PACT Interviews and Workshops

Live Workshop | Stuck in the Past: How to Move Forward When Threat Memory Hijacks Couple Therapy by Dr. Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, founder of PACT

August 28, 2026 8:00am – 10:30am Pacific Time

Why do couples get stuck in the past? Couple therapy sessions get derailed when the past intrudes into the present. Old injuries, grudges, betrayals, misattunements, and unrepaired hurt become organized as living memory. The couple may sincerely want repair, yet the body keeps warning: don’t trust, don’t relax, don’t move on. Threat reactivity is a survival mechanism everyone carries. It's part of the human condition. Once you can see it clearly, you'll be able to help even your most "stuck" couples find a way through.

In this 2.5 hour workshop, PACT founder and developer Dr. Stan Tatkin will explore the neurobiology of threat, threat memory, pattern recognition, emotional regulation, and the couple as a self-reacting system. 

Participants will learn how threat memory can make therapy feel intractable, why traditional rehashing of past events often deepens the loop, and how clinicians can help partners interrupt threat states before they take over the session.

Stan will offer practical ways to recognize when memory has hijacked the therapeutic process, stop the action, reset the couple’s state, and train partners to become better regulators of one another in real time. 

You'll leave with a clearer model of what's actually happening in your clients' brains, and concrete tools to help them get unstuck. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Describe how threat memory can intrude into present-moment couple interaction and interfere with repair, trust, and forward movement.
2. Explain how pattern recognition, salience, negativity bias, and subcortical threat systems can lead partners to experience old danger as current reality.
3. Identify clinical signs that a couple has entered a threat-memory loop rather than a productive repair process.
4. Distinguish between working through the past and repeatedly re-litigating the past in ways that reinforce dysregulation.
5. Apply state-regulation interventions to interrupt escalation, including stopping the action, slowing partners down, redirecting attention, and using brief reset procedures.
6. Use co-regulation principles to help partners track each other’s face, eyes, voice, and body for signs of threat activation.
7. Teach partners to prioritize each other’s state of mind over the content of the argument when threat begins to take over.
8. Recognize why some betrayal cases become organized around the endless search for “what I still don’t know,” and how that search can become clinically paralyzing.
9. Formulate stuck couple cases as two-person psychobiological systems rather than two separate individuals with competing narratives.
10. Increase therapist self-regulation when working with highly threat-organized couples, including recognizing when the therapist’s own state is being pulled into the couple’s loop.

Plus These Great Benefits!

Can’t make it live? Purchase in advance to receive access to the workshop recording for 3 months. Note: The recording is only available if you register before the live event begins. 

* CE credit is available for this workshop. 

* No PACT training is required to attend.

* Become a PACTplus: Alumni Community member now to reserve your seat for FREE.