Help clients grow into loving commitment!Making and keeping commitments is more difficult today than ever. About half of all marriages end in divorce, and serial monogamy is not uncommon. Couples Connecting: Prerequisites of Intimacy identifies the cultural and personal attitudes that impede commitment and impair intimacy, and it gives you the therapeutic tools to work with clients who don't know how to build a lasting love.Couples Connecting examines why past theories of self-actualization are now failing. Because our culture emphasizes individualistic values, people do not learn how to create and share bonds with others. Therapists must become developmental partners for clients who need to overcome failures of maturation in order to have successful, loving relationships with their partner. This essential guide offers you practical techniques and case studies, as well the theoretical underpinnings to deal with this crisis of intimacy. Couples Connecting provides specific, insightful studies on overcoming obstacles to genuine commitment, including: identifying patterns of anger in distressed and nondistressed couples ways to help engaged couples overcome the fear of following negative family patterns using family systems theory and psychodynamics to understand developmental issues in marriage suggestions for clinical practice with couples who fear intimacy implications of ten essential factors in intimacyCouples Connecting will help you design and use techniques to promote personal growth and bridge gaps between clients to help couples achieve satisfying and intimate relationships.