EP 149: Do You Want to be Right, or Stay Married? | Terry Real

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Mall. And today I'm having a conversation with Terry Real, an internationally renowned family therapist whose most recent book is Getting Past yout and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. One of the world's leading authorities on the psychology of relationship and how to really create really powerful and rewarding relationships. So we had a deep conversation about all that and give it a listen. It's a great conversation. Welcome, Terry.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Please.

Well, we're thrilled to have you and really excited to. I've been excited about this conversation. Really looking forward to it ever since you did your own summit focus on relationship, not not, not too far back. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio and to familiarize audience with you for those who aren't and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Great. Sounds great.

Okay, so Terry Real is an internationally recognized family therapist known for his groundbreaking work on male psychology, gender and couples. He has been in private practice for over 25 years and is the founder of the Relational Life Institute and the Relational Life Therapy Methodology. He is the best selling author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through, How Can I Get through to you? And the New Rules of Marriage. His new book is Us Getting Past you and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. Kerry has appeared as a relationship relationship expert for Good Marrying, Good Morning America and ABC News. And his work has been featured in numerous academic articles and media including Oprah 20 20, the Today Show, New York Times and others. Okay.

So having established your bonafides and that's quite impressive. It really is quite impressive. And obviously you are recognized around the world as a relationship expert. And so this should be interesting territory to explain with you, explore with you today. And so I love that you've been called the relationship turnaround guy. I like that. I've been a business consultant my whole life and I used to kind of frame myself as a turnaround specialist with companies. I like that. The relationship turnaround guy. So let's begin by getting a sense of your pathway into the work you do today. How did you end up becoming a psychotherapist and how did you end up focusing so much on relationships?

Oh my gosh. Well.

I like to tease and say I started off my career as a family therapist at about the age of four.

And if you spend time with my family, you would know why I did that.

You know, as I write about in my books, to be serious for a moment. I come from trauma, I come from violence. And.

I really think that I became a therapist to figure out how to heal myself.

In my very first book called I Don't Want to Talk about it, which is a book about male depression, but more broadly, what patriarchy does to boys and the damage that gets done and the way that damage shows up in adult men.

I remember writing in that book that I became a therapist in order to gather the skills I needed to have the conversation I needed to have with my father to free myself from becoming.

And I think that's true. I think I became, there's an old line, therapists for people who need to be in therapy 40 hours a week. And I think I became a therapist to heal myself. And then.

I moved from my traditional psychoanalytic orientation to learning family therapy as a way of teaching myself how to have relationships because.

I was clueless. The family I came from didn't help. Being a white man in our patriarch culture stuffed me with a lot of nonsense. So I had to figure out how to. How to do this. And.

All of my work has been one big psychodrama. I mean.

I'm trying to figure out how to live on this planet in a way that.

Is joyful and does no harm or mitigates harm anyway. And I've just been sort of sharing my own journey along the way with four books and institute.

A lot of hard work when I don't want to talk about it came out. It was the first book ever written about male depression. Before that book, and I'm proud of depression was a woman's disease, just like alcoholism was a man's disease. And.

I really had a part in bringing male depression to the poor.

I started getting calls from all over the country. There's somebody in Canada or LA or whatever that does your work. And after a few years, the light bulb went off. And instead of referring them to local people, I said, look, if you're crazy enough and you have the resources, come to Boston, where I live and work. And what evolved was a two day relational intervention. I was sitting with a couple always on the brink of divorce. That was my beat couples on the brink of divorce that no one else had been able to help. And we would spend two full days together. At the end of that time you were getting a divorce or you were on track. It was, this is the last stop. And I found a couple of things. One is I. I had a pretty great track record. I say 19 out of 20 of the couple did very well. And the other thing is that I broke just about every rule that I had ever learned in couples therapy.

And long story short, I was already teaching.

Therapy and family therapy. And rather than get into a shame attack and take myself apart for doing it all wrong.

I had the chutzpah to say, well, maybe everybody else is doing it wrong, and maybe it's better to do it this way. And I created a school of therapy called relational life therapy, created an institute, and we've trained thousands of therapists around the world and growing every day. If you're a therapist listening to this, please come and train with us. And now we're offering courses for the general public as well. And I wrote two subsequent books on relationships, and this last book defines may. There it is. Invited author in us getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship. I'm proud to say New York Times bestseller. And I really feel like this current work is the culmination of decades of my career.

