#810: Terry Real — The Therapist Who Breaks All The Rules

0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:10 The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today teaches people how to save themselves and their relationships
0:00:15 when they are on the brink. He is known as a turnaround expert. And what he teaches,
0:00:20 tactics and strategies are incredibly practical. I’ve used them in my own life. His fans include
0:00:26 Dr. Peter Atiyah, Kevin Rose, and many others. And he breaks all the rules of therapy, which is
0:00:31 part of what makes him very, very interesting to me because the results are undeniable. Terry Reel
0:00:36 is a nationally recognized family therapist, author, and teacher. He’s known for his groundbreaking work
0:00:42 on men and male psychology, as well as his work on gender and couples. His book, I Don’t Want to
0:00:47 Talk About It, Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, the first mainstream book ever written
0:00:52 on the topic of male depression, is a national bestseller. That really put him on the map in a
0:00:57 big way. His new book, Us, Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship,
0:01:02 is a New York Times bestseller. And I’ve also featured snippets of one of his audiobooks,
0:01:07 Fierce Intimacy, on this podcast before as a guest episode because what he teaches can be applied
0:01:13 immediately in all of your relationships, I would go so far to say. Terry’s Relational Life Institute
0:01:19 offers training for therapists and workshops for couples and individuals. And I will tell you in advance,
0:01:25 chances are you are going to disagree with some of what he says in this episode. So don’t throw the
0:01:30 baby out with the bathwater. If something gets your hackles up, just breathe and continue listening
0:01:37 and you will find something of value that you can apply in your life today or this week, sometime soon,
0:01:44 I promise you. You can find all things Terry at TerryReal.com. That’s T-E-R-R-Y-R-E-A-L.com.
0:01:50 We’re going to get right to a very wide-ranging and tactical conversation right after a few words
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0:05:33 Optimal, minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.
0:05:35 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:05:37 Now would have seen an appropriate time.
0:05:38 What if I did the opposite?
0:05:42 I’m a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
0:05:54 Terry, so nice to see you. Thanks for making the time for the show.
0:05:57 Oh, it’s wonderful to be here, Tim. I’m a big fan.
0:06:04 And I am a big fan. And it all started with two people. I would say Peter Atiyah first on the topic
0:06:13 of male depression and then Kevin Rose on couples therapy specifically. So we’ve had, I suppose,
0:06:21 indirectly and directly a few years, or I’ve had a few years of Terry Reel. And I thought that I would
0:06:29 share more of Terry live and in person with my audience for a number of reasons. And as we
0:06:34 discussed before recording, I thought we would start with some stories. Story time with Terry. And I will
0:06:37 cue it with bread.
0:06:40 Pumpernickel.
0:06:46 Pumpernickel. Exactly. As all good stories begin. Pumpernickel. So could you fill in the blanks with
0:06:47 that particular story, please?
0:06:55 So as you know, Tim, my specialty, a couple on the brink that no one else has been able to help.
0:06:59 That’s what I’ve been doing for 20 years. And that’s what I teach. So here’s a couple on the
0:07:07 brink. The issue was that he was a chronic liar. I teach my therapist, you pay attention to what people
0:07:11 report, you pay attention to what they do in front of you, and you pay attention to how you feel.
0:07:17 And he’s one of these guys, I walk in and I go, the sky’s blue. And he goes, well, not really blue.
0:07:25 It’s really, the guy is a champion evader. So I get that. He’s an evader. Then I ask a relational
0:07:31 question. A standard therapist would think, oh, where’d you get that? No. There’s somebody else on
0:07:38 the other side of that habit. He learned it. So I say to him, who controlled you growing up?
0:07:46 He’s an evader. Who is he evading? Sure enough, dad, military man, how he sat, how he ate,
0:07:52 his friends. I said, well, what did that little boy do with that controlling father? And Timmy smiles.
0:07:59 And that’s the smile of resistance. I like that smile. Very mischievous smile. And he says to me,
0:08:05 ready? I lied. Dad said, don’t play with Henry. I played with Henry and told him I was playing with Tom.
0:08:15 Boy, I always teach my students, be respectful of the exquisite intelligence of that adaptive little
0:08:22 boy or girl that you were. You did just what you needed to do to get by. But guess what? You’re not
0:08:30 that little boy. Your wife is not your father. Maybe you’re on death’s door here, but maybe it’s time to
0:08:36 change this up. That’s it. One session. Of course, I don’t tell you the one sessions that don’t work.
0:08:40 I have to tell you the ones that work. Anyway, one session. They come back two weeks. That’s
0:08:46 absolutely true. Hand in hand. We’re done. And they were. They were done. Okay, there’s a story here.
0:08:52 Tell me this story. Guy says to me, over the weekend, his wife sent him to the grocery store to get,
0:08:59 say, 12 thanks. And true to form, he comes back with 11. The wife says, where’s the pumpernickel?
0:09:08 I want folks to feel this. He says, every muscle and nerve in his body was screaming to say they were
0:09:15 out of it. This is a moment my wife, wonderful family therapist, Belinda Berman, calls relational
0:09:23 heroism. Every muscle was screaming to do the same old, same old. And I took a breath. I thought of you.
0:09:30 He was borrowing my prefrontal cortex. I thought of you, Terry. I looked at my wife and I said,
0:09:38 I forgot the goddamn pumpernickel. And she looked at me, true story, and she burst into tears. And she
0:09:46 said, I’ve been waiting for this moment for 25 years. That’s the story. So in relational life therapy,
0:09:54 the work I’ve created, we talk about three parts of the human psyche. The wise adult, the part I’m
0:10:00 talking to right now, prefrontal cortex, the most evolved part of the brain, that’s the part that
0:10:05 evolved last in the human species. That’s the part that evolves last. Hey, you parents out there with
0:10:14 ADHD kids, 26 years old, chill. You got 26 years before they start to calm down. Anyway, prefrontal cortex,
0:10:22 stop and think and choose. But what makes life interesting and dicey is there are two, we call
0:10:29 them subcortical parts of the brain, automatic, you know, knee jerk response. The mature, wise adult,
0:10:38 all the way amygdala in the back is the completely flooded, wounded child part, first moments of life
0:10:44 to four or five, just flooded, just wants to crawl in someone’s lap and cry. Between these two is what
0:10:49 we call the adaptive child part. And Tim, that’s the part most of the people I see have lived most of their
0:10:57 lives in thinking that that’s an adult. And it’s not. It’s a kid’s version of an adult. And the
0:11:03 hallmark of the adaptive child part of us is that it’s automatic. Fight, flight, fawn. I got to get
0:11:08 out of here or the world’s gone. I got to stand up for myself. What is fawn? Could you explain that
0:11:12 co-dependence? Oh my God, Tim’s feeling bad. I got to make him feel good because if he doesn’t feel
0:11:19 good, I don’t feel good. Big for a lot of women, but not only women. And it’s not an adult, let me see
0:11:24 what I can do to make this relationship work. It’s an anxious, compulsive, oh my God, I got to fix this
0:11:34 guy. Okay. What we teach is shifting out of that, we call it relational mindfulness. This is the core
0:11:41 skill from which all other skills depend. The adaptive child part of us, you know, you played
0:11:47 the losing strategies from fierce intimacy in a podcast. It doesn’t want to use skills. It doesn’t
0:11:54 want to be intimate. Intimacy is scary. It wants self-protection. So, I’m going to control you. I’m
0:12:01 going to scream at you. I’m going to withdraw from you. I will never get what I want in the relationship
0:12:07 when my adaptive child is taken over. And almost all of the people I see, that’s what happens.
0:12:12 You know, skills are great, but when you’re flooded, they go right out the window. So, the first skill,
0:12:17 I call it remembering love. Remember the person you’re speaking to as someone you care about.
0:12:23 And you live with them, dummy. It’s in your interest. So, get centered in that, you know,
0:12:28 somebody wrote, wait, why am I talking? And be honest with you. Are you talking to nail your
0:12:33 partner into the ground or prove you’re right? Then take a break. I’m a big fan of break. Wait until
0:12:39 you remember you’re talking to someone you care about, and the reason why you’re opening up your
0:12:47 mouth is to make things better. Now, what makes life even more dicey is that that adaptation,
0:12:56 like the guy in the story lying, was born in a relationship. And what happens is when people
0:13:02 shift out of, I call, I speak about miserable, comfortable, happy, uncomfortable. And when you
0:13:11 move out of that into new territory, vulnerability, risk-taking, courage, standing up for yourself for
0:13:19 some, coming down and yielding for others, when you move into intimacy, you lose that old relationship.
0:13:30 And there’s a lot of, not always, but there’s a lot of unconscious guilt and loyalty. So, part of the
0:13:35 reason why we don’t change is we’re loyal to the relationships that we learn how to be screwed up in.
0:13:44 And it feels odd. I say we’re immigrants. We leave the old country and the old people behind. So,
0:13:50 a story. Here’s a story. True story. The guy comes to me. He says, you’re my ninth therapist.
0:13:55 There’s a challenge. Gauntlets down, right? Another notch in the belt.
0:14:00 I mean, my ninth therapist. Eight therapists have tried to help me. And he was screwed up. The guy
0:14:07 was an award-winning artist, a celebrated artist. You know, he’s got a bad back. He doesn’t go to the
0:14:14 doctor. He’s got rotten teeth. He smokes too much. He’s just a mess. Going to die early at this rate.
0:14:23 What’s his story? Here’s his story. It was raised by a single mom. She died of alcoholism. Didn’t know
0:14:30 his dad. Her story was, when she was a little girl, her father beat everybody up in the whole house. Mother
0:14:37 and all four sisters in her. And the little nine-year-old girl, this feisty chick, walks over
0:14:42 to her father and says, you lay a hand on my mother or my sisters and I’m going to call the police and
0:14:48 have you sent to jail. True story. Father looks at this little nine-year-old and says, okay,
0:14:55 you win. I’m not going to lay a hand on your mother or sisters ever again. I’m just going to beat you.
0:15:00 And he beat her every day of her life until she finally escaped at 60.
0:15:00 Jesus.
0:15:02 Then she became an alcoholic.
0:15:03 Wow.
0:15:04 Catholic family.
0:15:12 So here’s what I say. I say, well, I know why a therapist have failed. And he cued me. He said,
0:15:16 I said, what happens with your therapist? He said, well, sooner or later, they all care more about me
0:15:23 than I do. And then I ditch them. Okay, got it. I said, okay, I know why that happened.
0:15:34 I say, your mother, who he adored, your mother was a sainted martyr. What she did to save her family
0:15:41 as a nine-year-old girl was crawl up on that cross and get crucified. And guess what? You’re up on that
0:15:49 cross with her. And if you take care of yourself and live a life and get happy and successful and
0:15:54 intimate, you will leave her on the cross. She’s dead, by the way, but it doesn’t matter.
0:16:01 You’ll leave her. And you ain’t going to do that. So you know what? I’m not going to try and make you
0:16:06 better. I’m going to celebrate your sacrifice. And this is a true story, Tim. He looked at me and he
0:16:13 goes, my back is killing me. Do you know a good doctor in New York? And there we were.
0:16:14 So what do you do with that?
0:16:18 I got him a good doctor in New York. I mean, once there’s progress,
0:16:20 move it.
