Inter-Partner Touch in Spiritual
Care and Couple Counselling
A Review of the Literature and Future
Implications
Martin Rovers PhD
Cassandra Petrella MA
Michael Machen MA
Touch and Love
• Born in love, or not
– A baby in our parents arms
• Growing in love, or not
– We each have a wound or two!
• Falling in love
– A babe in our lover’s arms
• Re-creating, repairing, healing love
– The work of love
• Held in LOVE
– Home to God
Touch defined
• “Touch, for the most part is a proximal sense. That is, we feel
those things that either are close to us or actually contact us”.
(Cholewiak & Collins, 1991)
• Montagu (1971, p.1) explains “The skin, like a cloak, covers us
all over, the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our
first medium of communication, and our most efficient of
protectors.”
• Sue Johnson says touching, caressing, stroking and the
emotions there evoked “are the royal route to love”.
Inter-Partner Touch defined
Inter-partner touch will be the term
used for the touch which occurs
between partners in the helping
relationship session. Touch between
couples can be eye to eye contact,
hand to hand touching, embracing or
hugging.
Human Development
• Touch is first experienced in the womb. The child is
held by the contents of the womb and the warmth
of the mother’s body.
• Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkey experiments.
• Rene Spitz’s study with human orphans.
• Tiffany Field: Massage therapy leads to 45%
weight gain in premature infants.
• Nicolas Gueguen: teacher back patting doubles the
likelihood of a child speaking up in class.
Attachment Security
• “Touch is the language of attachment” (Montagu,
1971)
• Bowlby`s early research (1969) was looking at
children her were separated from their parental
proximity when hospitalized.
• Felt-security
• Proximity seeking
• Early experiences of touch and later couples
relationships .
Communication
• Touch gives a person information about their physical
environment. It is a means of environment to person
communication.
• It is also a means of person to person communication.
• Touch expresses ones inner emotions to a partner.
• Dachner Keltner – touch expresses emotion, especially
compassion
In times of distress
• Interactional emotional regulation.
• Inter-partner touch can reduce a partner’s anxiety while a
partner is enduring a currently stressful situation.
• MRI study of couple hand holding (Researchers Jim Coan and
Richard Davidson)
Spiritual Growth & Connection
•
•
•
•
•
•
Touch has for centuries been used by spiritual healers to
promote mental and physical health healing. It was one of
the earliest forms of medicine before the pharmacological
revolution.
Spiritual rituals involve inter-person touch
Touch creates connected among beings
“laying on of the hands”
Study of touch therapies / Reiki leads to participant spiritual
experiences.
Touch can create a more spiritual connection between the
couple and for each individual.
Touch Therapies
• Humanistic therapy – therapist to client touch.
• Couple therapy: EFT, PACT
• Reiki / massage therapy
• Touch with sexual abuse survivors.
• Prayer and touching.
Touch and Couples Counselling
• Integration of touch in couples with one partner of
past sexual abuse.
• EFT: - Enactments in EFT – eye contact, “turning to
your partner”, often promotes comforting actions
between partners
• How do you get close? We already know that
couples who aren’t physically touching or intimate
are more disconnected from each other.
• Solomon & Tatkin - touch interventions in therapy
Future Implications
• Potential to expedite process of therapy.
• Provides comfort through the emotionally
demanding process of therapy.
• Increases connection and bonding.
• Promotes safety and secure attachment between
the couple.
• Heals attachment wounds through new secure
attachment development and a more dependable
sense of security.
• Security enhancing interactions lead to pro-social
beliefs about others.