Terry Real: Relationships, Trauma, and Inner Child Work
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Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Anson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. Today I am joined for the first time in a long time by a very special guest, renowned couples therapist, Terry Real. Terry is the founder of Relational Life Therapy and the author of four books, including the recent New York Times bestseller, Us, getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship. So Terry, thanks so much for doing this with me, man. How are you doing?

I'm very grateful to talk to you, Forrest. Thank you for this wonderful podcast that you're doing. Well, thank you. And I really appreciate you taking the time. We're actually going to be doing two of these together. This is the first one we're focusing on relationships. And then we're doing another one. We're recording it next week. Who knows when it'll actually air relative to each other on men and masculinity that your son Justin is going to be joining us for. I'm really looking forward to that one. And I wanted to talk to you about this stuff because the

They connect so directly to the work that you have done for years and years and years. And one of the things that I really appreciate about your work is you position the relationship that walks into your office as existing in, hello, a broader cultural context. People are carrying so much with them when they walk into the room to work with you. And particularly, you focus on these two dominant cultural forces, hyper-individualism on the one hand and then patriarchy on the other.

I know we're going to talk about the second one a lot, probably both during this conversation and next week, but I would love to start with the individualism piece of it. Would you mind explaining what you're speaking to with that and why that is such a big problem for couples when they come in? Greg Lubeysen, who came up with the double-blind theory of schizophrenia back in the early '50s, was an anthropologist

And he created family therapy. And he created family therapy because he looked at human interaction like an anthropologist and not like a psychologist. There's an old saying, when a kid is truant, an individual says, what does the truancy mean? A family therapist says, who's the kid going home to take care of? We're systemic. We're 3D. He had an ecological perspective. And his whole systemic work

And he's a Sigmund Freud of family. He founded family therapy. His whole work was what he called correcting humankind's epistemological mistake, philosophical mistake. What is that mistake? That we stand apart from nature and that we can control it. The word individual means apart from nature. We're an individual. We're distinct. Well, guess what? Our neurobiologies are not

closed systems. The idea of self-regulation turns out to be largely bullshit. We don't self-regulate. We co-regulate. We are born to be in connection and relation. Our very nervous systems operate in social interaction. If you want to really look at a quote-unquote freestanding individual, look at somebody who's been in solitary confinement. They go mad.

Now, of course, we are individualized. I'm not saying we're not. What I'm saying is we are individuals in context. There is no such thing as a person with no context at all. So being a trained family therapist, the grandchild of Gregory Bateson, I look at the individual in their ecosystem and the shifts out of context

the delusion of I'm apart from nature and the even more toxic delusion, I'm in control of nature, which I'll double back, is I am part of an ecosystem. I'm not above it. I'm not below it. I'm not to the side of it. Wake up, dummy. I'm in it. And I call this waking up to ecological wisdom. Our relationships are our biospheres. We breathe them. We can't control them and we can't escape them.

I don't believe in selfishness and I don't believe in altruism. I believe in enlightened self-interest. It is in my interest to keep my biosphere healthy because I'm in it.

I can choose to indulge and pollute my biosphere with a selfish temper tantrum over here, but I'll breathe in that pollution in my partner's withdrawal and lack of sexuality over it. There's no escape. We're an ecosystem. We're linked. And once we wake up to this map of relationality, of ecological connection,

It's not you versus me. It's not Forrest wins and Terry loses. It's not I give in to you. It's we're a team. What do we need? And that waking up to ecological wisdom, ecological humility. So for example, if I may guess, I want to tell you a story. You know, I love to tell a story. You're a story guy, Terry. You love a story. From a relational or ecological, the two words are sitting there.

relational, ecological, from a relational perspective, from the new map, the answer to the question who's right and who's wrong is who cares. What matters is how are you and I going to work this thing in a way that works for us? That's what matters. How many of you listening have tried to quote unquote resolve an issue with someone you care about by determining which one of you is right and which one of you is wrong? Good. How did that? So here's the story.

True story. It's very heteronormative. Her to him, you're a reckless driver. Him to her, you're overly anxious. How many of us have been through this one? Pretty classic. And they get into what I call an objectivity battle. Is it this or is it that? Is he right or is she right? One session with me, this is a true story for us. One session. Her to him, honey, start with that. Change the energy. Honey, I know you love me.

Call me a nervous Nelly. I don't know. Maybe she just takes the whole argument right off the table by speaking subjectively. Maybe I am. I don't know. Nevertheless, when I'm in the car with you and you tailgate and you weave back and forth and you go 20 miles above the speed limit, I get myself crazy. That's how we teach people to talk. Not you make me. I get myself crazy.

You know, when you're driving on your own, I mean, I worry about you, but it's your life. But when I'm in the car with you, you don't really want me sitting next to you the whole time we're together being miserable. You love me as a favor to me. Could you please slow down and drive more conservatively so that I don't have to be so on her? True story for us. Him to her, ready? Okay, honey. And he did. It's like magic.

Or what could have been a fight, I've seen it, 40 years. Yeah, for sure. It is solved in 15 minutes because it's not about you versus me. It's not about right versus wrong. It's not about objective reality. It's about the humility of asserting yourself subjectively and with love, making a request, not a complaint. These are all skills we teach. And lo and behold, knife through butter, boom, it works. Because...

I shift from two individuals duking it out to we're a team, let's work together. It's a whole new world. Yeah. It's so easy, even speaking personally, eight years or so into my relationship with Elizabeth, my fiancee,

to feel like you are in one boat and the other person's in this other boat over here, and you cross your fingers that you're headed to the same destination. But a lot of the time, you feel like you're headed to totally different continents out there. And it's this totally revelatory moment for people when they go, "Wait a second, we're actually in the same boat together. So when I'm throwing stones at their boat, I'm really throwing stones at my own boat." But

When people walk into your office, and they're particularly in that kind of more conflicted mindset, because if somebody walks in to Terry's office, they're probably at a higher conflict mindset there. How do you help them drop that mindset and shift into that more we orientation, even pretty quickly like you were talking about? Well, we're very confrontational, but we're confrontational with a lot of love. And it's my job to help you see that

that is in your interest to do what I tell you to do. You know, I don't say this, I say, Forrest, yeah, I specialize in couples on the brink of divorce that no one else, that's why I deal with tough couples. Forrest, let's just role play. Sure. Elizabeth is totally fed up with you. I'm your fourth therapist. She's got one foot out the door. Okay. Forrest, do you love Elizabeth? Yeah.

