Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
Categories
Psychology

LAST CHANCE COUPLE THERAPY

Peter Fraenkel

Bringing Relationships Back From the Brink

This title offers strategies and skills for therapists working with couples about to dissolve.

Therapy with couples on the brink of relationship dissolution involves unique challenges. Partners present with high levels of conflict, low levels of intimate connection, disdain and discouragement, and limited patience or hope. These couples have often tried therapy without lasting success and announce that "this is our last chance." Partners want to see evidence in the first session that the therapist can offer something new and that change is possible. Peter Fraenkel presents a practical, creative, integrative approach that combines action- and insight-oriented techniques to help last-chance couples manage conflict, modulate intense negative emotions, address power struggles, develop mutual compassion, and restore emotional intimacy and pleasurable connection. Special attention is paid to developing a collaborative therapeutic alliance when partners have little motivation for therapy or faith that it can be effective. Through engaging in "nonbinding experiments in possibility," partners can then better evaluate whether to "stay or go. Peter Fraenkel Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology at City College of New York; former faculty at the Ackerman Institute for the Family and NYU Medical Center; and is in private practice in New York City. He is the author of Sync Your Relationship, Save Your Marriage: Four Steps to Getting Back on Track (2011, Palgrave-Macmillan), and co-authored The Relational Trauma of Incest: A Family-Based Approach to Treatment (2001, Guilford). Dr. Fraenkel lectures and conducts therapist trainings internationally. He received the American Family Therapy Academy's 2012 award for Innovative Contribution to Family Therapy. He is a former Vice President and current Board Member of AFTA, Board Member, Minuchin Center for the Family, and a reviewer for several family therapy journals. He lives in New York City.

Available products
Book Published 2023-01-10 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

Peter Fraenkel's brilliant new book focuses on a crucial, special group of clients in couple therapy, those for whom the therapy really is the last chance. Anchored in his therapeutic palette approach that draws from a wide range of therapies, Fraenkel offers a keen understanding of these couples as well as the complex integrative therapy that can help them resolve this life crisis. Filled with poignant clinical vignettes and workable guidance for practice and drawing from Fraenkel's highly innovative toolkit for intervention that includes music and art, this clearly is the definitive book on this subject and the book that couple therapists should read this year

With great mastery, Peter Fraenkel pulls back the curtain to reveal the inner workings of his three-decade-long practice with the most precarious couples. Last Chance Couple Therapy is a curious and illuminating read for therapists, coaches, and clinicians.

This remarkable book, based on more than three decades of clinical work and richly illustrated with many detailed case vignettes, is a must-read for any couple therapist - and not only for those working with seemingly hopeless couples presenting with a long history of failed therapies. Fraenkel's 'open-hearted surgery' approach demonstrates convincingly that by continuously generating a vast range of different creative contexts, even the most entrenched couples get a chance to change their interactions and improve their lives. Amazing!