Couples Counseling: Innovative Approaches That Really Work

Marty Klein, PhD

Couples therapy consists of dozens of clinical decisions every hour—hundreds of decisions over the course of each case. Here’s a practical program that will build the skills you need to make these decisions, and to continue fine-tuning your work as you discover each couple’s unique clinical challenges.

Most couples enter therapy with a specific vision of their problems. They may describe themselves as having “anger problems,” “sexual incompatibility” or “trust issues”. A skillful therapist will explore how the clients’ framing of their situation is keeping them stuck–and how they might change that. While looking at the most common topics in couples therapy, Dr. Klein will show you how to identify the powerful client narratives that keep couples stuck in their dysfunctional patterns.

Couples typically want to talk about content—who’s doing or saying the wrong thing regarding money, parenting, sex, or whatever. In contrast, the most effective therapy addresses couples’ processes—and when couples learn that perspective and face who they are, they can frequently address their content problems themselves. That’s effective therapy. 

In this intermediate-level certificate program you’ll learn how to teach couples the skills they need in order to grow and change—and help them overcome their resistance to that very growing and changing. The program consists of 2 parts. 

About the Author: Dr. Marty Klein has been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist for 44 years. He is the award-winning author of seven books about sexuality and relationships.

Every year Marty appears in various national media, such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Daily Show. His Psychology Today blog gets 30,000 views per month, and is widely quoted.