Therapeutic approaches, and the certifications behind them
Couples usually ask two fair questions before booking. What kind of therapy is this, and who says you know how to do it. This page answers both. It lists the methods used in this practice, the body that certifies each one, and the situations where each works best. Everything here can be checked, since the Gottman Institute, ICEEFT, and the PACT Institute all keep public directories of the clinicians they have trained.
Dr. Vance built her practice across three of these models rather than one, and the reason is clinical. Some marriages are stuck at the level of skills. Others are stuck deeper, in attachment wounds or in what two stressed nervous systems do to each other. A therapist trained in one model will often run a good treatment aimed at the wrong problem.
Gottman Method couples therapy, Level 3 trained
John Gottman started filming couples in a Seattle lab in the 1980s and coded the small stuff: who reached toward the other, who turned away, whose heart rate spiked mid-argument. Four decades of that observation, much of it alongside his wife Julie, gave this field something it almost never has, which is the ability to predict from a short recorded conversation which marriages were heading toward divorce. Contempt turned out to be the strongest warning sign of all.
The therapy that came out of it is practical. In session you practice raising a complaint so it lands as a complaint instead of an attack, and you learn repair moves that work while an argument is still hot. Friendship gets rebuilt deliberately, because the research says it is the foundation the rest stands on.
Level 3 is the highest Gottman training tier before full certification review, and it requires supervised clinical work rather than a weekend seminar. In this practice, Gottman methods lead whenever the fighting itself has become the emergency.
More than 40 years of observational research with thousands of couples, including longitudinal studies predicting divorce from conflict behavior.
THE GOTTMAN INSTITUTE · RESEARCH SUMMARIES
Emotionally Focused Therapy, Advanced certified
EFT was developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, and its central move is to make the couple's negative cycle the problem, so that neither partner has to be the villain. The work happens at the attachment level, in the protest, pursuit, and withdrawal running underneath whatever the argument appears to be about.
It is also the most heavily validated model in the field. Research compiled by ICEEFT shows 70 to 75 percent of couples moving from distress to recovery and about 90 percent showing significant improvement, with results holding at follow-up.
Her EFT certification is at the Advanced level through ICEEFT, in Dr. Johnson's own training lineage. In her caseload it leads most often in two places, marriages that have gone quiet and lonely rather than loud, and affair recovery once the early stabilization is done.
70 to 75 percent of couples move from distress to recovery; about 90 percent show significant improvement. Effects are stable over time.
ICEEFT RESEARCH SUMMARY
PACT, Level 2 clinician
PACT, the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy, was developed by Dr. Stan Tatkin. It combines attachment theory with neuroscience, focusing on what your nervous system does in conflict before your thinking brain gets a vote: flooding, shutdown, the slammed door.
PACT sessions are experiential and sometimes filmed, watching micro-reactions in real time. Level 2 requires direct training with the PACT Institute beyond the introductory tier. Dr. Vance reaches for PACT when a couple's fights are fast, physical in the nervous-system sense, and over before anyone knows what happened.
Grounded in attachment theory and neuroscience, with a growing outcome literature on secure-functioning relationships.
PACT INSTITUTE
Discernment counseling and Prepare/Enrich
Two specialized certifications bracket the main methods. Discernment counseling, in the Doherty model, serves couples deciding whether to work on the marriage at all; it has its own section under services. Prepare/Enrich is the leading assessment for premarital and married couples, and it anchors the premarital counseling offered here.
How three methods integrate in one treatment plan
Integration is not improvisation. The assessment phase produces a map of your cycle, your attachment patterns, and your physiology under stress. The map determines the sequence: Gottman skills to make conflict survivable, PACT regulation where flooding blocks the work, EFT for the repair underneath, in whatever order your relationship requires.
Her doctoral research at Virginia Tech on the neurobiology of attachment and repair is what makes this integration disciplined rather than eclectic. The same research keeps the practice current; she still teaches at the University of Maryland and publishes in peer-reviewed journals.
The method is chosen for you, not before you
You do not need to pick between Gottman method couples therapy, EFT, and PACT before calling. That is the clinician's job, and the choice comes out of your assessment, not a brochure. Describe what is happening in a free 15-minute call and you will hear which approach would likely lead and why.
See also the issues each method treats and the evidence in detail.