Editorial: Empirically Supported Treatments in Couple and Family Therapy

• Date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12240
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Author: Jay L. Lebow

SEPTEMBER 2016 VOLUME 55 NUMBER 3

Editorial: Empirically Supported Treatments in

Couple and Family Therapy

JAY L. LEBOW*

Fam Proc 55:385–389, 2016

This special issue consists of research reviews of the principal empirically supported

treatments in couple and family therapy. This issue is quite special. For the first time,

we present the state of research evidence for this impressive set of treatments together in

the same place. All have been developed and assessed for at least a decade, most for over

20 years. Each has progressed to the more advanced stages of evidence that demonstrate

the impact of a treatment with most having been assessed in large dissemination clinical

trials (Darwiche & de Roten, 2015; Sexton & Datchi, 2014; Sexton et al., 2011).

This issue arrives at a time when the notion of empirically supported treatments is

somewhat less controversial than when such treatments first emerged. When Chambless

(Chambless & Hollon, 1998) first spoke of the process of separating treatments which had

sufficient empirical support (then calling them “empirically validated treatments”) from

others, reactions were strong. Many (including myself; Lebow, 2006) challenged the spe-

cial place that was being accorded to these treatments (Wampold, 2001; Westen, Novotny,

& Thompson-Brenner, 2004). Some treatments had a chance to be empirically evaluated,

whereas others did not, as funding was not readily available for research on all therapies;

the label “empirically validated” might be interpreted as suggesting that only these list of

treatments were effective; and this way of thinking about treatments substantially

ignored the shared common base of effective practice (J. L. Lebow, 2014; Sprenkle, Davis,

& Lebow, 2009).

Now, decades later, evidence-based treatments are less controversial. There has been

sufficient time for a range of such treatments to develop that involve varying treatment

philosophies, including experiential (Ellison, Greenberg, Goldman, & Angus, 2009) and

psychoanalytic (Crits-Christoph & Barber, 2007) concepts. Additionally, there has been

much more attention to common factors and the shared base of intervention within these

treatments as a broader recognition of transcendent, transdiagnostic factors has grown

*Editor, Family Process and Family Institute at Northwestern.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jay Lebow, Ph.D., Family Institute at

Northwestern, 618 Library Place, Evanston, IL 60201. E-mail: j-lebow@northwestern.edu.

385

Family Process, Vol. 55, No. 3, 2016 ©2016 Family Process Institute

doi: 10.1111/famp.12240