The Asia Pacific Rim International Counseling & Psychotherapy Conference 2013 (CounselingMalaysia.com), held in Kuching, Sarawak August 14th to 17th 2013 saw the sharing of academic presentation platform between American psychogists and scholars such as Professor Allen Allen E. Ivey, EdD, ABPP Distinguished University Professor (Emeritus) University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Courtesy Professor, University of South Florida and Professor Mary Bradford Ivey, Professor at University of South Florida; and Malaysian psychologists and scholars such as Dr. Edward WengLok Chan, D.Phil., M.Sc., BA (Psy), FMAPsy, FMCBTA, president of the Malaysian Association of Psychotherapy (MalaysianPsychotherapy.net) and principal consultant psychologist of the International Psychology Centre (MalaysiaPsychology.com) all keynote presenters at the conference as well as other Malaysian scholars such as associate professor Azahar Che Latiff, assiociate professor of Counseling, University Sabah Malaysia who also presented at the conference. The conference was attended by over 300 psychologists, counselors and scholars from USA, Malaysia as well as from other parts of the world.

These scholars and psychologists detailed the American and Asian perspectives on current issues in Psychotherapy, Counseling and Psychiatric theories, researches and clinical practices resulting in an innovative journal: The International Journal of Psychotherapy, Counseling & Psychiatry: Theory, Research & Clinical Practice (ISPCP-TRCP.org).

The American perspective was led by Professor Allen Ivey. He proposed that the counseling field is rapidly moving to an orientation to health and wellness. Much of this is due to research in neuroscience and the brain. He claimed to have discovered that preventive strategies such as stress management and Therapeutic LifeStyle Changes need to take a central place in psychotherapy practices. Some brain basics useful in daily practice was summarized. Substance abuse was discussed as an example of brain issues in helping. Multicultural issues in brain research was also presented.

This US positive psychology perspective which has its main tenets in prevention of psychopathology and wellness was further reinforced by Professor Mary Ivey another American psychologist who presented on The Community Genogram: Helping the Client Understand Social Contextual Issues. The community genogram is a systematic approach to helping clients see themselves not just as individuals, but also as cultural beings and persons-in-community. She claimed that our developmental experience in our home communities has a powerful influence on who we are and how we cope with life issues. Video demonstrations and experiential practice highlighted the workshop. The community genogram was proposed to be a highly practical approach, which can be used immediately in practice.

Professor Allen Ivey further reinforced the American positive psychology perspective with another presentation on: Counseling/Coaching: Practical Strategies to Improve Our Practice. In the presentation he claimed that Coaching in a variety of styles—life coaching, executive coaching, career coaching—has become an increasingly popular profession. In this workshop, the similarities and differences of coaching and counseling was addressed. Participants examined what he termed “counseling/coaching” in which key dimensions of the two professions are integrated. A video of a coaching interview was shown and analyzed from a counseling skills perspective. Participants had the opportunity to practice coaching skills with the expectation that they took some important and basic coaching concepts home to their own practice and teaching.

This positive psychology perspective of psychotherapy practice was not shared by many Asian and Malayssian psychologists and psychotherapists such as Dr. Edward WengLok Chan, president of the Malaysian Association of Psychotherapy (MalaysiaPsychotherapy.net) and principal consultant psychologist of the International Psychology Centre (MalaysiaPsychology.com), who gave his keynote address entitled: Amygdala Psychotherapy (AP) in which he reported that Asia, unlike in the US, is entering into an era where certainty, knowledge and clarity is replaced by uncertainty, not knowing and doubt; akin to the era of Modernism giving way to Post Modernism. Both traditions can be traced back to Western thinkers. At the same time, the Asian culture has been a model and inspiration for many Western and US psychotherapists and thinkers from which they drew sources for the positive psychology view expoused by Professor Allen Ivey and Professor Mary Bradford Ivey. Nevertheless Chan proposed that the American positive psychology perspective has missed the central point of Eastrern thinking such as Buddhism. He argued that the central concept of Buddhism is about suffering and emotional pain, ie how to cope with that rather than preventing it as expoused in positive psychology which claimed to have sources from Buddhist teaching (eg Siegal, 2014; Seligman 2014). Dr. Chan's proposal and model was a stark contrast to the positive psychology model. His AP model focused instead on staying with and processing the emotional pain and existential pain necessary for the therapy to be got from psychopathologies with the clinical facilitation of the AP therapists and no prevention is possible.