Well, I love that title, and I think that's very much at the heart of this summit and what it's really all about. And I can really resonate with your story as well. I remember during my own graduate studies in therapy and psychology counseling, that when I. When I did my first course on family therapy, I was like, why didn't I know any of this when I was growing up in that dysfunctional family of mine? I mean, I love my family, but, you know, most of most of us in the west have grown up in dysfunctional families, some more dysfunctional than others. But it would have been helpful just to have a little more insight into what was going on there. And. But yeah, it's really interesting that you found your way into this model that you call relational life therapy by breaking all the rules of the established model for couples therapy, and that you were having such a great track record with couples who were on the brink of divorce, because that's tough sledding. You know, you're often having to undo a lot of built up, you know, drama and conflict and investment on positionality on both sides. So what is. What is relational life therapy? Tell us a little bit about that, how that came together out of breaking one set of rules, and you evolved some kind of approach. Tell us a little bit about what are the. Some of the core Principles in that approach?

Well, the essence is in the title. What I believe is curative is teaching men, women and non binary folk how to live relational lives. And what do I mean by that? I mean lives of authentic connection. Having a good relationship to oneself, a loving relationship to oneself, and having, being connected and loving to the people around us, other races, other cultures, society, nature, the planet and ultimately spirit. All of the above.

Connection is our birthright. I believe that the state of authentic intimacy and connection is what we as a species are born for. We know that from the first weeks of life. Infants seek connection and we know things like there's a famous study. Not being in a state of intimate connection is as dangerous to our physical health, never mind our emotion, but dangerous to our bodies, one study indicates, as smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. We are born to be connected. Our central nervous system is not freestanding. We co regulate one another all day long.

And this book is really a critique of what I call the culture of individualism. We live in the context of relationships.

And we have to learn how to navigate them skillfully. We're in an interesting moment historically. We've never wanted more from long term relationships than we do now. Marriage was never romantic. You know, all those wonderful romances were all adulterous. Starting from the King Arthur in the middle Ages. There was no such thing as passionate marriage. But we want to be lifelong lovers and that's a great ambition. But our anti relational patriarchal culture doesn't equip our kids to have the basic skills to pull off being lifelong lovers. And we don't. Most couples are not happy. Half of them divorce and those that remain standing, how many of them are delirious? We need a new paradigm and we need a new toolkit in order to have.

This dream of a long term passionate connection to each other. Things get gunked up between us and you have to know how to handle yourself.

Well, one body of evidence that certainly supports what you're saying about the importance of connectedness and relationality and being in long term relationships is the famous longitudinal study at Harvard on adult development, which in some ways represents the patriarchy. Because they did it on men. Because when it started back then that was focus and a mixture of Harvard undergraduates and some young boys or young men. Boys or young men from some very poor families in Boston. They've been following them for more than 80 years now. And bar none, with all that evidence. And they finally started including the wives and families in the study, I think, and our colleague Robert Waldinger directs that study today at Harvard, that the most important factor leading to a happy life, to longevity, to health and wellbeing, is long term relationship.

So RLT relational life therapy differs from other therapies in a number of ways.

First of all, we take sides.

When I was in therapy school, the cardinal rule was thou shalt not take. And particularly you don't side with a woman against a man. I mean, if you lost your quote unquote neutrality, you had to go to a supervisor and talk about your mother for a while, you know, and then you would regain it and come back. We take sides. Not all problems are 50. 50, some are, but some are 90, 10, some are 99. 1. I had a couple, literally with a raging alcoholic, unmedicated bipolar man. And as far as I was concerned, his wife's quote unquote contribution was that she happened to be there. This was the feminist critique of family therapy. To go to an abused spouse and say, well, let's look at your contribution to this pattern is grotesque. So we deal with power and we deal with power imbalances and we rebalance them. We have a saying in rlt, I want the mighty to melt, I want the weak to stand up. And.

Specifically for 50 years, psychotherapy, self help has been about helping people come up from the one down of shame. And that's beautiful work, that's very important work. But we haven't even addressed helping people come down from what I call the other self esteem disorder, grandiosity. Come down from superiority, attack, contempt, entitlement, man. When you're looking at intimate relationships, people walking around in their relationships being one up, contemptuous, entitled, aggressive, controlling, revengeful, I mean, that does at least as much damage as people in the one down position. So in rlt, we help people come up from the one down, but also down from the one up. It's really a critical contribution.

