Terry Real

Yes.

And yeah, he said yeah.

Yes.

Here's my most famous quote. It's the height of pretension to quote yourself, but I will. You can do it. Thank you. Family pathology, family pathology, rolls from generation to generation. like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames.

That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children to follow.

We both were. It was a rare moment. We both were.

Apt and healing and difficult. I'll tell you this. I am the son of a depressed, angry father. He was the son of a depressed, angry father. I have two boys, 35, 37. Neither of them say that, and neither will their children. And that is the greatest accomplishment of my life.

Sure, yeah, no, I... I consider myself a relationship expert and an expert on male psychology.

Am I mansplaining? No.

Well, yes and no. I mean, power... Yes, miserableness also. I think one of the revolutionary things I said, and I really want to give a shout out to some beautiful early feminist psychologists, the folks at the Stone Center, Jean Baker Miller, but most of all, Carol Gilligan, my dear friend. who are man-loving feminists.

I was really, and to some degree am, one of the few male voices saying, patriarchy is a system that does damage to everybody. Mm-hmm.

Yes, men are on top and women are on the bottom, but if that's your idea of what's on the top, you know, not to whatever, but there was a, I won't say who, but there was an expert on TV talking about aspirational masculinity and how all these young men are looking at Elon Musk. Yeah, sure. Richest man in the world to send people to Mars. Fantastic. You want to be married to that guy?

Most people don't. And... If that's what you want to aspire to, I don't want to get too close to you.

I amplify emotion, particularly in men. They feel them initially very faintly, but the feelings aren't faint. It's just they're not used to honoring them.

You know, not to be grandiose myself, but I want to take ownership. I am the person to ask this, too, and I'll tell you why. There are no models anymore. There are no models of healthy relational masculinity.

Yeah. And, you know, boys and men are floundering. Everybody knows that. But look, someone described my work as women have had a revolution and now men have to deal with it. The response to the challenge that women are presenting to men is,

in their marriages, in the job market, in education, has largely been blowback, a resurgence of the most traditional and, frankly, unappealing aspects of traditional patriarchy, just dominance and bullying. That ain't it. And so... I don't want women to stand down from their demands. I want men to stand up and meet them.

What women are asking for from men is relationality, is learning to be intimate, is opening up your heart and sharing your feelings, being vulnerable, being soft when your partner's vulnerable, being responsible. These are all wonderful things for guys. Stop whining and let me teach you how to do it.

And the conundrum for men is what you learned about what it means to be a strong man as a boy guarantees you'll be seen as a lousy husband as a man. You cannot be invulnerable and intimate at the same time. So when I help men move into openheartedness, connection, the expression of feeling, compassion, responsibility, giving, I am explicitly reconfiguring masculinity with them.

You want my mature therapeutic self or you want my New Jersey self?

People with simple ideas will not have a hard time getting an audience. But these are carnival barkers who are leading our young men down the path of suicide. You know the TV show Adolescence, right?

And all the press it got. Yeah. You cannot reassert your masculinity through dominance and bullying and violence. That is not the answer. It's just not.

I'm loving Dan and telling the truth to him in the same breath. You deserve better than this. You're a good guy. Let's get you out of this.

Oh, my God. I mean, I would say the house is burning. That's not a metaphor. Our planet is burning. I started off my last book, Us, with the father of family therapy, the great anthropologist Gregory Basin, Margaret Mead's husband, who is truly the creator of family therapy. Basin called Western civilizations philosophical error. And that's this, that we stand apart from nature.

That's individualism. That's what the word individual means. We stand apart from nature, that's what I call toxic individualism, and we control nature, that's patriarchy. And whether the nature we think we can and should control is our bodies, our marriages, our kids, our country, the planet, the delusion of dominance is suicidal at this point.

It's a backlash. It's a resurgence. And frankly, I think it's sort of the last gasp of a model of power and masculinity that— Relationality is the card I've got in my back pocket. And that's what we're born for. That's what we're designed for. And that's what will keep us in this planet alive.

The dominance model makes for miserable people, miserable marriages, miserable families, and will choke the planet Earth.

