PACT Couple Therapy
For couples whose arguments escalate before either of you can stop them
By the time you notice the argument has gone wrong, it usually already has. Your voice is louder than you meant it to be, or you’ve gone flat and quiet and can’t find your way back to the conversation. Afterwards, neither of you can quite explain it: you both know what you meant to say, and neither of you said it. PACT starts from the least blaming explanation there is for that — your nervous systems got there before your minds did. Long before you chose your words, each of you read the other’s face, tone and posture, decided something was a threat, and moved.
Vista Counselling provides PACT couple therapy in Langley, BC with Dr. Kevin Klassen — a Registered Marriage & Family Therapist, trained in PACT and counselling couples since 2009 — in person at our Langley office or online across BC.
The argument starts in your nervous system, before either of you speaks.
What PACT Is
PACT — a Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy — was developed by Dr. Stan Tatkin, and it sits at the meeting point of three things: attachment, the developing brain, and the biology of stress. Its starting claim is a practical one. A couple isn’t two individuals having a conversation; it’s a two-person system in which each person’s nervous system is constantly reading the other’s — face, eyes, tone, posture, timing — and reacting to what it finds, in a fraction of a second, well below the level of deliberate thought.
That’s why so many arguments feel like they happen to you. When your system reads threat, it does what systems do: it fights, it flees, or it freezes. One partner gets louder and faster. The other goes still, or reasonable, or absent. Neither of those is a character flaw and neither is a choice, which is why arguing about who started it never settles anything.
PACT also has a name for what it’s aiming at: secure functioning — a relationship where the two of you operate as a team with real agreements about how you’ll treat each other, especially when one of you is a mess. Not endless compromise, and not conflict avoidance. Something closer to a working arrangement between two people who have decided that the relationship’s job is to keep them both safe, and who have worked out specifically how it’s going to do that.
What We Work On
Who Does the Work
Dr. Kevin Klassen, PsyD
Registered Clinical Counsellor & Registered Marriage & Family Therapist. More than 20,000 clinical hours since 2009. Trained in PACT, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, and the Gottman Method — the RMFT designation reflects specific, extensive, supervised training in working with couples and family systems.
What Sessions Look Like
We usually begin with a joint session and an individual session with each of you — enough to understand the relationship as each of you experiences it, and to see how each of your systems tends to move under pressure.
PACT is a more physical way of working than most couples expect. Rather than discussing last Tuesday’s argument in the abstract, we work with what’s happening between the two of you in the room: where you’re sitting, whether you’re facing each other, what your faces are doing, and the point at which one of you starts to escalate or disappear. Kevin will often slow a moment right down and ask what each of you just noticed — because that half-second is usually where the argument originates.
What we don’t do here: PACT as Dr. Tatkin teaches it also uses video recording and playback, and is often delivered in long sessions or intensives. Kevin doesn’t record sessions, and we don’t run PACT intensives. He’s trained in PACT and uses its understanding of arousal and attachment in the room, alongside Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy and the Gottman Method — an integrated approach shaped around the two of you rather than one branded protocol.
Standard sessions are 50 minutes. Because this way of working sometimes benefits from more room, longer sessions can be arranged — by request, or where Kevin recommends it.
PACT Couple Therapy FAQs
What does PACT stand for?
A Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy. “Psychobiological” is doing the work in that name: it means the approach takes seriously that a relationship runs on two nervous systems as much as two minds — attachment history, stress responses, and the split-second reading partners do of each other’s faces and tone.
Is PACT evidence-based?
PACT is built on well-established science — attachment research, developmental neuroscience, and the study of arousal and threat response — and applies it to couple therapy. It’s a younger approach than EFT or the Gottman Method and has a smaller body of outcome research behind it. In practice we use it alongside those two rather than instead of them.
Do you record sessions or run intensives?
No. Video review and long-format intensives are part of how PACT is often delivered, and Kevin doesn’t do either. What he does use is PACT’s understanding of arousal and attachment, worked with directly in the room.
PACT, EFT or Gottman — which do we need?
Usually some combination, and that’s a conversation rather than a form to fill in. Broadly: Gottman is the most concrete and skills-forward, EFT goes underneath the fight to the attachment question driving it, and PACT works closest to the nervous system and the moment. Couples whose arguments escalate before anyone can think often find the PACT angle most immediately useful.
Will you make us sit and stare at each other?
Not without warning, and not as a gimmick. PACT does work with proximity and eye contact because they’re the fastest route to what’s actually happening between two people — but it happens at a pace you can tolerate, with the reasons explained, and you can say no. Nothing in this work depends on being ambushed.
What if one of us shuts down completely?
Then that’s the most useful thing in the room. Shutting down isn’t stubbornness or indifference — it’s a nervous system doing the only thing it has left. PACT treats it as information rather than a problem to be overcome, and a good deal of the work is about making the conversation survivable enough that shutting down isn’t necessary.
What does it cost?
Sessions are 50 minutes. The fee is $200 per session. Many extended health plans reimburse Registered Clinical Counsellors — check whether your plan covers RCCs or RMFTs. Longer sessions can be arranged where they’d be useful — just ask. Full details, including our cancellation policy, are on our FAQ page.
Is PACT right for us if there’s been violence or intimidation?
Not usually, and not as a first step. Where there’s violence, intimidation, or coercion, we’d start with individual support instead. If this is your situation, VictimLinkBC is free, confidential and available 24/7 — call or text 1-800-563-0808.
PACT Couple Therapy in Langley
We see couples at our Langley office — free on-site parking, easy access from Highway 1 — serving Walnut Grove, Brookswood, Murrayville, Surrey, Cloverdale, Aldergrove, and the wider Fraser Valley, in person and online across BC. Directions are on our location page.
Not sure whether this is the right fit for the two of you? Contact us with your questions or book an appointment online — we respond within 1–2 business days.
Related Services at Vista
PACT is one of three approaches in our couples counselling work — alongside Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy and the Gottman Method — and all three inform how we approach marriage counselling. When the thing setting off the escalation is something one of you carries on your own — old trauma, anxiety, a nervous system that has been on alert for years — individual counselling or EMDR may run alongside the couples work.