Effective Marriage Counseling: The His Needs, Her Needs Guide to Helping Couples Paperback – January 1, 2010

This is a step by step instruction book for counselors. While it is written to counselors, it is an amazing read for the layman who is attempting to understand how and why certain techniques work. This book also helps the reader understand why traditional marriage counseling does not work. For example, who knew that counseling a couple in conflict together is a disaster to the marriage? Dr. Harley explains why this is a bad practice.He also explains why his program is different from other programs. The goal of his program is to restore romantic love to the marriage. He has a step by step plan to achieve this. He doesn't just make this claim, he continually gives the couples surveys to measure their progress. He does not believe that a couple should have to come to counseling for long. If they do, that is an indication that the counseling is not effective.This is a powerful book for any counselor who is truly interested in creating success stories. This program really does work and my husband and I can attest to that. I have devoured every book he has written and this is one of my favorites.

This is a great book on marriage counseling. The author's approach is very practical and is based on many years of actual counseling experience. He presents a counseling system that provides you with the knowledge, resources and systematic approach that you need to help couples that are struggling in their marriage. I also appreciated it as a Christian. I don't agree with every single thing that the author says; however overall, I feel that his teaching is consistent with the Christian perspective of marriage.

As a long-time correspondent on Dr. Harley's website, I found myself searching, at times, for documented "ties" that would bind together the practices and principles that make up the MarriageBuilders program. This book, written to enable the non-professional peer counselor to explain and expostulate on the principles, serves its avowed purpose very well. In addition, it offers insights into much of the underlying experiential data that led to the MB philosophy.

Dr. Willard Harley Jr. has brought his program of marriage counseling all together in his book, EFFECTIVE MARRIAGE COUNSELING. If you are familiar with Dr. Harley's work, this book ties together everything learned from his previous books, Love Busters, His Needs Her Needs, and Five Steps to Romantic Love. The one rub here is, for the counseling to be effective, both counselor and counselees will also need to read Harley's previous books.I mention that only because it can be quite off-putting to be half way through a book only to learn the information contained is worthless without further study. That's not really the case here. A counselor could come away with usable advice that could be implemented into any current counseling program, but to fully integrate Dr. Harley's methods will take a more diligent approach by both the counselor and the couple being counseled.The approach here revolves around creating new behaviors. Although Harley's is a somewhat unconventional approach, and at times his system has somewhat of a text-bookish feel to it, I believe most readers will also see the merit of the system and potential for a very high success rate.After the plan is laid out, Dr. Harley also includes a case study of Amy and Jack and detail the exact treatment of their issues. I would have liked to have seen a few more case studies included, but the reader does get a good feel for the approach taken and can easily see the effective results. The program implements a variety of assorted worksheets which are available to download online.For me personally, the majority of my counseling is pre-marital, but nonetheless, I certainly see the merit of this system and will be researching Harley's other books to further implement some of his program into my work.

I wish I had come across this book when I first counseled a couple who came to me with marital problems. Maybe their marriage could have been saved.

The BEST marriage support book series ever written.Every couple should read this entire series even if your marriage is perfect this will make t better.

This book is more for practitioners than anyone else and I found it very helpful. I intend to incorporate much of this book in my own practice. The author gives reasons for every intervention he discusses and incorporates assessments and interventions in a very easy to understand format.

I think the advice here if followed to a TV is more effective in replacing bad attitudes and unproductive feelings than any amount of psychotherapy typical found in traditional marriage coinseling. Harley effective teaches how to build emotional connection between a husband and wife.