Episode 120 Transcript: Getting Real with Relationship Expert & Author Terry Real

Elisabeth LaMotte:
From the National Association of Social Workers, this is Social Work Talks and I'm your host, Elisabeth LaMotte. And what a thrill it is to welcome Terry Real to today's conversation. He is a legendary speaker, bestselling author, trainer, couples therapist extraordinaire. He has written many bestselling books and today we're going to be discussing his most recent book, us, which was published in 2022 and just released on paperback last month. Terry Real has also developed a groundbreaking approach to couples therapy. It's called Relational Life Therapy. It underpins all of his writing, all of his teachings, and it breaks down for adults how to cultivate stronger relationship skills so that they can develop more authentic connections for themselves, for each other, and really for the planet as a whole. So Terry Real welcome to Social Work Talks. Thank you so much for joining us.

Terry Real:
Oh my gosh, what a beautiful introduction. Thank you, Elisabeth.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
You're so welcome. So many of our listeners are social workers or other mental health professionals. Could we start with you just describing for us what led you to choose the mental health field and how you decided to become a therapist?

Terry Real:
Oh my gosh. I tease and I say I began my career as a family therapist at about the age four, the Great Alice Miller, the drama, the Gifted child. The gift of the gifted child is extraordinary EQ because you have to regulate these giant grownups that you're depending upon. So as I've written about, as many of you already know, I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family and one of the great works of my life is breaking that chain. My first book was about male depression and I say, I am the son of a depressed violent father. He was the son of a depressed violent father. I have two sons, 37 and 34. They don't say that and their children won't say that, and that's probably the greatest achievement of my life. I became a therapist because I had to.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yes, and in what you're describing, you're breaking this intergenerational cycle, but not only that, you're teaching other people how to do it as well, not just in your clinical work, but in what you're communicating to the world with your writing. Tell us a bit more about the book us and how that built from your prior publications.

Terry Real:
What I take on in us is the essential mistake of western civilization. Gregory Basin, the father of family therapy anthropologist, talked about what he called the epistemological mistake, which is that we stand apart from nature. I talk about the toxic culture of individualism. The word individual means that I'm apart from nature. That's the definition of it. I stand apart from nature and that fuses with an even older tradition of patriarchy, which teaches us that we're above nature and in control of it and the control of nature, the nature we're trying to control can be our bodies. I've got to lose 10 pounds. Our minds, I've got to be more positive. Our spouses, our kids, you can control from the one up. You can also manage up. You can control from the one down. Don't set father off as a form of control. Codependence is control. And the essence of the work I do and teach is coming out of this delusion into what I call ecological wisdom. We are not apart from nature, we're in it. I like to say our relationships or our biospheres,

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yes,

Terry Real:
We're not above them, we're in them. We're also not below them. We're in them,

Elisabeth LaMotte:
We're in them, and they're always changing.

Terry Real:
And once we realize that we're in it, that we're systemically linked to each other, then the whole world of right, wrong me versus you power, all of that's bullshit. And I talk about enlightened self-interest. I don't like altruism. I like it's in my interest to keep the biosphere healthy because I'm in it.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yes, your deep psychological understanding of language and the subtle shifts that you've made in the conversation, I'm finding them so powerful in reading your book, in sharing it with clients and in learning more about you. That's one of course another well-known one is who's right, who's wrong? Who cares? It's just a basic frame of how to let go of right and wrong, I think for connected reasons in terms of what you're describing. Am I following you with that?

Terry Real:
I feel very empathically held by Elisabeth. I think you're understanding quite well. Listen, let me give you a story. I love to tell story. This is a true, my specialty are couples on the brink that no one else has been able to help. That's my beat. This isn't quite that, but I'll do is classic heteronormative her to him. You're a reckless driver. Him to her, you're overly anxious. I don't know if anybody listening can. Okay, so they marshal their evidence, they argue their case. This is how most people do things. Who's right, who's wrong? What's fair? What's not fair? No, I am telling you you're nervous. You're nervous about this. No, I'm telling you you're reckless. One session with me. This is a true story her to him, honey, let's start with that. Change the energy. Honey. I know you love me. Call me crazy. Call me a nervous Nellie. See, she just takes the whole objective battle off the table and speaks subjectively, call me crazy When we're driving and you're tailgating and switching lanes and speeding up, I get terrified.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Terrified.