0:16:23 I got it. So at that point, he was ready to actually make change.
0:16:33 Yeah. I say, look, this is what you’re doing. I admire it. I always side with the adaptation.
0:16:40 I admire it. By the way, you’re going to die. Your mother’s already dead. She doesn’t care anymore.
0:16:47 But what a loyal guy you are. Congratulations. You really want to live like this? And he says, no.
0:16:51 Everybody else argued with him. You got to live. You got to live. No, I don’t. No, I don’t.
0:16:57 Why don’t you crawl up on that cross and die with your mother? You go, I don’t think so.
0:17:07 One of the differentiating characteristics that I appreciate about you, and I can only speak to my
0:17:12 experience with you, but I’m sure it applies to therapists you’ve trained, is taking a position.
0:17:21 You’re not playing the neutral mirror with all of your clients, which gets old very quickly, for me at
0:17:25 least, when I’ve worked with other therapists. When I ask them what they think, and they’re like, well,
0:17:33 what do you think? And it just becomes this game of echo. Why do you think it is so uncommon to take
0:17:36 positions, and how can it be effective?
0:17:43 Oh, my God. We’re taught not to, as therapists. We’re actively taught not to. God forbid you should,
0:17:49 you know, thou shalt not take sides. If you take a side, particularly if you side with a woman against
0:17:55 a man, then you have to go to your supervisor and talk about your mother for a while, and then you can
0:18:02 go back into the therapy. No, no, no, no, no. The idea is that all problems are 50-50, and common sense
0:18:11 knows that’s just bullshit. Literally, I treated a couple, the guy was an untreated, bipolar, manic
0:18:18 depressive, alcoholic wager. What was the woman’s quote-unquote contribution? She was there. That
0:18:23 was her contribution. And this was the feminist critique of family therapy. You don’t say to an
0:18:30 abused spouse, what’s your 50% of this? I mean, that’s grotesque. So, in RLT, we call it like we see it.
0:18:38 Tim, you’re a nut. And Mrs. Tim, you’re an even bigger nut, and here’s why. And here’s what I think
0:18:45 you need to do about it. So, some problems are 40-60. Some problems are 99-1. We call it like we see it.
0:18:53 So, I want to bring up some other, perhaps, concepts or ways of looking at common problems that I think
0:18:59 could help people. Could you discuss objectivity battles? Maybe paint a picture of what that looks
0:19:04 like? And this is something I found personally very helpful, by the way, not just in intimate
0:19:08 relationships, but in all relationships. So, could you speak to this, please?
0:19:14 Yeah. I’m glad you said that, because relationships are relationships. We’re doing a corporate piece.
0:19:21 We’re doing a big thing for the general public. And the same skills in work, with your kids, with your dog.
0:19:26 Although, most people treat their dogs better than they treat their spouses. But anyway.
0:19:36 okay. What were we talking about? We’re talking about objectivity battles. So, what does it look like
0:19:44 to do that the wrong way? Actually, let me go big picture for 30 seconds. The essence of my work,
0:19:51 the new book, Us, is about correcting what Gregory Bates and the father of family therapy, husband of
0:19:59 Margaret Mead, called humankind’s epistemological error, philosophical error. And here it is. We stand apart
0:20:06 from nature, and we control it. We stand apart from nature, that’s individualism. We control it, that’s
0:20:13 patriarchy. And by the way, control can be one up, that’s male, do what I say, or regulating up,
0:20:20 one down, that’s traditionally the female, enabling, don’t get daddy off. Both forms of control, all
0:20:27 bullshit. Nobody controls anything. Instead, we offer a map, and then tools to live it. But here’s the new map.
0:20:36 You’re not outside of nature, idiot. You’re inside nature, and you depend upon it. Our relationships
0:20:43 are our biospheres. We breathe them. You’re an ecosystem. You can pollute your biosphere with a
0:20:49 temper tantrum over here, but your partner will retaliate with cold distance over here. There’s no
0:20:55 escape. You’re linked. And the idea that you’re not linked is diluted. So, once you wake up
0:21:04 to the fact that I’m in it, I’m not above it, then all the rules change. Who’s right, who’s wrong,
0:21:12 who cares? So, objectivity battle. Here’s the bitter pill. Objectivity has no place in personal
0:21:20 relations. I’m sorry. The relational answer, or ecological answer, there are two ways of saying the
0:21:24 same thing. The relational answer to who’s right and who’s wrong is who gives a shit.
0:21:29 What matters is, how are you and I going to work this thing in a way that’s going to work for us?
0:21:35 And proving who’s right and who’s wrong is not the way to do that. Look, I’ve been married 40 years.
0:21:43 When my wife and I have a disagreement over accuracy, who remembered it correctly, whose feelings are more
0:21:49 valid, you know, she’s a very difficult person, Belinda. And she has this nasty way of thinking
0:21:55 she’s right and I’m wrong. I don’t know why she does that. It doesn’t work. So, let me give you an
0:22:03 example of the new world. This is a true story. Okay? Totally heteronormative. Her to him, you’re a
0:22:08 reckless driver. Him to her, you’re overly nervous. How many of us have been through this one?
0:22:15 And then everybody starts marshalling their evidence and arguing their case. No, you’re nervous. You’re
0:22:19 nervous about this. You’re nervous. No, no, you’re reckless. You tailgate. Okay, that’s an objectivity.
0:22:28 Who’s right? Who’s wrong? After one session with me, true story. Her to him, honey, start with that.
0:22:36 Change the energy. Honey, I know you love me. Right or wrong? Maybe I’m overly nervous or whatever. See,
0:22:43 she just takes the whole battle off the table by talking subjectively. Maybe I’m overly nervous.
0:22:49 Nevertheless, when you tailgate and you go switch lanes and you speed up, I get crazy. I get scared.
0:22:55 Now, when you’re driving on your own, I worry, but it’s your life. When I’m next to you,
0:23:02 you don’t really want me sitting here being terrified the whole time we’re driving. As a favor to me,
0:23:11 could you please slow down and drive more conservatively? And him to her, be, be, be. Okay. And he does.
0:23:19 What might have been a fight that lasted 40 years is done in 15 minutes because it moves out of
0:23:25 objective. Who’s the authority? Who’s right? Who’s wrong? What’s fair? What’s unfair? And it becomes
0:23:36 relational. We’re a team. You love me as a favor to me. Could you? Sure. New world. New world and new tools.
0:23:42 And just to underscore that, I remember hearing you give an example and suppose the overarching point
0:23:48 that I was going to underscore is there isn’t a threshold past which your objective data wins
0:23:55 typically, right? So, so if you think, if you think your wife is yelling at a server at a restaurant,
0:24:00 it doesn’t matter if you have an audiologist sitting right next to you with various types of
0:24:02 measurement equipment, it’s still not going to work.
0:24:05 It’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. Yeah.
0:24:10 I call this applying a scientific method to your relationship, but good luck.
0:24:17 Yeah. So I’m probably going to do a poor job of prompting this, but I found it so fascinating when
0:24:23 when I heard you present it once. And that was in effect, the same way that people sometimes
0:24:28 escalate problems where they say, dah, dah, dah, dah, then you always do this. And it’s reflective
0:24:32 of this character flaw, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you could lay it out much more eloquently
0:24:38 than I could is the same way that you can deescalate something. If you apologize for it,
0:24:42 if you’re out yourself. Yeah. Could you speak to that? Because I just thought that was such a
0:24:46 brilliant turnaround technique when I heard it, that it’s stuck with me ever since.
0:24:54 Yeah. This is a step in the critical process of repair. And either in this one or you invite me
0:25:00 back, I would love to lay out some skills. You know, we did the losing strategy. I want to do some
0:25:09 of the winning. And here’s a skill that’s part of repair. First of all, look, all of us, when someone
0:25:16 we care about confronts us with something difficult, we move into two orientations.
0:25:21 The first is objective reality. Well, that’s true. That’s not true. That’s accurate. That’s not. Well,
0:25:26 you got to understand that. And then we argue. In our heads, it’s not out of our mouths. We don’t
0:25:33 listen. We rebut. And then the second orientation we all go to is ourselves. I can’t believe I have to
0:25:39 put up with this crap. Belinda, I was just on the road telling thousands of people how to love each
0:25:47 other. And I come home and you, this is, okay. Let go of objective reality. Let go of you and take a
0:25:56 breath. And I want everybody to write this one down. Enter into compassionate curiosity about your
0:26:02 partner’s subjective experience. Let me say it again. Compassionate curiosity about your partner’s
0:26:09 subjective experience. They’re nuts. Okay. But find out what kind of nut they are. That feels bad,
0:26:16 honey. Help me understand. Who sounds like that? But that makes peace. And then when they tell you,
0:26:23 you did this, you did this, you did this, acknowledge it. Don’t deny it. Don’t minimize it. Don’t
0:26:29 rational. Yeah, but that’s not an apology. Yeah, but I did it. Land on it. And if you really want to
0:26:34 get slick, here’s the deal. Ready? This is the advanced course. You went right to the PhD, Tim.
0:26:44 Here’s what I want you to notice. Generally speaking, functional moves in a relationship are moves that
0:26:52 empower your partner to come through for you. Nobody gets this. Functional moves in a car make the car go.
0:26:58 Dysfunctional moves stop it. Functional moves in a relationship empower the other guy to give you
0:27:04 what you want. Dysfunctional moves render them helpless. So what we do, because we’re trying to
0:27:10 get heard, is we go, you did this, and last week you did that, and 10 years ago you did that, and you
0:27:18 always, and you never. The normal escalation is from this moment to trend to character. And I teach
0:27:24 people to stay particular and not do that. Because every move up that ladder renders the person you’re
0:27:29 speaking to are more helpless. And they’re either just going to get mad or leave. You did it, you
0:27:36 always, you never, you are a, you’re a slob. Okay. All right. So stay particular if you’re the disgruntled
0:27:45 one. But if you’ve been confronted, B is, yes, I did it. Here’s an A. You walk up the same ladder I’m
0:27:50 telling you not to do as the disgruntled one. I did it. It’s not the first time I’ve done it.
0:27:56 Tay, the kids and I were waiting for you. You knew dinner was at 7. You come waltzing in at 7.45. You
0:28:05 don’t call. You don’t text. It was really rude. You’re right. I did that. And I can be late. It’s
0:28:10 an issue. We know that. And when I do that, I’m being thoughtless. I get caught up in the moment,
0:28:18 and I stop thinking about the impact I’m having. And that’s really kind of selfish of me. I do have
0:28:26 some selfish tendencies. I’m working on it. Holy shit. Now that’s an apology. So if your partner
0:28:34 outs you, you did it before, you often do it, you never, you always, it’s terrible. But if you out you,
0:28:40 oh my God, your partner’s going, wow, there’s hope. This is great. It’s a funny thing.
