by Eva Van Prooyen, M.F.T., PACT faculty, Los Angeles CA
www.evavp.com

When a betrayal has been discovered in their relationship, couples come to therapy feeling lost, disoriented, confused, and angry. They may even wonder if there is hope. Infidelity strips away happiness and threatens emotional security. It can come in a variety of ways, including contempt, neglect, indifference, violence, lying, and affairs. Information is discovered that forces the deceived partner to reevaluate history. Partners are left asking: Who am I? Who were we? Who are we?

Couples can come through painful infidelity, but only if the perpetrator shows regret, if there is transparency, and if both partners want to get back into the relationship. Under these conditions, a skilled PACT therapist can set up an architecture to work through betrayals.

The first phase is to address the fact that the victim has experienced a trauma that can never be undone, and that it has to run its course.

The...

by Mary Ackerman, MIC, BASS (Cllg); CARE Counselling Hong Kong, PACT Level II practitioner
Website: carecounsellinghk.com

Philippe and Grace, who have been married for twelve years, are clients in my clinical practice in Hong Kong. He is French Swiss and works in finance, and she is Korean American and works as an auctioneer. They have three daughters. They sought therapy after Grace found out that Philippe had been paying for prostitutes on his overseas travel. He admitted to fathering a child in the Philippines.

When I asked why they had come to therapy, both said, “To save our marriage.”

As I worked with them, I found it helpful to observe the influence of the three domains of PACT: attachment theory, arousal regulation, and neuroscience. An overwhelming sense of anger and fear ran through each session, and these domains helped me understand this challenging couple so I could develop an effective treatment approach.

First, their attachment styles were key....

by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
stantatkin.com

Our brains are remarkable organs. They take in and use massive amounts of information from inside and outside our bodies and allow us to go through about 90% of our day automatically. We can get from point A to point B while checking our emails, talking to others in the subway, drinking coffee, or doing any number of tasks simultaneously. Our brains are on automation, running our lives, making decisions, and doing what needs to be done, with little thought required. Our automatic brains are cheap to run and extremely fast and efficient. That’s a very good thing when you consider how much that ability would cost if we had to use the very expensive novelty-oriented parts of our brain. If we couldn’t rely on automation, we’d never be able to accomplish much of anything.

The automatic brain is made up of old memories, some of which are explicit, but most of which are implicit, or outside our awareness. This is called procedural...

by Rachel Holland, DClinPsych, PACT faculty, Buckinghamshire, UK
Email: [email protected]

One of the characteristics of secure functioning a PACT therapist communicates is that romantic couples, as the King and Queen of their domain, protect their relationship and each other in public and in private.

I had been working with Peter and Jane for four sessions. They came to therapy for help with intimacy, and our initial work focused on therapeutic alliance and social contracting. Both were outsourcing their arousal regulation away from the relationship to substances.

From the Partner Attachment Inventory (PAI), I knew both Peter and Jane experienced emotional neglect in childhood. They had parents and caregivers who were either unavailable and didn’t protect them sufficiently or behaved in ways that were frightening. More importantly, the couple now had this information about each other and a better understanding about how each operated. They were beginning to...

by Inga Gentile, MFT, PACT faculty, Bardu, Norway
Website: www.ingagentile.com
Email: [email protected]
“Nothing is more revealing than movement.” — Martha Graham

Despite our conscious narratives, which are formed in the brain’s left hemisphere, much of what we do is driven by fast-acting processes and affect-regulating capacities encoded in the right hemisphere as part of procedural memory. Our early repeated relationship experiences not only create a psychological blueprint for how we view ourselves and others, but also determine how we will operate in future relationships. They also influence the development of brain structures responsible for affect regulation later in life. These memories (when manifest in psychobiological reflexive behaviors\micromovements in the body and face) can either refute or support our conscious narratives. They also influence how we move toward and away from people and how we get people to move toward and away from us,...