Terry Real:
Now you care about me when you drive by yourself, whatever, I worry about you. But when I'm in the car with you, you don't want me sitting next to you being terrified. You care about me as a favor to me. Even though you know you're a safe driver, could you please slow down And him to her? Absolutely. Okay. And what would've been a fight for 40 is settled in 10 minutes because it's not about you me, it's not about right, wrong. It's not about fair or unfair. It's not about objective reality. Objective reality has no place in personal relationship.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Right.

Terry Real:
This is my experience. Let me remind you, you love me as a favor to me. Could I humbly ask? Sure. Honey, I'll do that for you. That's shifting from the world that we normally live in, which is about individuals and power to the relational world. We're in this together. We're an ecosystem as a favor to me,

Elisabeth LaMotte:
As a part of being in it together and building on this beautiful language that you've created. A piece of it that I hear in these examples is the accessing of the wise adult self. And if triggered in a fast driving car, taking the adaptive child self's hand off the steering wheel and attending to them and caring for them so that we can show up as our wise adult self. And I find that so powerful. Can you break that down a bit more for our listeners and our

Terry Real:
Yes, it's critical. Look, the name of my institute is Relational Life Institute. The name of the therapy is Relational Life Therapy. Guess what? What's curative in my work is teaching people to live a relational life in this planet. What did that mean? Well, it means that you remember the ecosystem, but that it takes the prefrontal cortex and like a lot of systems, I have a three part system I inherited from my great mentor p melody. We're talking about the wise adult part, prefrontal cortex thinking, choosing deliberate, intentional. Unfortunately that's not where we live all the time. There's also what we call the wounded child, part of us very young part that just experience the abuse or neglect all feelings, first moments of life to about four or five between this very mature part and very immature part is the part most of us live in thinking it's an adult, but it's not. I call it the adaptive child part. Pia called it a kid in grownup's clothing. This is the you that you cobbled together to cope a fight, flight or fix. And what happens is that in the heat of the moment, we get trauma triggered. The wounded child comes up where most of us have about two seconds worth of tolerance for that. And then the adaptive child steps in and says, I got this. And you do what you learn to do as a kid and that part of you is running your relationship and often making a mess. So the core skill that I teach is what we call relational mindfulness. It's akin to a spiritual practice. Take a breath, take a break, take a time out, get receded in the part of you that can be skilled, that wants to be skilled, and then go back into the Sue Johnson was totally right. Once you're triggered, skills go out the window. We have to deal with trauma.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
You described it so well that when you're triggered, it's not just that the skills go out the window. We relive the trauma of our adaptive child self.

Terry Real:
Yes.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
And there you have it.

Terry Real:
You don't remember trauma, you relive it,

Elisabeth LaMotte:
You relive it. I think that's so important for people to keep in mind. And I mean, Terry, I feel like you're taking the way that many of us skilled couples therapists work and you're growing it and you're amplifying it. I mean I always thought of this, yes, as a childhood self and yes as a reactive self, but it's like you're putting them together in a way that can more deeply help someone.

Terry Real:
Well yeah. I love my spiritual friend Thomas Bel and from him, I love this phrase, always be respectful of the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child. You did exactly what you needed to do back then. Good for you. But I have a saying adaptive then maladaptive. Now can I tell you another story?

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Please, please do.