0:28:46 Yeah. It makes me think of, I think it was Hurt Locker and the bomb defusing. It’s just like,
0:28:52 you know, it’s like, wow, nice job. Nice job with the defusing. And then of course,
0:28:56 ultimately you should be working on this issue that you say you’re going to work on or pay attention
0:29:04 to. Tell me if this is geotechnical bullshit. I’m sorry, but I have another story. One of my clients
0:29:10 told me this is true story. He said, on his wedding day, and I say this, no offense, but particularly
0:29:16 for men, on his wedding day, his father-in-law said, let’s go for a walk. Okay. He said, son,
0:29:22 I got two things for you to master. You master just these two things. Your marriage is going to be
0:29:28 great. He said, okay, pops, I’ll buy it. What you got? He goes, you’re really sorry, and you’re going to
0:29:42 work on it. Yeah. I imagine that that’ll give you a lot of payoff over a lot of miles. What is another
0:29:49 term that I’d never heard before being exposed to your work? Normal marital hatred. I got this from
0:29:55 Ed Tronick, infant observational researcher. Ed, along with Barry Braslington, was the first generation,
0:30:03 you know, since Freud, what we said about child development all came from listening to adults.
0:30:08 We didn’t watch any kids, and he was one of the first people to actually plunk a video camera in
0:30:12 front of mothers and infants, and then fathers and infants, and actually look at what happens.
0:30:19 And what he came up with, I borrowed, and it’s central to RLT, which is, the essential rhythm of all
0:30:27 relationships is harmony, disharmony, and repair. Closeness, disruption, and a return to closeness.
0:30:33 That’s where the skills come in, how to move from disruption to repair. Our culture doesn’t teach
0:30:39 it. Our culture doesn’t even acknowledge a good relationship is all harmony, just like a good
0:30:46 body is yours. A good body is like a 20-year-old’s body. A good sex life is like, you know, what you
0:30:53 had when you were two weeks into the relationship. No, all harmony is bullshit. Bullshit. One of the
0:30:58 things I like about you, Tim, is you tell the truth. You know what? You go to a cocktail party,
0:31:05 and you go, oh, there’s Harry and Shirley. They’re in their 80s. They still have sex. They love each
0:31:10 other. One of these days, I like to go to a cocktail party in here. There’s Harry and Shirley.
0:31:17 They actually split up for a year. He fell in love with another woman. He couldn’t take it because she
0:31:22 was such a drunk, but then she got into AA and got sober, and the two of them are really doing reasonably
0:31:30 well. Aren’t they cute? Just once I’d like to hear that. So we don’t deal with reality. You know,
0:31:39 the father of couples therapy back in the 50s said the day you turned to the person who was next to you,
0:31:47 it was assumed it was your marriage, and you’d say, this is a mistake. I’ve been had. This is not the
0:31:53 person I fell in love with. That said, Framo, is the first day of your real marriage. So here’s what
0:32:02 I want to say about disharmony. You ready? It hurts. It’s dark. You can really, really feel like,
0:32:09 what the hell did I get myself into? This is such a disappointment. And guess what? Your partner’s
0:32:16 probably feeling that about you, too. So I talk about normal marital hatred when you’re in that dark
0:32:24 face. You hate your partner. That’s okay. Don’t kill yourself or her. That’s okay. I’ll teach you
0:32:30 how to get through it, but it’s part of the deal for many of us. And here’s what I like to say.
0:32:35 I’ve been going around the world talking about normal marital hatred for, oh my God, what, 30 years.
0:32:40 This is true. Not one person has ever come backstage and said, Terry, what do you mean by that?
0:32:49 It’s okay, kids. Don’t sweat it. You can get through it. It’s normal. Relax.
0:32:56 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:34:24 What are some of the first steps or tools that you would recommend to someone listening
0:34:32 who agrees with what you’re saying, but has had no models for repair, has never learned how to
0:34:38 use any type of approach for repair? And this is something that your direct help and then also your
0:34:42 books have really helped me with because I did not grow up in a household with repair, right? It was
0:34:47 basically one person screams, then the other person goes to fix, which they don’t really want to do,
0:34:55 but it’s their attempt to basically quell the disaster and fury. And that’s it. Then everybody’s
0:35:00 kind of upset and it never gets addressed. That was the model growing up. What do you suggest to people
0:35:02 who want to start with repair?
0:35:08 You know, of course, I’m tempted to say, so are you a screamer or a fixer? But I won’t. I’ll leave
0:35:08 that alone.
0:35:11 I’m a fixer. I’m not a screamer.
0:35:18 Oh, okay. Lucky for your partner. But the problem is the resentment that builds up.
0:35:19 Yeah, exactly.
0:35:19 Yeah.
0:35:26 Yeah. Okay. So repair. First of all, here’s, I like to say I have a number of bitter pills to swallow,
0:35:32 but if you swallow them, things will be a lot better in your life. And here’s one of them.
0:35:41 Repair is a one-way street. Everybody gets that wrong. It’s not a dialogue. It’s not, well, these are your
0:35:48 issues with me. Well, these are my issues with you. No. You have your turn, but not then. Take turns.
0:35:55 So if you have a disgruntled partner, you are at their service. That’s the first thing to master.
0:36:01 You know, I like to say, Tim, you’re at the customer service window. Somebody comes to customer service
0:36:05 window and says, my microwave doesn’t work. They don’t want to hear you say, well, my toaster doesn’t
0:36:11 work. They don’t want your excuses. Fix the goddamn microwave. Tend to your partner and bring them back
0:36:17 into repair with you. Tend to them. Put yourself aside and tend to them. What does that look like?
0:36:28 Two things. First, do I get it? Listen. Don’t argue. Don’t rebut. Empty the well. I’m sorry you
0:36:33 feel bad. That’s beautiful. Compassion. I’m sorry you feel bad. I love you. I don’t want you to feel
0:36:39 bad. Help me understand. What feels bad? What’s it like for you? Okay. And then you reflect. This is what
0:36:48 I hear you say. Did I get it? Yeah. Good enough. Good. Two, is there something I could say or do
0:36:56 right now that would be helpful? What would you like? Who says that? And then if it’s anything
0:37:02 short of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, give it to them. Be generous. Those are the basics. I could be
0:37:10 more specific. Let me ask you a follow-up which is related to this. When someone is attempting to do
0:37:18 this but they’re having trouble biting their tongue because you ask what’s upsetting someone or you ask
0:37:24 them to describe their feelings and they say, well, when you did this, this, and this, and you disagree
0:37:29 with their assessment of reality. We already talked about where objective reality doesn’t exist. But
0:37:36 nonetheless, it could trigger visceral response. What is your advice to people who struggle with
0:37:40 that? Where it’s like, that isn’t a reflection of reality. Come on. And they want to rebut, but
0:37:45 they’re not supposed to. How would you suggest they table it? What should they say to themselves? Or do
0:37:51 you have any other pieces of advice? Well, we both know you’re a nut. Let’s investigate exactly what
0:37:57 kind of nut you are. Let’s get curious. And actually, let’s get compassion. One of the things I say is
0:38:04 no one’s a nut to themselves. You know, the paranoid who’s crouched under the desk because the Russians
0:38:12 have put germs in the ventilating system knows that we’re all going to die. And if you knew that there
0:38:18 were germs, you’d be under there with them. No one doesn’t make sense to themselves. They don’t make sense
0:38:26 sense to you. So let go of you and see if you can enter into the world of the person. When you show up
0:38:32 to our interview with a t-shirt, these are the rules of speaking. I make up. We teach people to say what I
0:38:39 make up is. No objective reality. What I make up is, you have a very casual feeling about this interview.
0:38:44 Don’t you know that you’re talking to the great Terry Reel? I’ve had a little formality. And I feel
0:38:50 really insulted. All right, you’re sitting there going, fuck you. Give me a break. If we were partners,
0:38:57 you would take a breath and you would go, okay, help me understand. What is it about the t-shirt that
0:39:03 was so upsetting to you? And then, okay, so you think it was disrespectful. Did I get that right?
0:39:08 It’s like, I don’t, you’re a nut. I know that Russians didn’t put germs in the ventilating
0:39:13 system, but I want to understand you. Look, I’m sorry that hurt your feelings. I didn’t mean to be
0:39:21 overly informal. And then if you really want an A plus, this is really parking your ego at the door.
0:39:28 I can understand how you might feel like that. And really what it is, is I can understand
0:39:34 praying, thinking the nutty things you think, if you think that way, that you would feel like that.
0:39:39 So give it to them. Be generous. I can understand how you might feel like that. Is there something
0:39:41 I could say or do that would help you feel better?
0:39:48 Got it. All right. Very helpful. I wanted to shift gears just a little bit. And we can go
0:39:53 in a lot of different directions. We can also come back to repair because, as you said already,
0:40:01 I mean, this is practically universally neglected in terms of any type of education that people tend
0:40:08 to receive, but we’ll park that for a second. I wanted to know what types of deal breakers exist
0:40:16 when you work with clients. And that could include addictions, psychiatric conditions, et cetera. But I
0:40:21 wanted you to maybe run us through what that list looks like, because I might want to double click on a
0:40:27 few of them. So if you go to my website, and I’m supposed to put in a plug for social media,
0:40:30 you can follow me. May I say how?
0:40:30 Of course.
0:40:42 Let me get it right. You can follow me at all socials at capital R real, capital T Terry, capital R real.
0:40:51 So at real Terry real, or you can go to my website, Terry real.com. Anyway, so I have an article about
0:40:59 this. Should I stay or should I go? And the tool I use is what I call a relational reckoning. And it’s
0:41:06 a question you ask yourself. Here’s the question. Am I getting enough in this relationship to make
0:41:15 grieving what I’m not getting worth my while? Let me say that again. Am I getting enough in this
0:41:24 relationship to make the pain of what’s missing? Okay with me? And if the answer is yes, it is okay,
0:41:31 then stop whining and embrace what’s good. You know, work the change to get more, but embrace what’s good
0:41:37 and stop walking around like a big angry victim. If the answer is no, it’s not enough, then do something
0:41:44 about it. Lean in and fight. And if it doesn’t work, drag your partner to hopefully an RLT therapist,
0:41:50 they’re the ones I believe in, and get an ally and get some help. And if that doesn’t work, you’re done.
0:41:57 So, okay. So in answering the question, what’s a deal breaker? Let me be clear. Deal breakers come
0:42:04 only after you’ve dragged your partner to a couple’s therapist and one that actually helps. And you know,
0:42:10 you’ve heard me say, I don’t think most do, but get one that will side with you and be an ally and take
0:42:18 that person on. Okay. Deal breakers. Basically, do they want to work or not? If you want to work and they
0:42:27 don’t, you could be done. And that could be an addiction, could be sexual acting out, could be anger, could be
0:42:34 lying, could be withholding and passive aggression. But if you’re not getting what you want, and the truth of the
0:42:41 matter is, your partner isn’t going to do the work of giving you more of what you want, you’re done.
0:42:48 And there are a lot of variations on that. Obviously, if somebody’s got an active addiction and they don’t
0:42:55 want to work on it, I would not. And people do. People go to Al-Anon and manage, but I’d prefer you
0:43:03 break up. If somebody’s a rager or mistreating you, if they violate contracts, particularly monogamy,
0:43:11 if they’re chronic liars, and if they have an untreated psychiatric condition, anxiety, depression.
0:43:17 And then, this is interesting, and I would really not trust yourself. I would only trust a professional.