Well, it is gaining steam in the moment. I believe that an accurate reflection of reality will prevail the dysfunctionality of this approach will become more and more clear and people will move into something more mature and nuanced. The issue is, you know, how many generations is that going to take and what kind of shape will we be in?

What I work with with the guys I work with is what I call learning to become family men. And what I say is a boy's question of the world is, what do you got for me? It's gratification. What do you got for me? A man's question of the world is, what do you need? What do you need? And being a family man means what's central here is not you and your needs.

What's central here is the team and what they need from you. I talk to many of the men I work with about the distinction between gratification and what I call relational joy. And gratification is just what you think it is. It's a short-term hit of pleasure, taking a drink, smoking a joint. A pretty girl flirts with you. You make a killing that day in the stock market. Your kid gets an A. Great.

I like pleasure in its place. Relational joy, which I have to teach so many of the men I work with, even what it is, relational joy is a deeper down pleasure that comes just from being in the relationship and being connected. And sometimes it's gratifying, sometimes it's a pain in the neck. You know, I tell a story of my beautiful Alexander, now 35,

And when he was little, I was giving him a timeout and we didn't have locks. And so I was holding his bedroom door shut. I mean, this guy was like maybe two foot three. And that door on the other side trying to get open, I mean, it was like poultry. There were lightning was coming out of that. I mean, the earth.

That little guy is trying to get it open. And I'm telling you, it's all. So a part of me wanted to just throw – truly, I talk about normal hatred in families. A part of me wanted to just throw them through the window. I was so mad. Yet a deeper down part was like, you mighty little spirit, you. Wow. You're going to do great.

And what so many of the men in our culture don't understand is the simple joy of being and connection. Right.

Men should listen to what I'm saying because it's in your interest to. You will be happier. Your marriage will be happier. You will change the legacy that you pass on to your children. And listen, I know how important that is to you out there, whoever's listening, that guy. The American dream, everybody talks about what is the American dream.

I started off... My beat were couples on the brink of divorce that no one has been able to help. These women would drag these guys in, and I would lean in and tell them. She's right. You're wrong. This is what's going to happen if you don't shape up. This is what you could get if you do. You're a good guy. This is terrible behavior. Let me reach in and help you, man.

The American dream is the dream that our children will have it better than we did. When we think about that, we almost always think about that in terms of material success. But I want you to think about your children having a better legacy than you had. I think ma'am will listen. You know, the thing is that I'm right.

Yeah, this is hilarious. So, you know, in families, there are famous stories. And here's one that was true then, and I'm still working on it now. When my kids were teenagers, they're in their 30s now, they both joined hands and kind of bounced up to me and said, Dad... Are you aware of the fact that when we confront you with something we're critical about, that you're dismissive of us?

And I looked at them. This is absolutely true. And I looked at them and I said, that's ridiculous.

Yeah. So let's just leave it there.

I am very grateful. It's been a blast talking to you. I really appreciate it.

I mean, you can do better than this. And the men would say, okay. And the women would just fold over and start to cry. They had dragged this poor sucker. The record so far was eight therapists and not one person backed up the woman and confronted the man. Not one. We're taught not to in therapy school. Not only are we not taught how to, we're actively taught that you don't do that.

You don't tell truth to power under patriarchy.

Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.

Yeah.

42.

About two years more than my marriage.

Yeah, I like to say my books appear under pillows all over America. Here, honey. If you want a little action tonight, read this book. So, yeah. No, a lot of the men that I see are what I call wife-mandated referrals. And I don't mean to be marginalizing same-sex marriages. But the men I see, here's a quote from Terry Real. Shame-based people have pain. Grandiose-based people have trouble.

they're not in pain, the people around them are in pain. And they come to see me when the trouble gets so great that either the people around them are dragging their butts into seeing me or the crisis has opened up and they're desperately trying to save their relationship. That's mostly how it goes.

Often. You know, two out of three. Look, here's maybe more nuanced. And this, too, is broad generality, so take it with a grain of salt. But women in our culture— It's changing with feminism, but traditionally, women in our culture lead from the one down. accommodating shame position and have covert grandiosity, whereas men lead from the one-up superior position and have covert shame.

And with women, they're depressed, they're depressed. With men, they're depressed. No, they're not. They're drinking. They stuff it down, yeah. Yeah. And you don't see the pain anymore. you see the flight in the medication or grandiosity that avoids the pain.

And so many of the difficulties we think of as quote-unquote typically male, substance abuse, rage, affairs, I'm not saying all of them are fueled by depression, but many of them are. And underneath the depression is trauma. And the way we traditionally, quote, unquote, turn boys into men is we teach them to disconnect.

Disconnect from vulnerability, disconnect from their feelings, disconnect from others.

Yeah, we call that learning to be independent. And the consequence of a disconnected boy is a disconnected man. We're not invulnerable. We're human.

I tell the guys I work with, pretending to escape your own vulnerability is like trying to outrun your rectum. Oh, no.

That's a way of following. So, no, of course we're all vulnerable, but trying to live up to that superhuman code leads every man vulnerable to anxiety and shame that they then don't admit because that would be weak. So the whole thing is just a mess. And the work I do, I say I feel like a surgeon reattaching nerves.

I thought what it meant to be a man was to be raging and dominating and abusive like my father. And I wanted no part of it. My father used to beat me. I mean, he'd piss my father off and he'd get out a pretty thick belt and whack the shit out of you. And one of the things I've realized 30 years after the fact was, unfortunately, my vulnerability or sensitivity was a trigger for my father.

This is Modern Love.

If he saw me being vulnerable or sensitive, he would go into a rage. just when I needed him most. But he was very contemptuous of weakness and vulnerability. So he would never talk about his childhood. I knew it was very difficult. He lost his mother when he was eight. His father and he and his brother lived through the Depression in America.

His father was kind of the black sheep of the family, couldn't find work. They moved in with another relative. The relative was mean to my dad. And I got my dad to tell me, gosh, I was close to 30, that when he was, what, 11-ish, his father brought he and his brother, younger brother, into the garage and turned on the car and told him to go to sleep. And my father knew that.

that there was something wrong. And he went back and forth with his dad and finally physically fought him. And he says his shoe cracked the window, and he and his brother got out. And then he was banished the next day.

Yes, of course. It softened my heart, and I felt bad for him, and I understood immediately. And he said, my father was a passive man, my father was a weak man.

That's right. And so he became the anti-that. And the anti-that was a macho asshole. But I could understand why he would be contemptuous of what he deemed as weakness.

Because his father's weakness threatened to kill him. It was murderous.

That's a beautiful question. We don't have to go into a lot of detail, but For two years, Belinda and I and my kids and— Belinda's your wife, yeah. Yeah, a great family therapist in her own right, I want to say. We were followed by a documentarian, and there's a docu-series that's coming out about us.

Dan, this is what I think you mean to be saying right now. Fucking bullshit. No matter what I do for you, it's never enough.

And one of the beginning scenes of the—astoundingly enough, I was 34 years old, not married yet to Belinda, and my parents came for a week of family therapy— Wow.

And we filmed it. And the film survived. And what you see, and I hadn't seen it for 40 years.

No, someone was doing family therapy with us. Gotcha. Yeah. And what you see is after 10 minutes, I sideline the therapist, who's pretty irrelevant, actually. And I move in to my dad and mom. I am doing relational life therapy with my parents at 34. You see it.

One of the core principles of RLT is what we call joining through the truth. confronting people, but in a way that's precise and loving so that they can hear it. One of the things that therapy school says about grandiose people in general and men in particular is, you know, don't tell truth to power. We I believe my field colludes with patriarchy and protecting perpetrators.

We have done a great job of helping people for 50 years come up from shame, but we've been ridiculously ineffective at helping people come down from grandiosity. And I knew that I had to do that. So there was a moment with my dad. He started crying. I get it. Forgive me. He talked about his mother who died. He talked about his exile. And he started crying and he said, I haven't felt any of this.

I haven't thought about this my whole life until you started probing, Terry. And as he was crying, I put my hand on his shoulder and And I said, you cry, old man. Every tear you cry is a tear I don't have to. That was pretty wise at 34.