Terry Real:
Yeah. Also true. This was a couple on the brink of divorce. The guy was a chronic liar, lied about everything. Of course that's untenable. Okay, so in RLT there are three phases. One loving, which most therapists don't do. We're too nice. Elisabeth, let me tell you what you're doing over and over again. That is blowing your own foot off. This is the adaptive child trying to run your relationship. Once I have that established, where did you learn this from? Where did this come from? And RLT is pretty unique in that we do deep trauma work while your partner is sitting next to you. It kills me. It's part of the individualistic bias of our field that almost all trauma work is done behind closed doors. No, no. Go back to that childhood experience with your loving partner next to you. They live with these immature parts of you. Let them see where they come from. Alright, so where did this come from? And then the third phase are skills. Let me teach you how to do it differently. So here's the guy, chronic liar, because I'm a relational therapist, I ask him a question that it seems brilliant, but for people who have trained with us falling a lot, he was the kind of guy you say to him, the sky is blue and he says, well, it's a marine and he's not going to give it to you. Right? So there are three sources of data. The report wave says he's a chronic liar. His behavior with you is not blue as a and how you feel sitting with him. So I say to him, you have a black belt in evasion. You are a master evader who tried to control you growing up. Sure enough, his father, what he ate, how he clothes, what courses he took. I said, how did you deal with this controlling father? He looks at me and smiles. That's the force of resistance, that's help that smile. And he says to me, guess what? I lied. Brilliant

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Survival.

Terry Real:
My father said, don't play with Henry. I played with Henry and told him I was playing with John. So I say to him, brilliant boy, well done. Guess what you're not for and she's not your father. Maybe it's time for a new, they go away, they come back two weeks later, we're done, we're cured. And they were. I say, okay, there's a story. He says, she sent me off to the grocery store for 12 things. Sure enough, I came back with 11. She says to me, where's the pumper nickel? I want everybody to feel this. He said, every muscle and nerve in my body was screaming to say they were out of pumper nickel. And in this moment I took a breath. I thought of you, Terry, we can lend our clients, our prefrontal cor, they can borrow our brain. I thought of you. I looked at my wife and I said, I forgot the goddamn pumper nickel true story. And she burst into tears and she said, I've been waiting for this moment for 25 years. And that's healing.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
It is healing and it's change in the moment. Psychological growth and change.

Terry Real:
RLT is known for producing characterological transformation in jig time,

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Big time. Another corner of this that I think is so important that I want to make sure we get to is the clarity and the structure in which you break down the process of a repair. Because you talk about relationships being in harmony and disharmony and the idea that that is natural, that is life and that where we tend to really struggle is that repair to get us from the disharmony back into the harmony. So can you break that down a bit for our listeners and our viewers please?

Terry Real:
Yes. I owe this to the infant observational researcher, ed Tron. He along with Barry Brazelton, was one of the first to actually stick a camera in front of mothers and infants and see and what he came up, the rhythm of relationships, its closeness, disruption, return, the infants totally relaxed, and then those gas were noise. Infant freaks out, mother freaks out, the bus freaked out. And then the gas passes or the nipples, and then we're back to, it's like walking balance in balance. Our culture does not acknowledge this rhythm. A good relationship is all harmony. It doesn't equip us to deal with,

Elisabeth LaMotte:
It's so unrealistic,

Terry Real:
Right? You're talking to the guy who coined the phrase normal marital hatred. That disharmony phase is raw. Okay. So what makes life dicey is when you shift from harmony, disharmony, we all marry our unfinished business. We can return to that.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yes, we do.

Terry Real:
When you shift into that, you shift into your trauma. The adaptive child comes out and does what it did to survive, but it doesn't work. When you can move into the wise adult part of you which can be cultivated, you can then reach for the skills that will lead you back into repair. And I break them down. You can go to my, there's a way of speaking, there's a way of listening. There's a way of making repair, but you have to be in the part of you that wants to make repair before you'll use those skills.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
So may I also, because so many of our listeners are social workers, as we continue this conversation, I want to read a passage from page 101 that shifts us a bit, but I think we'll be of interest to many of our listeners. You write relational life therapy transforms. Patriarchy, transforms individuals one couple at a time. The preservation of individualism has historically required the suppression of the less privileged voices. The unacknowledged social underpinning of both forms of individualism is cast privilege and exclusivity. You and me, consciousness is rooted in competition as if resources were limited and only the strong survive. The US consciousness by contrast embraces the whole acknowledges our relationship to the unseen, the orphan, the exiles. Once we incorporate the perspective of the excluded priorities reorder. And the reason I want to share this is I think social workers in particular are so poised for this to speak to the way we work in terms of our training and activism and understanding. So I wanted to share that and just get your thoughts.

