Including a Brief Substance-Abuse Motivational Intervention in a Couples Treatment Program for Intimate Partner Violence

Substance abuse (SA) and intimate partner violence (IPV) frequently co-occur, providing challenges to researchers and treatment professionals alike. Researchers have struggled to understand the nature of the relation between these 2 difficult issues. Are they wholly un-related, indirectly related, or is there a causal relation between the 2? Treatment professionals face the dilemma of how to provide treatment to clients who abuse substances and who are violent with their intimate others. Most treatment for these 2 disorders is provided separately with varying degrees of effort to coordinate services. Models of combined treatment are few, and none address couples in which both partners are violent or abuse substances. This article briefly reviews the literature on SA and IPV, and then describes a 1-session SA intervention, based on Motivational Interviewing, which has been added to the conjoint couples treatment model for IPV.