Main description:

Grounded in theory, research, and extensive clinical experience, this pragmatic book addresses critical questions of how change occurs in couple and family therapy and how to help clients achieve better results. The authors show that regardless of a clinician's orientation or favored techniques, there are particular therapist attributes, relationship variables, and other factors that make therapy-specifically, therapy with couples and families-effective. The book explains these common factors in depth and provides hands-on guidance for capitalizing on them in clinical practice and training. User-friendly features include numerous case examples and a reproducible common factors checklist.

Contents:

1. What Is Responsible for Therapeutic Change?: Two Paradigms

2. A Brief History of Common Factors

3. Common Factors Unique to Couple and Family Therapy

4. The Big-Picture View of Common Factors

5. A Moderate View of Common Factors

6. Getting Clients Fired Up for a Change: Matching Therapist Behavior with Client Motivation

7. A Strong Therapeutic Alliance

8. Models: All Roads Lead to Rome

9. A Meta-Model of Change in Couple Therapy

10. The Case against Common Factors

11. Common-Factors Training and Supervision

12. Implications for Clinicians and Researchers

Appendix A: Moderate Common-Factors Supervision Checklist

Appendix B: Instruments from Other Authors Related to Common Factors