Terry Real:
Oh, that's beautiful and thank you for Yeah, I'm very proud of being a social worker and social worker as a field is systemic. As a field, we're ecological and we have a longstanding tradition of whopping the marginalized to the table and understanding the consequences of oppression and marginalization. I'm still grappling as a school for 40 years I've been writing about patriarchy and we're just really opening up to issues of racism and other forms of marginalization. But the gift bringing those without voice into the table is they have a different story to tell. My classic example of this is how many of us have heard that the alpha male, and this is grounded anthropology, the strong gorilla gets the female. Well that's a story told by alpha male anthropologists. And when anthropology opened up to women, anthropologists, lo and behold turns out there's also a male in gorillas and primates that they call the relational male. This is the guy who groans and takes care of the kids. And it turns out the relational male gets just as many mates as the big strong alpha male gets. But we wouldn't know about that if we were just listening to male anthropologists. So different voices have different perspectives.

We're still grappling that with the school. I talk in RLT, we talk a lot about the adaptive child. When we started grappling with issues of oppression and marginalization, we had to shift that. There's also, if you're a marginalized person, an adaptive adult that's adapting to trauma and oppression that may be happening in the elevator on your way up to the therapist's office. And so calling that the adaptive child and referencing it just to your family, it doesn't hit the, we have to have a bigger perspective of, for example, as a white male therapist telling a black female client or a black male client, you need to be more vulnerable, really easy for you to say buddy. And for me to say to a black client, you need to be more vulnerable without some explicit acknowledgement of the complexities of that and the complexities of my saying that as a privileged white male, your invulnerability, which may make you very difficult husband to live with, maybe just what you need when you leave your apartment and go out on the street. And I don't have a more nuanced understanding of all of this. I'm going to blow it with you. So I think social work has been attuned to these systemic issues and issues of oppression in ways that give us a leg up.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
The issues of oppression are ones that so many of our clients feel. And you're speaking to it so thoughtfully, I can't help though. But be curious, do you notice any kind of gender differences in how clinicians train in relational life therapy? And if so, what do you observe there and how do you navigate that?

Terry Real:
Yeah, it's interesting. I used to be pretty glib about it. I didn't want women to be disempowered. The first phase of the work is confrontation. And another distinguishing characteristic royalty is we don't just take issues of shame. We do deal with that. But we also deal with issues of grandiosity, helping people come down from the one up, which psychotherapy is neglected for 50 years.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Curiosity.

Terry Real:
And I think the reason why we neglected is because of patriarchy. We were nice to perpetrators, we protect the perpetrator. Don't lean in and confront a grandiose man. Being nice to someone who's grandiose rather than dealing with them replicates the traditional feminine role. We're going to nurture you out of your grandiosity. Good luck with that. So we find a way of moving in and saying, look, bill, we call it joining through the truth. You hold the person in one regard and you're clear is a be about their rotten behavior both at the same time. Bill, you're a decent guy.