I would have.

The disempowered, more enabling partner drag in an aggressive or irresponsible, really unsufferable partner, and I would take them on and all RLT therapists take on the grandiose partner look. Role play Fleet, you don't seem like a grandiose person to me, but.

We.

Call this carefrontation as the first phase. Look, when you yell and scream and call your wife horrible names.

She'S never going to warm up to you sexually. I mean, you complain that your sex life is dried up. Do you want to take a look at what you're doing and what you might do differently to? That's the sort of straight talk that we start off with. We separate the person from their grandiosity. You're a nice man. These behaviors suck. And more than that, they're not going to get you what you want. I can help you. Will you let me help you? And people say yes. So we deal with grandiosity, we take sides, and we're people. We're not blank screens. I talk about a fight I might have had with my wife, we're grounded. We do the same practice that we teach you to do. And on days when we don't, we look just as ugly as everybody else does. So we're in it with you. Those are the main things. We're relational with the people we work with. We're not blank screen therapists. We take sides. We confront grandiosity.

And there are three phases to rlt. The first is what I was just talking about. Carefrontation, waking up the client. Look, this is the thing that you're doing over and over and over again, which will never. Word. Let's take a look at it. The next phase is trauma work. Because people are right. Once you're trauma triggered, skills go out the window. So we have to deal with that. Where did you learn this from? Where we talk about the adaptive child. We'll get into that. What were you adapting to? Where did you learn to be to yell and scream and carry on like that? So we do deep trauma work in the presence of the partner. We're the only people I know who does that. Janina Fisher. A little. And then the third phase is teaching.

Look, that's not how you tell your partner you're angry. That's not telling her you're angry. That's acting it out. Let me tell you what telling her you're angry sounds like. We take you by the hand and we teach you how to do it. And I think it's this combination.

Of loving confrontation, deep inner child trauma, and then skill building and education that RLT is known for producing a dramatic change quickly and permanently. And I think it's a combination of these three together that produces such transformational changes.

Wow, that's fascinating. It just feels like such a really human model and a very real kind of adult, honest model. And I just love it. And so, yeah, I feel even a bit vulnerable sharing this. But when I started dating as a young man, I wasn't really interested in all the one up, one down games. And I actually got dumped quite a bit early on. And then I finally kind of discovered a friend pulled me aside one time and still didn't land with me, but in one relationship I just suddenly was inspired to kind of make kind of a one up move. And I found their partner responded to that. And from then on my strategy was always being one up. Now I wasn't abusive, but it was still subtle control. There's no question that I entered into relationships and with the intention of staying subtly one up. You know, if anybody was going to do the dumping, it was going to be me. I was always going to be free to go, right? And, and of course that did not lead to satisfying relationships. And finally, gratefully, I stumbled into a relationship. I've lost a couple partners to cancer, but I managed to stumble into several relationships with very wise women who patiently, you know, dealt with my grandiosity and taught me how to be in relationship without needing to be one up. But I think it's easy to see how people fall into those patterns and maybe that has to do with this strain of individualism in our country. You know, it's interesting that we are hired, hardwired for connectedness, as you said, and it's essential to our well being and yet we have such a strong strain of individualism in our country, especially in the US and, and so, you know, it seems like there's almost a setup for ending up where we are until we can somehow find a therapist like you and learn how to do it differently.

Well, we need a new map and we need a new set of tools. So let me start with the map because we're on the culture of individualism.

And I go into this in the book, I go into the. The idea of individualism is an idea. It has a history. Medieval people didn't think about individuals. If you did, you'd be burned at the stake. And in the future we may not think of individuals in China. Individualism is not a big cultural thing. The idea of individualism is the brainchild of a group of white.

Well off men in the Enlightenment period.

It's produced wonderful things. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Rights of Man. But the delusion of individualism.

Fuses with patriarchy and sets us up.

Both all genders.

But I'm going to say, particularly men, sets us up as positioning ourselves as apart from nature and above it, dominating. You know, people say it's a mistranslation, but at least in the King James version, God gives Adam dominion over everything that flies and crawls walks on this earth. Bad idea.