by Jami Faletti, M.F.T., PACT faculty, Los Angeles, CA
Website: jamifaletti.com
Email: [email protected]

Have you noticed the crazy number of articles, blogs, and quizzes circulating on social media right now asking you to question your relationship? Just look at your Facebook feed and you’ll see it’s teeming with titles such as “Should You End Your Relationship?” and “How to Tell if You’re with the Right Person.” These articles seem to prey upon, pander to, and perhaps even inspire our worst thinking—that we chose the wrong person or are in the wrong relationship

You can probably tell my hackles are up a bit because PACT therapists know this is the worst place to start if you want to improve your situation. In fact, the first order of business when a couple comes to a PACT therapist is to take any and all threats to the relationship off the table. Unless someone is actually leaving, it doesn’t make sense to do...

by Rachel Cahn, MA, LPC, PACT faculty, Boulder, CO
Website: www.rachelcahn.com
Email: [email protected]

Andrea and Brent (not their real names) have been married for twenty-three years, and have been struggling since their youngest son left for college. Now that their focus is no longer on their children, the distance between them is apparent. In session, they describe a recent conflict around Andrea’s birthday. Brent usually orchestrates lavish celebrations with many guests, while avoiding the quieter interpersonal aspect of the occasion (which she relishes). Andrea’s most recent birthday took place while they were at an event with extended family, and Brent’s attention was focused on another family member. Andrea felt dropped when Brent didn’t even acknowledge the day with her, and he felt guilty and shut down in the wake of Andrea’s disappointment. Describing the week is painful for both of them: Brent anxiously averts his...

by Lon Rankin, LPCC, PACT faculty, Santa Fe, NM
Website: LonRankin.com
Email: [email protected]

Every species of mammal uses the limbic system—the social, emotional, relational part of the brain—to create strong bonds that provide safety and a felt sense of security. Adult-child bonding is especially crucial for the development of the complex human brain and nervous system, and the development of an internal felt sense of security in the world—both real and perceived. When parents are too often inattentive of their child’s emotional needs, this bonding does not happen optimally, and the injury of insecurity can prevail.

Memories, especially negative ones, are extremely powerful in influencing our perception of the world and our behaviors. Our subjective experience is colored by our past. All experiences, at any age, involving fear and threat are “velcroed” into the memory system in the interest of self-protection, but memories from...

by Jeff Pincus, LCSW, PACT faculty, Boulder, CO
Website: CouplesTherapyBoulder.com
Email: [email protected]

Emotional development doesn’t happen in isolation. The entire field of psychotherapy rests upon the premise that one human being can help another to move beyond vestigial strategies developed in the context of the distant past and to live life in a way that is less encumbered by personal history. We consider this to be emotional or psychological growth. Part of the blessing of being human is that this process can be ongoing as we learn, grow, and continue to develop across our entire lifespan.

As a PACT therapist, PACT trainer, and husband who continues to put PACT principles to the test in my own marriage, I have been awed by the acceleration of development and maturation that occurs within a committed partnership when both parties co-create a foundation of secure functioning. This is the bedrock that PACT helps couples stand upon, and that supports a resurgence...

by Karen Berry, PhD, PACT faculty, New York, NY
Email:  [email protected]

Bottom-up interventions are the bread and butter of PACT. These interventions can be simple to execute, yet powerful in their effect. For example, the therapist can ask partners to face one another, with the therapeutic intention of using eye gazing to reduce their allostatic load. Compared with habitual long, slow, top-down conversations, bottom-up interventions more readily empower the couple to use their neurological systems to affect change in the relationship.

All clinicians have seen how a couple can become reactive and operated out of conditioned responses from childhood. Their brains can register threat in nano seconds. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) moves at lightning speed in response to facial gestures, dangerous words and phrases, jerky gestures, tone and prosody, as well as general body language. PACT therapists watch moment-to-moment shifts of the ANS, implicit expressions...