Coming close | The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically-Based Marital Therapy (Norton Professional Books) |...

Evidence-based Marital Therapy | The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically-Based Marital Therapy (Norton Professional Books) | John Mordechai Gottman

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	• The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically-Based Marital Therapy (Norton Professional Books) John Mordechai Gottman W. W. Norton & Company, 1999 - 456 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Exceptional!

At last there is an answer to the question I've been asking since beginning my studies in psychology--"Isn't there anything ELSE?" There are many schools of thought that reign in fiefdoms of psychology, including systems theory, behaviorism, Imago, and psychodynamic to name a few. Each is dogmatic, and when tested across research studies, all can benefit patients (despite zealous claims to the contrary by the priesthoods in each camp). However, until I read The Marriage Clinic, I was not aware that our field has shown such poor results in the area of marital therapy. While individual psychotherapy tends to work, Gottman sites research to show that marital therapy does not create lasting change. This is serious.

Our current state of the art in marital and family therapy tends include unsatisfying, unnatural, and even ridiculous, techniques for clinicians to use with people facing the problem of how to improve their marriage. Thank goodness for people like Gottman, who actually collect data to inform decisions, and use common sense and humanity to understand and apply those findings. I see Gottman as our field's greatest living visionary, whose research and relationship building techniques will hopefully spread to parent-child relationships and IO psychology as well.

As to this book specifically, don't get it unless you are a clinician. If you are looking to help your own marriage, I suggest The Seven Principals of Making Marriage Work, which is very user friendly. The Marriage Clinic is quite technical in parts, and can be dense, however it is a very fun read. Gottman's personality and humor come through loud and clear. I found myself laughing out loud at times. I confess I enjoy how he exposes the senselessness of so much of the techniques we currently utilize, and backs it up with meticulous research. This book begins with a solid lit review, a discussion of Gottman's basic ideology and rationale, and then goes into the nuts and bolts of how to apply his ideas.

Even if you are not a marital therapist, it will change the way you look at relationships. He teaches a new vocabulary for describing what you are observing in relationships that I find exceptionally helpful. I would recommend this to anyone conducting psychotherapy, as it will improve your ability to make inferences about your patient's relationships. I also enjoyed the case vignettes very much. If you like Gottman, I highly recommend his books on parenting as well.

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Coming close

Gottman has years of experience and his experience shouldn't be taken lightly. But to trust human relationships to modernism is a slippery slope that is leading society to reject tradition and endorse individualism. Gottman's book is an excellent collection of experience, but no one should consider it a 'bible' of marital interventions.

Evidence-based Marital Therapy

If I were to recommend only one book on marital therapy, this would be it. Gottman appears better grounded in research than any other marital therapist with whom I'm familiar. He does a great job of showing what actually works in long-lasting marriages and politely debunks a lot of the popular ideas about how to make marriages work. As just one example, he illustrates how unessential "I messages" are. The book also contains a lot of assessment tools and exercises that will be useful to therapists and couples.

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Recommended reading for all relationships

Dr Gottman is a noted researcher in the field of interpersonal relationships. You can read the summary for the book in the description. I was never one of those readers who thinks Sister Mary Amazon will give me a gold star on my report if I bore you with 500 lines of basically repeating the publisher's summary.

The book is purportedly about marriage. I can tell you as an unmarried person that this information can apply to all relationships. I use many of the principles described in the book in my day to day relationships with friends, merchants, coworkers and other people I don't have a joint checking account with.

Its recommended reading between relationships. You can learn why things went south, for example. It also is a good metric for gauging new people. If they behave in a way that looks like you are going to be heading towards a troubled relationship, you can either bail or try to guide things in the right way.

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Gottman's "The Marriage Clinic"

Excellent book on the importance of marriage and how to strengthen marriage. However, it is written more towards therapists, but if you are interested in how to strengthen marriage, this is an excellent resource

A complete marital therapy program based on the author's much heralded research on marital success and failure. Research on why some couples divorce and others experience sustained bliss has led to a theory, including the fact that successful couples have an abundance of good feelings toward one another and are able to deal with inevitable conflicts without becoming hostile. This book offers a theoretically based systematic approach to assessing and treating dysfunctional marriages. It is packed with specific interventions and exercises.

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