Acting with genuine care and concern, pastors can be effective in helping married couples resolve difficulties and discover reconciliation, joy, and love. The question often is, “How do I do it?” In Pastor, Our Marriage Is in Trouble, Charles L. Rassieur, an experienced counselor, outlines a step-by-step approach that takes the pastor from beginning to end in a process of short-term intervention and counseling. A helpful tool in the process is the Pastoral Marriage Counseling Questionnaire, which can be used in gathering essential information about both spouses and their relationships. In addition, you’ll find important information about: a rationale for the need and opportunity for pastoral intervention in troubled marriages how the marriage counseling process begins with the initial pastoral contact with one or both spouses help for the pastor in preparing for individual counseling sessions with each spouse important topics for marriage counseling regardless of which approach or model is used the last two sessions of counseling: deciding whether to end counseling, to refer the couple to other professional resources, or to contract with the couple for further counseling sessions

A step-by-step approach to making your marriage loving again.

Brief therapies have become popular-indeed a necessity-in today's managed care environment. Perhaps because it is one of the more complex psychoanalytical models, object relations theory for couples has not been adapted to a short-term model until now. In this volume, James Donovan provides a model for short-term object relations couples therapy, while at the same time offering an easy-to-read primer on object relations that gives the practitioner a step-by-step model replete with examples for using object relations in practice. The goal of this short-term therapy is that couples emerge with an awareness of these internalized object relations and their significance. This book builds on previously successful couples work by advising the therapist to focus on the core, recurring impasse that threatens the couples relationship and stirs old wounds, and gives detailed intervention strategies that focus on the mediation and resolution of the core fight. The five-step model outlines the ways to dismantle the conflict at the levels of the individual and the couple. Donovan integrates aspects of other successful couples therapies into his model in order to broaden its applicability to a greater diversity of treatment situations.

Written in a way that allows the reader to "sit-in" on counselling sessions, this book relates, on a case-by-case basis, a range of marital crises as they are unfolded, discussed and (with some exceptions) resolved.

I know of no better guide for couples who genuinely desire a maturing relationship.M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled A remarkable bookthe most incisive and persuasive I have ever read on the knotty problems of marriage relationships. Ann Roberts, former president, Rockefeller Family Fund