ABSTRACT

Premarital counseling has long been difficult for marriage and family therapists. The exploration of patterns and issues that is common in many cases becomes difficult due to the clients being in “love” or the perpetual myth that all married people live “happily ever after.” This chapter will talk about an intervention that was used by a cotherapy team in working with a premarital case. However, the concepts may be useful to a couple who have become stuck in therapy, parent-child dyads, and parent-adolescent dyads. Concepts from behavioral sex therapy (sensate focus; Masters and Johnson, 1970), intergenerational therapy (Friedman, 1991), and functional family therapy (Alexander and Parsons, 1982) were employed in forming the hypothesis and designing an intervention.