A Clinician’s Guide to Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships
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Close romantic relationships shape every dimension of psychological wellbeing. When those relationships are strained, the effects reach far into daily functioning, mental health, and the quality of life that therapy aims to restore. A Clinician's Guide to Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships brings together the research, theory, and clinical application that practitioners need to work more effectively with the couples, families, and individuals who seek their help.
This edited volume translates relationship science into clinical practice. It does not offer generic guidance on communication. It offers a carefully assembled set of chapters from distinguished scholars and therapists who work at the intersection of empirical relationship research and psychotherapy.
The result is a resource designed to help clinicians think more clearly about the problems that close relationships present, and to intervene more purposefully when those problems appear.
What This Book Is
A Clinician's Guide to Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships is a 350-page edited volume co-edited by John H. Harvey and Amy Wenzel, published originally through Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in 2002 and now available through Routledge. The first edition brought together contributions from leading scholars in close relationship research, marriage and family therapy, clinical psychology, and developmental science.
The book is organized around a central premise: that the growing body of theoretical and empirical work on relationship maintenance and enhancement has direct and practical implications for clinical work. In the decade before publication, research into the everyday behaviors, cognitive styles, and expressions of love that sustain close romantic relationships had expanded substantially. This volume was designed to channel that knowledge into the hands of practitioners who needed it most.
Harvey and Wenzel assembled a distinguished group of contributors. Each chapter addresses a specific problem or clinical theme, drawing on research to offer frameworks and approaches that therapists can carry into their work. The book is not a collection of abstract theory. It is a collection of applied clinical thinking, grounded in scholarship.
The book's subject classifications span mental health, family therapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology, behavioral science, and marriage, family, and sex therapy. That breadth reflects its intended reach across practice settings and professional disciplines.
What This Book Covers
The volume is organized into four major sections. Each section builds on the last, moving from theoretical foundations through clinical psychopathology and into prevention, intervention, and reflective commentary.
Theoretical Links to Practice
The opening section connects close relationship research to the clinical questions practitioners encounter. Chapters address the management and maintenance of relationships as skilled activity, exploring how relational competence is developed and what happens when it breaks down. Attachment theory receives dedicated attention, with chapters examining how individual attachment styles shape functioning within close relationships and what that means for clinical work.
Family relationships, stepfamily dynamics, and the role children play in affecting the quality of close romantic partnerships are also addressed in this section. Foundational concepts, such as hurtful messages within family relationships and how cognitive styles influence relationship maintenance, provide the theoretical grounding for the clinical material that follows.
Psychopathology and Close Relationships
The second section examines how psychological distress and psychiatric conditions intersect with close relationship functioning. Depression receives extended coverage, including its effects on marital relationships and how relationship dynamics can both contribute to and maintain depressive episodes.
Postpartum depression is addressed as a distinct clinical presentation that places particular demands on partnership functioning. Anxiety disorders and social phobia are examined for their disruptive effects on relational intimacy and communication.
Alcoholism within marriage is treated both as a clinical problem in its own right and as a relational issue that requires interventions directed at the partnership, not just the individual. These chapters make the case that psychopathology rarely exists in isolation from a close relationship context, and that clinicians who ignore that context miss critical points of leverage for change.
Prevention and Intervention
The third section turns directly to what practitioners can do. Chapters on premarital therapy examine how preventive clinical work can reduce the risk of early relationship deterioration and eventual divorce. The role of insight-oriented couple therapy is explored as an approach to deepening relational understanding and resolving the interpersonal patterns that keep distress in place.
Forgiveness receives substantial attention, framed not as a moral imperative but as a clinical process with measurable effects on relationship quality and psychological well-being. Remarriage and the particular challenges it presents for blended family functioning appear here as well, offering clinicians frameworks for working with clients who are navigating second partnerships and complex family structures.
Peer marriage, in which partners prioritize equality and friendship as the foundation of their relationship, is treated as both a therapeutic aspiration and a clinical concept with relevance to how couples define their own goals.
Commentaries on Relationship Maintenance
The final section offers reflective commentary on the material across the volume. These chapters invite readers to step back and consider the broader implications of what close relationship research means for clinical practice, for psychotherapy training, and for the ways therapists conceptualize the problems their clients bring.
Biopsychosocial approaches to relationship therapy appear in this section, emphasizing that biological, psychological, and social factors all shape the relational difficulties clinicians encounter. This closing section does not summarize what has come before. It extends the conversation.