Yeah, I do. Do you understand that you might lose her? Yeah, I'm worried about that. I don't want that to happen. I can teach you how to change your moves to render yourself more likable to her, but I have good news and bad news for you. Which would you like first? Give me the good news first. It'll work. Okay, love that. Not only will you keep her,

but the two of you will be happy, happier than the norms of this culture allows. That's the good news. What's the bad news? Yeah, hit me, doctor, even though you're technically not a doctor, but okay. Everybody calls me doctor. Everybody calls you doctor. I know, I know. Here's the bad news. You have to do what I tell you. I don't know about this one, man. I feel kind of mixed about that. Well, here's what I say, my friend. Don't take it on faith. Hmm.

Let me coach you. You know, you're a tennis player. And I go, Forrest, you've done really well. And you have. You're on the circuit. You know, you're a solid B player. You've done really well. I'm going to teach you stuff that's going to feel awful. But let me start with the way you hold your racket. The way I hold my racket? I've been holding, yeah. Here, let me change your grip. Holy crap. Don't believe me. Go out, get used to it, see if it works better.

That's what I say to everybody. Don't believe me, try it, see if it works better. But it does. The skills that we teach work better. For example, role play for us, Elizabeth is fed up with how critical you are of her, how often you complain about her. She could well be fed up with how critical I am, but okay.

All right, I charge the extra at 4-way. I've worked on that one a lot for the record. If I'm going to do a cross-throw, you get my bill. Listen, I always normalize. I'm always on your side. Yeah. What you're doing is what everybody does.

And it's nuts. The way in our culture we try and get more of what we want is we let our partner do what they do, call that being spontaneous. Then when they disappoint us, we share with them all of our negative feelings about what a lunatic they are and how miserable it is to be with them. Or we get incredibly resentful about it, yeah. And we either lash out or we withdraw or guess what? Try this one. Honey,

I would really love it if you dot, dot, dot. Yeah. Would you work on that for me? Move from complaint to request. Lose the criticism. Ask for what you want. But we don't do that. A, we don't know how. No one's taught us. And B, it's vulnerable. Yeah. That's the part I was going to call out. It feels very uncomfortable for a person to do that a lot of the time. And we don't have good training around it. Yeah. Well, maturity is uncomfortable.

But it gets you what you want. Yeah, for sure. So talking about maturity, as you were just saying there, you really call out these different aspects of our personality in your work. Yes. Call them parts, call them states of mind, whatever language a person wants to use. Particularly, you highlight adaptive child, wise adult, and another part that you can speak to here. Would you mind explaining these terms?

So the wise adult, my friend, spiritual teacher, not a psychologist, Thomas Ubel, wonderful man, has many sayings. I love a good line. He says, to observe is to have choice. He also says, urgency is our enemy and breath is our friend. And the key is your prefrontal cortex. I call it the wise adult part of us.

This is the part of us that can stop and observe and think and choose. It's the last part of the brain that came to the human species. It's the last part that develops in kids. It's part of you I'm talking to right now that's present-based and rational and can make skilled decisions. What makes life interesting is there are two, we call them subcortical, more primitive parts of the brain.

that get activated when the heat's on, when you're flooded. One we call the wounded child part of you. And when I do experiential work, first moments of life up to four or five, the part of it is just experience, the abandonment, neglect, or the violation, all feeling flooded, crawl up on someone's lap and scream and cry. Between this very young, all feeling part and this

present-based, very mature part is the part of us that most of the people I work with have lived their whole lives in, thinking that it's an adult, and it isn't. I call it the adaptive child. It is a kid's version of an adult. And the hallmark of the adaptive child part of us, which is what you learn to do to survive, is it's automatic, knee-jerk, fight, flight,

Fix, fawn. And for those of you listening, forget freeze for a moment. Fight, flight, fawn, or fix. Fix is not a mature, hmm, what can I do to make things better? Fix is that codependent, anxious, oh my God, forest feels bad. I'll twist my, I can't feel, okay. Nature is fawning. Oh, Mr. Lion, don't eat me. I'll lick your paws. Let me make you feel better. It sure is. Take a moment, those of you listening,

I know that 364 days out of the year you're in your wise adult, but that one day with intimate sexual partner, fight, flight, fawn. Forrest, what are you? Oh, I'm a classic fawner. You're a fixer, a fawner. Oh yeah, fixer, fawner. I've got a solution for your problem. You come to me with what ails you. I've got the medicine for that, absolutely, yeah. Right, and you can pass on this.

But what would you say Elizabeth is? Elizabeth is a little bit more disorganized in her attachment style, so she can kind of bounce around a little bit. I think that she's- Pick one with you currently. Yeah. When I move over to Trixie, she moves into what? I think that she's more of that kind of shutdown response, but more of a flier probably. Flier, yeah. Yeah, totally. So the more I fix, the more she... And then we teach people to say the more, the more.

The more I fix, the more she flees, the more she flees, the more I fix. So you've got to pursue her, distance her dynamic. A little bit, yeah. I think so. Yeah. None of your best, if we're talking about you. Yeah, I mean, we're doing pretty great these days. But no, I can look through the annals of our relationship and absolutely see a lot of what you're describing. Yeah, for sure. So that's my knee-jerk response. And the core skill when you learn to live relationally is you take a breath,

or a walk, or a break. You can go to my website and download a whole page on how to take a formal time out. Could be a whole day you need to take a break. Take a break and remember love. Get re-centered out of that automatic knee-jerk flooded trauma response into your wise adult. Belinda is not the enemy. I am not that little boy. I don't need to fight. I can make peace. Let me try.

