An Interview with Therapist Terrence Real
Terry Real, LICSW is a family psychotherapist, best-selling author, internationally-recognized speaker. He is a senior faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge, MA and the founder of the Relational Life Institute (RLI), which offers workshops for couples, individuals, and parents who wish to develop deeper connections in their relationships.
Amelia Worley: Thanks for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Amelia Worley, a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. I'd like to welcome Mr. Terry Real. Mr. Real is the family psychotherapist, best-selling author, and teacher. He is also the founder of the Relational Life Institute, which offers workshops for couples, individuals, and parents who wish to develop deeper connections in their relationships. Mr. Real has numerous publications on relationships, depression, and psychological issues that men face, including his upcoming publication, “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.” Before we get started, Mr. Real, can you please let us know a little more about yourself and what made you interested in studying relationships?
Terry Real: Oh gosh, there's an old saying, a psychotherapist are people who need to be in therapy 40 hours a week. I first became an individual therapist 40 years ago, and I think I did in order to gather the skills I needed to have the conversation with my depressed, violent, loving father that I needed to have in order to free myself from the legacy and not become him. And I did. I learned how to be an individual therapist and I healed a lot of my trauma. I then went on to family therapy and couples therapy, literally in order to learn how to have a relationship. I come from a really dysfunctional family, we all come from a really dysfunctional culture, and I didn't know how to do it. So, I became a professional, and then in 1995, I published a book called, “I Don't Want to Talk About It,” which was the first book ever written about male depression. And it did real well to a lot of depressed men in America. And I was getting calls all over the country, "Can you help me with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?"
And what I began to realize was that moving men out of depression was synonymous, in my mind, with opening their hearts and reconnecting them. The way we turn boys into men traditionally in this culture is through disconnection. Feminism has worked for 50 years on girls and women's disempowerment. The womb for boys is disconnection. We teach them to cut off from vulnerability, from their emotion, from others. And I began to believe that the healing move for boys and men is reconnection, connecting them to their hearts and to others. And so my work was grounded in the restoration of relationality with men. And I began to feel like the best way to do that is in their current relationships. So, I began to invite partners and, in some cases children, into the therapy room to teach these guys how to live relational lives, how to live lives of authentic connection to themselves and to others. And so the work naturally gravitated away from doing individual therapy to working to transform people individually, but through their relationships and the restoration of relational capacities.
Amelia Worley: So to begin, can you describe what relational life therapy is and what methods it uses to help couples in therapy? Additionally, how is it different from regular couples therapy?
Terry Real: We break a lot of rules. Let's see if I can name some. The relational life therapy, first of all, we're not neutral. And when I was a couples therapists, the corner rule was thou shall not take sides. If you took sides, you had to go to your supervisor and talk about your mother for a while. We're not neutral. Some issues are 50/50, but some are not. Some are 70/30, some are 99/1. And specifically, I came out of it through my work with men and through a feminist perspective. Women across the West are asking for more emotional intimacy from us guys, then traditional masculinity raises us to deliver. The essence of traditional masculinity is invulnerability. The more invulnerable you are, the more manly you are. And women are asking men to move into vulnerability, to move into their emotions, to open their hearts, to be less defensive, to be more sharing. In other words, to have a broader, a repertoire of relational skills.
So we agree with that. We take sides. We side with the person who is asking for more intimacy in the relationship, and the way you're going about asking for it may not be very skilled. I'm not saying women are angels, but the demand for increased intimacy is good for us. And so we're not neutral. We're perfectly capable of saying, "Mrs. Jones, you're a nut and Mr. Jones, you're an even bigger nut, and here's why, let me tell you what's going on." The other thing is that we're lovingly confrontational. There are three phases to relational life work. The first, I call: waking up the client. This is where you hold the mirror up to the client about what their maladaptive responses may be born of childhood trauma and adaptation that are blowing their own foot off. This is what you're doing that will never get you more of what you want.
And the confrontation is, I call it: joining through the truth. Anybody can club somebody with the truth, but this confrontation is so loving, so empathic, so on the side of the person you're talking to, that they feel closer to the therapist through the confrontation rather than more resistant and distant. So the first phase is waking up the client. The second phase is trauma work. This is where that adaptation came from. You were adapting to something. So I do deep trauma work in the presence of the partner, another rule we break. We don't find trauma work out to an individual therapist, we do deep trauma work, inner child work while the other partner is sitting there. There's some contraindications, but if there're going to be vicious or whatever, but by and large... Excuse me. Sorry. But by and large, it's much more powerful to have the partner who's been on the receiving end of the person's immature adaptations, see where the whole story comes from. It opens their heart.
