#810: Terry Real — The Therapist Who Breaks All The Rules

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/7a92ad3c049cd9ea

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. My guess today.
Teaches
people how to save themselves and their relationships when they are on the brink. He is known as a turnaround expert and what he teaches, tactics and strategies are incredibly practical. I've used them in my own life. His fans include Dr. Peter Atia, Kevin Rose, and many others. And he breaks all the rules of therapy, which is part of what makes him
very, very interesting to me because the results
are undeniable. Terry Reel is a nationally recognizing therapist, author, and teacher. He's known for his groundbreaking work on men and male psychology, as well as his work
on gender and couples.
His book I don't want to talk about it.
Overcoming the secret legacy of male depression, the first mainstream book ever written on the topic of male depression is a national bestseller. That really put him on the map in a big way. His new book, Us Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, is a New York Times bestseller. And I've also featured snippets of one of his audiobooks, Fierce Intimacy.
On this podcast before as a guest episode, because what he teaches can be applied
immediately in all of your relationships, I would go so far to say. Terry's Relational Life Institute offers training for therapists and workshops for couples and individuals. And I will tell you in advance
Chances are you are going to disagree with some of what he says in this episode. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. If something gets your hackles up, just breathe and continue listening, and you will find something of value that you can apply in your life today or this week. Sometime soon, I promise you. You can find all things tarry at
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S
Terry, so nice to see you. Thanks for making the time for the show.
Oh it's wonderful to be here, I'm a big man.
And I am a big fan, and it all started with two people. I would say Petertia first.
on the topic of male depression and then Kevin Rose on couples therapy specifically. So
We've had, I suppose indirectly and directly, a few years or I've had a few years of Terry Reel. And I thought that
I would share
More of
Terry Live.
and in person with my audience for a number of reasons. And as we discussed before recording, I thought we would start with some stories. Storytime with Terry. And I will cue it with
Bread.
Pumpernickel. Pumpernickel. Exactly. As all good stories begin.
Pumper nickel. So could you fill in the blanks with that particular story, please?
So as you know, Tim, my specialty a couple on the brink.
that no one else has been able to to help. That's what I've been doing for twenty years and that's what I teach. So here's a couple on the brink.
The issue was that he was a chronic liar. I teach my therapist
You pay attention to what people report, you pay attention to what they do in front of you, and you pay attention to how you feel. And he's one of these guys, I walk in and I go, the sky's blue. And he goes, Well, not really blue. It's really uh uh the guy is a champion evader, so I get that.
He's an evader.
Then I ask a relational question. Uh standard therapist would think, Oh, where'd you get that? No.
There's somebody else on the other side of that
habit.
He learned it. So I say to him, Who controlled you growing up?
He's an evader.
Who is he evading?
Sure enough.
Dad.
Military man, how he sat, how he ate.
His friends.
I said, Well what did that little boy do with that controlling father?
And Timmy smiles. And that's the smile of resistance.
I like that smile. Very mischievous smile. And he says to me
Ready?
I lied.
Dad said don't play with Henry. I played with Henry and told him I was playing with Tom.
Smart.
Boy.
I always teach my students be respectful of the exquisite intelligence.
of that adaptive little boy or girl that you were. You did just what you needed to do,
Ticket by.
But guess what?
You're not that little boy.
Your wife is not your father, said
Maybe your own

But maybe it's time to change this up.
That's it.
One session.
I don't tell you the one sessions that don't work. I don't tell you the ones that work. Anyway, one session. They come back two weeks later, it's absolutely true. Hand in hand, we're done. And they were.
They were done.
Okay, there's a story here. Tell me this story.
Guy says to me
Over the weekend his wife sent him to the grocery store to get, say, twelve things, and true to form, he comes back with eleven.
The wife says, Where's the pumper nickel?
Uh one folks to feel this.
He says every muscle and nerve in his body was screaming to say they were
Out of it.
This is a a moment my wife, wonderful family therapist Belinda Berman, calls relational heroism. Every muscle screaming.
To do the same old, same old and I took a breath.
I thought of you.
He was borrowing my prefrontal cortex. I thought of you, Terry, I looked at my wife.
And I said.
I forgot.
The goddamn pump pickle.
And she looked at me, true story.
And she burst into tears.
And she said, I've been waiting for this moment for twenty five.
Yeah.
That's a story.
So in relational life therapy, the work I've created, we talk about three parts of the human psyche.
The wise adult the part I'm talking to right now, prefrontal cortex, the most evolved part of the brain.
That's the part that evolved last in the human species. That's the part that evolves last. Hey, your parents out there with ADHD kids twenty six years old. Chill. You got twenty six years before they start to calm down. Anyway, prefrontal cortex.
Stop and think.
And cheers.
But what makes life interesting and dicey is there are two we call them subcortical parts of the brain, automatic, you know, knee jerk
Response.
The mature wise adult
All the way
The Megdala in the back is the completely flooded
Wounded child part first moments of life to four or five.
Just flooded, just wants to crawl in someone's lap and cry. Between these two is what we call the adaptive child part. And Tim, that's the part most of the people I see have lived most of their lives in, thinking that that's an adult. And it's not. It's a kid's version.
of an adult. And the hallmark of the adoptive child part of us is that it's automatic.
Fight, flight, fawn.
I gotta get out of here or the world's g I gotta f stand up for myself. What is Fawn? Could you explain that. Oh my god, it's him feeling bad, I gotta make him feel good because if he doesn't feel good I don't feel good.

