Most of us enter relationships believing that love will help us handle conflict. But we learned, as partners and as clinicians, that love doesn’t automatically teach us how to slow down when we’re triggered, how to be vulnerable with what we’re feeling, how to stay connected while disagreeing, or how to return to each other after a rupture. These skills are learned, not inherited. The PACER is a model for conflict resolution that we present and explicate in detail in our book, Love. Crash. Rebuild.

Before the PACER model existed, we (Mark and Haruna) were a couple with a strong bond but very different emotional languages. We had the intensity, the affection, the commitment. What we didn’t yet have was a reliable way to interrupt the patterns that emerged when we felt hurt or scared. Even small misunderstandings could escalate quickly. We tried to repair, but sometimes our attempts made things worse. Our reactions—shaped by history, culture, and family dynamics—often took over.

The PACER model didn’t come to us in a moment of genius. It accumulated over time—piece by piece, conflict by conflict, session by session. And eventually, the same five steps we used to steady ourselves became the framework we now teach couples who are trying to find their way back to each other.

The earliest seeds of PACER were planted in moments when we kept talking long after we had stopped thinking clearly. In one of the first arguments we ever deconstructed together—one that started with something trivial but spiraled quickly—we realized that the problem wasn’t the issue itself. The problem was that we couldn’t stop ourselves from reacting to each other.

Pause became the first step because nothing that follows matters if partners can’t interrupt the emotional surge. We learned three important lessons:

It is the deliberate act of creating just enough space to allow the body and mind to come back online. Interpersonal

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