The Five-Step Path From Rupture to Repair

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.

1. Pause: Interrupting the Reaction

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:

• A pause is not withdrawal.
• It’s not punishment.
• It’s not disengagement.

It is the deliberate act of creating just enough space to allow the body and mind to come back online. Interpersonal anxiety is an experience that can spread rapidly between partners, often without either fully understanding how or why. Pause is the antidote to that contagion.

When we started practicing pause seriously, the quality of our conflicts changed. We were no longer fighting in a fog. We were taking a moment to breathe, regulate, and remember who we were talking to.

2. Accountability: Turning Toward Ourselves Instead of Each Other

Accountability grew out of the humbling realization that we were both contributing to the friction we experienced. Not intentionally, and not maliciously. But inevitably. We each had sensitivities and interpretations that preceded the moment itself.

In one moment that reflects many early conflicts, we found ourselves arguing about a plan that had gone sideways. Each of us felt misunderstood. Each assumed the other should know our internal experience. Underneath anger were softer emotions—fear, disappointment, longing—that neither of us named until much later.

Accountability means saying, “Here is my part of what’s happening.” Not as self-blame, but as self-awareness.

Erich Fromm (1956) described love as an active discipline, something that requires attention, intention, and honesty. Accountability is one form of that discipline. It is the willingness to examine what we are bringing into the moment: the fears we don’t speak, the stories we tell ourselves, the reflexes we inherited from past relationships or early life.

When both partners take accountability, shame decreases, and curiosity increases. We start seeing the pattern instead of the villain.

3. Collaboration: Facing the Pattern Together

Collaboration is where the relationship starts to become its own entity. We began to see that neither of us was “the problem.” The problem was the choreography we unconsciously performed when we were upset. The narrative therapist Michael White (2007) wrote about the externalization of the problem. He stresses that people (us!) are not the problem; it's how they (we!) are communicating that is the problem.

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Once we could name our dance, something loosened.

Instead of Mark feeling pressured and Haruna feeling dismissed, we could articulate what happened between us in those heated moments. We began saying things like:

• “This feels like the pattern starting.”
• “I think we’re in that loop again.”
• “Let’s figure out what’s happening to us.”

Collaboration is the step where the couple becomes a team. Not because the conflict disappears, but because both partners can look at it together rather than through the lens of threat.

4. Experiment: Trying Something New When Old Habits Don’t Work

Experiment was born out of trial and error in our own marriage. We realized we couldn’t think our way into new patterns—we had to try them.

Sometimes the experiment was tiny:

• Changing the way we open a hard conversation
• Agreeing to start a conversation when we catch ourselves blaming the other
• Practicing saying, “I need a pause,” instead of going silent or escalating
• When things were really heated in the beginning, we would hold hands and say, “Just for today, no fighting.”

Emmanuel Ghent (1990) wrote about the difference between surrender and submission. Submission is compliance; surrender is the willingness to drop defenses in service of genuine connection. Experiment is a form of surrender, an openness to discovering something new about ourselves and each other.

Our early experiments were awkward, imperfect, and sometimes laughable. But they worked. They created new emotional experiences that slowly rewired old expectations.

5. Reset: Returning With a New Story

Reset is the quiet, steady emergence of a new relational identity. Not because the relationship goes back to what it was, but because the couple integrates what they have learned and becomes capable of resolving conflict more quickly.

Reset showed up for us in small, almost unremarkable moments: places where we expected a rupture but instead felt steadiness. Times when we didn’t spiral in the ways we once had. Moments when we found our way back to each other without losing ourselves.

Reset is the recognition that “we are not who we were before, and our relationship isn’t either.”

It represents confidence—not just in each other, but in the process the couple has built.

Why PACER Works

The PACER model works because it gives couples a way to organize what feels chaotic. It takes something overwhelming (rupture) and turns it into something manageable. It invites partners to move from protection to connection, from fear to curiosity, from instinct to intention.

And it keeps the couple oriented toward the most important truth of all:

• Rupture is inevitable.
• Repair is learnable.
• Every time you repair, your relationship grows stronger.