Most couples therapy talks about the relationship. PACT works inside it.
The Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy — PACT — was developed by Dr. Stan Tatkin, a clinician and researcher who spent decades studying how the brain, the nervous system, and early attachment shape the way we love.
The premise is simple, and it changes everything: conflict in relationships isn’t primarily a communication problem. It’s a nervous system problem.
When you and your partner argue, withdraw, pursue, or shut down — those aren’t choices, exactly. They’re automatic responses. Protective strategies your nervous system developed long before this relationship, often long before you have any memory of them. Your body learned what danger looked and felt like. Your body learned what it needed to feel safe. And now, in your most intimate relationship, those same systems are running — often completely outside your awareness.
PACT works by getting underneath the argument to what’s actually driving it.
In a PACT session:
Rather than sitting back and talking about what happened at home, we work in the present moment. I ask you to face each other. I watch what happens between you — in your face, your posture, your voice, the flicker of expression that passes in half a second. I slow it down. I help you see it.
We work with your nervous systems directly. Not against them — with them. Because your body’s responses aren’t problems to overcome. They’re information. They’re telling you something important about what you need, what your partner needs, and what the relationship needs to feel safe.
What PACT is built on:
PACT integrates three bodies of research that transformed how we understand human connection:
Attachment theory — the science of how our earliest bonds with caregivers wire our nervous systems for relationship. Pioneered by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, and extended into adult partnerships by researchers like Dr. Tatkin.
Arousal regulation — how the nervous system moves between states of activation and calm, and how two people in a relationship co-regulate each other constantly, often without knowing it.
Neuroscience of the face — the remarkable science of how human faces communicate safety or threat to one another in fractions of a second, and how attuned attention to these signals changes everything in a relationship.
Who PACT is for:
PACT is effective for couples at every stage — those in crisis, those who’ve tried other approaches without lasting change, and those who simply want to go deeper. Because it works at the level of the nervous system, it often creates shifts that talking alone can’t produce.
It is the approach at the center of everything I do.