizes construct of attachment injury, an injury that occurs when one partner violates the expectation that the other will offer comfort in times of danger or distress. This incident becomes a clinically recurring theme and creates an impasse that blocks relationship repair in couples therapy. (BF)

Compared a sample of spouses of workaholics and spouses of nonworkaholics on ratings of marital estrangement, positive feelings toward husband, and locus of control. Spouses of workaholics reported greater marital estrangement and less positive affect towards husbands and higher external locus of control than did spouses of nonworkaholics. (BF)

Instruments measuring Carl Jung's (1921/1971) theory of psychological types have been widely used in various counseling contexts, including career counseling, marital and family therapy, and team building. The most popular measure of types, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), was developed by Katherine C. Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs…

The purpose of this study was to investigate marriage and family therapy (MFT) trainees perceptions of divorced mothers relative to married mothers. We used a recall design in which participants recalled details from a vignette about either a divorced mother or a married mother. Participants were 74 students currently enrolled in five American…

Couples with chronically ill children are particularly at risk for experiencing marital distress. The study presented here is a 2-year follow-up of a randomized control trial that assessed the efficacy of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) in decreasing marital distress in a sample of couples with a chronically ill child. Thirteen couples with…

Marriage and Family Therapy is an increasingly popular treatment that was almost unknown 50 years ago. Family Therapy has been multidisciplinary from the beginning, drawing practitioners from social work, psychology, psychiatry, nursing, and pastoral and mental health counseling. It is often difficult to get a whole family to arrange schedules so…

This book provides a comprehensive overview of a number of popular approaches to family therapy, pointing out the similarities and differences in various approaches. It opens with a brief overview of family therapy models. The following eight chapters discuss eight separate models of therapy: (1) Communication/Validation Family Therapy; (2)…

Family therapy presents ethical dilemmas not encountered elsewhere in mental health practice. For example, who is the patient? Is it an individual, a particular dyad or the family system? If there is more than one patient, how is the therapist to maintain a posture of therapeutic neutrality? How is confidentiality to be managed? Little progress…

While it is commonly assumed that marital therapists define their tasks as preserving marriages, most traditionally trained marriage therapists espouse a more neutral role: that is, facilitating a constructive resolution to the marital problem, whether or not that resolution ends up entailing divorce. Despite this professed ideal of neutrality, it…

One of marital and family therapy's key contributions to counseling is its use of systems theory; that is, studying a phenomenon in relation to its context. This paper addresses several contexts which will influence marriage and family counseling: (1) the future of psychotherapy; (2) marriage and family counseling's projected future; and (3) the…

Because the emotional trauma associated with a mastectomy exceeds the physical trauma, the recovery of the woman is greatly affected by the response of her husband or lover. Sex therapy, therefore, involves the couple. The approach described is aimed at assisting the couple to confront and integrate the mastectomy experience. (Author)