And this getting centered, this regulating yourself, I call it relational mindfulness. It's just like mindfulness. And a meditation practice really helps us, by the way. When I'm triggered, when I'm flooded, take a break, take a breath, take a walk, get that little Terry on my lap and have a chat with, do whatever I need to do to get re-centered in my wise adult,

Then I go to Belinda and use a skill. This is the first skill, relational mindfulness, shifting out of that reactive flooded brain into a thoughtful responsive brain. And the beauty is this shift can be cultivated. It can be learned and strengthened like going to the gym. And that's your way out of this mess. That's recovery. Moving out of the adaptive child response

into a wise. And forgive me for, I will let you talk in a minute, but can I tell you a story? You'd love a story, Terry. I'm here for Terry's stories. True story. A couple on the break of divorce, my specialty. He was a liar, chronic liar. It was the kind of guy the wife says to me, if you ask him what color his shoes are, he'll say they're not shoes, they're sneakers, which is a lie. He lies about everything. This guy has a black belt in evasion.

See, the adaptive child part of us was adapting to someone. So you're an evader. Okay. I say to him, who tried to control you? Get it? The bigger the thumbprint, the bigger the thumb. Sure enough, his dad, military man, how he ate, what clothes he wore, what classes he took, what friends he had. I said to him, how do you deal with this controlling father? He looks at me and smiles. That is

His health, that smile, that's resistance. And he says, guess what? I lied. Dad said, don't play with Henry. I played with Henry. I told him I played with John. Smart little boy, I say to him. Yeah. And I always teach our students, always be respectful of the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child part. You did just what you needed to do back then to preserve yourself. Good boy. However, you're not five.

and she's not your dad, I think you can be a little braver. That's all I said. I have a saying, adaptive then, maladaptive now. Time for something new. True story. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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Now, back to the show.

I'm glad that you told it because that's exactly what I was thinking while you were talking about it, how these responses or these tendencies that people have are so functional in nature. And a lot of the time when we talk about coping, people assume that coping is a bad thing. It's like, no, we all need to cope. You got to figure out how to make it through the world, right? And so having a kind of appreciation for that can be a great first step for people. Always appreciate. Yeah. But you bring your adaptive child into your relationships and the adaptive child part of us

does not want to use skill. The Adapter Child part of us doesn't want to be intimate. The Adapter Child part of us wants to be right and safe. Doesn't want to be vulnerable. We can do better. So they come in two weeks later, hand in hand, they say, we're done. And they were. They were done. Done with therapy. Done with everything. Problem solved. Great. I said, okay, there's a story. Tell me the story. They go, between the first session and this one, 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, and my wife, wonderful therapist, Belinda Berman, she called this relational heroism. She said, every muscle and nerve in my body was screaming to say to my wife they were out of the pumpernickel. But in this moment, I took a breath. That's relational mindfulness.

I thought of you, Terry, we therapists can lend our clients our prefrontal cortex. I thought of you. I looked my wife in the eye and I said, "I forgot the goddamn pump ring." True story, she burst into tears and she said, "I've been waiting for this moment for 25 years." That's recovery. That's what we're working on. That piece of us, that more responsive, problem-solving,

you know, get me out of the fire piece of us, is often really difficult for people to identify when they first start doing therapeutic work. Like recognize the presence of the adaptive child in the room, getting a quicker iteration speed. I'm going, oh, wait a second. This is the part of me that the first time that we talked to you had this great line that I think about all the time, which is like the child sitting on your lap driving the car.

And you just don't realize that the child is sitting on your lap, hands on the wheel, and your line at the time, I think, was something like, you got to get its sticky fingers off the wheel. And I just think about that one over and over. How do you help people get a better sense of recognition of the presence of that part when it shows up in the relationship?

Well, you can always ask your partner. They'll tell you. They will probably know. Yeah, no, that's a good shortcut. Find, flight, or fix. What do you think I am? They'll tell you. And you begin to feel it. The hallmark of the adapter child is just automatic. I call it whoosh. Comes up from the feet.

It's visceral. It feels so compelling. The whole world. If I don't stand up for myself. Oh, yeah. If I don't get out of here, I'll be sure. You know, if I don't fix you. And it can feel good. Like there's an energy or like a, I don't know, like feeling pissed about something. Having a trip can be like a really good feeling for people. And, you know, it's interesting because when I talk about moving from individualism to taking care of your biosphere.

We have a saying in RLT, we want the weak to stand up, we want the mighty to melt. So if you're a fighter and that feels good to you, but it doesn't get you anywhere, you need to breathe and come down. If you're a fleer or a fixer, your biosphere may need you to be more assertive, more conflict, not less. So you may need to come up and lean into it.

It's what your biosphere needs from you. You know, the great Carol Gillian says, there's no voice without relationship. There's no relationship without voice. So you can be assertive. It's not always yielding. It's whatever your knee jerk is, take a breath and move beyond it.

Research is research. I can't help but think about myself here a little bit as we're going through this. That sort of healthy assertiveness that's tied to what you were describing

just when we first started talking, expressing needs in a clear way and an open way inside of the field, that's my bleeding edge in the relationship. It has been the whole history of the relationship. Thankfully, I've improved some over time. Well, that you have a hard time doing that. Yeah, that I have a hard time doing that. Absolutely. And I've had to get a lot better at expressing those needs in a coherent way. Yeah. Well, may I? Oh, please, Terry. Please, may you. Yes.

So you were an emotional caretaker growing up as a kid? You took care of someone? I was a sensitive kid. I wasn't an emotional caretaker for either of my parents. I got punished a lot by other kids socially. For being sensitive? For being sensitive, yeah. For being kind of touchy-feely. And so I retreated, hard exterior, all of that. Yeah.

Or that's my kind of story with that. Okay, so you went behind a wall to protect yourself from the other kids, not so much from your parent. Totally, yeah. That's not uncommon, unfortunately. And so you were boundary violated by your peers. Kids on the playground are the most violent enforcers of gender, of patriarchy. Oh, for sure, yeah. Yeah, and so...

Having a history of being violated, you put up a wall. You tend in your relationships, even though you feel perhaps very dependent, in reality, I would probably call you a level void in. Optimal distancing, for sure. Yeah. And caretaking is walled off. You're not putting your wants and needs out. So...

A history of having your wants and needs trashed puts you behind, your adaptive child operates behind a protective wall, and the adaptive child part of you has no faith that your wants and needs will be sensitively cared about and dealt with.

