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Creating Optimal Relationships

Use of the Voltage Concept with Couples

Kathryn Elliott and James Elliott

Recent relationship science research finds that intense, satisfying romantic love is a real phenomenon occurring in couples. Creating Optimal Relationships: Use of the Voltage Concept with Couples provides the field of marriage and family therapy with the first model for assisting couples to sustain bliss for a lifetime. The voltage concept, based on over forty years of clinical research, uses a skills-based approach from Anthetic Relationship Therapy. By providing psychodynamic skills for facilitating each partner’s psychological growth, the psychological infrastructure is then achieved for supporting optimal relating skills. The voltage concept presents a useful dichotomy of closeness levels to which partners aspire. Couples who want a more surface relationship fit a
Low-Voltage Relationship model marked by less emotional intensity. With such couples, minimal skills can be taught to reduce any conflict that brought them to therapy.
High-Voltage couples desire great emotional depth and receive skills to help them achieve it. Perhaps even more valuable, the voltage vocabulary equips clinicians and partners in understanding a common source of couple conflict; that is, the voltage mismatch. The book offers options for treatment when a voltage discrepancy exists in the couple.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 232 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4422-3810-7 • Hardback • October 2015 • $116.00 • (£89.00)

978-1-4422-3811-4 • eBook • October 2015 • $110.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Psychology / Psychotherapy / Couples & Family, Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis, Psychology / Psychotherapy / General

Creating Optimal Relationships

Use of the Voltage Concept with Couples

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Recent relationship science research finds that intense, satisfying romantic love is a real phenomenon occurring in couples. Creating Optimal Relationships: Use of the Voltage Concept with Couples provides the field of marriage and family therapy with the first model for assisting couples to sustain bliss for a lifetime. The voltage concept, based on over forty years of clinical research, uses a skills-based approach from Anthetic Relationship Therapy. By providing psychodynamic skills for facilitating each partner’s psychological growth, the psychological infrastructure is then achieved for supporting optimal relating skills. The voltage concept presents a useful dichotomy of closeness levels to which partners aspire. Couples who want a more surface relationship fit a
Low-Voltage Relationship model marked by less emotional intensity. With such couples, minimal skills can be taught to reduce any conflict that brought them to therapy.
High-Voltage couples desire great emotional depth and receive skills to help them achieve it. Perhaps even more valuable, the voltage vocabulary equips clinicians and partners in understanding a common source of couple conflict; that is, the voltage mismatch. The book offers options for treatment when a voltage discrepancy exists in the couple.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 232 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4422-3810-7 • Hardback • October 2015 • $116.00 • (£89.00)

978-1-4422-3811-4 • eBook • October 2015 • $110.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Psychology / Psychotherapy / Couples & Family, Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis, Psychology / Psychotherapy / General

Author

James Elliott, PhD, created Anthetic Therapy and Anthetic Relationship Therapy and founded the Anthetics Institute in Berkeley, California and Lafayette, Louisiana

Kathryn Elliott, PhD, LPC-S, LMFT, is director of Anthetic Therapy Center.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1What Is the High-Voltage Relationship
Chapter 2A New Psychology as the Foundation for the High-Voltage Relationship
Chapter 3The Inner Critic and Its Sabotaging Effects on Relationships
Chapter 4Using the Anthetic Inner Figure Language
Chapter 5 What It Takes to Create a High-Voltage Relationship: The Anthetic Values
Chapter 6Eight Intrapersonal High-Voltage Skills
Chapter 7Nine Skills to Empower the Self for Optimal Relating
Chapter 8 Creating Connection: The Interpersonal High-Voltage Communication Skills
Chapter 9Interpersonal Skills for Handling Negativity in Relationships
Chapter 10Increasing the Voltage: Depth Connecting Skills
Chapter 11Handling the Voltage Mismatch
Chapter 12 Maintenance Skills: High-Voltage for a Lifetime

Reviews

Not just an illustrative guide of psychodynamic principles to help couples communicate more optimally, this book is an evocative foray into the very essence of emotional closeness, warmth, and empathy between two souls searching for connection. Whether you're high voltage, low voltage, or not-so-sure-what-your voltage, these skills will diffuse conflict and conflagration and improve upon love's gentle embrace. Highly recommended!
— Eric Green, Purdue University

In developing the ‘high voltage/low voltage relationship’ concept, the Elliotts have provided a means for couples to quickly and comprehensively understand and analyze themselves and their relationships. This book is a welcome addition to the field and one that clinicians will find themselves coming back to again and again in their work with couples.
— David A. Spruill, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Creating Optimal Relationships

Use of the Voltage Concept with Couples

Kathryn Elliott and James Elliott

Creating Optimal Relationships

Use of the Voltage Concept with Couples

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