0:43:28 If there’s a massive difference in the maturity level of the two people, the evolution of the two people,
0:43:38 the immaturity of the unevolved one will start to feel too painful to the more mature one, and they
0:43:40 should leave and find a different partner.
0:43:46 So, when you… I guess a few questions related to everything you just said. The first is,
0:43:54 I have to imagine that in many instances, it’s one partner who not necessarily drags the other person,
0:43:59 but convinces them to do therapy. They’re not equally enthusiastic about perhaps being in front
0:44:07 of the therapist. So, I would imagine there’s a grace period of sorts to enlist the other person.
0:44:18 So, how do you do that if one person is more resistant or stoic, and the other person is
0:44:22 the one who’s more enthused, who sort of initiated that first session?
0:44:29 It’s sort of carrot and stick. I talk about leverage, negative and positive leverage.
0:44:35 Tim, your partner is saying to you this, this, and this. She’s pretty fed up. Are you fed up,
0:44:43 partner of Tim? Yeah, I’m fed up. How fed up are you exactly? Do you believe her? Why should he
0:44:49 believe you? And what I’m doing is I’m amplifying the negative consequences. They’re there, but you’re
0:44:55 not looking at them. So, my first move is to empower your partner to be firm and speak up to you,
0:45:01 and I use that as leverage to get your interest. So, this is the negative thing that I can help you
0:45:08 avoid. And here’s the positive thing I can deliver. Would you like a happier, warmer, sexier partner?
0:45:15 Okay. And if you have kids, this is a big one. Hey, Tim, what kind of father did you have?
0:45:24 What kind of father do you want to be? I got bad and good news. If you don’t do this work,
0:45:32 you’re going to do some version of what got done to you to them. You want to do that? Would you like
0:45:38 to be a better father than the one you grew up with? Okay, well, you got to let me help you. And a lot
0:45:44 of particularly men who won’t do, it’s hard work, this work. They won’t do it for themselves. They won’t
0:45:52 do it for their witty wives. They will do it to spare their children. So, I get buy-in. And it’s a
0:45:57 combination of, this is what’s going to happen to you if you don’t change. And this is what could
0:46:02 happen for you if you do. Here’s the consequence. Here’s the reward.
0:46:08 And when you’re talking about deal breakers, could you just clarify in what sense they are deal
0:46:13 breakers? Does it mean that you will not work with them as clients until they address one of those
0:46:19 deal breakers? For instance, they have addiction to alcohol or gambling or whatever it might be.
0:46:23 I found it interesting that you mentioned the anxiety and depression because one of the topics
0:46:31 I wanted to talk to you about is male depression. And I guess I’m curious if you work with some of
0:46:37 those in tandem or if people are kind of left to their own devices to figure it out.
0:46:44 never, never do that. I never confront somebody and then let them swing in the wind. I’m always right
0:46:50 next to you telling you, okay, this is what you’re doing that ain’t working. Let me take your hand and
0:46:55 teach you what does work. And that’s different than a lot of other therapies. We get, roll up our sleeves
0:47:03 and get granular. Tim, this isn’t you. I’m just, Tim, do you notice that your face is kind of frozen when
0:47:08 you talk and you’re speaking a monotone and your wife is out of her mind right now because nobody’s
0:47:13 ever said this to you, but she, she’s bored as hell next to you. Look, this is what I want you to do as
0:47:18 we learn to, we learn for you to start speaking about your feelings. I want you to go like this with your
0:47:26 face. Animate it. I want, yeah. Let me see a little oomph here. I mean, that’s what I call micro-coaching.
0:47:32 And we roll up our sleeves and get right next to you and teach you how to do it better. We call them
0:47:42 preconditions. Addiction, acting out, psychiatric conditions. Acting out either violence or sexual acting out.
0:47:49 We will not take couples if there’s domestic violence. You go off to a safety program. You go
0:47:54 off to a perpetrator program. I don’t ask people to tell the truth to power if it’s dangerous.
0:48:02 You know, safety for, about the others, sexual acting out, addictions, psychiatric disorders.
0:48:09 RLT therapists will meet with the couple, but only to talk about the issues. What are you going to do
0:48:15 about your depression? What are you going to do about your womanizing? How are we going to settle
0:48:23 this? The idea is it would be bullshit for me to pretend that I can help you and your partner get
0:48:30 closer while you’re still engaged in this stuff. So sobriety first. I will meet with the couple,
0:48:36 but to deal with what you’re not dealing with. Then we can work on your relationship.
0:48:43 So let’s double click on your first book. I don’t want to talk about it because I know
0:48:50 Peter Atiyah, who’s an old friend of mine, of course, very well-known doc these days is a huge
0:48:57 fan of this book. I have not yet read it. I apologize for that, but I would love for you to perhaps
0:49:04 describe what people get wrong about male depression, or we could dive directly into covert depression,
0:49:10 because I’m wondering how many of these preconditions might be explained by depression as
0:49:13 opposed to being separate problems.
0:49:18 First of all, for those who haven’t, please read Peter’s book, Outlive. It’s great. In the last
0:49:25 chapter, it was about his work with me and Esther Perel, about his own psychological work. And also,
0:49:29 if I may, Peter had a podcast that we did together, and he talked about his work with me. It was very
0:49:37 moving. So look those two things up. Male depression. When I wrote that book, it’s 30 years old. It’s
0:49:43 selling as well as my new books, by the way. It’s really been a keeper. Depression was seen as a
0:49:51 woman’s disease, and I argued against that. And what I said is that a lot of men have the same kind of
0:49:58 depression that we normally think of. I call it overt depression. But a lot of men, unlike women,
0:50:06 have what I call covert depression. You don’t see the depression. You see what the man is doing to
0:50:13 defend against the depression. And many of the problems we think of as typically male may be fueled
0:50:23 by depression. So self-medication, rage, philandering, radical withdrawal, all of these may be symptom of
0:50:29 an underlying depression. A lucky guy gets what we call a dual diagnosis. You’re, you know,
0:50:34 forgive me, I can’t be, you know the joke. You’re terminal, I want a second opinion. Okay,
0:50:43 you’re ugly. It’s like, it’s like, okay, the bad news is you’re addicted. And the worst news is
0:50:48 underneath the addiction, you’ve got a depression. Lucky guy gets a dual diagnosis. Unlucky guy gets
0:50:54 one or the other. If you stumble into an addictions person, they’ll clean up your addiction, but they
0:50:57 won’t deal with them. If you go to a psychiatrist, they’ll give you a mass period of depression,
0:51:01 but you’re drinking like a fish. First, you have to deal with the defenses.
0:51:09 When they settle down and move into some level of sobriety, then the underlying depression comes
0:51:15 to, you don’t even have to go after it. It comes up. I say the cure for a covert depression is an
0:51:22 overt depression. And once the pain comes up, you deal with it. But I think part of the reason why
0:51:29 that book has lasted for 30 years is there’s a third piece, which is not only do men express depression
0:51:37 differently, but the ideology is different. Girls and women get depressed because they famously lose their voices
0:51:48 and blame themselves and turn inward. Boys and men get depressed because of what I call normal boyhood trauma
0:51:59 under patriarchy. We are taught at 3, 4, or 5 years old to deny our vulnerability, to disconnect from our feelings,
0:52:08 to disconnect from others, all in the name of autonomy. We cut off half of our humanity.
0:52:15 The feelings, the vulnerability connection, really in some ways the most rich, nourishing parts of what
0:52:22 it means to be a human. And that cut off, which is imposed on boys, I have story after story,
0:52:35 that cut off is traumatic. And it also renders you isolated and lonely. So there’s a lot of trauma.
0:52:42 That trauma becomes depression. That depression becomes acting out of self-medication. And if you
0:52:50 really want to heal someone, you hit all three layers. First, the defenses, then the depression,
0:52:59 then the childhood trauma. How do you think about teasing out when, for instance, addiction is
0:53:07 paired with underlying depression, maybe downstream of it versus independent? Because I suppose there’s
0:53:13 a risk of asking a barber if you need a haircut in the sense you go to the surgeon, they tell you you
0:53:18 need surgery. You go to the fill in the blank, right? They tell you that you need whatever their
0:53:23 specialty happens to be. Just like you mentioned with getting the single diagnosis versus the dual
0:53:30 diagnosis. So how do you determine if something is actually paired with underlying depression, since
0:53:34 that’s the sort of example we’re talking about in men, versus independent?
0:53:39 It’s really simple. When the person starts to get sober, do they get depressed?
0:53:44 And the depression that they get looks just like psychiatric depression.
0:53:48 I see what you’re saying. So if they’re a workaholic and they pair that down, does the
0:53:52 depression then have room to breathe and express itself, basically, when the coping mechanism is
0:53:55 removed in some capacity?
0:54:00 Yeah. As opposed to you remove the coping mechanism and, oh my God, I’m so much better.
0:54:16 But 99 out of 100, you go from sobriety to trauma. You have to deal with the underlying trauma. My great
0:54:24 mentor, Pia Melody, a great legend in the 12-step community, ran the meadows for 70 years. First,
0:54:31 the addiction, then the personality issues, and then underlying childhood trauma. If you don’t deal
0:54:35 with the underlying trauma, it’s going to be hard for that person to stay sober.
0:54:45 What type of approaches or modalities do you favor for working with trauma when you get to that layer?
0:54:51 We like to do trauma work with your partner sitting next to you, and we’re unique in that.
0:54:56 And I’ve got to tell you, I’ve argued against what I call toxic individualism in this culture,
0:55:04 and psychotherapy is up to its eyeballs in supporting individualism and supporting patriarchy.
0:55:09 I want to ask you about this word, patriarchy, because you have so many messages that I think
0:55:17 I want to convey to not just a male audience, but I have a very large male audience, and I feel like
0:55:24 patriarchy can be a very loaded term, and that there are matriarchal or matrilineal,
0:55:29 there are patrilineal societies, both of which function pretty well. And I’m just wondering how
0:55:36 you think about using versus not using that term, because I feel like there’s a risk that you might
0:55:41 turn off men who actually need to hear a lot of what you have to say. How do you think about that?
0:55:48 It is what it is. So let me talk about what I mean, and then we can talk about the marketing of it.
0:55:53 I make a decision between what I call political patriarchy and psychological patriarchy.
0:56:00 And political patriarchy is the oppression of women by men. It’s all over the globe, and
0:56:09 you know, it’s deadly in some cultures. It’s a very real thing. Psychological patriarchy is basically
0:56:17 traditional masculinity writ large. Oh, double back. But psychological patriarchy, traditional
0:56:29 masculinity, guys, listen up, is a system that does damage to everybody. Everybody. And does deep,
0:56:36 deep, deep damage to our relationships. What do I mean by that? Let me just take traditional
0:56:43 masculinity. The essence of traditional masculinity under patriarchy, the overarching system, is
0:56:50 invulnerability. The more invulnerable you are, the more manly you are, the more vulnerable you are,
0:56:56 the more girly you are, and that is not a good thing. And of course, we both know there’s been a huge
0:57:03 resurgence. You know, a backlash. Don’t tell us we’re bad people. I’m not talking about not being
0:57:10 powerful. I’m talking about not being dominant. There’s a difference. Rhianne Eisler talks about
0:57:17 power over versus power with. I want men to be powerful. I also want women to be powerful. I want
0:57:24 all of us to be whole. And what patriarchy does is what Carol Gilligan calls the binary. These human
0:57:33 qualities are feminine. A good man has none of them. These human qualities are masculine. A good woman has
0:57:38 none of them. And it’s what Olga Silverstein called the halving process. You take a whole human being,
0:57:47 you draw a line down the middle, half of humanity say goodbye to. That is not healthy. That’s not good
0:57:54 for anybody. So vulnerability, for example, what we do, the way we quote-unquote turn boys into men
0:58:00 under patriarchy is through disconnection. We teach them to disconnect from their feelings.
