Behavioural Couples Therapy³

Behavioural couple therapy (BCT) is based on the assumption that relationship distress and related conflict results from an unfair relationship bargain, whereby partners fail to negotiate a fair exchange of preferred responses. There is a resulting sense of injustice, which leads to conflict. The aim of BCT is therefore to help partners develop communication and problem-solving skills to negotiate a mutually perceived fair relationship.

Behavioural therapy, with cognitive and emotion-focused goals¹⁴

This therapy is primarily behavioral with integration of cognitive and emotion-focused goals. It includes guided discussions of ongoing conflicts and reviewing the couple's patterns.

Cognitive Behavioural Conjoint Therapy⁶

Cognitive-behavioral conjoint therapy is a manualized intervention for PTSD designed to simultaneously reduce PTSD and associated symptoms and enhance relationship satisfaction. Therapy includes both in-and out-of session exercises including psychoeducation, couple specific goal setting, focusing on positive experiences, enhanced dyadic communication, and attention to activities that lead to behavioral and experiential avoidance and concurrently double as shared rewarding activities for the couple. The therapist guides the couple to investigate how trauma has influenced thoughts related to trust, control, emotional closeness, and physical intimacy and to challenge any appraisals that influence individual and relationship functioning.

Cognitive Existential Couples Therapy¹⁹

Cognitive Existential Couple Therapy was adapted from Cognitive Existential Group Therapy and aims to address key existential and functional themes including the death anxiety, fear of recurrence and living with uncertainty, coping with cancer treatments and their side effects, the impact of the diagnosis and treatment on the couple’s relationship, including sexual impact, relating with medical and other professional staff, family concerns, body image and self-image concerns, and lifestyle effects and future goals.

Congruence Couples Therapy

Congruence Couples Therapy is an integrative, humanistic model developed for working with pathological gamblers and their spouses. It is based on the principle of congruence, and aims to work towards alignment of four dimensions of functioning: intrapsychic, interpersonal, intergenerational and universal-spiritual. This framework guides the intervention to increase attending, awareness, acknowledgment, and alignment with the pathological gambler and their spouse.¹⁷

Conjoint Intimacy Enhancing Therapy⁵

Conjoint Intimacy Enhancing Therapy focuses on improving couples’ ability to comfortably share their thoughts and feelings regarding cancer, promote mutual understanding and support regarding their own and one another’s cancer experience, facilitate constructive discussion of cancer concerns, and to enhance and maintain emotional intimacy. Techniques were drawn from cognitive-behavioral and behavioral marital therapy, the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program and from Gottman and colleagues’ communication skills intervention and were adapted to the context of dealing with prostate cancer.

Couple-Based Cognitive-Behavior Therapy⁹

A staged approach is followed to teach the couple how to manage the patient’s anxiety during exposure, in particular through practicing partner-assisted exposure and response prevention, including the use of emotional expressiveness techniques to enhance productive communication during exposures. The couple is guided through the development of learning strategies to facilitate decision making about reducing symptom accommodation and implementing alternative non-OCD-focused behaviors.

Couple Dialectical Behavioural Therapy⁸

Couple Dialectical Behavioural Therapy emphasizes the role of deregulated emotions in the breakdown of communication and the escalation of conflict. It focuses on creating a variety of ways to validate inherently valid things that partners express in particular by matching the form and function of communication. One of the main goals is to reduce negative patterns and develop constructive patterns of communication and interaction.

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy is based on the assumption that relationship distress and related conflict results from insecure attachment, which leads to insecurity among one or both partners that their attachment needs will not be met. The aim is therefore to help partners understand this insecurity and develop ways to modify interaction patterns and emotional responses to promote development of a secure emotional bond.^3,22

Hope and Forgiveness Focused Therapy¹⁶

Hope therapy is designed to change irrational beliefs and offer a more optimistic view of change, under the assumption that hope can ensure positive change. Hope-related therapy is a short, semi-structured form of treatment. The goals are to strengthen relationships and reduce the rate of divorce by focusing on goals, past achievements, positive and healthy coalitions through solution based and cognitive-behavioural techniques.¹⁶

Forgiveness therapy focuses on relieving feelings of resentment and anger. It focuses on several factors, including: awareness/discovery and unveiling of anger; decision and commitment to forgiveness, acting and compensation, and discovery and relief from emotions. It targets the cause of conflict and aims to ameliorate accumulated anger that might otherwise cause severe problems between spouses.

Problem focused therapy¹⁴

This therapy has a problem-focused orientation with a central emphasis on focused communication training around the identified problem. Communication training can play a central role, incorporated with guided discussions of ongoing conflicts and reviewing the couple's patterns.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy²⁰

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is an insight oriented form of couples therapy, designed to help couples explore how difficulties have arisen in their relationship and what interferes with changing them. It promotes looking at what lies behind current difficulties and paying attention both to conscious and unconscious factors.

Psychotherapy²¹

Psychotherapy included both group and individual couples therapy. Group couples therapy was eclectic, incorporating elements from behavioral therapy, system therapy, dynamic approaches, and nonverbal disciplines including psychomotor therapy, art and activity therapy.

Traditional Behavioural Couples Therapy¹⁰

Traditional Behavioural Couples Therapy follows a staged approach to form new rules and boundaries in terms of the relationship, promote the practice of individual emotion regulation skills, teach couples to use appropriate emotional expressiveness skills for both speaker and listener, and inform couples about anxiety and depressive symptoms.