Yeah, that's definitely part of my story, for sure. Yeah. That I get what I want when I solve my own problem, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, right. But that's not very relational. Because I'm a problem solver, so I could solve that problem, but to your point, not very relational. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I would say, well, here's what you're missing. You're missing putting yourself in someone's hands, which is a beautiful feeling. You're missing being a mess and have someone hold you. You're missing comfort.

You're missing a lot by taking care of everything on your own. And if Elizabeth complains about you, it would be along the lines of she's lonely and she wants more from you, would be my guess.

It depends, but I think that broad strokes right on. All right, we'll take it. I have a 70-30 rule. If it's 70% right, it's good enough. Yeah, totally, totally. But to your point, there's been a lot of process around that inside of our relationship. We've really worked around these tendencies. And I think that for me, having the experience of somebody who is so relational, she's training to be a therapist, and is so deeply connected to that

has allowed me to risk being more vulnerable in those ways and then get good responses. And that's positively reinforcing. And it's just been a big upward spiral in our relationship in a good way. Well, you've moved into your wise adult with her and done the work. I say the cure for love avoidance is negotiation.

Identifying what you want and need and putting it out, and sometimes getting it more than you think, and sometimes not, which isn't a bad thing for you either. You win either way. But you get a lot more than you imagined you would, and that's what we call a corrective emotional experience, and it's healing. That's how we can heal each other. But you have to do the work first of moving out of your caretaker, I have no needs, to your vulnerability,

No, I have needs. To the risk, taking care of your biosphere always means risk. The bravery of, oh, my adopted child is convinced she doesn't care, but I'm going to try anyway. And then boom, she does. Wow. That's healing. That's recovery. So yeah, when I talk to you about these things, you've moved into health from a lot of them, but these are your defaults. Totally.

And that's how relationships can heal. It isn't that our partner heals us, it's that we can use the crucible to move beyond what we learned as kids and open our hearts and take chances and grow.

I think that maybe in that story, it's a useful way into talking about something else that I wanted to get into at some point, which is that there's a classically gender-socialized aspect to the story that I'm telling you. The more walled-off male partner who is uncomfortable coming forward with emotional vulnerability, the more searching female partner who wants more of that and feels like she's not getting it. It's just one of those classic scripts that I have to imagine has walked into your office

a thousand times or whatever it is at this point. A thousand times, yeah. Well, first of all, let's talk about patriarchy for a moment. The first thing I want everybody to understand, I talk about political patriarchy, which is the oppression of women by men, happens all over the world. That's not my primary concern. I'm not primarily political or social activist. I talk about psychological patriarchy, which are the dynamics of patriarchy,

And the dynamics of patriarchy hurt all genders and is devastating to men and devastating to our relationship. Specifically, what it means to be a man under patriarchy, let's look at sensitive forest on the playground, is invulnerability.

The more invulnerable you are, the more manly you are. That's what I was searching for, man, 100%. And your vulnerability got violently punished by the other kids. After 50 years of feminism, when a girl crosses over to boy land, she can get some grief. But if a boy crosses over to girl land, the response is truly violent, emotionally and sometimes even physically violent.

The enforcers of traditional masculinity are other kids and it's tough. That was totally my experience. You learn to tuck your vulnerability inside and not express it. Judy Chu did research on boys by the wound of girls is at the age of adolescence, 12, 11, 14. They learned to stop telling the truth and to accommodate. The wound of boys, three, four, five.

They haven't even learned to read and they've read the code. What we learn is to be a man is to be disconnected from your vulnerability, your feelings, from others. We call that being independent. And what I say to guys is what you learned about being a man, whether you wanted to or not, it's imposed on you, will ensure that by today's standards, you'll be seen as a lousy husband. We connect as humans to vulnerability.

And across the world, heterosexual women are insisting on more connection and open heart from their men. And there's a role disjuncture. Women want open-hearted men in their marriages. Boys are taught quite forcefully to close their hearts on the playground. And one of the things I say is that leading men, women, non-binary folks into intimacy is synonymous with leading them beyond patriarchy.

Women's over-accommodation will never work. Men's invulnerability will never work. Going one up into superiority will never work. Going one down into enabling codependence will never work. Again, Carol Gilligan, you cannot love from the one up. You cannot love from the one down. Love demands democracy.

And we have no idea what that looks like in this culture. Brand new. I just want to kind of ask you a question about this. Maybe, again, a little research is research here. I've always thought of myself as being quite sensitive on the dude spectrum. I've always been totally grounded in my identity as a guy, but I've just thought of myself as a sensitive, touchy-feely kind of dude.

One of the things that I really appreciated in the stories that you tell is you tell so many stories of the most heteronormative macho dudes rolling into your office with the exact same set of problems that I feel like I experienced growing up, essentially, just the universality of it.

really kind of spoke to me in a way. And so I basically just wanted to ask you about that. Do you think that, obviously, there's more of a spectrum here in terms of a person's sensitivity or vulnerability or whatever it might be, but this really does seem like a pretty universal issue for guys in the culture, at least as you describe it. Yeah. You know, the research, little boys are more sensitive than little girls. Yeah. Little boys have stronger feelings. Stimuli-sensitive, all of that, totally. Yeah.

But we teach them to shut it down. We teach them to shut it down through emotional violence. We shame them. The first ring of patriarchy is what Carol calls the binary, what Olga Silverstein called the having process. You take a whole human being, draw a line down the middle. What's on the right is masculine. What's on the left is feminine. We all know what goes where. And we enforce both genders.

to deny the half that isn't socially appropriate. And we enforce it through trauma. I talk about normal boyhood trauma. The way we get kids to deny half of who they are is through emotional and sometimes physical violence. And the act of denying half of who you are is intrinsically violent and traumatic. So everybody who comes to the table has been wounded. Look,

We're born to be whole. God bless your sensitivity. And your sensitivity doesn't mean that you can't be tough or aggressive or competent or strong. You know, a lot of guys whine and go, I'm sensitive and my girlfriend doesn't like it. She doesn't find it sexy. I go, well, are you sensitive in the bedroom?

A big open secret for heterosexual women is in the bedroom, a lot of women like manly men. Great. In the bedroom, when you're talking about how your kid's going to be raised, I doubt that she wants you to steamroll her. So the key is wholeness and flexibility. I'll talk about that when we talk about men. I'm not talking about letting go of anything. I'm talking about making it whole and relational.