0:58:05 There’s hard research. Three, four, five. Little boys have more feelings than little girls,
0:58:10 actually. They’re more sensitive. But by three, four, five, they know better than to open their
0:58:18 mouths and say anything. They’ve read the code. So no vulnerability, no emotion, not too connected to
0:58:24 others. You’re independent. Great. Here’s what I say. I would say it to you if you showed up in my office.
0:58:31 Tim, the things you learned as a boy about what makes a good man are the very qualities that will
0:58:34 ensure that by today’s standards, you’ll be seen as a lousy husband.
0:58:44 Across the board, I’ll just deal with heterosexuals for a moment. Women want men’s hearts. They want
0:58:51 connection. Tell me what the fuck you’re feeling. Open your mouth and share with me. When I come to
0:58:59 you with a feeling, be compassionate and not dismissive. Well, guess what? All of that goes against what was
0:59:06 imposed on you as a boy about how to handle yourself as a man. But one of the things I say is moving men,
0:59:14 women, non-binary folk into true intimacy is synonymous with moving them beyond traditional gender roles,
0:59:21 beyond patriarchy. Men have to move into vulnerability and open their hearts. Women have to move into
0:59:30 assertion with love, not with harshness, but with love. And doing that on both sides moves beyond
0:59:34 anything that this culture teaches us. It’s pioneer work.
0:59:39 All right. Thank you for unpacking that. We might come back to it. I’m happy to talk about that more.
0:59:42 I have follow-up questions, but I don’t want to take us off track with the trauma question,
0:59:49 because you were talking about one of the defining and unusual characteristics by conventional therapy
0:59:57 standards is that RLT does trauma work with the partner present. That’s where I then took us on a
1:00:02 side quest with the question about patriarchy. You know, as a relational therapist who argues against
1:00:09 exaggerated individualism, look, here’s the thing. We’ve never wanted more from our relationships than we do
1:00:14 right now. It’s historically new. We don’t think historically, so we don’t get this. But
1:00:22 our parents, grandparents, a companionable marriage was plenty good enough. But we want more. We want
1:00:27 real intimacy and sustaining. We want to hold hands, walk on the beach, have heart-to-hearts, have great
1:00:35 sex in our 60s and 70s. I mean, we want to be lifelong lovers. This is new. Marriage was never built for that.
1:00:41 Go into Western literature and find me a passion at marriage. All passion is adulterous.
1:00:42 It’s new.
1:00:49 Yeah, it’s new. But we live in an anti-relational culture. That’s patriarchy. We live in a culture
1:00:59 that’s about up, down, wind, lose, right, wrong, no. We have to wake up to ecological wisdom. We’re a team.
1:01:06 We’re in this together. What do you need, honey? It’s in my interest to keep you happy. That’s the
1:01:12 new world order. And, you know, not to disarm man, but I do get these big burly guys, and they say,
1:01:18 why should I have to work so hard to please my wife? And I go, knock, knock. You live with her.
1:01:27 It’s in your interest. That’s what I teach people. It’s in your interest to learn how to do this stuff.
1:01:33 And also, I would just say, for clarification, that you mean to keep someone happy, but in a
1:01:38 interdependent, not codependent way, right? Because it’s easy to go into that fixing mode,
1:01:41 and people think they’re making someone happy.
1:01:45 You’re right. And I didn’t say, it’s in your interest to make them happy.
1:01:48 What I really say is, it’s in your interest to take care of your biosphere.
1:01:55 If you ride in the one-up, at some point we should talk about this. If you’re more in the one-up,
1:02:03 and you’re more entitled, demanding, dominant, you don’t listen, you got to come down off your high
1:02:09 horse. If you ride in the one-down, like a fixer, oh my God, oh my God, my partner’s upset,
1:02:15 codependent. You need to take a breath. What your biosphere needs is for you to be assertive
1:02:24 and be more conflictual and fight a little more. Stand up for yourself. So you have to correct what’s
1:02:31 off. It’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s what’s off for you. If you’re one-up, come down. If you’re one-down,
1:02:38 like a fixer, then assert yourself and take some risks. But both are vulnerability. When we think of
1:02:43 vulnerability, we think of sensitivity. But for a fixer like you, standing up for yourself, and oh my
1:02:51 God, they may get mad at me, that’s vulnerability for you. So what does my biosphere need? You know,
1:02:58 Carol Gilligan says, there can be no voice without relationship. So come down off your high horse if
1:03:05 you’re dominant. There can be no relationship without voice. So I would work with someone like you, and I
1:03:12 would have you, okay, I want you to identify what you’re feeling. I want you to identify what you want
1:03:18 and need right now. Don’t worry about pleasing them. What does Tim want? And I want to teach you how to
1:03:25 articulate that in a way that might get listened to. May I hypothesize about you?
1:03:26 Sure. Go for it.
1:03:31 This could be wrong, but here we go. What I make up, as we say. So you have this dominant,
1:03:33 I’m assuming, father.
1:03:33 Yeah, his father.
1:03:40 And this codependent, unhappy mother. This is what I call the unholy triad of patriarchy.
1:03:46 You wonder why so many men are love avoidant or avoiders. Well, here’s why. You have an
1:03:52 irresponsible or shut down father. You have an unhappy mother. You have, and I guarantee this
1:04:01 was you, a sweet, sensitive, big-hearted young boy. The mother doesn’t have to do a thing to
1:04:07 enmesh him, to use him. That boy looks at his unhappy mother and says, what can I do to make
1:04:13 her happy? And he lets go of what he wants and needs and becomes her caretaker emotionally.
1:04:20 Grows up, and his template for relationship is, I’m a caretaker. I’m a fixer. I got to take care
1:04:27 of them. My needs, nobody gives a shit. So what that breeds, maybe you, maybe not, is what we call
1:04:33 love avoidant. You live behind walls. Because relationships mean I surrender my, you know,
1:04:39 my needs and caretake them. I’m a human, so I need relationships. I pull them in. But once they’re in,
1:04:45 I got to keep them at arm’s length or they’ll eat me alive. So you live behind walls to protect
1:04:48 yourself. That’s that adaptive child. How am I doing?
1:04:56 I mean, you’re 100% spot on. I think at the very end, I had a question in my mind as to
1:05:01 whether I have those types of walls, because I don’t know what they might look like.
1:05:05 So perhaps, could you give me an example of what those might look like? And then I could tell you.
1:05:11 How good are you at identifying what you want in a relationship and assertively going after it?
1:05:17 I’d say pretty good at identifying. Could be a lot better at proactively going after it
1:05:21 and requesting it. Tend to be very indirect. That would be accurate to say for sure.
1:05:27 Yeah. And the cost of that indirectness is you don’t get your needs met, and then resentment grows,
1:05:31 and then whatever. So I have eight million sayings in my mind.
1:05:34 Make him progress. Make him progress. I’ve improved a lot.
1:05:44 I can feel that, by the way. I can feel that. I would teach you, the cure for love avoidance is
1:05:51 negotiation. I would teach you to identify what you want and lean in and have the daring break the rules
1:05:57 and say, hey, you know what? I don’t want to eat Indian tonight. I want to eat Japanese.
1:06:03 And the last two nights, we ate what you wanted, and tonight we’re doing Japanese.
1:06:06 Well, I don’t like that, Tim. Well, okay.
1:06:11 And, you know, for you fixers, I say, let the bad thing happen.
1:06:18 You know, that adaptive child part of you is petrified of conflict. You don’t want to make dad
1:06:23 angry, and you don’t want to make mom unhappy. You’re a fixer. You’re a good boy, and you want
1:06:30 to bring peace. Well, this is where trauma enters into our relationship. That adaptive child part of
1:06:37 you has no model for healthy conflict. It’s either yelling and screaming or giving in.
1:06:43 And, you know, we children, we look at mom and dad, we go, I’ll be that one. You looked at mom,
1:06:49 I’ll be that one. I don’t want to be dad. I don’t want to be that aggressive. So you don’t have a
1:06:55 healthy template for healthy aggression. Didn’t have that model. Yeah. Yeah, me too. I had a violent
1:07:02 father. I would teach you how to have healthy conflict and feel good about that, but it would be
1:07:11 very scary initially. So you nailed a couple of things that I want to revisit. So the first,
1:07:16 and this will come back into the patriarchy thing too, because what you do, Terry, is so powerful and
1:07:21 so important. I want as many men to listen to it as possible, which is why I’m talking about the
1:07:26 patriarchy piece. It’s not because I disagree with a lot of what you’re saying, although I do have some
1:07:32 clarifying questions. So one thing you said is, you hypothesized, right? The story you make up is
1:07:38 that I was very, very sensitive, or I was a very sensitive young kid, which is true. I was very
1:07:44 sensitive, much more so than my schoolmates. And then for a host of reasons, really also including
1:07:51 some pretty terrible childhood abuse, not from my family, ended up trying to, yeah, I’ve written about
1:07:58 it extensively, but yeah, maybe another time. But the upshot of it is that I turned that off, right?
1:08:04 Emotions, insensitivity, or reliability. So I completely compartmentalized that, locked it, put it
1:08:11 away. And that continued to be the case. And I paid a lot for that. There was some upside. There’s some
1:08:15 upside. I had a very high pain tolerance. I could handle certain things. I could be very aggressive and
1:08:22 take a lot of shots in the course of doing various things, competitive sports, business, whatever. So
1:08:27 I had some quote-unquote success from that, but there was a lot of collateral damage. And then around
1:08:35 2013, for a number of reasons, including a relationship I thought was going to end in marriage and kids
1:08:45 coming to a halt, decided to reopen the doors and sort of reactivate that sensitivity.
1:08:49 So that’s been a project for the last 12 years or so.
1:08:52 Brilliant and courageous, both. Congratulations.
1:08:59 Thank you. Thank you. And so that’s been an incredibly rewarding and challenging path thus far,
1:09:05 and it continues. I don’t regret having done that. My question, I suppose, and this might seem a little
1:09:11 out of left field, is that when you’re talking about men being available to their partners and
1:09:19 emotionally attuned, and I know I’m using different vocabulary. I agree with all of that. But I suppose
1:09:27 some people listening might feel like men and women might be positioned as equivalents in a lot of ways,
1:09:33 sort of emotional doppelgangers. And I’m just wondering if you feel like there are any patterns in terms of
1:09:38 male and female differences that you spot again and again that don’t need to be fixed, that they’re
1:09:43 actually just, whether intrinsic or otherwise, sort of differences to embrace. And I’m just curious
1:09:49 what your thoughts are there. I tend to think there are, but I’m curious what your position is on that.
