The High-Conflict Couple: A Dialectical Behavior Therapy Guide to Finding Peace, Intimacy, and Validation

As a licensed marriage and family therapist who has been DBT trained since 2004 and led weekly DBT groups for 8 years, I would say this is one of the best self-help books on marital problems. Although Marsha Linehan originally developed DBT for seriously suicidal clients, DBT skills can benefit everyone. If you think your spouse has symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD), you may have read books that insinuate that your spouse will always make your life miserable and that you should, to preserve your own sanity, just get out of the relationship. This is in many cases not true. Contrary to popular opinion, borderline personality disorder is treatable. It is usually a result of someone who is naturally emotional by nature being subjected to prolonged abuse in childhood. I think of it as a severe form of post traumatic stress disorder.While it is normal to want to be close and attached to one's spouse, the person who has been abused in the past is conflicted in both wanting and fearing closeness. This is the source of the alternating clingy and angry behaviors. A person who really puts DBT into practice can make remarkable progress. For those of you married to people with BPD, recognize that, while they will always be somewhat emotional and dramatic, this can make life with them quite interesting. The point I want to stress is that DBT can help them greatly decrease their more distressing behaviors.There is a lot of misinformation out there about BPD, and even some therapists who should know better see it as a stigma. The good thing about this book is that it never mentions borderline personality disorder except in the bibliography. So you can use it to work with your BPD spouse without labeling him or her as the "sick one."

This book provides great insight on how to keep conflict manageable. It’s very pragmatic and has some helpful exercises.

Very useful book. The results depend on your willingness to put the skills into action.

Well written

This is the most helpful book so far in the world on reducing conflicts and negative interactions in various relationships. Concepts in this book help improve behaviors not only in couples, but in other interpersonal relationships such as family, friends, work, community. There are two key concepts in this book, Accurate Expression and dealing with High Negative Emotional Arousal due to Invalidation.Be aware, in my opinion, this is a hard high-level book to understand. Being Ph.D. and completing most of known books on relationships, this book was not as easy to master as Gary Chapman's excellent books. It is like Quantum Mechanics of Relationship Psychology. I believe that there are 3 prerequisites.1. Be willing to change your own behavior. This is 90% of work. You can later teach your partner concepts of this book using Accurate Expressions.2. Understand the process of Mindfulness and use it routinely with your thoughts, spoken words and actions.3. Master Marsha Linehan's DBT training manual book because this book is based on using DBT skills.I got great help from my therapist who was trained in DBT. It is worth time and money to get help from professionals or friends so that you can better understand how to use methods described in this book.

Well written practical advice for anyone in a high conflict relationship. If you are tired of fighting and want to do real work to apply real tools than this is for you. If you are looking for a book that will tell you that you are fine the way you are and other person needs to change . . . keep looking.

This book did help me and my girlfriend. We had a toxic relationship, it was both of our faults. No one can blame just one person in a relationship because a relationship requires two people. There were lies, drama, and we thought there was no saving our relationship. We decided to give our love one more shot. We looked into self-couples therapy and found this book. As you can tell from my summary there had been many high conflicts. We took time each day to have a "couples session" of our own. When reading this book it was almost spot on at some dialogues.. this book teaches a better way of handling the situation and saying things that are worded differently. Worded into a better way that would avoid the usual arguments. To my surprise the new changes I learned from this book actually did dodge arguments a few times but the new changes did not prevent all arguments. We would still have fights and arguments over miscellaneous things, but not as bad as before these new changes. So my take on this is that it is not as effective as seeing an actual couples therapist but it is definitely effective to an extent.

Honestly this book is really saving our relationship. I have BPD and my partner has some issues with anger. DBT helped me but working with a partner really helps keep our relationship stable. I highly recommend it. Our therapist also uses it for her practice.

It is helpful for couples and counsellors providing information in easy to access language.

Great book

I recommend. Very well written book

Buen libro, buen tema