The idea that I'm above nature and I can control it is a lethal delusion. Whether the nature I think I should control is my partner or my children or my body. I've got to lose £10 or my thinking. I've got to be more positive. This idea of power over is a killer and it is central to Western civilization and it is the way we run our relationships. And it's nuts. The new paradigm that I write about and work with is what I call ecological wisdom or ecological humility. I am not above nature, I'm in it. Hello, Wake up. Our relationships are our biospheres. We're not above them, we breathe them. And I don't talk about altruism. I talk about enlightened self interest, happy spouse, happy house. When we think of ourselves as an ecosystem that we're in, as opposed to we're lord and masters above. Once we have the humility of understanding we're in it, then it becomes in our interests to keep our biosphere clean. You know, I could choose to pollute my emotional biosphere with a fit of temper over here, but I'm going to breathe in that pollution. And my partner's withdrawal and lack of generosity over.

There'S no escape.

And once we shift out of that power over model to collaboration with model, everything changes. All the terms. So, for example, I have a saying, you can be right or you can be married. What's more important to you?

The relational answer to the question who's right and who's wrong is who cares? What matters is, how are we as a team going to make this work? And when you lose your individualistic me versus you thinking and let yourself remember that you're a teen, that means you too. You have a voice. You need to assert yourself. That's part of the relationship. But you assert yourself within the larger context of my marriage, my family. Can I give you an example? Absolutely, yeah. True story. So.

Straight. The stereotypical hetero normative. She says, I'm a wreck. You're a reckless driver. He says, no, I'm not. I'm aggressive, but I'm never. She says, no, you're reckless. He says, no, I'm not. I call this an objectivity battle. I hope people can relate. Is it this or is it that? No, it's that. No, it's not. No. Well, I have my evidence over here. And why am I evident?

Goes on endlessly. After a few sessions with me, this is what she sounds like. This is a true story.

She says, honey.

I know you love me. I know you care about me. Listen, call me crazy, call me neurotic, but when I'm in the passenger seat and you're driving and you're going 20 miles above the speed limit, you're changing lanes and you're tailgating people.

You may know that you're safe, but I don't feel it. I'm terrified. And I don't know, you don't really want me to be sitting next to you being terrified every time we drive. As a favor to me.

Could you drive more conservatively so I don't have to be so scared? And he says.

Sure.

And what would have been a fight that could have gone on for 40 years is solved in 10 minutes. Because it's not about who's right and who's wrong. It's not about one of us wins and the other one loses. It's about let's remember that we're a team and we care about each other. How can this work for both of us? And that is literally a different part of our brain, that is a more mature part of, of who we are. And that's what this work is designed to wake up. Wow.

I don't know if I'm familiar with his work, but I hear strains of Marshall Rosenberg's work. Non violent communication in there. Such a beautiful way to communicate in such that you really are going to meet each other's needs and not devolve into the argument. The previous argument. And I also love what you said about enlightened self interest is a term I use in my work a lot. And enlightened self interest is always long term interest because. And once you're, you know, because it might, in the short term might feel good to punch somebody, but in the long term you go to jail. Right. So. And when, as soon as we focus on our long term interest, that always involves others because like it or not, we're interdependent beings. We're completely interdependent with everyone. Right. So long term interest ends up being in everyone's interest.

And.

And I like that at one point I was doing earlier work on my dissertation, I was going to do it on altruism. And I read everything about altruism. I was very dispirited because the scientists were all saying altruism is a myth. I still know that that's true. I think we have altruistic instincts. But I like the term enlightened self interest as well. So you used an example of an argument. Let's talk about arguments a little bit. Because that's one thing that can really degrade the quality of relationships. And couples long term often allow themselves to devolve into that kind of constant arguing and nitpicking and bickering and that kind of thing. And you know, once we get in arguments, we like to win, right? We like to be right. It's very addictive to be right. Right. And I love that phrase. We have a similar phrase in a training I do sometimes when we have two people in a train, they're just locked, they got their horns locked. We'll just look at one of them and say, what do you want? You want to be right or you want to have a relationship? You choose? You don't get that. Both. Right. So, but once people find themselves in that argument, right? I mean, I know you say in your book, if somebody wins, both lose. So how do you move from that phase? You kind of gave us an example there. But could you talk a little bit more about how we undo our patterns of arguing and needing to win arguments? Well.

This is what's central.

As a couples therapist. The most important question that I ask myself when I'm sitting with, say, a warring couple like that or any couple.