And you mentioned the shame piece a second ago, and that reminded me of something that you talk about a lot, which is this kind of movement from shame into grandiosity. I think that's probably particularly true for guys, but I imagine that people in general are pretty capable of that one. What do you mean by that, and how does that work, for lack of a better way of putting it? Well, yeah. It's a central part of traditional masculinity that you right the wrong through attack.

That you move from feeling inadequate, unlovable, defective, helpless, impotent, to omnipotent, enraged, controlling, entitled, and dominating. And this is the dynamic of abuse. This is why in domestic violence, the woman is most at danger when she starts to separate and move out because the guy feels abandoned. All abusers have a core of abandonment.

but they have two seconds of tolerance for that one down feeling. They go up into grandiosity, contempt, angry victimhood, revenge, rage. And what's devilish about that is it works as a form of self-made. You feel better. You were talking about that earlier. It feels good to be pumped up. Grandiosity feels good, but it makes your life a mess. So you go from the one down to the one up, from helplessness to attack.

And in the moment you feel better, this is what I wrote about when I wrote about male depression. In the moment you feel better, but your life is ruined. And that is the root of male violence. And it's central to traditional masculinity. Helping men sit with their own vulnerability is literally asking them to reconfigure masculinity itself. No one asks men to do that.

So as you're doing this kind of work with people, you're talking about some of the things that we've been talking about during this conversation. You're interacting with the wounded child, the adaptive child, the wise adult, all of that.

Naturally, just pragmatically, you're working with a couple, you're wandering into trauma work pretty quickly. Yes. And RLT is a bit unusual in that when you're counseling a couple, you will do trauma work with both members of the partnership present. Yes. Why do you do it that way? How do you keep it safe? All of the kind of natural questions about that are ones that I have. Elizabeth is a trauma therapist. This is what she focuses on. So I was really curious about it. RLT has three phases. Phase one, loving confrontation.

Forrest, you're a fixer. You don't ask for what you want and need, but you're sure as hell resent it when you don't get it. Let's talk about how that- Diagnosed, baby. Diagnosed, yeah. Let's talk about how that resentment leaks out sideways. We don't have to go there, but- No, I mean, that's been the story of my last three years of personal development. So you're right there with me, Terry. Yeah.

So that's the adaptive child. It wasn't safe for you to ask for what you wanted and needed, and you quite cleverly learned not, but there's a bill to. That adaptive child will not lead you into intimacy. The adaptive child doesn't know how to be intimate. Adaptive child knows how to protect herself. Good for you, but you're not that little boy. Elizabeths are not the boys on the playground. Your sensitivity is welcome here. Not always, but more than you think.

Yeah. Let's have courage. So that's one. Let's take a look at what you're doing and spone your own foot off. I have a saying, I have a million sayings. You don't have the right to get mad about not getting what you never asked for. 100%. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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Now, back to the show. Okay, so the first thing I do is lay out for you your half of the more the more. This is the relational stance you learned to do as a kid, but for you back then, it ain't going to work with Elizabeth. And therapy doesn't do that. They don't confront people. We do. With love, I'm on your side. Two,

Once I get what you do with Elizabeth that will never get you what you want, the very next sentence is, where did you learn this from? And you're going to take me back to the playground, that sensitive little boy who psychologically, socially got the shit kicked out of him. And then I would have you with Elizabeth sitting in the chair next to you, go into your body and find that little boy in the playground.

And ask him to come up out of your body and sit in an imaginary chair. Your eyes are closed. Look at him. What's he look like? How do you feel toward him? Tell him. And how does he respond hearing you say that? What do you want to say to this? And how does, so I do trauma work, inner child work. We're right there. I can feel it. Yeah. I don't think we're going to do it in the podcast, but we could. And so, well, let's just do two minutes. Okay. I'll be a guinea pig.

All right, close your eyes, go down into the cavity of your body. How old is that little boy who learned it, being sensitive isn't a good idea? Give me the youngest. Seven, eight years old, something like that. Find that seven-year-old, he's still in your body. Tell me when you got him. Take your time. Yeah, okay. As you look at him, what does he look like? Chubby cheeks, blondish brown hair, yeah.

I don't know, four feet tall, something like that. He sounds adorable. Sounds really cute. How do you feel toward him as you look at him? Really warm. Yeah. Tell him that. Tell him out loud. As I look at you, little, what would you call that little guy? Does he have a nickname? Oh, I would just say Forrest. Yeah. Okay. As I look at you, little Forrest, I feel, say it out loud. As I look at you, little Forrest, I feel really warm.

Yeah, feel that. Let yourself feel that. And how does he respond? Good. I mean, smiles. Yeah. I think there's a certain skittishness, but smiles. Okay. So he's a little held back. Mm-hmm. And he's also pleased. It's both. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Would you be willing to give him a message from me? Mm-hmm. Tell him I said he's a really smart little boy and it's really smart of him to hold back. Tell him that out loud. Here he says.

Terry says that you are a really smart little boy and it's smart of you to hold back and be a little careful. And how does he respond to that? Smiles. There's a warmth in the building in the space. I don't know a better way to put it. And he may not be able to, but why don't you ask him if he can put that smile into words.

For whatever reason, that's a little tricky. I don't know if it's because it's a visual thing or... That's fine. That's fine. Yeah. How do you feel, the adult you, as you take in his smile and warmth? How does that feel to you? Good. Also slightly emotional, but good. Yeah. And the slightly emotional, I can feel that and see, yeah. Yeah. I think that it's...

I'm such a words person and it's so not a words thing, which is funny, but it's really just very moving. It's an emotional movement. It's what my mentor of P.M. Melody would call joy pain. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's like a cathartic- You're touched. Positive feeling. Yeah, touched. I feel touched by it. Yeah. And tell him that. As I look at you smile, I'm touched in my heart. Yeah, as I look at you, I'm just really touched.

And how does he respond to that? Let him feel that. How does he respond to that? Really warmly. It's much more like open. This is very abbreviated, but if you feel right, keep your eyes closed, keep your eyes closed, keep looking at him. Do you feel like you can take care of this little guy emotionally? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Be with him? Can you be with him? Yeah. Can you keep him safe and protect him? Yeah, for sure. Tell him all that.

