A Look at How PACT Is Expanding

By The PACT Institute

The Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy® (PACT), developed by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, has always centered on building secure-functioning relationships through attachment, neurobiology, and arousal regulation. 

Over the years, the model has evolved to address the ubiquitous, human “baked in” neurobiological limitations that affect all interpersonal relationships between all human beings. Stan’s research and commitment has expanded to the human condition writ large. This includes how and why human relationships across time and cultures fail to maintain safety and security, mutual happiness, and resilience. 

These revelations go beyond psychology to consider human neurobiological features and limitations of the human brain and mind. They affect all our relationships. And, all reinforce the need for secure-functioning behavior guided by purpose-centered social contracts to protect each other from each other. 

PACT now has a stronger emphasis on prevention: shared partner responsibility for relationship design, purpose (What/why are we?), vision (Where are we going/pointing?), and mutual governance (How do we keep the peace?). 

This shift invites couples to move beyond emotional connection and become co-creators of a principled secure-functioning system that partners design to ensure safety and security, happiness, and win-win outcomes. 

Top-Down Emphasis on Relationship Structure and Organization

As the PACT model evolves, its emphasis has shifted more clearly toward structure, organization, and mutual governance within the couple system. A foundational truth has emerged: Without a shared purpose and a clearly defined vision for their relationship, even the most loving and egalitarian unions will eventually falter. 

PACT therapists are now encouraged to guide couples toward creating a shared framework — or a mission statement that defines why they exist as a couple and what they want to achieve together.

In this view, the PACT therapist sees both partners as fully autonomous adults, sharing equal power and authority unless they explicitly agree otherwise. They are not passive participants in their relationship, but rather its active designers. Partners are responsible for deciding the kind of relationship they want to build — what values it upholds and how they will protect and maintain it. 

PACT places new emphasis on helping partners consciously and declaratively co-create their relationship culture. It’s not just about resolving conflict or improving communication. It’s about shaping a durable, flexible system designed to withstand stress. 

Couples must not only collaborate in creating their relationship, they must also govern each other to protect one another from harm — and from each other — especially during times of distress.

Psychobiologically, the expectation that couples behave as a secure-functioning system under pressure gives therapists a valuable lens through which to assess social-emotional development, executive functioning, and moral reasoning. Partners who can be pro-self and pro-relationship at the same time, particularly when it’s hardest to do, demonstrate the kind of collaboration and mutual care that secure functioning requires. 

Shared Principles of Governance

In its continued evolution, the PACT model has shifted strongly to include social contract theory (consistent with justice and fairness, game theory, non-linear theory, and secure-functioning principles). This move reframes the couple relationship not as one driven primarily by feelings or emotional connection, but as an intentional, principled agreement between two (or more) autonomous adults. 

These individuals come together on mutually determined terms and conditions — deal or no deal — based on fairness, justice, and mutual sensitivity. This lens elevates the couple’s purpose beyond preference or personality into the realm of shared moral operating principles. In other words, re-orientation to team-think (aka: a two-personal psychological system of interdependence).

At the core of this shift is the idea that couples must be the authors of their shared relationship mythology. Rather than allowing unconscious patterns or inherited family dynamics to dictate the shape of their union, partners are called to define a central organizing principle that governs their relationship. 

For many this might be something like, “We put our union first, above and beyond everything and everyone else, because everything and everyone is affected by our happiness and effectiveness as a collaborative team.” 

Though that is purely a made-up idea, partners could create meaning and purpose around it, thus making it so. However, the idea would have to make sense (aka: work) for both partners as a central organizing principle. And so it’s an invention with a practical purpose; a beginning in the formation of their new culture with its own morals and ethics. 

A Framework of Fairness and Intention

With this framework, the couple understands that the strength of their bond is not just for their own benefit — it’s a functional necessity for all other domains affecting their lives: mental and physical health, happiness, creativity, children, career, and community.

Importantly, there is no universal “right” purpose. The point is not to impose a standard hierarchy of values. Rather, the point is to help partners articulate and align around a design bespoke to each partner’s vision of what this union should be and how it should run in order for it to work both today and going forward. 

Wise forward-thinking adults must plan for their devils, not their angels, because devils we all can be. Due to various conditions — stress, distress, emotional/cognitive load, aging, impulsivity — we are, as a species, unreliable. Whether the couple prioritizes their children, spiritual commitments, personal growth, or professional goals, what matters most is that both parties fully agree and can coherently defend their rationale. 

This level of clarity creates a principled infrastructure — a personal moral code — for how the couple will operate. This infrastructure enables the secure-functioning relationship to thrive under stress, maintain trust, and sustain intimacy over time.

How to Make Agreements That Last

For agreements to function under stress, they must be formed with care and intention. Too often, couples make agreements in haste or under emotional pressure, only to abandon them when they’re most needed. PACT emphasizes that agreements must be properly constructed — thoroughly understood, personally meaningful, and mutually vetted — or they will not hold up during times of conflict or when either least wants to fulfill the agreement.