The most important question is not what are the stressors? Because a good couple can handle stress. Kids, money, sex, whatever. The most important question is not even the choreography we call it. The more. The more the vicious circle they're caught in. You know, the more I'm going to make you a gay couple, the more Fleet pursues, the more Dave distances. And the more Dave distances, the more Fleet pursues. That pattern's really critical, but it's not the most important question. The most important question I ask is this one. Which part of you am I speaking to?

Am I speaking to? And we talk about three parts.

The first part is the most mature part of the brain. Prefrontal cortex doesn't develop until you're 26 years old. Last part of the brain to develop in the human species. And this is the present based, I call it the wise adult part of it. Present based, non trauma triggered, able to stop, think, deliberate, choose a thoughtful adult.

The autonomic nervous system scans our bodies four times a second. Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? If the answer is yes, I'm safe, we stay in this mature part of our brains. If the answer is no, I'm in danger, that shuts down. And we're immediately seized by subcortical, more primitive parts of the brain. More automatic fight, flight, freeze or fix automatic knee jerk response. And I want your listeners to think for a moment about what their automatic response is. Fight, screw me, screw you, light, and you could be sitting 6 inches in front of somebody and still call that stonewalling.

Freeze. Just paralyzed and fix.

Fawning is what the biologists call it. I'm going to make you feel better because that's not a mature adult I'm going to work on. I'm too upset that you're upset. I'll tie myself into knots. It's sort of codependent, enabling. Fight, flight, freeze for fit. Take a moment, those of us who are listening and out yourself in those rare moments. I know you're almost always in your adult, but in those rare heated moments in your current intimate sexual relationship, where do you go? Fight, flight, freeze or fix.

And I call that the adaptive child part of us. There's the wise adult all the way in the back, amygdala, very primitive, the wounded child, which when I do healing work is seen as first moments of life up to about four or five, very young, flooded, reactive, on the receiving end of the abuse or neglect. It just wants to crawl in someone's lap and be held and cry. Between those two is the adaptive child. And that's what I like. The. The adaptive child is the you. It's a kid version of an adult. It's the you that you put together in the absence of healthy how you adapt it. And the issue is the almost everybody I see has lived their lives out of the adaptive child thinking that it's a wise adult and it's simply not. That's black and white, it's rigid, it's automatic, it's compulsive, it's harsh, it's repetitive. There isn't a lot of flexibility in that. And the work is in the heat of the moment.

When you're triggered, when you're doing the same old same old that you learned as a kid. You're going to stand up for yourself and not be or you're going to get the hell out of here or you're going to fix it. Whatever your knee jerk response that comes right out of your childhood. You take a breath or take a break. I'm a big fan of break. Take, take a walk around the block. You do some breathing. I call this relational mindfulness. And it really is bringing the spiritual practical of, of mindfulness into our relationship in this moment.

Can I breathe myself out of that reactive state back into center? I call it remembering love. You remember the person you're speaking to as someone you care about. And the reason why you're talking is to make things better if you're not there. I have great advice for you? Shut up. Don't try and solve your relationship problems from that adaptive child. First, get yourself out of the reactivity, get centered, and then deal with the relationship.

So again, we have three phases. The first is, what is that adaptive child doing in your relationship over and over again that's screwing you. For example, angry pursuit.

If your big move in your relationship is to angrily complain about how your partner isn't close to you, you will never get them closer by doing that. So the first thing we do is look at what are you doing? Or more accurately, what is that adaptive child part of you doing over and over again? That is never going to work. The second phase is, okay, where's this from? What were you adapting to? Where did you learn this? That's the trauma work. And then the third phase is, let me teach you how to do it better. Can I give you. Can I tell you a story?

Absolutely.

True story. Couple on the brink of divorce. He's a chronic liar. She's going to leave him because she can't stand all this lie.

And for the therapists who are listening, and I hope all of you therapists, if I can put in a plug, come to my website, relationallife.com relationallife.com or just terryreal.com and come train with us. We have a two and a half year training program to learn how to do this. And you can start, you don't have to commit to the whole thing. You get a taste of it. But anyway, so they come to me on the brink of divorce. And for the therapist listening, he's the kind of guy, I say to him, the sky is blue. And he says, well, it's Akma Marine. He won't give it to me. Right, right. That's too much of a confession and admit that it's blue. So I have this guy's stance between what his partner says and the way he's operating in the room. He has a PhD in evasion. This guy's relational stance that he repeats over and over again is evasion. Got it. So then I ask him a question. If you're not thinking relationally, it sounds brilliant, but it's fallen off a log.