I feel really confident that I can keep you safe, that I can protect you, that it'll all be okay. - And I will be with you. - And I'll be with you. - Tell him, I know how alone you were. You don't have to be alone ever again. I'm here. If you would say that out loud. - A little edgy, but-- - Let yourself feel it. - I know how alone you were, and I won't let that happen to you again.

Yeah, as he responds. It's funny, the image is kind of breaking up for whatever reason. Yeah. I don't know if a certain self-consciousness is coming in, but I mean, the overall, the feeling is really good. Also, it's healthy distrust. You've got to put it in a, he's going to have to see you do it. Yeah, maybe that's safe. Would you tell him your version of, you can mistrust me. That's cool. I'll prove it to you over time. Would you tell him that?

Yeah, this is really okay. I got it. And you show things through your actions. And how does he respond to that? The image is clear. Good. Yeah, so I think there's more of a stability there. Yeah, he's come back. Is there anything more he wants to say to you or is there anything more you want to say to him? For now, there'll be plenty of time to talk to each other. Yeah, it feels like there's a lot there for you. And this has been...

and it's going to be kind of a slow, long process, and that's really okay. Tom, you don't have to do anything for me. You don't have to be any way for me. You don't have to do anything for me. I feel really good, and I'm going to make it okay. Is there anything more you need me to say to you? For whatever reason, it's nonverbal. Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm such a verbal person, but it's like a totally nonverbal thing. Being nonverbal,

Why don't you take a moment in your mind's eye, why don't you bring him up on your lap and put your arms around him and let yourself feel him there and let him feel you there. And if you want, take a moment and say something silently just for you and him. Tell me when you're done. Yeah, done. Great. And just felt very, I don't know, yeah, sweet. It's wonderful. One last thing, close your eyes.

Shrink them down in the palms of your hands and take your palms and put them into your heart, put them into your heart where he can rest safely. Let him know that he can call on you anytime and you may well be calling on him, doing more work with him. Thank him for coming. When you're ready, open your eyes. That was very sweet, Terry. You're a very sweet man. Thank you, buddy. I do appreciate it. Yeah, that was very, very tender stuff.

And it is funny how I'm such a cognizer in general, but whenever I've done processes like that in the past, it just gets so nonverbal so quickly, which I think is telling because it's a young part of the personality. It's kind of like that pre-left brain, pre-cognitive aspect that's really coming online for people. And that little boy was barely verbal

But he already knew not to trust. Yeah. And he was right. He was right to not trust. Yeah, I think a lot of my early relationships, not to just, "Hey, we're here." So a lot of my early relationships were really defined by this sense, this kind of questioning of, "Does this person like me as much as I like them?" And sort of a deep feeling of probably not. Well, he was shamed for who he was. Yeah.

and for enthusiasm to a certain extent. I'm a big enthusiastic bundle by my nature, and that's not the coolest emotion to express with a group of eight-year-old boys or whatever. There's a lot of that. Well, thank you, Terry. That was very alive for me, as you could probably tell. It was beautiful to watch. Two things. That's the second phase of RLT.

for you to form a relationship with this young part of you so that when you get triggered, he doesn't take over. Yeah. And then the third phase is teaching your skills. Once the flooding subsides enough because you're now taking care of that little part of you, then you can do relational mindfulness, take a breath, wait a minute, I don't need my wall.

I couldn't share what I'm thinking and feeling with Elizabeth. Here I go. So first, loving confrontation. Second, trauma work. Third, skill building and teaching. And about the trauma work, it kills me that, see, I think our field is up to its eyeballs in supporting individualism and patriarchy. And

Virtually all of the trauma work that gets done in my field is behind closed doors. Individual behind closed doors. Yeah, totally. Imagine how nice it would be for Elizabeth to have been sitting next to you.

Yeah, I do want to ask you about that, Terry, because in a way, that's both a good and bad example of what we just did. What I mean is that because I'm kind of aware as I'm going through this, there are X thousand people watching me do this. It's like a very revealed, very somewhat vulnerable process. And I need to... We get

a third of the way into it and I'm like, all right, I'm going to fully commit to this and make it as real as it can be. But I would imagine for a person that doing that with their partner there would kind of be doubly vulnerable for them in a way. Do you want the other person to see this aspect of you?

So yeah, it could be totally great for them, but for the person doing it, man, that's a high bar to clear, I have to imagine. Well, yes and no. See, you would be particularly sensitive to this, if I may, because you're love-avoidant. So maybe, okay, good point, good point. So it's hard for you to imagine that you could be this vulnerable with your lover and that she would be compassionate and kind to you about it.

Well, I can easily imagine her being compassionate and kind to me about it, but your overall point here is very well taken. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we talk about your skittishness and we talked to Elizabeth about how she's going to handle herself. If as a couples therapist, I feel like you're with an irresponsible partner who would be mean to you, either there or after the fact, we don't do it. Yeah.

you're making good choices about this there's some contraindication sure but you know the punch line here is little forest you can be brave with elizabeth you can take down the wall and be more assertive identify your wants be more vulnerable be more courageous be more assertive go for it and meanwhile rather than doing all of this behind closed doors and maybe

talking about it a little. Elizabeth sitting next to you, she lives with your walls and she may be at times pretty frustrated with your walls. When she sees where the walls come from, when she feels you do this work with this little part of you, it opens up the heart. And I think that not doing trauma work with your partner sitting next to you with rules is an incredible missed opportunity.

It just creates so much empathy between the two partners. Oh, now I get why you're a fighter. If you didn't fight as a little boy, you would have gone under. Sure, don't do it to me, but instead of hating that fighting part of you, I have compassion. That's a wonderful opportunity of doing that work with your partner sitting next to you. Maybe a related thing that can help some couples out with this is a lot of normalizing.

which is what you do a lot of in your work, or at least my read of it, it does seem that way. One version of this is what you call normal marital hatred, which is one of my absolutely favorite phrases of yours. It's sort of funny to pivot toward what sounds like hatred from such a tender investigation that we were just doing there, but I actually think it connects really smoothly because there's kind of appreciation that conflict is normal. Conflict is a normal part of a relationship. There are going to be times in every couple's life

where you do kind of hate your partner, not in a destructive way, but there are just aspects of them that are grinding on you. Elizabeth feeling totally ground on at a certain point, but like, "Oh my God, can this guy just tell me what he wants actually so I can deliver the goods for him or vice versa, whatever it is?" How did you kind of come to that idea, Terry? I'm wondering. It's a funny question to ask because it's so not how most people talk about relationships.

