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Effective Threesomes?
A Critique of Four Models of Couple Therapy
By
James Rye, B.A. M.Phil. P.G.C.E.
Dissertation submitted to the University of Nottingham in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, May, 2005
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Foreword _______________________________________________________________ 3
What Is A Couple? _______________________________________________________ 4
A Critical Review of Four Couple Counselling Models ___________________________ 7
Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT) _________________________________________ 8
Cognitive Marital Therapy (CMT) ________________________________________________ 12
The Seven Cs: A Behavioural Systems Framework ____________________________________ 15
The RELATE Model __________________________________________________________ 20
Problems in Assessing the Effectiveness of Couple Counselling Models _____________ 24
Integrating New Factors __________________________________________________ 28
Disjunctive Stages ____________________________________________________________ 28
Relationship History and Forgiveness ______________________________________________ 30
Gender _____________________________________________________________________ 32
Conclusion _____________________________________________________________ 34
The 3E-4D Model for Couple Counselling __________________________________________ 35
Bibliography ___________________________________________________________ 39
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Foreword
My journey towards the topic for this thesis started from places of personal
pleasure, pain, and need. The pleasure stems from the fact that couple therapy
is the area of counselling that I really enjoy the most. In my early years of close,
and hopefully therapeutic, involvement with people in a pastoral context, a large
proportion of the work I did was with couples. Since then I have worked with
many couples in a secular context, both face-to-face and via telephone.
Approxi