And then the third phase is: teaching. This is what you've done wrong, this is where that maladaption comes from, and this is what right would look like. And I think it's the combination of all three of these, confrontation, deep trauma work, and skill building that produces transformational change quickly. So that's what we do. We are not neutral, we judiciously self-disclose. We're not a blank screen. This is not transference-based therapy. And another thing is that we're at least as interested in grandiosity as we are in shame. For 50 years, psychotherapy has dwelled on helping people come up from the one down of shame. In RLT, we're also interested in helping people come down from the superiority contempt entitlement of grandiosity. And I believe as a couple's therapists, you must be able to help people come up from the one down and also down from the one up. Doing one without the other is insufficient. So there are a lot of things that are very distinct about relational life work.
Amelia Worley: I really like that. Can you identify any common myths society believes about relationships?
Terry Real: Well, my new book, if I can do this, “Us”, being released June 7th, it is all about taking on what I call the toxic culture of individualism. And what we know from interpersonal neurobiology these days is that the idea of a free standing individual is mythic. We don't self-regulate, we co-regulate one another all day long. Our central nervous system is not designed to be alone and self-cystic. We are designed to be in relationship. And this whole book is about shifting from an individualistic patriarchal model that says we're above nature and in control of it, whether the nature we're above and in control of is our bodies, “I've got to lose 10 pounds",” our thinking, “I've got to be less negative,” our partners, our kids, society, the world at large. And the whole book is about trading in that mythic idea of power over dominion, for a much more realistic idea of collaboration and cooperation.
When we move out of you and me, win, lose adversarial thinking into the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that can remember that we're a team, that this is a relationship that we are in a whole, all of the terms that we live with shift. For example, from a relational perspective, the question who's right and who's wrong is: who cares? What matters is how are we going to work in a way that's going to work for both of us? And so the first order of business is shifting out of what I call you and me consciousness, which is subcortical, triggered by trauma about survival into what I call the wise adult part of us, prefrontal cortex, the part of us that can remember the gestalt, the whole, that we are not striving above our marriage, for example, but we're in it. I call this replacing the hubris of power and control with ecological wisdom and humility.
Our relationships are our biospheres. We're not above them, we're in them. You can choose to pollute your biosphere by having a temper tantrum over here, but you'll breathe in that pollution by your partner's withdrawal or lack of generosity over there. You and they are connected in an ecosystem. And once we wake up to an ecological systemic consciousness, this isn't about you versus me in some power struggle. This is about how we are going to operate together in a way that works for both of us, then a whole range of new skills and new ways of thinking open up to us.
Amelia Worley: So, going off of that further, how does that shift from individualistic thinking to relational thinking. How does that heal problems in relationships then?
Terry Real: Well, it is the difference between, for example, "You're a reckless driver." "No, I'm not." "Yes, you are." "No, I'm not." "Yes, you are." "No, I'm not." I call this objectivity battles. Who's right and who's wrong? And instead, think of this, "Honey, you may be a fine aggressive driver. I'm not arguing that, but I want you to know that when you tailgate and change lanes and speed, none of which you deny, I get myself very nervous sitting next to you. I know you love me. It would be the world to me if as a favor to me, you could tone down your driving so that I could feel safer in the car. Would you do that for me?" And the person next to them goes, "Sure, I'll do that for you." Problem solved. Are you an aggressive driver or not? That could go on for 50 years. “Could you tone down your driving for my sake so I could feel safer?” “Sure, I’ll do that for you, Honey.” Problem solved in 10 minutes. That's the difference between approaching an interactional problem individualistically and relationally.
Amelia Worley: Okay. So also in your book, “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship”, you talk about how healing of the self can occur in relationships. You mentioned that this is not done by controlling our partner, but rather by coming to terms with the ignored parts of ourselves. Can you expand on that idea more?