You know, it's interesting. I really owe it to Ed Tronick, wrote a great book called The Power of Discord. And Ed, as you know, is an infant observational researcher. And he and Barry Breselton were the pioneers of sticking a video camera in front of mothers and infants and then fathers and infants and actually looking at what happens between them. Before them,

Everybody's thoughts about what happened in early childhood came from adult therapy patients and reconstructing is ridiculous. And it was really Ed who came up with the idea of what I came to call harmony, disharmony, and repair. Closeness, disruption, a return to closeness. And he records this. You can go to YouTube and here's the tape. Watch some wild videos. Yeah, totally. Here's the tape. Ready?

The child is, we call it molded, you know, just a noodle. And then there's gas or noise or whatever. Child goes nuts. Mother tries to comfort the baby, having none of it. Baby's angry. Mother gets angry. Mother glares down at the baby that she can't comfort. The little baby takes her arms and shields her face from that glare, the hostile glare of the mother.

Then the gas passes and we're back to mold it again. Here's the beauty of that tape. You ready? 40 seconds. Yeah. 40 seconds. Yeah. I say harmony, disharmony, and repair can occur 30 times during one dinner conversation or can span 50 years of a marriage. In our culture, all the skills,

come from moving from disharmony back into repair, and we don't teach them. We don't even acknowledge that disharmony exists. A great relationship is all harmony. It's all bullshit. So I love embracing the whole pattern. What Tronix says is trust, even in infancy, let alone is not unbroken harmony. That's bullshit.

Trust is going through the whole cycle over and over and over again and trusting that when you fall, you'll be caught. After you're screaming and yelling at each other, one of you says, let's not fight. Let's come here. And you make up. It's the rhythm of going through it.

and surviving that gives us trust. And we can go through it and survive a lot better if we learn a technology that our culture doesn't teach us. And then so much of it is about learning how to do that in a skillful way, which is that skill development piece that you were talking about at the end. Yeah, totally. Our culture doesn't teach us any of the skills we need. And so many people have bad modeling or no modeling. Yeah. Yeah, there's no modeling. Right. And

You get trauma triggered when you're in disharmony, so you lose the wise adult that even wants to use it. That's why the first skill is moving out of the flooding into the part of you that wants to use skills to be it. We have a boot camp to go online, and they're all over the country now, two-day workshop. And my favorite slide of the boot camp is, other workshops teach you skills. We deal with the part of you that won't use them.

Yeah, I think that's so many people's very visceral experience of their relationship. They've listened to however many hours of podcasts or gone to therapy or whatever it is, and they've kind of learned that what I should do, it's the applying it that people struggle with so much. Yeah. I mean, true, Jonathan was right. That's why a total skill-based program won't work when you're triggered, the skills go out the window. I don't care about skills. I care about protecting myself.

Okay, take a break. Go for a walk around the block. Talk to that little boy. It's okay. I gotcha. Then go back and deal with your partner. Terry, thanks so much for doing this with me today. That was a...

Remarkably intimate conversation, certainly for me and I would imagine for a lot of the people listening. And I just really appreciate it. I appreciate your work in general. So looked forward to talking with you. Really glad that we could do it again. Looking forward to speaking again next week. Before you get out of here, is there anything else you want to tell people about? Anything you've got going on? Programs, things you're doing? I know you do a lot of training for therapists. We've got a lot of therapists who listen to the show as well.

Yeah, we have all sorts of training on how to do this. It's a very uncommon way of working. So go to relationallife.com and you'll see all of that. If you're not a therapist or a coach, but what I like to call a normal person, go to terryreel.com and we have courses for the general public, healthy self-esteem, healthy boundaries. So go to terryreel.com

I'm intent not just to teach therapists and coaches, but to teach the general public how to live a more relational life on this planet. Awesome. Thank you so much, Terry. This has been totally great. Beautiful, man. See you real soon.

I loved talking with Terry today. I always love talking with Terry. The conversation that we had on the podcast, I think it was three years ago or something now, it was a while ago, remains one of my favorite episodes that we've ever done. We talked today about relationships. We're going to talk again next week. I'm not sure if these are going to air sequentially or not. They might about masculinity. I'm really looking forward to that conversation as well. And we started by talking about individualism.

and the ways in which these different cultural forces, particularly individualism and patriarchy are the two that Terry really highlights, tend to show up in the counseling office for a therapist. Because when somebody walks into the room, they're walking in as themselves, they're walking in with all of their individual experiences, of course, but they also exist in, hello, a context. And that context really matters when you're doing therapy with people. Modern Western culture,

maybe particularly in the United States, that's what I can speak to because that's the country that I live in, really values individualism. Despite living in this deeply interconnected world through globalization and technology and social media, all of this stuff,

we still have this organizing principle that we are all kind of an island unto ourselves. And if you really want to go into some existential theory with it, yeah, you are ultimately an individual person. There is a fundamental distance and separation between you and others that can never be fully bridged.

But Terry also likes to think ecologically, and we are not above nature. We're a part of nature. We're not above our relationships. We're a part of our relationships. And the real movement that Terry needs to help a couple go through when they walk into the office is a movement from me to us, and that's why it was the title of his most recent book. Most people exist in

in one of two models when they think about their relationships, and particularly when they're thinking from that more adaptive child, not so wise adult perspective. The first metaphor that Terry likes to use is a seesaw. When one person's down, the other person's up. When one person's up, the other person's down.

And often what happens is that each of them are upset at the other person for their circumstance. The person who's down on the ground is going, "Wait a second, why don't you just push harder up there so I can be up?" And the person who's up is like, "Get off the damn seesaw so I can go down."