1:10:00 I don’t know. Who are we beyond our socialization? I don’t know. What I do know is that the bifurcation
1:10:06 of men and women under patriarchal culture, which is virtually ubiquitous in the world,
1:10:17 is so strong. You gave up your sensitivity because your sensitivity was punished. And the playground is the
1:10:24 greatest enforcer of traditional roles. You learn. Three, four, five-year-old boys learn to keep their
1:10:31 mouths shut or they’re going to get punished. And for the guys out there, I got to say, for a girl to
1:10:39 cross into boy land is like, no, she’ll get some shit. For a boy to cross into girl land evokes violence,
1:10:47 emotional, and I’m sorry, at times, even physical violence. It’s dangerous to break the rules.
1:10:55 It’s dangerous to stand up for being whole in this culture. And I talked to parents about having their
1:10:59 boys be literate, gender literate. Can I tell you a story?
1:11:01 Of course. I love your stories.
1:11:10 So when my kids were little, I’ve got two kids. One’s a massive jock, Justin, and one is a gay doctor,
1:11:16 ballet dancer, danced professionally, and he’s got five. Anyway, they were both amazing and very,
1:11:23 very different kids. And we went off to vacation, like the Dominican Republic, and they had cornrows
1:11:31 put in their hair. The kids did that. My little one, Alexander, who turned out to grow up to be gay,
1:11:37 did his whole head in cornrows. And they were like green, no, pink and gold, his favorite color.
1:11:43 His older brother, Justin, the jock, had a couple of like Keith Richards, cool rock and roll, you know.
1:11:47 All right, it’s time to go to school. We’re back from vacation.
1:11:53 Belinda and I sit him down and go, here’s the deal. If you go to school with that in your hair,
1:11:58 you may get crap from the other kids. If you don’t go to school with that in your hair,
1:12:03 you may feel like you’ve missed out on expressing yourself. And it could be the kids are going to love
1:12:09 that stuff in your hair. I don’t know. What do you guys want to do? It’s not my decision, it’s yours.
1:12:14 And we talked to boys about, do you want to express yourself and deal with the crap you’re
1:12:21 going to get? Or do you want to comply and deal with the inauthenticity of that? It’s your choice,
1:12:27 not ours. I don’t make those choices for my boys, but it’s an on-the-table conversation.
1:12:34 So they’ve all said, sure. And as the older one, Dustin, the Keith Richards, puts his foot in the car,
1:12:41 goes, I can’t do it. And we wind up cutting his hair. His brother, Mr. Pink and Gold,
1:12:48 looks like the toast of the town, but it could have gone another way. So I would teach young Tim
1:12:57 how to negotiate his sensitivities so that when they were welcome, they were overt. And when they were
1:13:04 unwelcome, you put up a shield of toughness to protect yourself and having some sense of which
1:13:05 moment is which.
1:13:11 How did you navigate that with your boys? Like, how did you raise your boys? I’d be so curious to hear
1:13:20 more about it because there is a time to, it’s not limited to men, of course, or boys, but I think
1:13:25 there’s a lot of value placed. And I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing on competition and
1:13:30 winning and so on and so forth. And I’m just so curious, since you mentioned the jock in particular,
1:13:34 how did you think about raising those two boys? And did you raise them any differently?
1:13:41 I did. No, they were both raised similarly to one another, but they’re very different from the
1:13:47 culture at large. It’s funny, we just had our first relational life therapy annual conference,
1:13:53 and my sons got on stage with me. And the older one, Justin, the jock, was very funny. He looked at the
1:14:00 crowd and he said, you know, being the son of two therapists, the way I grew up, you want to talk to
1:14:07 me about how your nanny had sex with you when you were five or your deepest anxiety, I’m there,
1:14:13 no problem. It took me into my 20s to learn how to sit on a bar stool, have a beer and talk to guys
1:14:24 about a game. Nobody’s perfect. You know, the thing is, I want whole people. And going back to people
1:14:31 may be turned off by what I’m saying, it absolutely kills me when people describe my work as Terry’s
1:14:41 I’m trying to feminize men. No, I want whole human beings. I want smart, sexy, competent women. I want
1:14:51 powerful, big-hearted, compassionate men. We don’t need to have ourselves in compliance to the world order.
1:15:01 We can be whole. And the issue is, whole and adaptable. What is this moment calling for? And
1:15:03 I got to tell this story. This is one of my favorite stories.
1:15:04 Please.
1:15:11 So I had the privilege of going to Maasai land in Tanzania with another family who knew this
1:15:19 particular compound, these guys, very well. It took 10 hours of driving to get to them. They were
1:15:25 remote. And this is the real deal. I mean, you know, we’re talking, you know, earlobes down here and
1:15:29 everybody had, and they have spears and they kill lions. And these are real warriors.
1:15:37 So I had a men’s group with the elders for four nights running, and we talked about everything.
1:15:43 So I go like this to them. In the United States, there’s a debate about what makes a good man,
1:15:49 Marani, warrior, all one word. What makes a good Marani? Some people say a good Marani is sensitive
1:15:56 and thoughtful and kind. Some people say a good Marani is fierce and tough and no bullshit.
1:15:59 What do you guys think? Which is it? True story, Tim.
1:16:05 So this little guy has got to be 4’3 and 1,000 years old, crooks his finger, and he sounds like
1:16:12 he’s totally pissed at me. And it goes from Maasai to Swahili to English to Swahili. And this is what
1:16:19 he says. I have no interest in talking to you about what makes a good Marani. I could care less. But I
1:16:25 will talk to you about what makes a great Marani. He said, when the moment calls for fierceness,
1:16:31 a good Marani will kill you. Don’t mess with him. I mean, he’ll kill you. When the moment
1:16:36 calls for a good man calls for tenderness, a good Marani will lay down his sword and shield and be
1:16:43 sweet like a baby. A great Marani is a man who knows which moment is when.
1:16:45 That’s good. Yeah, that’s very good.
1:16:52 I want whole people who can adapt to what’s in front of them. That’s health.
1:17:04 How did you and your wife think about changing how you would raise your kids from how you were raised?
1:17:10 How do you think about that? And just be curious to hear you approach that from whatever angle makes
1:17:10 sense.
1:17:17 Well, as you probably know, both my wife and I came from terrible trauma, terribly violent families.
1:17:25 I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Four books, 40 years. Here’s probably my single most famous quote.
1:17:29 You know, they say it’s the height of pretension to quote yourself, but I’ll do it.
1:17:39 Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in
1:17:46 its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames.
1:17:53 That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow.
1:18:02 Belinda and I made a rock solid commitment that we were not going to leak the kind of reactivity
1:18:10 and violence that we grew up with on our kids. And we didn’t. We did it on each other. We had a real
1:18:19 rock’em sock’em marriage for years. We were both fighters, but we spared the children. And they know that.
1:18:27 And they’re really robust, radiantly healthy boys. I am the son of an angry, depressed father.
1:18:35 He was the son of an angry, depressed father. I have two boys. Neither of them say that,
1:18:41 and neither were their children. And that is the greatest achievement of my life.
1:18:48 I mean, it’s an amazing achievement. And I’d love to get a little more, not microscopic,
1:18:54 but granular in the sense that a lot of people say they want to change. A lot of people have
1:18:58 New Year’s resolutions and they say, you know what? I’m not going to be the diabetic my parent
1:19:03 was because I can fix it. I can change it. And they don’t change. So I’m wondering how,
1:19:09 especially since you had the rock’em sock’em experience in your marriage, what were the actions
1:19:18 you took or the strategies you had to check yourselves and ensure that you weren’t letting
1:19:22 those older inherited behaviors bleed into your parenting?
1:19:28 Well, first of all, get help. Men don’t get help. In the book one, I said,
1:19:32 a man is about as likely to get help for depression as he is to ask for directions.
1:19:39 You know, if you come from a tough background, I say this to the people I work with all the time.
1:19:48 You can’t come from what you came from and have the happy, healthy family you want without doing
1:19:53 a shitload of therapy, a shitload of work. Men’s groups, women’s groups, 12-step groups,
1:19:59 therapy, but therapy that works. But the first thing I want to say is, thank God you don’t have
1:20:04 to do this on your own because you won’t know what to do. Get help. And get help that helps.
1:20:12 Years and years of spiritual work. I’ve been meditating over 50 years and all stripe of
1:20:17 therapy work. There’s a saying, therapists are people who need to be in therapy 40 hours a week.
1:20:24 I became a professional therapist to heal myself. And then I became a family therapist to learn how to
1:20:31 have a relationship. I mean, I was so far behind the starting gate. In 12-step, one of these folks say
1:20:41 is the last phase is gratitude. I was so on the ropes. Unlike a lot of people, if I did my defaults,
1:20:46 I’d be dead now. That’s true. A lot of my friends that I grew up with are dead. If I did what I learned,
1:20:57 I’d be dead. I had no choice but to go under or reconfigure myself. And that’s a gift. The same
1:21:02 with Belinda. And we are. We’re reconstructed human beings. Belinda calls us retreads, you know,
1:21:09 like a tire. And I love reconstructed human beings. We have a lot of depth. And if I can do it, you can
1:21:14 do it. There’s a way to do it, no matter where you come from. But you’ve got to be willing to do the
1:21:16 work. And it’s hard goddamn work.
1:21:23 What do your group therapy experiences look like? I remember, I don’t think you would mind
1:21:28 me saying this. I’ll double check with them after we finish recording. But Kevin went through a group,
1:21:33 I want to say, for lack of a better way to describe it, sort of therapy experience with seven or eight
1:21:38 people. He didn’t tell me anything. Men. Men. And he didn’t tell me anything about the content,
1:21:43 of course. But it had a really big impact on him. And I’m curious what the format was,
1:21:47 what the rules looked like for a men’s group like that.
1:21:52 We start off with check-ins. How’s everybody doing? What’s on your mind?
1:22:02 And then either we move into a theme that emerges. So my practice is 10 full-pay people and four pro
1:22:09 bono at any given time. And the 10 who pay, they tend to be high rollers. So here’s a group of some of
1:22:17 the bigger mover and shaker guys in the world right now. We had a hilarious time talking for two hours
1:22:24 about how we were all petrified of our wives. So sometimes a theme will emerge. Fathers, anger,
1:22:33 self-medication, being afraid of our wife. And or as the check-in evolves, one person will like pop.
1:22:44 And I’ll go, Dave, do trauma work with you. We’re not going to do it. Just go around anyway. But if
1:22:50 you were in the group, at some point, I would say, I want to go back to that little boy who learned how
1:22:58 to be a fixer. How old were you when you first adopted that? Four or five is whatever it was. Close your
1:23:06 eyes, go into your body. Find that four-year-old boy. Ask him to come out and sit in a chair facing
1:23:12 you. What’s he look like? How do you feel toward him? What do you want to say to him? What does he need to
1:23:17 hear from you? What’s it like for him? How does he respond to what you just said? And I get into a dialogue
1:23:26 between you and this little boy. Of course, it’s very emotional. And it ends always with you saying to that
1:23:36 little part of you, I’m here now. I can take care of you. Your angry partner may not be available,
1:23:45 and that’s frightening to you. But I’m available. We don’t need her. You turn to me. And that’s
1:23:52 transformative. So I do deep trauma work in the men’s group, or we do a theme, or we just all hang out and
1:23:56 talk about what’s going on in our lives. Any or all of the boat.
