Book Description

"How You and Your Partner Can Become A Super Couple: Vol. 1 Functioning." is a self-help book for couples and marriages. It covers five areas of couple/marriage interpersonal interactions: (1) communication, (2) negotiation, and expressing (3) anger, (4) sexual and (5) loving feelings. There is didactic material on each of the five topics and then there are experiential activities or exercises for couples to do, in order to improve their relationship. The Introduction describes the "blame game", which is an obstacle to improving couple relationships. On the other hand, if couples can stop blaming each other and get to work on their relationship, they may improve it in these areas. This book has step-by-step instructions for doing activities in the five areas. There are specific instructions for doing about ten activities or exercises in each of the five areas. They are derived from my doing these activities with couples in my practice of couple/marriage therapy in the past fifty years. The instructions have been tested and refined in my couple workshops and in my practice of couple/marriage therapy. What I learned, for the most part, was what these couples taught me. Of course, I read books, took workshops, and had supervision of my work. The interplay of being in a couple relationship, going to my own personal couple therapy, doing couple therapy with other couples, and then thinking and reading about couple relationships and couple therapy helped me refine my own understanding of couples--impressing me with what worked to deepen the intimacy of couples and what did not work. This book is an end result. My formulations of guidelines for couples were further tested and refined when I trained graduate students for thirty years in the Marriage and Family Therapy Training Program of the Blanton-Peale Graduate Institute (Institute of Religion and Health) in New York, NY. I not only had to articulate my theories and techniques for the students, but also had the opportunity to see how the application of them by the student-therapists helped their couples or did not help. Thus, I've worked directly with hundreds of couples and marriages and indirectly through my supervision of students with thousands of couples and marriages. Two Partners Can Become a Super Couple A super couple has an intimate coupling, which is a close, personal, emotional, sexual relationship between two specific adults. They have a live, healthy, growing relationship. It is an emotionally, mentally, and physically challenging relationship, in which the two partners feel satisfied and fulfilled. They feel maintained and sustained by each other and their relationship. Each gives to the relationship and each receives from it. A super couple has skills in five areas: o They talk with each other about their thoughts, opinions and beliefs. They communicate well, even if they disagree. o They negotiate decision to do something, and move toward win/win solutions in which one partner convinces the other to change his or her mind, o Their sex life is satisfying and fulfilling for both of them. Sex as well as friendship and companionship are ingredients of an intimate relationship. o They face the inevitable frustrations by expressing anger constructively so that they do not "fight dirty," are not mean to each other, and do not turn their partner into an enemy. o They add icing to the cake by expressing their loving feelings explicitly. This Book Guides Couples in Becoming a Super Couple This book is a comprehensive and systematic do-it-yourself training manual, or guide, for partners. As they go on a journey together, I invite them to take ten weeks to read this book and do the exercises. They can choose to continue as they have been in the past or to make changes. If they decide to make changes, they might think of me as their tour guide. I will suggest some new ways for them to be together; I will direct their atte