The process begins with identifying areas of sameness and agreement before diving into specifics. This method anchors the couple as equal stakeholders, reducing the likelihood of getting lost in details that divide rather than unite. 

From there partners must rigorously test the proposed agreement: Do they both understand it the same way? Why does each person want it — for themselves, not for their partner? What could go wrong, and are there acceptable exceptions?

In this way, partners become co-legislators — working on solutions together, not working on each other. They give each other permission to enforce their agreements, allowing for automation, reflexive behaviors, and forgetting. However, the understanding must be absolute or it won’t work. 

We can forget or react reflexively, but when reminded, prompted, cued, or confronted, the other must immediately cooperate, yield, shift, or apologize without condition. They must consider these agreements or principles to be “blood oaths,” which means to violate the pact (no pun intended) is to face the consequences as an absolute deal-breaker. 

Why Make Agreements

Without both partners willing to act as expected if, after being reminded, the other fails to cooperate immediately, that failure can only mean one thing: the violating partner will not tolerate being governed. Any assurance of safety or reliability vanishes. The only good-faith response is for the other to actively withdraw from the union in protest. This harsh reality must be part of a well-constructed agreement/principle/rule/law, or agreements lose their meaning. 

Social contracts of this kind have been the only thing that has kept human beings from harming one another. Love or any other emotion has no effect. Do the research. Though painful and disappointing, it is still a fact of human nature. This is true of proper parenting, effective governing and leadership, effective societies, companies, teams, and any other form of unionizing involving people, particular unions that are free, fair, and voluntary. 

Secure functioning is strictly a behavioral, tactical matter and is devoid of personal grudges, emotional motivation, or other one-person only interest. It’s a matter of policy, not personalities. Its purpose is to protect feelings, prevent future fighting and conflict, and provide space for positive emotions to emerge…by design. 

Human beings by nature cannot govern by emotion or by one-person thinking. We already do that naturally, and that is, has always been, and will always be our obstacle in sustaining order, peace, interpersonal trust, safety, and security over time. 

Containers: Structured Assessments and Interventions

One of the most powerful clinical tools in the evolving PACT model is the use of containers — structured, time-limited, task-oriented frames that serve both therapeutic and diagnostic purposes. These frames, or exercises, provide the couple with a clear task, offer the therapist a purposeful role, and generate real-time data about how the partners function together. While often playful in tone, containers are designed to provoke just enough stress to surface meaningful, observable reactions.

Within these frames, the therapist can assess social-emotional functioning, attachment style, arousal regulation, and even subtle signs of developmental delay or deceptive behavior. Because the interaction is happening in the here-and-now, containers allow for immediate feedback and a deeper understanding of how each partner responds under relational pressure.

Containers help therapists test and retest clinical hunches, track progress over time, and anchor learning in embodied experience. They also offer opportunities to disrupt maladaptive patterns through psychodramatic techniques. 

In this way, the container is not just a method — it’s a microcosm of the couple’s relational system, revealing how the relationship functions (or malfunctions) under stress.

Collaborative Speech

Another way the PACT model has evolved is in its emphasis on the practical and neurobiological power of collaborative speech — the intentional use of prosody, pacing, and we-centric language to create safety between partners. 

Collaborative speech helps regulate each partner’s nervous system and reinforces the couple's shared identity. When partners match each other’s rhythm, tone, and emotional cadence, they are better able to co-regulate and remain connected under stress.

Therapists can use collaborative speech techniques as interventions, including:

• Role-play exercises that help partners mirror each other’s tone and pacing
• Voice-check rituals to slow speech when tension rises
• Re-scripting conflict from “you always” to “we could” 

By micro-tracking prosody and phrasing during high-stress moments, therapists can highlight how even subtle shifts in vocal tone can trigger or soothe a partner. These practices turn the act of speaking into a shared regulatory tool, shifting couples away from adversarial patterns and toward alliance. 

Ultimately collaborative speech reinforces the couple’s status as a secure-functioning team capable of joint problem-solving, emotional attunement, and mutual protection — even outside of therapy.

Polyamory and Consensual Non-Monogamy: Extending Secure Functioning

While PACT was originally oriented toward monogamous couples, partners increasingly bring non-monogamous dynamics into sessions — and PACT has evolved to accommodate non-monogamous and polyamorous partners. At the heart of this expansion is the understanding that secure functioning is still essential, and it can be scaled across multiple partnerships.

In polyamorous relationships, the primary dyad serves as the foundational unit for co-regulation and safety. Therapists must help partners create explicit multi-person agreements that define how time, emotional energy, and resources are shared and how additional partners — or “thirds” — are integrated. Structured communication protocols, including who gets informed first and how, help prevent misattunement and relational rifts. 

Through structure and organization, shared purpose, agreements, and collaborative speech, polyamorous partnerships can operate as secure-functioning systems. This evolution of PACT reflects both clinical flexibility and a respect for relational complexity.

As the PACT model continues to evolve, its core commitment remains the same: helping partners build secure-functioning relationships grounded in sensitivity, fairness, trust, and mutual respect.