By Lindsey Walker, LMFT
PACT Ambassador and Level II Therapist
https://lindseywalker.com/

Couples therapists often struggle with how to sort through the many feelings and complicated relational dynamics that arise in couple therapy sessions. You have two people, both hurt. Each come with a different perspective, combined with years of history and unresolved conflicts, and they are looking to you to figure it all out.

By walking into your office, they invite you into their relationship. As a therapist, you join them through attunement. As a PACT therapist, you combine your attunement with identifying the couple’s observable behavior, which enables you to determine what they have not yet integrated into a secure-functioning relationship.

When you mind your own experience with couples, while simultaneously observing how they interact with each other, they provide you with real-time information about who they are and how they handle their relationship. As you gain this information,...

By Lindsey Walker, LMFT
PACT Level II practitioner
Seattle, WA
http://www.lindseywalker.com

You’re lying in bed, curled to one side, your blankets pulled up tight and cozy. It’s cool and quiet, and the night has long fallen around you. “Ah, sweet slumber,” you think, “just moments away.” But wait, what’s this? Your mind is racing as if you’ve just had your morning cup, and your heart is fluttering to match. You’re far from slowing down, yet a little voice inside keeps trying to convince you it is time for bed and you’ll be drifting off to sleep in no time.

If only you and your partner hadn’t just had that fight.

Mere inches away, the love of your life is also pretending to sleep. What a fantastic game of charades you find yourselves in—each keeping up your act while guessing if the other is actually sleeping or is just lying there and waiting. You both want the other to reach out, say something, do something,...