1:24:02 Are there any guidelines for how people can respond to what someone else says or discloses?
1:24:07 Or I’m just thinking there are sometimes rules in organizations like the Entrepreneur’s Organization
1:24:14 and in forums and things like this, in these smaller sized groups. If somebody was thinking about
1:24:18 creating something like this for themselves, and I know it’d be good to have a professional involved,
1:24:23 of course. But are there any other rules or guidelines that you think are helpful in these
1:24:23 types of groups?
1:24:28 As you know, I have 8 million sayings, and here’s one of them. Generally speaking, unsolicited advice
1:24:29 doesn’t go very well.
1:24:31 Yeah.
1:24:38 So we all learn to have good boundaries in these groups, which we can double back and
1:24:45 talk about. A core principle of RLT is what we call full respect living. I may disagree with
1:24:52 how you think, but I hold you in respect. It’s a part of the culture of the group that we speak
1:24:59 to one another with humility. This is what I’m making up, Tim. And with respect. No one in these
1:25:04 groups that, well, a fucking asshole. How can you do this? We just don’t talk to each other that way.
1:25:07 And I never had to make that explicit. It just happens.
1:25:13 When you were talking about identifying the age of the little boy and having him sit in the chair,
1:25:20 for some people listening, they might hear echoes of, say, internal family systems, IFS. Does your
1:25:25 approach, is it similar to that? Does it differ from it? How do you think about that?
1:25:30 Let’s do this briefly, because this could be a whole. There are some similarities. For example,
1:25:38 there’s a three-part part of the psyche. What I call the wise adult has some correlation to what
1:25:43 Dick calls self. What he calls protectors and managers has some correlation to what I call the
1:25:48 adaptive child. And his exile is my wounded child. So there’s some similarities, but there are also some
1:25:55 very distinct differences. I don’t believe that the adaptations that you learned as a kid are all
1:26:04 defensive, are all about protecting the wound. And I believe there are bad parts. Dick is almost a
1:26:10 religious fervor that there’s no such thing as a bad part. No, there are grandiose, retaliatory parts
1:26:17 of you that you really need to corral. And there’s also entitlement and privilege. And it’s not all
1:26:24 grouped around protecting a vulnerability. We think that in psychiatry, too. We think all grandiose
1:26:30 behavior is a defense against shame. No, some grandiose behavior is just entitlement and hatred.
1:26:36 That’s part of our humanity. You know, I don’t think Hitler killed millions of Jews because he was
1:26:43 protecting a vulnerable part of himself. There’s more to it than that. So we take on some of the
1:26:52 issues of grandiosity and entitlement and some of the less savory parts of our humanity in a way that
1:27:00 I don’t think IFS quite does. Broadly speaking, do you think there are any new or particular challenges
1:27:07 with modern relationships, whether it be dating or marriage? Anything that is relatively kind of new
1:27:14 on the scene, in your opinion? Well, polyamory is interesting. Yeah, let’s talk about it. Fire away.
1:27:21 Belinda and I spent three months in Costa Rica and amongst the young expats who can’t find a monogamous
1:27:30 couple anywhere. And polyamory is a real challenge. Monogamy is the challenge, too. I used to say,
1:27:38 monogamy is unnatural and open marriage is like, wow, hold on. So people trying to, you know,
1:27:46 there are people experimenting with different models of intimacy. And okay, open the doors and
1:27:53 there are challenges. Yeah. I remember I was chatting with someone who had experimented with
1:28:04 every variant of polyamory and she referred to it as polyagony. That was her label for it. But I would
1:28:09 love to know, are there challenges for monogamy now that didn’t seem to exist 20 or 30 years ago
1:28:16 or that are just much more exaggerated now? Yeah, a number of things. First of all,
1:28:23 we men are trying to figure out what the hell we are. And, you know, someone wants to describe my work
1:28:29 as women have had a revolution and now men have to deal with it and no one knows what to do. Women have
1:28:38 had a revolution and they are speaking up and they are insisting on intimacy from us guys in ways that are
1:28:46 exactly in conflict with our traditional role as men. You know, Eric Erickson said,
1:28:54 it’s a sign of a healthy culture that socialization practices in childhood equip you to succeed in your
1:29:01 adult roles. And it’s the sign of a culture in transition when there’s a disjuncture between the
1:29:08 two. And for men, this is this juncture. What traditional masculinity teaches you as a boy,
1:29:16 whether you want it or not, often through punishment, by today’s standards, will give you problems in your
1:29:21 relationship. You got to be vulnerable. You got to open your heart. Literally, you have to reconfigure
1:29:28 masculinity in order to be a good partner these days. And people need help with that. The cultural
1:29:36 response to feminism and women’s empowerment has been a big backlash. You know, the manosphere and
1:29:46 that sobering movie, Adolescence, there’s a big resurgence of, I’m a man and I’m tired of being told
1:29:52 I’m bad and go screw yourself. It ain’t going to work. The toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube.
1:29:59 So what I say is, I don’t want women to stand down. I want men to stand up and meet these new demands.
1:30:03 Look, I’ve been saying this for 40 years and research has finally caught up with me.
1:30:11 personality, intimacy, open-hearted connection. The ace that we RLT therapists have in our back
1:30:17 packet is that’s what we human beings are designed for. We’re designed to be intimate. Not being
1:30:25 intimate, I know you do a lot of great work with health on your podcast. Not being intimate is as bad
1:30:30 for your body as smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. This is a hard black and white
1:30:38 research. We are born to be intimate. Moving beyond traditional gender roles is the only way to get
1:30:48 there. So stop whining, stand up, and learn a few relational skills. It’s good for you. It’s good for
1:30:54 your body. You’ll live longer. It’s good for your marriage, and it’s good for your children. And let me
1:30:59 help you learn how to do this better. That’s revolutionary. You’ve got a lot of people out
1:31:05 there. I’m so happy to be on this podcast with you, truly. You’ve got a lot of people out there.
1:31:14 I’m mad as hell, and I’m not putting up with it. We men need to reclaim our power. No. We need to open
1:31:19 our hearts and listen. And listen, here’s a simple way. You don’t like patriarchy. Here’s what I said.
1:31:27 I teach the men I work with to learn to become family men. Here’s how you’re a family man. You
1:31:33 decentralize yourself. I wrote this, and I don’t want to talk about it. A boy’s question of the world
1:31:40 is what he got for me. A man’s question of the world is what’s needed here. And I teach men to show up as
1:31:46 men and not boys. What’s needed here? You know, research on happiness is, I like black and white
1:31:54 research. If you get a gift, you’re happy. You get happier for a bit. If you give a gift, you’re even
1:32:05 happier and longer than if you get it. What men need to understand is it’s good for us to be empowered,
1:32:14 be assertive, and also to be connected and show up and ask ourselves, what’s needed here? How do I need
1:32:16 to show up here? That’s a man.
1:32:23 I like that framing, the questions and how they differ for boys and men. It does, I think, perhaps to some
1:32:29 listeners sound like men have a lot of heavy lifting to do, and women have had this revolution, and all is
1:32:37 well in woman land. Is there such a thing as toxic femininity? Is there collateral damage to all these societal
1:32:44 shifts? Yes. I’m glad you brought this up. Because in family therapy, we talk about first and second
1:32:51 order change. First order change is just a rearrangement. You know, Tommy’s truant. You get
1:32:56 Tommy and I be truant, and then Sally starts pooping her pants. It’s like, okay, well, rearranging the
1:33:03 furniture. Second order change is a revolution. No kid has to be symptomatic. In our culture,
1:33:11 there’s a lot of what I call individual empowerment. I was weak. Now I’m strong. Go screw
1:33:19 yourself. I am woman. I have found my voice. Hear me roar. No. And you get a lot of, I’m going to get
1:33:24 into trouble, but too bad. You get a lot of people in that traditional feminine side of the equation.
1:33:31 It doesn’t matter what body you’re in. You’re, as a fixer, on that feminine side. You get a lot of,
1:33:37 the people on the feminine side move from disempowerment to individual empowerment. I call
1:33:45 it, I was weak. Now I’m strong. Go screw yourself. And everybody will cheer. Mom, dad, therapists,
1:33:54 12-step sponsors, your men’s group. No. Relational empowerment is the next step. I was weak. Now I’m
1:34:00 strong. I’m going to go toe to toe with you. I’m going to tell you just what I want and need. Now
1:34:06 listen to this. What could I give you to help you to do that for me? Who sounds like that? We’re a team.
1:34:13 I love you. What do you need? Let’s work together. That’s the next step. And a lot of women,
1:34:20 early stage feminism, move from disempowerment to individual empowerment. You know, as a couple
1:34:26 therapists, often the bane of my existence is an individual therapist who’s individually empowered
1:34:34 their client right out of a workable relationship. No, I was weak. Now I’m strong. I love you. We’re a
1:34:39 team. Let’s roll up our sleeves and work on this together. That’s the new world order.
1:34:44 So we’ve covered a lot of ground. I’m looking at all my notes. There’s a lot that we, I’m sure,
1:34:49 could cover, but are there any other tools that you would like to cover?
1:34:55 Yes. I want to go back and talk about relational empowerment versus individual empowerment.
1:34:56 Right.
1:35:03 Because here’s how I say it. Under patriarchy, you can either be connected,
1:35:10 that’s you, the fixer, accommodating, self-sacrificing, peacemaking,
1:35:15 or you can be assertive. That’s more traditionally, quote-unquote, masculine,
1:35:21 independent, competent, aggressive. But you can’t be both at the same time
1:35:27 because power is power over. When you move into power, you break connection. That’s individual
1:35:34 empowerment. I was weak. Now I’m strong. I don’t care how I sound. Just listen. No, you do care how
1:35:40 you sound or you’re not going to get listened to. I teach people, and particularly women in this one,
1:35:45 or whoever’s coming up from the one down, what I call loving power.
1:35:50 And could you just, for the sake of revisiting, just describe one up, one down, one more time?
1:35:52 Because people may not have gotten that.
1:35:59 It’s what Pia called my great mentor coming out from under the great lie that a human being could
1:36:07 be inherently superior or inferior to another human being. Healthy self-esteem, which I have to teach
1:36:14 people in this culture, comes from the inside out. You’re here. You’re worthy. You’re lovable.
1:36:21 You’re a good human being because you’re breathing, period. And your essential worth can’t be added to,
1:36:28 can’t be subtracted from. This is democracy. This is one person, one vote. We’re all equal under the law
1:36:35 until recently. Anyway. This is democracy. But we don’t live like this. We live in the world of patriarchy,
1:36:44 which is one up, one down, superior, inferior, better than, less than, all day long. And the one down,
1:36:53 shame, inferiority, helplessness, defectiveness, unlovability. For 50 years, my field has focused on
1:37:00 helping people come up from that one down. Good. But we’ve almost totally ignored helping people come
1:37:08 down from the one up. Entitlement, anger, judgment, contempt, self-righteous indignation,
1:37:14 all forms of grandiosity. There’s a lot of ink now being spilled on the so-called narcissistic
1:37:20 partner, which is almost always a man. And the idea is they can’t be treated, leave them. Bullshit.