Another metaphor that I use during the conversation is how many people really feel like they're in their own little rowboat. And maybe their partner or their friend, their family member, whatever relationship we're talking about here, is in this other rowboat that's kind of next to them, and you hope that you're going in the same direction. And the real revelatory moment for people is when they go, wait a second, we're actually all in the same rowboat here? And the question is, are we rowing in the same direction or not? We are all fundamentally on the same team.

But the model for problem solving that most people have when they first walk into the room is a power-based model. I get what I want by pushing harder than you are willing to push. Or an example that Terry gave, I get what I want by proving to you that I'm right.

This is a zero-sum approach to relationships. If you're carrying around that model, the way that you get what you want is by the other person not getting what they want. And so we have to fundamentally change that model. We have to get that I get more of what I want by giving you what you want. And that can be a really difficult hill for people to climb initially.

One of the things that Terry has to navigate inside of that process with people are these different aspects of our personality. He called them the wise adult, the adaptive child, and then the wounded child, these three characters that show up in the room over and over again. The wounded child is the part of us that's based on early painful experiences that we had, and then the adaptive child is what emerges in response to those experiences.

That part had to adapt by adopting behavior that made a lot of sense back then but is causing some problems inside of our relationship today. And in our intimate relationships, we tend to trigger each other's adaptive child responses. This then leads to the creation of something that we didn't talk about very much during the conversation, but it's a cool idea. Terry calls it a core negative image, and this is basically the worst story that we have about our partner.

And there's not a lot of space in this story, this image that we have of the other person for change, for possibility. They just are that way. And our problem exists because of that person over there, that's the way that they are.

Now, from there, our conversation took a real turn because I shared a little bit about my own relationship with Elizabeth and Terry really went to town and got very interested about it. And then we just kind of wandered toward doing some inner child work, which was...

really interesting. It was totally real for me. Whenever I have one of those experiences on the show where I'm talking to a clinician and we just start doing it because real material comes up or they want to make it more real for the audience and give a direct depiction of the kind of work that they do, I always have a moment inside of me where I'm like, how into this am I going to get? How

how revealed do I want to be about this, particularly when you're dealing with an aspect of your personality that is so intimate and young and vulnerable and sensitive and all of these words that we use. But pretty quickly in the process, I just decided to be real about it. There's a part of me that feels a little uncomfortable about that just because it was pretty revealed and probably the most revealed that I've been on the show.

But hey, I hope that people got something out of it. I hope that they found it interesting. I know that I got a lot out of it personally. And it was just very cool to see Terry work. And what took us into that role play was a conversation about masculinity and gender socialization and the kinds of things that we punish out of people. Young boys are often punished for their sensitivity. Young girls are often punished for their assertiveness.

What happens in a relationship when these two people grow up and need to start interacting with each other if they're in that kind of a heteronormative relationship? Where's the little boy who knew how to perceive and understand and relate to the emotions of the people around them? Where's that sensitivity? Where's the little girl who knew how to say what she meant and express herself and be open and clear and assertive in that way?

And what would happen if they could talk to each other without so much of the adaptive behavior getting in the way of that conversation, without so much of the socialization getting in the way? Terry talked about how we are, to some extent, half people walking around with each other, where men are taught to purge that sensitivity, purge those things that we think of as being more classically feminine. A while back, I did a video talking

talking about gender socialization and how many of the traits that we ascribe to more masculine or more feminine are almost random in how we think about them. Clearly, sensitivity, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, emotional attunement, these are not feminine traits or masculine traits. These are human traits. They exist in some distribution across the population as a whole, and we've really done men dirty in a lot of ways, particularly inside of their relationships by socializing out of them

All of these traits, all of these capabilities that would be enormously of service inside of their relationships, that would actually make them a more interesting, more desirable partner to most women. And so part of what Terry's trying to do with people is help them reclaim all of those aspects of personality. You want to be able to play with all of the toys. You want to be able to use all of the tools in the toolbox. If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

And part of that, particularly working with the adaptive child and the wounded child, includes or naturally flows into a certain kind of trauma work. And so we talked a bit about how RLT, relational life therapy, does trauma work and how it's quite unusual in that it'll do trauma work inside of a couple with both of the partners present.

And then at the end of the conversation, we closed by talking a little bit about normal marital hatred. I love this concept from Terry because it, hey, it's normal. It normalizes something that if you've been in a long-term relationship, you've just experienced at some point. Everybody hates each other sometimes. It's okay. We all have conflict inside of a relationship.

Like Terry was talking about, you go up together, you go down together, you do some repair, you figure it out, you go up again. This can all happen on a pretty tight timescale. Like he was mentioning with the videos of mothers and children, this can happen in 40 seconds, or it can happen over the course of 40 years.

But either way, if you don't include conflict and, frankly, failure, things going really sideways as part of your model of a relationship, you're just not going to get that far because you are living in this idealized vision of what things look like. And the first time that things go sideways, you are not going to be willing to put up with it because you think that conflict is not a part of a healthy relationship.

Now, of course, you want to be reasonable about how much conflict, what kind of conflict. And it's in that that

inclusive process. And it's funny to refer to it as an inclusive process, but I really think that it is. It's a shades of gray process. It's when people go through that and are willing to go through that, which is the hardest thing for people to do. People love to have these harsh lines around things because it's very easy for our mind to attach to that person bad, that person good.

No, people are complicated. They got parts. They have aspects. Stuff gets weird. It's okay. Are you able to find your way through it in a healthy, functional, relational way from that stance of us, from that stance of we're in this boat together?

I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. I am very curious about the feedback for this one. Also, maybe particularly the feedback for the roleplay session. I'm glad that I did it. I got a lot out of it. And, you know, hey, I think that part of what I'm doing here is modeling a degree of openness to that kind of thing and vulnerability and...

just a willingness to interact with your own history and your own demons to a certain extent. So very curious what people thought about it. If you've been watching the podcast for a while or listening to it, it would be great if you subscribed. If you haven't done that already, you can find us on YouTube, you can find us on essentially every podcast platform: Spotify, Apple,

If you want to support us in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a week, you can support the show. You can get some transcripts. If you are listening to the show, particularly on Apple, we would love it if you left a rating and a positive review. That really helps us out. So until next time, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you soon.