Jealousy is a powerful emotional force in couples' relationships. In just seconds it can turn love into rage and tenderness into acts of control, intimidation, and even suicide or murder. Yet it has been surprisingly neglected in the couples therapy field. In this paper we define jealousy broadly as a hub of contradictory feelings, thoughts, beliefs, actions, and reactions, and consider how it ...

Clinicians' own internal resources for understanding relationships--that is, their attachment organizations--have been found to influence the process and outcome of treatment. The current study addressed whether the attachment organizations of novice couple and family therapists were associated with couples' experiences of their therapists, therapeutic alliance, session impact, and emotionally ...

Using data from a previous investigation, the purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of Behavioral Couples Therapy (BCT) on the prevalence of partner violence among married or cohabiting substance-abusing men (N = 80). Participants were randomly assigned to receive either BCT or individual-based treatment (IBT). The proportion of couples who engaged in male-to-female physical ag...

This study investigated demographic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal predictors of treatment response in a randomized clinical trial of 134 distressed married couples, which examined traditional (N. S. Jacobson & G. Margolin, 1979) and integrative (N. S. Jacobson & A. Christensen, 1996) behavioral couple therapy. Results based on hierarchical linear modeling revealed that interpersonal variabl...

There has been little effort by behavior therapists to develop couple interventions that view marriage from a content-relevant or developmental perspective. Consequently, we have delineated ways in which a perspective of intimate relationships including individual factors and dyadic development might guide the enhancement of traditional behavioral couples therapy (TBCT) with novel and improved ...

Fals-Stewart, Birchler, and O'Farrell (1996) found that married or cohabiting substance-abusing men (n = 40) who participated in behavioral couples therapy (BCT) in addition to individual-based treatment (IBT) for substance abuse had fewer days of substance use and, along with their partners, reported higher levels of dyadic adjustment during and 1-year after treatment than husbands who receive...

Emotional arousal during relationship conflict is a major target for intervention in couple therapies. The current study examines changes in conflict-related emotional arousal in 104 couples that participated in a randomized clinical trial of two behaviorally-based couple therapies. Emotional arousal is measured using mean fundamental frequency of spouse's speech, and changes in emotional arous...

Although the failure to develop a satisfying intimate relationship with one’s partner is the single most frequently presented problem in therapy (Horowitz, 1979), couples therapy, the modality that most directly addresses this problem, is a relatively young discipline. In this discipline, systematic approaches to changing distressed relationships are still being developed and evaluated. At pres...

Couples in distressed relationships often get caught up in power struggles, "Power Over" interactions that are informed by both neurobiology (e.g., the fight-flight reaction) and by cultural assumptions (e.g., competition, individualism, and patriarchy). This article seeks to widen the discourse about power by highlighting "Power To" and "Power With." Power To includes the ability to self-regul...