I've been with indecent guys, they're called sociopaths. You're warm. You've been a cheater and a philander for 20 years. What's sad Bill? I'm talking to a decent man who's behaved indecently for 20 years. Will you let me rescue the real you from this crap? That's how we work. We tell the truth with love. And people always say, well, can you get away with that? You're a man. Can a woman do that? And I always used to. Yeah, which is true. I mean, my wife has no problem confronting men. Pia, our great mentor, used to say she was a cowgirl and she'd lean in. The way you're coming on right now is what I call coming on like garlic mouthwash. So I used to say, no competence trumps gender if women can take their seat and do this. But my students confronted me and now I say, it's easier for me as a man. It's harder for a woman having said that you can do it. So it's nuance. And as our women therapists train, it's harder for many of them to stop being pleasing good girls and be assertive and aggressive. But by the time they're done with our training, they don't have a problem.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yeah, I mean even the way you're giving these examples, so it's both thoughtful, it's gentle, it's kind, but it's direct and it's so psychologically grounded. And for anybody who's not familiar with your books, reading it is the same way. I mean, I'll share even as you talk about this grandiosity, first of all, as an aside, I love how you at really well-timed points. You will say, dear reader.

And it feels like when you're reading it, it feels like you mean that. And there's this point where you say, dear reader, think about it yourself. Think about your own internalized grandiosity. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, huh, I don't think I have that. I can't think of that. I pause and then it's like I'm having a conversation with you because the next thing you say is, if you're having trouble, why don't you ask your spouse? And literally he was sitting right there and I asked him, it was a worthwhile conversation. And it was a little bit like I got a little bit of your brain and I brought it into our conversation. And it's just very powerful and beautiful the way that you write. And I would say my only issue with your book is I often suggest books and films to clients to do in tandem with our work. And so many of them are finding this so powerful. But the thing they will not do with your book is read it slowly, which I want them to do. And they won't do it. They just can't put it down. And they'll admit it. They'll say, I know I was supposed to just do a chapter a week and we were going to talk about it, but I just had to keep going.

Terry Real:
Well, if that's the worst criticism, I'll take it. I also love people to listen to it. I'm proud of the way I read it and Bruce Springsteen did the intro and his reading is phenomenal and it's beautiful to listen to.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yeah, it's a beautiful introduction and your voice comes through very beautifully on the audio book. So that is another option for our listeners and our viewers and information about is in the show notes section. I am curious what direct advice you have for clinicians who are just starting out in our wonderful field. What advice would you give them?

Terry Real:
Come and train in RLT.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
We'll have to the institute. So that is an option for people. I expect many, many people will be interested in doing that. I have a story I would like to share with you.

Terry Real:
Oh, please.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
And it happened in March of 2020. I received an email from your institute inviting any colleagues to join a call to talk about what was about to happen with this global pandemic. And I joined, I assume along with hundreds, maybe thousands. And you were so direct and encouraging and concrete about the transition that we needed to make and that we could make and that we all did make for varying degrees of time. I want to thank you for doing that call and for helping me and so many others get started. And as one of our last questions, I am curious how you feel that the pandemic has shaped your work and shaped relationships.

Terry Real:
There's a sentence, and one of the things I'm really proud about in RLT is it fans out the shift from power over or managing up the two different, more traditionally male, more tradit female, but they shift from control to ecological interdependence.

I talk about what I call coming out from under the great lie. The lie that a human being or group could be essentially superior or inferior to another grandiosity shame. And that dynamic of inferior superior plays out in our brain, plays out between partners, plays out between races, plays out in our relationship with nature. And moving into relationality means being in right relationship to yourself, to your spouse, your kids, to other races, to nature itself. And one of the things I say is that as a species, we will trade in the paradigm of dominance and power for the paradigm of cooperation and interdependence or we will die

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Or we will die.

Terry Real:
So the same shift that can transform a marriage, I believe is a shift we're on the edge of as a species. And I don't know, I'm not a fan of neutrality. This is the fight of our life and therapists and social workers are we therapists are change agents, own that.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yeah. So poised to own that

Terry Real:
We know more about how to live wisely than the culture at large.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Such a good point.

Terry Real:
Own that.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Terry Real, thank you so much for joining this conversation and discussing this wonderful book. Us listeners, please do check out the show note section of our website for information both about the book, but about how to train at the Relational Life Therapy Institute. And I hope that someday we can continue this conversation with your next book. Thank you for joining us.

Terry Real:
I would love that. Thank you, Elisabeth. What a lovely interview. Thank you.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Thank you very much.

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