Socio-emotional Relationship Therapy ― Bridging Emotion, Societal Context, and Couple Interaction

?This book describes a new model for clinical work with couples, Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy (SERT). SERT intervenes in sociocultural processes that interfere with couples experiencing mutually supportive relationships. This approach integrates recent advances in neurobiology with social constructionist understandings of gender, culture, personal identities, and relationship processes. The aim of SERT is to help couples move toward a balanced power dynamic and establish mutuality in the relationship. Transforming power disparities in relationships helps couples move toward a more equal flow of attention and support toward each other.

Carmen Knudson-Martin, PhD, LMFT, is internationally recognized for her work regarding gender, marital equality, and relational health. She is a founder of Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy, an approach that attends to the micro-processes through which couple interaction, emotion, and socio-cultural context come together in the moment by moment of clinical process. Her book, Couples, Gender, and Power: Creating Change in Intimate Relationships, weaves a link between research and practice as she makes the influence of the larger social context in couple relationships come alive and offers a step by step template to guide clinical work, with an emphasis on the political and ethical implications of therapist actions. She and her research team have published over 50 articles articulating the importance of the larger social context on issues such as marital equality, relational development, postpartum depression, women’s health, and couple therapy. Carmen is a Professor and Director of the Marriage, Couple, and Family Therapy program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She serves on the Board of directors of the Family Process Institute and the American Family Therapy Academy is series editor of the SpringerBriefs in Family Therapy.