Okay the truth is a you can’t really “read” this and I listened to it over a year ago. But I should have posted about it then so I am trying to make up for that now. This is Dr. Stan Tatkin’s masterful audio program explaining the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy, or PACT. I have been using this approach with couples for the past 6 years and cannot offer enough endorsement of it’s principles and techniques. PACT has helped me help countless couples of all races, religions, sexual orientations, economic classes and with every problem you could imagine. The best explanation I can give about PACT is that it addresses the “bios” level of programming (patterns) in our hard-drives (brains) so that everything we do in relationships runs more smoothly. For those of you who are technophobic (which I am but I just happen to have had the “bios” thingy explained to me once), the bios level of your computer is the level you are almost never aware of. It is operating all the time in the background, quietly running the show. If it gets messed up though, look out. None of your other programs will run. The whole computer will seize up. So that’s the level that you need to make sure is running smoothly or else the rest of it doesn’t even matter. PACT hits the bios level.
A couple I finished working with not too long ago proved by “bios” theory beautifully. They came in one day and said “we’ve been thinking it might be time to stop seeing you regularly”. They went on to say that they both looked at the lists that they had made before seeking me out. These lists were the things that they both wanted to see change in the relationship. The amazing thing to me was that now they said “we looked at the lists and realized that all of those things are either fixed or no longer important to us but we don’t remember discussing them in here with you!”. Ah, bios. See, we fixed the deeper problems that were quietly running their relationship amok but that they did not know were there. They were so stuck on fixing the “I hate it when you don’t do your share of housework” programs/patterns that they did not realize that there was a deeper level that was driving the rest of the mess. When we worked on that everything else miraculously (or really not so miraculously!) shifted. The rest of the stuff either got fixed without my help or they no longer cared about it because they were so thrilled about the rest of the relationship that those things seemed trivial now.
To me, that’s the elegance of PACT. It gets right to the underlying issues without getting stuck in the daily “who left the cap off the dang toothpaste” stuff. It’s surgical. Which makes is not only more effective but so much faster than other theories I have been exposed to. And as much as I love doing therapy, no one wants to be in therapy forever.
So there you go. Buy it. Listen to it. If you are a therapist it will improve your work. If you are in a couple it will improve your relationship. If you aren’t currently in a couple it will give you some great stuff to think about before you get into the next relationship. The whole download takes about 5 hours, which sounds like a lot but I found that if I just played it while I was driving back and forth to work each day that I had listened to the whole thing in less than a week. So don’t let the length intimidate you. Also don’t let the idea that it has some neuroscience intimidate you. As much as I love the brain that was NOT my best class in graduate school. Dr. Tatkin is gifted at making difficult stuff easy to understand so that even those of us who could not currently pass a high school chemistry class can still understand his work.
I hope you give it a try.
Cheers,
Dr. Jordan