Dr. Chan made reference to the conference themes - Environment, Education and Relationship - and pointed out that these were issues most commonly brought to us psychotherapists and counselors in the postmodernism era of Asia as these are also issues that have been going through immense developments in recent years throughout the Asia Pacific Rim. Chan reported that today in Malaysia and throughout Asia, counsellors and psychotherapists are called increasingly to give counselling & psychotherapy in an environment filled with uncertainty, not knowing and doubt. At the same time we are living in an exciting era of seeing emerging new fields such as neuroscience and the maturation of the different practices of psychotherapy. And yet the practice of psychotherapy is littered with impasses and failures. In order to address these important issues, we need to go back to basic; he posed the fundamental question, what is it psychotherapy a therapy for? Of course the clients come to see us with a myriad of presenting and underlying symptoms that they want resolve. But surely we are more than just symptoms managers and preventors as positive psychologists proponents expoused. WE should have a vision of where we are bringing our clients; a model which allows therapeutic goals to be formulated effectively. It was proposed that it was precisely the failure to articulate workable therapeutic goals in many of the models and theories of psychotherapy that has led to the malaise of much of the failure of therapy that has met us. Chan proposed a new model and practice of psychotherapy that is both developmental and collaborative in nature and bypassed much of the failures met by many of the current psychotherapy theoretical practices; a model that honours the founding father of psychotherapy: Freud and the psychodynamic tradition which is referenced by the developmental part of the current model, and also sees the individual as later psychodynamic therapist such as Fairbairn and Kohut and systemic therapist did, within the context of relationship and our therapeutic need for connection. And yet this need for connection is fundamentally ruptured. The therapeutic navigation between trying to get the healing from the rupture of this need to trying to make the new connection with others is filled with landmines of psychopathologies and failures of therapy.

The model and practice proposed by Chan was Brain Based Developmental and Collaborative and provides a path to navigate through modern psychopathologies: a developmental, but non-linear, relational and collaborative path for the individual and others seeking therapy. THe positive psychology model proposed by Ivey and Ivey which has a lineage in the American and Western influenced modernistic psychotherapy techniques such as CBT, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic counselling and Rogerian client centred psychotherapy with linear positive orientated goals have been proved to be grossly inadequate (Chan, 2009) to deal many psychopathologies.

Chan proposed instead the need of a non linear therapeutic process as expoused by Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein, 1981). He suggested that we need to be able to embrace the "not knowing" of Asian Zen Buddhism and as proposed by Harlene Anderson (Anderson 1997). This is a paradigm shift away from the perspective of the counsellor or psychotherapist taking up the role of the expert as expoused by practitioners of positive psychology as prescribed by the Iveys or in some other traditions still within the same framework of US influenced positive psychology where the client is priviledged solely to have all the therapeutic knowledge and solution as practiced by Rogerian, EFT, NLP and other humanistic psychotherapists and theoriests.

Chan proposed that therapeutic knowledge, healing and progress in its contextually bounded form, as Foucault (1974) termed, "piecemeal" form, evolves in collaboration amongsts counsellors, psychotherapists, reflective teams, studennts, clients, their partners and their families. The Developmental Collaborative model defines a new expertise role for the therapist, one inspired by Harvile Hendrix in Imago Therapy (Hendrix, 1988; Hendrix & Hunt, 1994, 2003, 2005) of that of being the facilitator for the therapeutic process to lead the client through the journey of getting healing from that initial rupture of symbiosis so deeply encoded in our amygdalas as the brain science research that Allen Ivey has referred to above and developing the self through connecting with others. However the brain science Allen Ivey has referred to failed to focus on the amygdala and instead he has rigorously avoided focussing on the emotional pain generated by amygdala stress. Instead he and others in the American positive psychology camp has focussed on prevention strategies from psychopathologies and "wellness". This failure also determinea the ultimate failure of positive psychology as a therapeutic tool for psychopathologies; despite limited general health benefits similar to benefits of progressive muscles relaxation by behavioural therapists a decade ago, which was not able to make real inroad into treating anxiety disorders, positive psychology has and will continue to fail treating psychopathologies because of its fundamental premise to avoid dealing with emotional pain.

