IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: 

#1 The history of the psychotherapy field is one of scientific study. In the 1950s and 1960s, many brilliant thinkers, including Fritz Perls, R. D. Laing, B. F. Skinner, and Albert Ellis, broke free of Freudian constraints and created new therapies that focused on the here and now instead of the there and then.

#2 The cornerstones of family therapy were the ideas of reciprocity and venting, which were based on the theory that healthy marriages are those where one partner responds to the other’s good behavior with his or her own good behavior in turn. But research has shown that airing resentments doesn’t reduce anger, it increases it.

#3 The idea that emotion is the enemy that mucks up the marital work of problem solving is a myth. In fact, emotions are central to problem solving. Without access to our emotions, our rational processes are handicapped, and we become little better than a conglomeration of arbitrary and random behaviors.

#4 John had a colleague, Robert Levenson, who was also studying relationships. They teamed up to study couples, and found that it was extremely difficult to observe reliable patterns of behavior in just one person. But when they studied interactions in pairs, they found extremely reliable patterns.