Real-world couple counseling and therapy: an introductory guide provides practitioners with an inclusive exploration of the unique features, challenges, and opportunities of contemporary couple counseling. Integrating CB, existential, and systems approaches, and based on best available research, the text offers guidelines for beginning couple therapists along with breadth and depth of coverage. Comprehensive and pragmatic, it examines the essence of the field: assessment, ethics, treatment planning, effective interventions, pitfalls, and best practices. Rich with lively examples, vignettes, and dialogues throughout, several unique features are synthesized throughout the text: a perspective from almost a century of experience doing and teaching graduate-level couple therapy, a unique connection between stages of development and appropriate interventions, and integrated exploration of the effects of culture and gender, a unique focus on male clients in couple work, and the "point-counterpoint" perspectives of CBT and existential approaches. Real-world couple counseling and therapy contains essential information for 21st century practitioners and is ideal for graduate courses and practitioners in counseling, therapy, and social work."--Back cover