Who This Book Is For
This clinical volume was written for practitioners. Its primary audience includes marriage therapists, family therapists, relationship therapists, couples therapists, and clinical psychologists who work with relational distress as part of their caseloads. Clinical social workers and counselors who treat depression, anxiety, or postpartum distress within a relational context will find the psychopathology section directly applicable to their work.
The book also serves graduate students and advanced trainees who are developing their clinical conceptualization of close relationship problems. For supervisors and faculty, the volume provides a structured framework for teaching about the intersection of psychopathology and close romantic relationships that moves well beyond introductory coverage.
Researchers and clinical scholars who study relationship maintenance, couples functioning, or family psychology will find the theoretical chapters useful as both a resource and a reference point for the applied literature that was emerging in the early 2000s.
The book is not introductory. It assumes familiarity with clinical concepts and a commitment to evidence-informed practice. It rewards readers who want more than technique, who want the conceptual depth to understand why the techniques work and when they are most likely to fail.
Why This Book Matters for Clinical Practice
Relationship distress is one of the most common reasons individuals and couples seek psychotherapy. Depression, anxiety, and relational strain are rarely separable in clinical reality. A client presenting with depressive symptoms is very often also experiencing difficulty in close partnership. A client managing postpartum distress is navigating not only her own psychological state but the demands placed on her relationship with a partner who is also adjusting to new parenthood.
This volume takes that complexity seriously. It does not treat psychopathology as an individual problem that happens to occur within a relational context. It treats the relationship itself as a clinical system with its own dynamics, vulnerabilities, and resources for change. That perspective is what gives the book its enduring relevance for practitioners who want to work more effectively with the full range of difficulties their clients present.
For clinicians whose work draws on cognitive behavioral approaches, the book offers valuable context for understanding how relational factors interact with the cognitive and behavioral patterns that CBT targets. Attachment styles, communication patterns, and the cognitive styles that characterize close relationships all connect to the individual-level work that evidence-based therapists do every day. Understanding those connections deepens clinical work and sharpens case conceptualization.
Praise for the Book
Leonard T. Sperry, writing in the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy, captured the clinical value of this volume directly: "A Clinician's Guide to Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships is a very important book, and co-editors John H. Harvey and Amy Wenzel are to be heartily congratulated. Relational distress and enhancement is a cutting-edge topic today, and the editors have invited a group of experts to present their work at the interface of research and clinical practice."
The review continued: "Any clinician working with couples will surely find that these chapters are conceptually interesting and clinically relevant. I read these chapters with great interest. I learned much, and I believe that my therapeutic work with couples will be greatly enhanced as a result."
That endorsement from a senior clinician and researcher speaks to what the book delivers: chapters that are both intellectually serious and practically useful to practitioners working with real clinical challenges.
Book Details
The full citation for this volume is:
Harvey, J. H., and Wenzel, A. (Eds.) (2002). A Clinician's Guide to Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
The book is a first edition, published in 2002, running to 350 pages. It is now available through Routledge. Related subject areas include mental health, family therapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology, behavioral science, and marriage, family, and sex therapy.
Purchase This Book
A Clinician's Guide to Maintaining and Enhancing Close Relationships is available through the following retailers:
Explore Dr. Amy Wenzel's Clinical and Scholarly Work
If this volume speaks to the kind of rigorous, research-grounded clinical work that you are looking for, there is much more to explore across Dr. Wenzel's body of scholarship.
Clinicians interested in how cognitive behavioral therapy applies to perinatal populations will find her book Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Perinatal Distress directly relevant. That volume covers the application of CBT to pregnant and postpartum women experiencing depression, anxiety, and emotional overwhelm, and it reflects the same commitment to evidence-based, individualized clinical care that runs through this edited guide.
For practitioners working with parents who experience intrusive thoughts related to their children, Dropping the Baby and Other Scary Thoughts offers a highly practical clinical resource drawn from decades of research and direct clinical work.
The full range of Dr. Wenzel's publications spans cognitive behavioral therapy technique, perinatal psychology, suicide prevention, women's mental health, therapeutic relationship-focused CBT, and more. More than 125 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters accompany over 25 authored and edited volumes, many of which are available for purchase directly from this site.
For clinicians, graduate students, or faculty who want to understand the depth of expertise behind this body of work, Dr. Amy Wenzel's biography provides a full account of her research, clinical practice, academic appointments, and the development of Therapeutic Relationship-Focused CBT.
If you are a clinician seeking evidence-based therapy rooted in the same scholarship that produced this volume, or a professional looking to learn more about Dr. Wenzel's clinical training resources and practice, reach out through the contact page to learn about the next steps.