Show me the thumbprint and I'll tell you about the thumb. Once I identify what the adaptive child part of you does, the next question is, what were you adapting to? Where did you learn this? So I say to him, who tried to control you growing up? Sure enough, his dad. Military man. How he ate, how he sat, what clothes he wore with friends. How did you deal with this? Controlling father. He looks at me and smiles. That's important, that smile. That's resistance. And he says to me, I lied.

I lied to him. He said, don't be friends with Henry. I was friends with Henry. And I told him I was friends with John. Got the old man off my back. 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 survive and be intact and grow. Good for you. Smart little four year old boy. But I have a saying. Adaptive then, maladaptive. Now you're not that 4 year old. Your wife is not your father. How about a new bag of tricks? True story. They come back two weeks later, hand in hand. They say, we're done, we're cured. And they were. It was one session in Europe. Tell me there's a story.

Between the last session and this one. She sends him off to the grocery store to buy 12 things. True to form, he comes home with 11. She says to him, where's the pumpernick? He says to me, every muscle and nerve in my body and we've all been here was screaming to say to her, they were out of pumping. And in this moment, I took a breath, I thought of you. We therapists lend our clients our prefrontal core, our brain. I thought of you. I looked my wife in the eye and I said, I forgot the pumpernickel. And true story. She burst into tears and she said, I've been waiting for this moment for 25 years. That's recovery. Wow. Beautiful. That's what we're after. Wow.

And really it chose to. I mean, I think there's a lot of modalities for healing trauma, but I think insight is incredibly powerful. When we really see the connection, say, oh, I see, I created that, that way of being to deal with that situation back then. It was very intelligent. It worked then. It's not serving me now. I'm going to stop doing it, you know, and some, on some level, it's that simple. Now there's, there's stuff in the body and the nervous system we need to work through, but the, the power of insight to really understand why we're doing the things that we're doing is so powerful. I love it. So, yeah, I would say, I would.

Take it a little differently or further if I can. I would say.

These inner children, these traumatized states and states of adaptation are very young and they live inside of us. They're circuits of technology. And the work that I do is about Forming a relationship with these younger states in us, putting your arms around them, hearing them, but ultimately demoting them. You know what we'll call this guy? Pete. You know what, Little Pete, You're a very clever little boy to lie and not be controlled. I love you to pieces, but this is my wife, and she's not really trying to control us. You're a little paranoid, my darling. So I hear your fear. I love you to pieces. You talk to me about it. You let me deal with her. So it's really a relational model. A lot of trauma work is release work. We do that, but it's more like bringing the adult part of you into an ongoing relationship with these inner children, these inner states, on an ongoing basis, so that when they kick up, we deal with them, and we don't act them out and demand that our partner deals with them.

So in some ways, in that work, that inner work, you may be pointing to this. So sometimes when we're triggered, it's quite obvious we're upset, we fly off the handle. And we all have our triggers, and we're probably well aware of times we get very triggered. But triggers can be much more subtle. And some of our adaptive child patterns and strategies can be subtle. And we can be playing out some adaptive strategy, apparently calm, cool, and collected, but nonetheless, something triggered that defense mechanism or that adaptive strategy. So how do we learn about those? I mean, it might be easier to if we're willing to start looking to ones where we know we really fly up the handle and we really create big messes. But how do we, you know, learn to identify? How do we get more familiar with the adaptive child or the whole choir of adaptive children that are showing up in our life?

Exactly. Well, I do ask people to pay attention to their bodies. And when you're triggered, even if it's subtle.

Most of us have a particular physical sort of repertoire of sensations that go along with being triggered. And I ask people to pay attention to that and start to get to know that. But the other thing is, particularly with these more subtle issues, we have to swoop in and teach people how to do it differently. It's one thing to say, well, Fleet, you need to deal with the little boy that's afraid of being left.

And stop being so one up in your relationships and allow yourself to be vulnerable. And if you're left, you're left. That's all great. And I also need to say, okay, when you just said that to your partner.

Shoot me if I'm wrong. But from where I sit, that Wasn't being forthright with her, that was managing her. Were you aware of doing that? Now that you say so, yeah. Okay, this is what not managing her would sound. Let me give you the words. And we do what I call micro coaching. We roll up our sleeves. Then we say, don't do it that way. Do it. Don't say it that way. Say it this way. For example, don't complain. Don't criticize your husband.