1:37:26 That’s more individual empowerment. We treat grandiose man, breakfast, lunch, and dinner in
1:37:34 RLT. Come down from that entitlement. Come down from that contempt. It’s poison for you. Let me teach
1:37:41 you how to do it. You’ll be happier. And we do. We effectively help people come down from the one up.
1:37:47 How do you do that? Just because people probably view this as very unfamiliar territory, as you mentioned,
1:37:54 50 years of bringing people up from one down. But how do you bring someone down a step back to
1:38:01 baseline from grandiosity? You have to wake them up. There are three phases to RLT. The first we call
1:38:09 waking up the client, which is loving confrontation, which most therapy doesn’t do. Once we get what you’re
1:38:15 doing, that will never work. And if you’re riding the one up, your grandiosity, then we move into trauma
1:38:23 work. What set you up to do that? And then we teach you skills. It’s all three. IFS doesn’t teach skills,
1:38:29 by the way. A lot of trauma people think you remove the trauma. You don’t need to teach skills and wishful
1:38:35 thinking. Anyway, so first we confront what you’re doing. Then we go back to your childhood roots and where
1:38:42 it came from and help you with that. Then we teach you new skills to replace it with. Why should you come
1:38:52 down from your rage and dominance and control? Why? Well, how’s it working for you? I talk about poison
1:38:59 privilege. And let me say this, and this is particularly true for men. You know, God in her wisdom has given me
1:39:08 access to the dream. The real American dream is that if you have money and fame,
1:39:15 it will transmute you. You’ll become a demigod and you’ll be happy. I treat those people. They’re not
1:39:21 happy. They’ve done well in the world, but they’re not happy between their ears and they’re miserable to
1:39:29 live with. Some so-called expert got on television and talked about aspirational masculinity and Elon Musk,
1:39:35 go to the moon. Great. Be the richest man in the world. Great. You want to be married to that guy?
1:39:43 You want to be that guy’s kid? Good luck. All of the people I treat are incredible successes in the
1:39:51 world and a mess inside. Why? The first thing I teach is the difference between gratification and what I
1:39:58 call relational joy. Gratification is pleasure, short-term pleasure. You make a million bucks,
1:40:05 great. Pretty girl flirts with you, great. I like pleasure in its place. Relational joy, which many
1:40:12 of the people I, the grandiose people in particular, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Relational joy
1:40:19 is the deeper down pleasure of just being there and being connected. And many of the grandiose people I work
1:40:24 with simply don’t know what relational joy is. They’ve lived their whole life for gratification
1:40:30 and it’s empty and they feel the emptiness and the people they live with are fed up with them and
1:40:38 they certainly feel that. So what I have to offer is relational joy. That’s the ace in my pocket because
1:40:44 that’s what we’re born for. That’s the only thing that will make you happy. Let me teach you to come down
1:40:51 off your perch and enter into being a human being like the rest of us. And let me teach you to really
1:40:58 look at what you’ve been doing. Can I tell you a story? Yes, always. A guy came in and he was quote
1:41:03 unquote depressed. Another one of these guys with five therapists under his belt. Nobody’s been able to
1:41:10 help him. And he’s on the break of divorce. And I listened to him and I go, I can’t help you with
1:41:17 your depression, but I can save your marriage. Okay. But you know, you have a very, this is a guy,
1:41:23 he literally go to work, come home, flop on the couch. His wife would be running around. They’d all have
1:41:28 dinner. She’d do the homework with the kids. She’d put them to bed and then he’d slump off the bed and go to
1:41:35 sleep, get up the next day and go to work. She’d be ready to divorce him. So you have a very mysterious
1:41:45 depression. It goes into remission at 845 and it comes roaring back at 515. When you’re at work, you manage
1:41:52 the function. When you’re at home, you’re on the couch. A million people have tried to help you with your
1:41:57 depression. I can’t, I’m not going to try. You’re depressed. Sorry. Been there. Here’s what I want
1:42:05 to tell you. True. Here’s what I want to tell you. Says what? Get off the couch. Go do homework with
1:42:11 your kids. Go help your wife with your dishes. You manage to pull yourself out of yourself from nine to
1:42:19 five. You give yourself a pass when you get home. You’re going to wind up divorced and you’re going to do
1:42:29 great damage to your children. And he looks at his wife and he says, I realize I’ve really abandoned you
1:42:36 in this family. And I made excuses for myself all these years. And he starts to cry. That’s remorse.
1:42:44 That’s open heartedness. I say he’s come out of the coldness of outer space into the warmth of connection
1:42:54 through remorse. Oh my God, I see what I’ve been doing to you. I’m so sorry. And I looked at him
1:43:00 and I said, as I say to so many people in that moment, I say to him, welcome to the planet earth.
1:43:05 Welcome to the human race. It’s been really lonely up there, hasn’t it?
1:43:11 Well, Terry, you have a lot of resources and a lot of books. Who should start where? In other words,
1:43:16 do you suggest people start with any particular book or resource? If they have a particular
1:43:23 challenge or issue, where would you point them? How can we provide a roadmap for people who want to
1:43:33 explore more of Terry real? Do the social media thing at real Terry real that covers all the social
1:43:41 media at real Terry real. Go to my website, Terry real.com. I’m pleased to say we have a lot of
1:43:47 offerings now online for the general public, of course, on self-esteem, of course, on healthy boundaries,
1:43:53 courses on relationship skills. We have little mini courses, how to come back from infidelity.
1:44:00 We have particular topic courses now that are followed up by online groups that you can join.
1:44:06 So if you’re coming back from infidelity, here’s a three-hour workshop and here’s an ongoing group you
1:44:15 can be part of. We’re doing more and more of that. In terms of books, I like Us, the new book. I like,
1:44:20 I don’t want to talk about it, the old book. And I like Fierce Intimacy. I like all three of those.
1:44:25 Yeah. Fierce Intimacy. It is quite funny because I loved Fierce Intimacy and I wanted to find a
1:44:32 Kindle edition to highlight. And could you explain why there isn’t one, at least as it stands right
1:44:39 now? It’s audio. Sounds to ask me to, you know, it’s one of those things, God was with me. I sat in
1:44:46 a booth, no notes, and I just talked for three days. And that’s Fierce Intimacy. It’s insane for
1:44:50 people who want to listen to it. You know, there’s certain people, maybe at that point,
1:44:56 the spirit was at your back. And similarly, I remember at one point I was using a meditation
1:45:00 app designed by Sam Harris, and he had this interlude, which was this commentary, and it was
1:45:04 five or 10 minutes long. And I said, could you please send me the text? Could you send me the
1:45:09 Google doc? And he said, what text? I said, what do you mean, what text? He goes, I just got in the
1:45:13 booth and riffed for 10 minutes. And I was like, okay, there are levels and then there are levels.
1:45:18 So nicely done on Fierce Intimacy. Thank you. Yeah, just a few more questions. And everybody
1:45:23 should go to TerryReal.com. I’m sure that the socials are also available from TerryReal.com.
1:45:27 And we’ll link to everything we’ve discussed in the show notes. Outside of your own books,
1:45:33 are there any books that you have gifted frequently to other people or re-read
1:45:37 more than once yourself that come to mind?
1:45:42 I’m a big fan of Jim Gilligan’s book, Violence. It’s not an easy read.
1:45:44 What was the name of the book again?
1:45:45 Violence.
1:45:46 Oh, violence.
1:45:52 Yeah. Jim was the medical director of the Bridgewater Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
1:45:56 And he worked with serial killers. He worked with Hannibal the Cannibal.
1:46:04 And he starts off as a young man taking this over. And he says to himself, if I can figure
1:46:09 out the dynamics of these guys, I can figure out what violence is. And he does in the book.
1:46:12 So that’s been a great inspiration to me.
1:46:15 Why has that been an inspiration to you?
1:46:24 I deal with male violence. I deal with violence. And both Jim and I agree that violence is the shunting
1:46:32 from the one down to the one up. From shame to grandiosity. From helplessness to attack.
1:46:37 And so it’s really, it took him 25 years to write that book and it shows.
1:46:46 You know, not to drift, but when 9-11 happened, I wrote an op-ed piece that nobody published.
1:46:53 In the piece I said, this is the first time we’ve been hit on American soil. This is a national trauma.
1:47:00 And like anything we’ve faced before. And as a trauma expert, I know that you have two choices.
1:47:07 You can tolerate the discomfort of sitting with the vulnerability and pain of that trauma.
1:47:15 And maybe asking some tough questions about why and what needs to happen. Or you can escape that
1:47:22 discomfort by a flight into one up, grandiosity, judgment, contempt, and attack.
1:47:30 And my hope for this country is we join together in the vulnerability rather than escape into attack.
1:47:33 Nobody published that. Two weeks later, we were in Iraq.
1:47:49 So I like the book. I like the book. I want people to resist the temptation of flying from discomfort into one up, superiority, contempt, judgment, and attack.
1:47:58 On all sides, the left and the right. The left is not shy about moving into self-righteous indignation and contempt either.
1:48:10 I’ll put my body on the line and be on the streets protesting your agenda and still hold you in regard as a human being.
1:48:22 I don’t have to dehumanize you in order to fight you. Gandhi knew that. Martin Luther King knows that. That wisdom is being lost all over the globe right now. It needs to be rekindled.
1:48:26 Any other books that come to mind besides violence?
1:48:28 I like Raymond Chandler.
1:48:31 Yeah, Raymond Chandler is amazing.
1:48:35 Where would you have to go start? Or do you have a favorite?
1:48:45 You know, I love lines. Belinda made my day by giving me a book called The Great One-Liners from Noir. I like noir. It’s a big sleep, I guess.
1:48:52 There’s a great line. When Humphrey Brogard meets Lauren Bacall playing Sam Spade, she says,
1:48:55 Oh, I see you met my little sister. He says,
1:48:59 Yeah. She tried to sit on my lap. I was sitting up at the time.
1:49:06 Now that’s writing.
1:49:25 All right. So speaking of one-liners, just a few more questions and then we’ll wind to a close. If you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, just to get a message, a line, a quote, a question, anything like that to many, many millions of people, what might you put on that billboard?
1:49:32 Have the courage to move beyond the defaults you were handed and do it with help.
1:49:42 Terry, thank you for taking the time today. It’s so nice to see you again. I really appreciate you carving out the time, being flexible on Start Time and covering so much ground as well.
1:49:56 You’re a wonderful interviewer, Tim. And I’m sure you’re going to edit this out, but if I dare say it, even the little I know you, I’ve grown fond of you. I’m rooting for you. So what a service you’re offering. And thank you for having me on.
1:50:19 Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Terry. And to everybody listening, we will have links to everything in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash podcast. Just search Terry or Terry real and it’ll pop right up. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Don’t forget the last piece. And thanks for tuning in.
1:50:31 Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
1:50:40 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
1:51:03 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It’s kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.
1:51:18 And these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.
1:51:28 If you’d like to try it out, just go to Tim dot blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim dot blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
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1:54:56 There are no material conflicts other than this paid testimonial.
1:55:00 And of course, all investing involves risk, including loss of principal.
1:55:02 So do your due diligence.