1st Edition

When One Wants Out And The Other Doesn't Doing Therapy With Polarized Couples

Edited By John F. Crosby Copyright 1989
    284 Pages
    by Routledge

    284 Pages
    by Routledge

    For anyone who practices marriage and family therapy the author says they have one kind of client population that seems to be a modal or predominating type. For three decades he has experienced more marital situations where one of the couple wants “out” of the marriage and the other wants to “stay in” than any other type. The idea for this collection of first-person therapy methodologies developed after two successive national meetings of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), in New York (1985) and Orlando (1986). The cases that were discussed were characterized by the presence of alcoholism, and drug and other addictions, rather than  presentations that dealt with a polarized couple wherein the marriage had simply become a devitalized, ho-hum relationship.  This volume seeks to address the balance.

    1. Polarized Couples: Behind the Façade 2. "I Do and I Don’t": Treating Systemic Ambivalence 3. The Art of Depolarization 4. The Assessment and Treatment of Polarizing Couples 5. What’s the Rush?—A Negotiated Slowdown 6. Early Fit and Faulty Fit: Object Relations in Marital Therapy 7. Power and Presence: When Complementarity Becomes Polarity 8. Therapeutic Deadlock in Impending Divorce Situations 9. The Divorce Dance: Doing Therapy with Polarized Couples 10. Marital Therapy with Polarized Couples 11. When One Wants Out and the Other Doesn’t: Assessment and Treatment 12. I Don’t Love You Anymore (or At Least I Don’t Think I Do)

    Biography

    John F. Crosby, Ph.D. The University of Kentucky