Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy

This path-breaking volume introduces Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy for clinical work with troubled couples. Practice-focused and engaging, it integrates real-world knowledge of the intersections of gender, culture, power, and identity in relationships with empirical findings on the neurobiology of attraction. Case examples detail the process of therapists in the moment as they develop both their clinical skills and their understanding of the social contexts fueling couples' difficulties. Applications of the method, which can be used with same-sex couples as well as heterosexual ones, are shown in addressing infidelity, tapping into partners' spirituality, and modeling and encouraging mutual respect and support.

Among the topics covered:

• Undoing gendered power in heterosexual couple relationships.
• Interpersonal neurobiology, couples, and the societal context.
• How gender discourses hijack couple therapy-and how it can be avoided.
• How SERT therapists develop interventions that address the larger context.
• Building a circle of care in same-sex couple relationships.
• Couple therapy with adult survivors of child abuse: gender, power, and trust.

Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy opens out practical new possibilities for marriage and family therapists, clinical psychologists, social workers, and counselors seeking ideas for more meaningful couples work.

Carmen Knudson-Martin, PhD, LMFT, is internationally recognized for her work regarding gender, marital equality, and relational health. She is a founder of Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy, an approach that attends to the micro-processes through which couple interaction, emotion, and socio-cultural context come together in the moment by moment of clinical process. Her book, Couples, Gender, and Power: Creating Change in Intimate Relationships, weaves a link between research and practice as she makes the influence of the larger social context in couple relationships come alive and offers a step by step template to guide clinical work, with an emphasis on the political and ethical implications of therapist actions. She and her research team have published over 50 articles articulating the importance of the larger social context on issues such as marital equality, relational development, postpartum depression, women's health, and couple therapy. Carmen is a Professor and Director of the Marriage, Couple, and Family Therapy program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She serves on the Board of directors of the Family Process Institute and the American Family Therapy Academy is series editor of the SpringerBriefs in Family Therapy.