Terry Real: Well, we all marry our unfinished business, we all marry our mothers and fathers. Falling in love is the conviction that this person is going to heal me, or at the very least, I'm going to avoid all that nastiness that I grew up in. The real relationship comes when you realize that your partner is precisely designed to throw you into the soup. Now, that doesn't mean you're in a bad relationship, it means you're in a truly intimate relationship. What matters is what do you do once you're in the soup? Now, most of us in this culture will try and heal ourselves by getting from that partner what we didn't get, and by often retaliating when we don't get it.
The new news comes when we deal with our own inner wounding and our own adaptation. We stop asking the partner to heal us, but as we move from these triggered automatic adaptive responses to a more thoughtful adult response, we do something different in the moment and they do something different in the moment, and that heals our trauma. Not that they get it to us, but that something different happens between us because I have done something different inside my mind. Can I give you an example?
Amelia Worley: Yeah, definitely.
Terry Real: The essence here is understanding what I call the adaptive child part of us. Subcortical automatic response fight, flight, fix about survival. And when we feel unsafe, the autonomic nervous system scans our bodies four times a second, am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? If the answer is yes, we say seated in the prefrontal cortex, we're here and now we can be thoughtful. If the answer is no, I feel I'm in danger, which has everything to do with being trauma triggered. Then I will click into whatever I use as a kid to adapt to that danger. And I will repetitively do that in my relationship, even though it never gets me what I want. The essence of this book is about how to cultivate the skill, the wisdom of in the heated moment, shifting from that automatic response, what Dan Siegel calls the reactive brain, to the wise adult prefrontal cortex, the integrated brain.
So let me give you an example. A guy comes to me on the brink of divorce. I specialized in couples on the brink of divorce. He's a chronic liar. He's the kind of guy I say to him, "The sky is blue," he says, "t's aquamarine." He won't give it to me. So quickly, I identify what we call in relational life therapies, his relational stance. His stance is evasion. This guy has a black belt in evasion. So when you think relationally, you can figure this out. It seems brilliant when you're not thinking relationally, but I have a saying, show me the thumbprint and I'll tell you about the thumb. If he's evading, the question is as a child, who did he have to evade? And so, I ask him, "Whatever the adaptation is, what were you adapting to?"
So I say to him, "Who tried to control you growing up?" Brilliant. His father. "Tell me about it." Military man, how he ate, how he drank, how he dressed, everything. I said, "How did you deal with this controlling father?" He says, with a smile, that's the smile of resistance, he says, "I lied." Brilliant, brilliant little boy. I teach my students, always be respectful of the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child. You did exactly what you needed to do back then to preserve your integrity and grow, lying. Brilliant. Only I have another saying, adaptive then, maladaptive now. You're not that four year old boy, your wife is not your father. So we surface all of those.
They come back two weeks later, it's an absolutely true story, and they're holding hands, "We're cured." "Okay, tell me." She sent him to the grocery store for 12 things, true to form, he comes back with 11. She says to him, "Where's the pumpernickel?" He says, "Every muscle and nerve in my body was screaming to say they were out of it. And on this day, in this moment, I took a breath, I looked my wife in the eye and I said, I forgot. And she burst into tears, true story, and said, 'I've been waiting for this moment for 25 years." That's what we're after. That's recovering.
Amelia Worley: Wow. That's incredible, honestly. So in your opinion, what is the best way to transition out of being an adaptive child?
Terry Real: Well, I speak about what I call relational mindfulness, take a break. I'm a big fan of breaks. Take a walk around the block. Go to my website, if I can say, terryreal.com is a one pager on the 10 Commandments on how to take a time out. Physically remove yourself for a while, but get centered, re-regulate back in the part of you that can remember what you are about. Remember that the person you're speaking to you care about, and the reason why you're speaking is to make things better. Until you're in that place, shut up, don't try and resolve anything you won't. So the first skill, I call it the ER skill, is getting re-centered in the part of you that can use skills to begin with. Then from that place, open up your mouth and speak to your partner. But the first order of business is you tending to those triggered early child states inside your self.
Another one of my sayings is maturity comes when we deal with our inner children and don't foist them off on our partners to deal with. You deal with your triggering, you get centered, then you go back to your partner and say, "What are we going to do to make this work?"
Amelia Worley: So, on the other hand, what are some signs that it is time to leave a relationship? Where is the line between relationship problems and relationship toxicity?
