The Marriage Clinic presents a complete marital therapy program based on John Gottman's much heralded research on marital success and failure. Here one will find not only a wide range of succinct and useful assessment procedures, but also a highly specific, research-based, and modularized treatment program. In addition, there are dozens of questionnaires and interview protocols to be used in both assessment and intervention. In prospective, long-term research with over 700 couples, Gottman has discovered certain factors that distinguish happy, stable couples from both unstable, ultimately divorcing couples and stable but unhappy couples. These findings, which are explained here in understandable, nontechnical language, form the basis of his Sound Marital House theory of marriage, which guides the new therapy. This therapy has two goals: changing the marital friendship and teaching couples to regulate conflict. Despite the high aims of much marital therapy, Gottman found that most marital conflicts involve fundamentally unresolvable relationship issues called "perpetual problems." He shows how therapists can help spouses move from gridlock to dialogue on these issues. Solvable problems can be resolved more easily when the couple has a strong marital friendship. He gives therapists the tools to teach spouses five fundamental skills to develop and strengthen their friendship: softened start-up, accepting influence, repair and de-escalation, compromise, and physiological soothing. Gottman compares his clinic to a restaurant, where clients are offered a menu of treatment formats, from psychoeducation for specific issues to extended therapy to repair a badly damaged marital friendship. Therapists, too, can choose among the questionnaires and strategies for those that fit the needs of particular couples. Whatever their choice, they will find that their practice is greatly enriched by the scientifically-based offerings of The Marriage Clinic. --- from the publisher Reviews: "If you want to read a book that will improve your track record when working with cuples, then John Gottman's The Marriage Clinic should be at the top of your reading list….This book should be a well-used addition to any therapist's library. If it isn't a classic already, it will be very soon. As somone who has been working with couples for nearly 30 years, I have found Gottman's work to be refreshing, invigorating, and renewing." —Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Jay Memmott [A]n important addition to the field of couple therapy… the first time that a couple therapy is developed from marital research." —International Academy for Marital Spirituality (INTAMS) Review, Alfons Vansteenwegen "There is an astonishing wealth of assessment tools…[T]horough and insightful." —Milton H. Erickson Foundation Newsletter Contents: Part I: Research and Theory * Myths and Mistakes of Marital Therapy
* Repair and the Core Triad of Balance
* The Sound Marital House: A Theory of Marriage Part II: Assessment * The assessment of Marriage
* The Disasters and Masters of Marriage Part III: Intervention * Assumptions and Intervention Overview
* Enhancing the Marital Friendship
* Solving What Is Solvable
* Living with the Inevitable
* Life Dreams and Shared Meanings
* Avoiding Relapse
* Resistance to Change
* Putting It All Together: Working as a Team and Terminating Therapy
* Emotion and Meta-emotion
* Buffering Children from Marital Conflict Appendices * The Basic Questionnaire
* The Sound Marital House Questionnaires
* The Basic Interviews
* Intervention Tools
* Products Available from the Gottman Marriage Clinic About the Author: John M. Gottman, Ph.D., is William Mifflin Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of over two dozen books, including Seven Principles to Making Marriage Work, The Heart of Parenting (with J. DeClaire), When Men Batter Women (with Neil Jacobson), and Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. | 
