Interview With Nerea Rodríguez: Couples Therapy From The PACT Model

The PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy) model is an innovative and insightful approach to addressing relationships. Through tools from neuroscience, attachment theory and arousal regulation, PACT explores how emotional bonds can be strengthened by addressing non-explicit aspects, such as unconscious emotional responses and forms of self-regulation in each individual..

Chatting with Nerea Rodríguez

Nerea Rodríguez, Clinical Psychologist and Sexologist, is here to answer all your questions about couples therapy and the PACT model.

Why do human beings tend to look for a partner?

Given our social nature and vulnerability at birth, biology has endowed us with innate mechanisms that allow us to bond and attract our primary attachment figures at birth. This, if all goes well, provides us with protection and growth in an environment that facilitates our physical and psychological development, in short, our SAFETY.

As adults, we still need to feel safe, appreciated, and important. The couple relationship fulfills this function, it provides that place in which we feel in a space of intimacy and complicity that offers us a privileged bond, our couple bubble, just as occurs in the relationship of the baby with its main attachment figure.. Some turn to friends, family, self-help books, or directly to less healthy ways such as substance use. This search for security is one of the reasons we paired up.

It is often said that our society is increasingly individualistic. Is the concept of a couple in crisis?

I would go further, I believe that our value system as a society is in crisis. Couple relationships throughout human history have reflected the social, cultural and religious context. In the current moment in which we live, the individual is put before the community, the immediate above the long term and the novel is more attractive than usual. All of this, of course, conflicts with the concept of a couple that makes us look long term and deal with permanence..
With this as a paradigm, we also intend for our relationship to satisfy our individual needs, and if not, we think that this relationship is not for me, without realizing that the relationship is that third entity that is between us and that has needs. own, which will often conflict with the individual needs of each of the members of the couple.

What are the main reasons why couples come for consultation?

In my consultation I see how the reasons are repeated: difficulties in communication, infidelity, jealousy, sexual difficulties, birth of a first child that requires a readaptation of the couple system and even couples who come for consultation to clarify if they want to stay together or No.

However, from the couple model that I work with, we see these reasons for consultation simply as the tip of an iceberg, as the symptoms beneath which something deeper beats, which has to do with what each of us carries out. a couple relationship, based on our personal, family and, above all, bonding history, that is, with how we have developed through the relationship with our main attachment figures.

What is the PACT model that you work with, and how does it apply to relationship problems?

PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy) is the psychobiological model, as its name suggests, created by Professor Stan Tatkin, Doctor of Psychology. Although it draws on many theories and models of psychotherapy, The three main areas of PACT are: Attachment Theory, Evolutionary Neuroscience and Arousal Regulation Theory.

It involves bottom-up work, in which the integration of arousal and affect regulation as psychobiological processes, in combination with the consideration of attachment styles and neurobiological deficits, creates an approach to work with the most primitive self. couples.

What differentiates the PACT model from other couples therapy approaches?

Unlike other so-called conflict models, which work with triggers and content problems, that is, with the tip of the iceberg, PACT is a capacity model in which we work with the non-explicit, the non-verbal and with the capabilities socio-emotional, defenses and deficits that disturb the relationship, leading the members of the couple towards safe functioning in which they regulate each other and stop threats.

In PACT, a key concept is co-regulation, that interactive regulation that allows the couple to maintain a window of tolerance in which they are able to feel calm and connected. Without a doubt, this model has marked a before and after in my daily work with couples.

How is a typical Couples Therapy session carried out under the PACT model? What specific techniques are used?

At PACT we are constantly researching and many assessment techniques are themselves an intervention. Knowing how each member of the couple is linked, based on their attachment history, what makes them deregulate and what regulation strategy they usually use to return to calm, allows them to become experts of each other, learning to touch the appropriate keys, always from the premise of reciprocity, to calm or activate your partner.

Furthermore, we prefer to see the difficulties they present in person, so we use staging through action and the body, with techniques typical of Psychodrama such as role playing or sculpture.

In your experience, what are the main benefits that couples usually obtain from working with the PACT approach?

Every day I see in my consultation how having a biological explanation and knowing how their brains work gives them peace of mind, since it allows them to understand others from their shortcomings and deficits, which reduces criticism and the attribution of lack of interest. or bad intention on the part of the other, as an explanation for their relationship problems.

This allows them to read their partner between the lines and go beyond the triggers, allowing them to see each other as a team.since PACT will always encourage focusing on the RELATIONSHIP, which makes it easier for the couple to go from a vision of YOU and ME to a vision of US for whom THE RELATIONSHIP COMES FIRST.

What are the main keys for a relationship to work in the long term?

When we feel attracted to someone, having common hobbies, good sex or being similar, can lead us to embark on a relationship, however, all of these are factors that can change over time, so what is really going to keep us united in the long term is: