#798: Terry Real — Breaking the Rules of Traditional Couples Therapy for Superior Results, A Few Frameworks That Work

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

Hello, ladies and germs, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. For this episode, I'm going to offer something a little different. I'm going to introduce you to Terry Real. Terry Real is by far the best relationship coach, the best couples therapist I have ever met. He does not just parrot back questions. If you ask him what he thinks, he will not just ask you what you think. He has strong opinions, positions. He says it straight.

First and foremost, he has a toolkit. He has practices that are incredibly helpful for couples. His name has come up with various friends ranging from Kevin Rose to Dr. Peter Attia. He does not disappoint. In this episode, because he is very, very hard to get a hold of for direct client work, you will get to, in effect, hear him like you would in a real session. I've done real sessions with him. So what you'll hear in this episode and learn, among other things, are, number one, that relationships are not always harmonious. And that will be obvious to anyone who's been married for a while, for instance. But it is a constant cycle of harmony to disharmony and then repair. So the critical skill set is repair. And what I'm going to share in this episode, because I was so impressed by it, are a few chapters from his book Fierce Intimacy. And this will provide you with a map for identifying losing strategies and replacing them with winning strategies. These are real approaches that you can use. So a bit of background on Terry. He is the creator of relational life therapy or RLT, which underpins all of his books, courses, teachings and so on. He is also the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller, Us, subtitle, Getting Past You and Me, to build a more loving relationship. Last but not least, I'll throw in a little bonus, and that is if you'd like an extra dose of calm, C-A-L-M, I recommend checking out Henry Shukman, a past podcast guest and one of only a few dozen masters in the world authorized to teach Sanbo Zen. His app, The Way, has changed my life. I've been using it daily, often twice a day, and it's lowered my anxiety more than I thought possible. And equivalent to a lot of the more aggressive things I've done, like accelerated TMS and other therapies. So try it out for 30 free sessions. You can just visit thewayapp.com/tim. That's thewayapp.com/tim, no credit card required. So you will have a very good feeling for if it's working for you after I would say 10 sessions. You can find all things Terry Real at terryreal.com. That's terryreal.com.

And now please enjoy these chapters from Fierce Intimacy by none other than Terry Real.

SPEAKER_2 (2:49)

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Terry Real (2:53)

Can I answer your personal question?

Let me talk for a moment about the nature of relationships to begin with. All relationships are an endless dance of harmony, disharmony, and repair. Closeness, disruption, and a return to closeness. My paradigm for this came from the work of researcher Ed Tronek at Harvard, who was one of the first of a generation of people to actually plunk down a video camera and record what the transactions are between mothers and infants. Before infant observational research, Freud had taught us that the relationship between mothers and infants was an endless dance of oceanic bliss. Clearly, Freud had never talked to a mother. The real relationship, as Tronek's video recorded, was this dance of closeness, disruption, and return. The infant starts off molded in the mother's arms, totally relaxed, a little noodle, and they're in perfect harmony with each other. Then some gas arises or a hunger pang or there's a noise in the street. The baby goes nuts. The baby goes through a flurry of disruption. The mother tries to soothe the baby to the degree to which the mother fails. The mother goes through a flurry of disruption. The two of them are absolutely at odds with each other trying to find harmony and peace. And then the pacifier is accepted or the nipple is taken or the gas passes or the noise dies away and the baby goes back to molded and noodle and all is well. This dance, Harmony, Disharmony and Repair, is the essential rhythm of all human intimate relationships, Harmony, Disharmony and Repair, Closeness, Disruption and a Return to Closeness. This dance can play out 20 times during the course of one dinner conversation. During the course of one dinner conversation, your partner can look to you lovely, homely, scintillating, boring, just the way you can see yourself. The psychoanalyst Ethel Person once said that as you go through these endless variations during the course of one dinner conversation, handsome, ugly, scintillating, boring, a normal person gets up at the end of that dinner and says, that was a nice dinner. A grandiose or narcissistic person gets up and says, you know, if I was with the right partner these fluctuations wouldn't be happening. There's nothing abnormal about this rhythm. It's the same rhythm in the relationship you have with yourself. Harmony, disharmony and repair. Closeness, disillusionment and a return to closeness. This relationship, harmony, disharmony and repair, can also play out during the course of decades in one marriage or one relationship. I talk about three phases of love. The harmony phase I call love without knowledge. You can have a deep soul recognition that this is the person who is the dream of your life. And you may know that, but you don't know what the bottom of their closet looks like, or what they do with their underwear at night, or how their bills are being paid. You have a deep, intimate connection with them at one soulful level, but you don't know them very well. That harmony phase is inevitably followed by disillusionment, disharmony. And when you're in the disillusionment phase, I call that knowledge without love. Now you see all your partners' warts and moles. You know all about their imperfections, but you don't love them very much. In fact, you're pretty hurt and angry. This is the dark night of the soul that is a part of all relationships. And it's rarely acknowledged in our culture. In our culture, just like a good body is a 17-year-old body, and a good sex life is the sex that you have in the first three months of your relationship. A good relationship is all harmony. There's nothing about disharmony and repair. You know, just once, I'd like to be at a cocktail party, and instead of hearing, oh, there's Herbie and Sylvia. They've been married 53 years, and they have the same wonderful, passionate sex life that they had in their 20s. They never fight. They're always one. Just once, instead of that, I'd like to hear, oh, there's Herbie and Sylvia. They actually separated a couple of three times during the course of their marriage. He had an affair while they were separated. She's really never quite completely gotten over it. But they've managed to survive, endure and be with each other and not lose their grip. I think they're really a loving pair. Aren't they cute? Just once, I'd like to hear that, but you don't. Disharmony, disillusionment is rarely acknowledged. No one tells you how dark it is. No one tells you how raw it is. The great couples therapist, some would say the father of couples therapy, James Framo wrote back in the 50s when it was assumed that the person you were sleeping with was your spouse, by the way. Framo wrote, The day you turn over in bed, look at the person next to you and realize, this is a dreadful mistake. You have been had. The one you fell in love with is not the one you're spending your life with. That day, says Framo, is the first day of your real marriage. Harmony and then disillusionment. Knowledge without love. It's dark. It's raw. It's desperate. You feel very alone. You feel betrayed. You feel had. Guess what? That's normal. That doesn't mean you're in a bad marriage or a bad long-term relationship. It means you're married. It is an integral part of all relationships. For over 20 years, I've gone around the country talking to people about what I call normal marital hatred. And you know what? Not one person has gone backstage and said to me, Terry, what do you mean by that? Normal marital hatred is part of the deal. The trick is getting from that dark night back into the light again, moving from disharmony into repair. Disharmony into repair. What is repair? Knowing love, mature love. In this phase, you also see your partner's warts and moulds, but you choose to love them anyway. They are worth it. The good things you're getting outweigh the bad. Now, if you're in a place where that disharmony phase is really calling to you, and you're thinking, should I stay or should I go? I have a tool for you. And I like to interrupt whatever the lecture is to actually give you a concrete tool you might use. For those of you who are wondering whether you should stay or you should go, here's the tool. I call it a relational reckoning. Relational reckoning. Relational reckoning is a question, a question that you ask yourself, and it's simply this. Am I getting enough in this relationship to make grieving what I'm not getting worth my while? Am I getting enough in this relationship to offset the pain of what's wrong and what's lacking? And grieve you will. We long for perfection. We all long for gods and goddesses who will never let us down. But real relationships, of course, are about the collision of your human imperfection with your partners and how you manage it. I wouldn't want a perfect relationship. The collision of my humanity with yours is the guts, the stuff of intimacy itself. Harmony, disharmony, repair. How do we get from disharmony to repair? That's where the skills come in. And that's where most of us lose our way. Because it's only the functional adult part of us that will turn to skills. And what happens in the disharmony phase is that we are triggered. Early wounds, old family of origin dramas come to the surface. We take our eyes off the prize. We stop thinking about making things better between us and the partner we love. And instead we are taken over by adaptive child strategies, by different agendas. And actually, I sat down one day and figured out what they were. They're not infinite. There are only five of them. Here are the five losing strategies. Being right, controlling your partner, unbridled self-expression, retaliation and withdrawal. Being right, control, unbridled self-expression, retaliation and withdrawal. Let's take each of them in turn.