Many intimate relationships do not survive the process of working through issues to do with incest. However, some relationships do well despite these upheavals. Therefore the focus of the current study was on how lasting marriages manage to construct emotional safety in order to maintain emotional intimacy. The relationship issues of marriages where one partner is a survivor of incest have not been widely researched. Yet it is in the survivor's relationship where many issues arising from the incest may be played out. Literature in the survivor area focuses on the need for safety and support. Therefore, models of couple counselling may need to include these issues in their notions of healing within the process of counselling. This study was conducted using qualitative research methods. Focus groups were a primary source of data. The study examined the construction of safety in longterm intact marriages of incest survivors. This examination looked at the three-stage model of counselling for trauma proposed by Judith Herman, and the relationship between these three stages of healing and the construction of safety. The research participants included female incest survivors and husbands of survivors of incest. Participants were asked to individually make written constructions of safety related to each of the three stages of healing. A group construction process followed these individual constructions and differences within the written materials were also highlighted. Segregated groups met three times, each time concentrating on a particular stage of healing. A single validating group of the combined women and men's groups met later to do an overall construction of the notion of safety. Results indicate that emotional safety is indeed an important issue for both partners in relationships where the wife is a survivor of incest. There are differences between survivors and partners about the significance of the three stages. A model of the retrospective construction of safety has been developed. This model includes the important elements of the experience of emotional safety that arose. These elements were knowledge, negotiated control, negotiated trust, communication, how anger is managed and directed, and managing the difficult times and issues such as the times of the disclosure of incest.

Te aim of the research dissertation thesis is to introduce transactional analysis as a practi- cal tool applicable for efective communication with clients in low-threshold addictology services. Te main objective is the discovery of ego-states that clients use in communication with employees, determining the representation of individual ego-states at both client and employee side. A partial goal is to observe the methods of communication with the client, which lead to the provision of services in the framework of Adult to Adult transactions. Te output usable in real life is a manual of communication between employees and clients using principles of transaction analysis. Te research group consists of 88 observed, recorded and evaluated interviews between employees and clients of the low-threshold addictology service Drop In Prevention and Treatment of Drug Addiction Center, specifcally in the Drop In Low-threshold Center. Tey were active users of illegal addictive substances who have requested some service from the spectrum of harm reduction services at the time of the research. Te thesis uses qualitative research in the form of text and word analysis used in the com- munication of clients and employees in the Drop In Low-threshold Center with the aim of capturing the usual communication...