Request. Don't tell him what he did wrong. Tell him what right would look like. And we're full of very pragmatic coaching about how to do this more relationally. The culture doesn't teach us, and your family of origin didn't teach you. So there's a technology.

Of how to do this well. And when people master the skills, it goes better. It goes better to say, hey, Fleet, next time we're talking, do me a favor instead of this. Could you do that? It would help me. That goes better than you. Son of a bitch. I can't believe you. Just don't ever talk to me like that. There are two ways of saying the same thing, but one skilled and one isn't, and the skilled one works better. So as you teach people how to do it and they're doing the work of forming a relationship with these old knee jerk responses, they begin to substitute a more thoughtful way of doing it with the help of an ongoing process.

Wow. So as I'm hearing about your model, it's this shift from couples therapist as a facilitator, negotiator, mediator or something. And you're really. This is relationship education and training and relationship coaching, right?

Yes, it is.

And I, and I think that's so powerful because it's what we really, we all need. I mean, relationships are, I mean, you can boil some things down to simple principles, but nonetheless, they're complex. We're complex beings. And none of us were trained to do this right in school. None of us got any training on how to, how to do relationship. So I mean, this is, this is, it's really beautiful. So. And I love that you. You called relational life therapy. You sometimes reference it as relational mindfulness. And so you and I were chatting before the interview. We both have a background in meditation for many years. And so do you bring that into your practice in terms of actually training people to pick up a formal mindfulness practice and some kind. We all know, I mean, well, it's a human trait, mindfulness, and we can all try to be more mindful in the moment, but it's a lot easier to do that if we actually have some training that's increasing our default level of mindfulness that we walk around with. Right. So I'm wondering how you integrate that into, to the way you train therapists as well as the way your therapist and you bring it into your practice. Well, one of the reasons I ask that is I know that our summit, not universally, but many people on our summit have a background in mindfulness. There's a strong interest and a lot of our presentations are going to have some relationship with mindfulness. So I want you to flesh that out for us in terms of your model.

Well, look, the experience that you're having on the pillow.

Comes to visit you in that heated moment when you need to take a breath and come out of your reactivity and try and get centered. I mean, the more practice you have coming out of your reactive mind into a centered state, the easier it's going to be when you're dealing with live ammo in the marital battlefield. So work that we do on mindfulness in general is a great ally. And conversely.

For example, drinking or getting high.

Are mindfulness dissolvers. And you, you don't want to.

You do want to spend time on the pillow if you're serious about your relationship and you don't want to try and resolve a long standing issue after you've had a few beers. It's just kind of, I don't know, excuse me. It's just kind of logical.

To me. But this is really about bringing our spiritual practice. You know, some teachers said that Dharma in the west is our relationships.

So, Terry, thank you so much for all of this. Incredibly beneficial and practical. So as we bring our conversation to a close here, just two last things. One, I'm going to ask you how to let us know, let our audience know how they can find out more about your work. But before that, if you just have any final, any words of advice for, you know, this summit's all about making this year the best year of our lives. And unless we're very unusual beings, that's going to have a lot to do with the quality of our relationship. So any final, you know, directional pointers for us and then, and then where we can find out more about your work.

You know.

Don'T be spontaneous.

Be artful.

Good one.

Take learning about relationships seriously and make a study of it together. I call this being partners in health, partners in recovery. But read, read my book, if I may.

Go to go to my website. We've got courses on relationship courses. We just did One on relational parenting for a therapist. Come and train with us.

But whether it's me or you or whomever.

Have some humility. You do not know how to do this in a sophisticated way. There have been people like me, you, others who've been studying this for a long time. We do know a few things about how to do this. Learn some wisdom and be humble and bring your spiritual practice.

You know, people always say relationships take work, but they don't say what it is. The work of relationship is minute to minute. In this minute right now, am I going to go with my knee jerk automatic response or am I going to take a breath and do something more humane, more skilled, more mature? Every minute we're with each other, there's an opportunity to make that choice. So make that choice and get support and learn a few things about how to do it.

Wow.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

So Terry Real, New York Times best selling author and they can find all about your work as you were referencing your website, I believe it's terryreal.com right? Quite simple.

That's the easiest way to do it. If you're a therapist, go to relationallife.com relationallife therapy one word, two Ls relationallife.com and learn about our training.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jerry. Be well.

Thank you. Be well.

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