The Amygdala psychotherapy model (AP) at the same time goes beyond Imago therapy model (ibid) and traditional developmental couple therapy model (Bader 2010) both of which of which are still rooted within the American positive psychology perspective in terms of their linear dimensional focus of therapeutic knowledge and wellness: Bader (ibid) expoused a developmental model of couple relationship maturity from symbiotic to interdependennce whilst Hendrix (ibid) despite his insight of the emotional pain generated from the rupture of relationship connections, has his therapeutic focus on getting couples to do positive psychology type practices ie the couple dialogue (ibid) to prevent and heal from psychopathologies. The developmental nature of AP stopped short at seeing our emotional, existential pain which underlies all psychopathologies (as Hendrix did) as originated in the infant-caregiver rupture of connection. AP breaks the linear developmental process and providing thus a therapeutic practice instead where both Imago therapy and Developmental Couple Therapy models have failed to provide. Both these models provided valuable theoretical relationships dynamics and indeed; therapeutic frameworks for couples and individuals to get therapy ie "healing" but without the clinical environment necessary for this to be achieved. Therapists are left with prescribing various positive psychology type homeworks for couples to fail inevitably because back at home where amygdalas are fully engaged there is no prospect for individuals and couples to apply any theoretical practices introduced at the therapy room to do therapy and prevention from psychopathologies. THe current AP model provides the therapeutic environment and practices to all Psychotherapists to work with the individual and his or her partner to get the needed therapeutic healing as well as achieving therapeutic growth both for individuals and couples by engaging their activated amygdalas fully during therapy whereby non-activated amygdalas type homework therapeutic progress take a backseat. AP achieves therapeutic progress through improvement of significant relationships, individual emotional health and the reversal of the shrinking of the amygdalas of individuals and couples; shrinking resulted from anxiety generated from ruptures of connections inevitable between couples and reversal resulted during and in between therapies through the active facilitation and collaboration of the therapists by getting the developmental unmet needs of individuals and couples met and healed.

Future papers will detailed some of the clinical practices and outcome of the AP model.

Anderson, H., 1997; Conversation, language and possibilities: A postmodern approach to therapy. Basic Books; New York

Bader, E., 2010; In search of a mythical mate. Basic Books; New York

Beck, A. 1989. Love is never enough: How couples can overcome misunderstanding, resolve conflicts and solve. New York:HarperCollins Publisher.

Chan, E. (2000). Love is never enough; a Collaborative Couple Therapy Model. Kuala Lumpur: Discern Publishing House.

Chan, E. 2009; Using hypnosis in CBT treatment of clients with Anxiety Disorder; in Current Research & Practices on Cognitive Behavior Therapy in Asia; ed. Tian, P.S.O & Tang, C, SK; CBT Unit Toowang Private Hospital, Australia

Foucault, M., 1974, The Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith, Tavistock, London

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Hendrix, H. and Hunt, H.L. (1994).The Couple Companion: Meditations and Exercises for Getting the Love You Want. New York: Pocket Books

Hendrix, H. and Hunt, H.L. (2003).Getting the Love that You Want Workbook: The New Couples’ Study Guide. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hendrix, H. and Hunt, H.L. (2005).Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Ivey, A. (2013) Neuroscience, Stress Management & Substance Abuse Counselling. Presented at the Asian Pacific Rim International Psychotherapy & Counseling Conference 2013

Seligman, M (2014), Positive Psychology, keynote presentation at the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference, Anaheim, USA.

Siegal, D. (2014), Brain Storm; keynote presentation at the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference, Anaheim, USA

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