Terry Real: You can get on my website, I have an article that I wrote for the psychotherapy networker called, “Rowing to Nowhere: When Enough is Enough”, in which I tackle this issue, when's enough enough? They're obvious, if there's drug addiction or alcoholism or acting out either sexual aggressive and the person doesn't want to do anything about it, if there's a serious psychiatric disorder and the person refuses to do anything about it, if one of the two partners wants to be a thoughtful relational accountable partner and the other one doesn't, just wants to be a big baby. One of the deal breakers is if there is a distinct discrepancy in the emotional maturity of the two partners and the immature partner doesn't want to do anything about it, then the more mature partner feels pain in living with the other person, and I would help them get out. But it mostly has to do with not what the difficult partner is struggling with, but whether they're motivated to do anything about it or not.
Amelia Worley: So how can staying in a toxic relationship affect mental health and hinder self growth?
Terry Real: I talked to people about, I wrote this in the book, about what I call becoming relational champions. That means that you get centered in a place in your soul in which you say, "I deserve, it is my birthright to be in a relationship that is essentially cherishing, a relationship in which I can cherish my partner, they'll let me, and I feel cherished by my partner. And if I am in a relationship that is essentially uncherishing, first, let me do something about it, then we go get help. And then we get help that really helps. A lot of couples therapy doesn't do much, so let me get help that really helps. And two, if all bets are off and there's nothing I can do about, it's bad for me to be in an uncherishing relationship, it's bad for our kids to see me in an uncherishing relationship, it's bad for the uncherishing partner, it's bad for all of us. It's time to pull the plug."
Amelia Worley: So some people seem anxious or afraid to leave a relationship they know isn't healthy or good for them because they're worried about being alone or they're nervous to try and find someone else. What type of advice would you say to someone feeling that way?
Terry Real: Well, that person is what I would call a love dependent or a love addict. They are filtering their sense of self-worth and well-being through connection to the other. They're using other base to seem the other person's warm regard for them as a prosthetic to supplement their own faulty warm regard for themselves. So that person needs to work on self-esteem, learning how to cherish themselves. And 9 out of 10 times that person's dealing with an abandonment wound. As a child, they were not aligned with, they were not met. Adults don't get abandoned, adults get left, children get abandoned. And that a childhood ego state of abandonment feels like I'm going to die. A child will die unless they're cared for. So I would say self-esteem work and prom work on an abandonment wound. That's at the core of their terror about being alone.
Amelia Worley: So if someone is unhappy or in an unhealthy relationship, but they stay together for the sake of the kids, is this typically the right move for everyone involved? Or is it actually better and healthier for children to have their parents separate?
Terry Real: It all depends, but that's really case by case. How old are the kids? How long you're going to have to tough it out? If you stay together for the sake of the kids for a year because they're about to graduate high school, fair enough. If you're staying together for the sake of the kids and they're three, well, that's quite a different matter. And what are you putting up with? What are you passing on to your children as a legacy? What are you teaching them about how you're going to be treated? It's a very personal decision. It's not for me to decide that for you, but I will say this, on the one hand, you have the damage of the divorce and what that does to children. On the other hand, you have the damage of raising your children in a loveless environment, and what that does to children. There's no easy answer to this one. Either way, your kids are going to be hurt.
Personally, I believe kids do best when either or both parents are happy and in loving relationships. And I would rather have the couple split up by and large and find other people to be happy with. I think that's better for the kids in the long run, but this is one of those questions you ask six therapists to get 33 different answers.
Amelia Worley: So lastly, do you have any final advice or anything you want to share with our listeners currently in a struggling relationship?
Terry Real: Well, I would invite you to my workshop starting in June. It's the first ever Us workshop online, go to my website and find out about it. I would invite you to find a relational life therapist. Of course, I believe in my method, in those I've trained, they're on my website as well. Get help and get a therapist who will really support you. I don't think the traditional, uh-huh, uh-huh, tell me more about it, oh, that's what you think, oh, tell me what you think, is going to work. You find the therapist who's going to deal with what you're dissatisfied with and take your partner on and see if they can render themselves more pleasing to you. And if you don't have that support, find a different therapist. So my first order is find help and my second is find help that will really support you, take the issues on, not be so nice, not be so passive, and deliver a better relationship for you.
Amelia Worley: That's great. Well, thank you so much. It was wonderful interviewing you today.
Terry Real: Thank you. It was a great joy. Be well.
*Cover photo credit: Dennis Breyt
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.