Full Contact Couple Therapy
Most couple therapy models do not produce therapy that worked for couples. Their techniques, including visualisation, positive dialogues and homework as utilised for example by Emotion Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT) (Greenberg & Johnson 1988, Gottman based couple therapy (Declare & Gottman 2001), and Imago therapy by Hendrix and Hunt (Hendrix and Hunt, 2003; Hendrix and Hunt, 2005), have led to little successful outcome. These techniques are not able to address the multisensory amygdala based ruptures in relationships. The techniques employed by most couple therapy models are prefrontal lobe based i.e. they engage couples’ prefrontal lobe only. The activations patterns of each other’s amygdala by each party of the couple who seek therapy remain unchanged despite going through most of these therapies.
What is needed is a multisensory “full contact” amygdala based therapeutic approach that provide couples the multisensory amygdala based therapeutic experience whereby couples are able to have new amygdala experience in their relationship that are therapeutic after experiencing the old stressful amygdala relationship stimulated experience similar to the PTSD and panic attack patients that needed to re-experience the original offending stress stimuli in a safe therapeutic environment in order to extinguish the fearful emotions.
This approach has also more basis in neuroscience. Pare and Duvarci, 2012 has shown that extinctions of neuro connections in the amygdala can occur without direct mediations with the prefrontal lobe which is not possible in real time as they are “too far” away when the amygdala is stimulated (Chan, 2014; Chan, in press; and Solomon & Taksin 2011). Furthermore the ‘limbic resonance’/ ‘limbic regulation’ (Lewis, Fari & Lannon, 2000; Lewis et al., 2000; Brehony, 2003; Farrow & Woodruff, 2007; Schore, 2003; Thorpe 2015) argued that physical proximity to others e.g. to the partner in couple relationship, is critical.
Couple therapy based on prefrontal lobe type of assignments and tasks mentioned above do not have this limbic engagement required for the therapeutic effect that Cash, 2001 proposed which although was referring to the therapist client context would also be highly relevant to that between partners in couple relationships in couple therapy which as Hendrix and Hunt, 2003; Hendrix and Hunt, 2005, has shown that the relationship between romantic partners are essentially therapeutic in nature.
