Ah, the holiday season — a time of celebration, togetherness, and making cherished memories with loved ones. AND a time filled with unique challenges, sometimes unrealistic expectations, and potential stressors that can strain even secure-functioning relationships.

From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, couples find themselves in conflict as they navigate complex family dynamics and try to balance time and resources. 

Here PACT certified therapists explain why the holidays can be such a stressful time and offer practical strategies for you and your partner not only to survive the holidays but to find joy and connection in the midst of the chaos.

What are some of the pressures couples face that are unique to the holidays?

The holidays are like other special events like a birthday or anniversary, but they go on for several days or more. So, instead of a few hours, couples are figuring out how to spend several days or longer in a way that feels festive and good to...

As PACT founder Stan Tatkin says, “A daily gratitude practice is a happiness practice.”

And the cultivation of gratitude in your own life can serve as a potent tool to enhance your clients' emotional well-being — and your own.

More than just a platitude, gratitude has the transformative ability to rewire our brains, foster our resilience, and instill in each of us a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment.

We asked some PACT faculty members how they cultivate gratitude in their own lives. They generously shared their insights about the field and a few about themselves. Enjoy! And thank you for being a part of the PACT community.

Eda Arduman, MA, Clinical Psychologist, PACT Faculty
Q. What’s one thing that made you smile recently?

A. We had been unsuccessfully trying to schedule time with some dear friends. Then last Saturday night, my husband and I decided to get some ice cream, and at 10pm we came across our friends in the middle of Principe Street in Lisbon. We all walked toward each...

By Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT
PACT Founder

The topic of your disagreement is not as important as how you handle the disagreement. Most issues boil down to errors in memory, perception, and communication. You can solve many of these mistakes by doing the following:

1. Make eye contact. If you are able to check in with each other’s eyes, you’ll be able to catch errors quicker and emotionally regulate one another. Drop all distractions when you have a disagreement and go face-to-face.

If you’re unable to do this when a disagreement pops up, address the issue but agree to return to the issue at a time when you can.

2. Slow down. It’s common for partners to go too fast when they get into a fight – to the point where they are speaking faster than they can think. Avoid making errors by taking a breath and consciously slowing down as you speak.

3. Be brief. Make a point and then allow your partner to make a point. You should have a nice back-and-forth. The longer...

In place of a blog article this month, we’re sharing a question that a PACT community member posted in the Google Group recently, along with several responses. Both the question and the responses were thoughtful and authentic, and we wanted our larger PACT community to have the benefit of reading them. 

The question of how to maintain enthusiasm for your work as a therapist and avoid burnout is an important one, and we hope some of these responses will resonate with you. 

Also, if you’re a PACT-trained therapist and you’re not yet a member of the PACT Google Group, request to join today! You’ll find valuable information and become part of a vibrant community of dedicated PACT therapists seeking to do their best work. 

Question: How Do PACT Couple Therapists Find Grounding and Maintain Enthusiasm for the Work?

I am a new therapist. I graduated last summer and got off the ground in a private group super quickly. All throughout my practicum and...

By Ed Coambs, MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, LMFT, CFT-I™
PACT Level 2 Therapist

Why is couples therapy important for the two of you?

For me, it comes from seeing and experiencing the relational, psychological, and physical pain that comes up around money and relationships. 

Early in my marriage, money became an overwhelming source of pain, confusion, anxiety, and distress. Over the course of my life, I have watched and experienced profoundly painful things happen related to money in my family life with nowhere to turn to sort through what this would mean. 

• An ex-wife suing her ex-husband multiple times to the point of bankruptcy
• A sibling struggling to make ends meet while my life flourished financially 
• As a child experiencing my mom’s criticisms of my father's spending on home improvement projects 

There is so much more to each of these story segments and yet they are all related and connected in complex ways to my sense of self, mind, brain, and body....

By Doris Montalvo Moll
Clinical Psychologist
PACT Level 3 Therapist

Purpose

This work stems from a concern of mine, an initially unarticulated feeling that I have had for some time. This feeling arose during both clinical and nonclinical situations in which I heard statements, such as "I am too dependent," "I have problems with my partner that should not affect me so much," "I do not intend to depend on anyone,” "You should not make your decisions thinking about someone else." I’ve usually heard women say these kinds of things.

Since I am a PACT therapist, my vision of the couple relationship has to do with the idea of interdependence, or mutual dependence. However this concept is complicated at a theoretical level. It has different meanings that are not always related to what we understand from the PACT perspective. In addition, interdependence is not a concept known or used by the general population. 

Therefore, the purpose I have in writing this paper is to explore...

By Krista Jordan, PhD
PACT Certified Candidate

PACT therapy is a highly dynamic form of couples therapy developed by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT. What distinguishes PACT therapy from all other forms of couples therapy to date is the integration of one of the newest areas of psychology and psychiatry — interpersonal neurobiology. This subfield focuses on the interaction of the brain and nervous system within and between humans.

Sessions are typically two to three hours long. While PACT therapy was developed originally to help couples in severe circumstances, it can be applied to almost any pairing. This includes parents and children, siblings, or even friends. If a couple (or pair) has very high levels of distress, sessions may need to be shorter (closer to an hour) but more frequent (instead of once a week, they may meet two to three times).

PACT & Attachment Theory

To develop PACT, Stan took important developments from interpersonal neurobiology and merged them with a...

By Nicole McGuffin, PsyD, LPC, BCN
PACT Level 3 Therapist

There is confusion about personality disorders. According to the DSM-5 (APA, 2013) a list of pathological symptoms and traits categorize a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). The DSM-5 narrowly classifies this group of people by grandiosity, needing admiration, having entitlement, and lacking empathy. These traits are critical in the understanding of NPD. However, this route struggles to capture issues of self and affect regulation including feeling inferior, low self-esteem, vulnerability and inferiority, emptiness, fearing boredom, emotional distress, affective reactivity, and rage (Caligor & Stern, 2020). 

Section III of the DSM-5 (2013) introduces The Alternative Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD). Its requirements include both personality functioning impairments and pathological trait elevation. It covers a broader range and is more inclusive of characteristic difficulties in identity,...

PACT Founder Stan Tatkin has had a busy year promoting the principles and rewards of secure-functioning relationships. 

As a clinician, author, and frequent podcast guest, Stan pours his energy and expertise into caring for the smallest union of human primates — couples. In his latest book and over the airwaves, he dissects the common couple conflicts he has seen partners repeat throughout his career. 

Stan compels us to stop, just stop, look each other in the eye, and find common ground. Of course, relationships can and should be positive and fun-loving, but Stan cautions that for love relationships to last, partners must mutually abide by the key organizational principles that they create to avoid a chronic loop of arguments. 

In these podcasts Stan rinses, washes, and repeats the formula for genuine connection in secure-functioning relationships. He reminds us that as human primates, we constantly misunderstand each other and thus are prone to quick, negative...

By: Jess Cleeves, MAT, LCSW

PACT Level 2

It’s inevitable. If you see individual clients, you will work with someone who is struggling in their primary partnership. While we’re prepared to support an individual’s healing process, we have a profession-wide blind spot; few of us are trained to ethically and effectively support individuals whose clinical concerns are partnership-related. In fact, our superpowers in treating individuals may end up acting as the couple’s kryptonite. 

Relationships Show Up in Individual Therapy

Our training and daily interactions as individual therapists constantly hone our abilities to empathize and validate our clients. We commit to believing that our clients’ experiences are, indeed, their experiences. While we also push our clients to evaluate their experiences toward their own growth and transformation, doing so when the client’s focus is their romantic relationship poses a particular challenge; we can...