And if not an adult
Let me see what I can do to make this relationship work. It's an anxious, compulsive, oh my God, I gotta fix this guy.
Okay.
What we teach
is shifting out of that we call it relational mindfulness. This is the core skill.
From which all other skills
Depend. The adoptive child part of us
You know, you played the losing strategies from fierce intimacy in a podcast. It doesn't want to use skills.
It doesn't wanna it doesn't wanna be intimate.
Intimacy's scary. It wants self protection.

So I'm gonna control you, I'm gonna scream at you, I'm gonna withdraw from you.
I will never get what I want.
In the relationship when my adoptive child has taken over and almost all of the people I see
That's
What happens?
You know, skills are great, but when you're flooded, they go right out the window. So the first skill
I call it remembering love.
Remember the person you're speaking to is someone you care about. And you live with them, dummy. It's in your interest. So get centered in that
Yeah, somebody wrote, Wait, why am I talking? And be honest, are you talking and nail your partner into the ground or prove your then take a break.
I'm a big fan of break.
Wait until you remember you're talking to someone you care about and the reason why you're opening up your mouth is to make things
Better.
What makes life even more dicey?
Is that that adaptation, like the guy in the storyline.
was born in a relationship.
And what happens is when people shift out of I call I speak about miserable, comfortable, happy, uncomfortable.

And when you move out of that into new territory.
Vulnerability
Risk taking.
Courage.
Standing up for yourself for some, coming down and yielding for others.
When you move into intimacy you lose
That old.
Relationship.
And there's a lot of not always, but
There's a lot of unconscious guilt.
Um
Loyalty.
So
Part of the reason why we don't change is we're
loyal to the relationships that we learn how to be screwed up in. And it feels
Odd. I say we're immigrants. We leave the old country
And the old people.
So
A story.
Here's a story. True story.
The guy comes to me.
He says you're my ninth therapist.
There's a challenge. Gauntlets down, right? Another notch in the belt.
A therapist have tried to help me and he was screwed up. The guy is an award winning artist.
A celebrated artist.
You know.
He's got a bad back, he doesn't go to the doctor, he's got rotten teeth, he smokes too much, he he's
Just a mess.
Gonna die early at the threat.
What's a story?
There's a story.
It was raised by a single mom. She died of alcoholism.
Didn't know his dad.
Her story was
When she was a little girl, her father beat everybody up in the whole house. Mother and all four sisters and her.
As a little nine year old girl that's feisty chick.
Walks over to her father and says, You lay a hand on my mother or my sisters, and I'm gonna call the police and have you sent to jail.
True story.
Father looks at this little nine year old and says okay.
You win.
I'm not gonna lay a hand on your mother or sisters ever again.
I'm just gonna beat you.
And he beat her every day of her life until she finally escaped at sixty. Jesus. Then she became an alcoholic.
Wow. Catholic family. Yeah.
So here's what I say.
I say, Well
I know why eight therapists have failed.
And he cued me. He said, I said, Why what happens with your therapist? He said, Well sooner or later they all care more about me than I do.
And then I get ditch him.
Uh okay. Got it.
Yeah, okay, I know why that happened.
I say, Your mother
Who he adored.
Your mother was a sainted
Murder.
What she did to save her family as a nine year old girl was crawl up on that cross and get crucified.
And guess what?
You're up on that cross with her.
And if you take care of yourself and live a life and get happy
And successful.
An intimate
You will leave her on the cross. She's dead, by the way, but doesn't matter.
You'll leave her.
And
You ain't gonna do that.
So you know what?
I'm not gonna try and make you better.
I'm gonna celebrate your sacrifice.
And it this is a true story, Tim. He looked at me and goes
My back is killing me.
Do you know a good doctor in New York?
And there we were.
So what do you do with that?
I got him a good doctor in New York. I mean, once you there is progress, you're moving.
I got it. So at that point he was ready to actually make change.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Look.
This is what you're doing.
I admire it.
I always side
With the adaptation.
I admire it.
By the way.
You're gonna die?
Your mother's already dead, she doesn't care anymore.
But what a loyal guy you are. Congratulations.
You really want to live like that?
And he says, No.
Everybody else argued with him. You gotta live, you gotta live. No I don't no I don't. Uh why don't you crawl up on that cross and die with your mother?
You go, uh I don't think so.

Yeah. So yeah, one of the
maybe differentiating characteristics that I appreciate about you and I I can only speak to my experience with you, but I'm sure it applies to therapists you've trained is
Taking a position.
Right. You're not
playing the neutral mirror with all of your clients. Which gets old very quickly, for me at least when I've worked with other therapists when
I ask them what they think and they're like, Well, what do you think? And it just becomes this game of echo.
Why do you think it is so uncommon to take
physicians and w and how can it be effective.
Oh my God. We're taught not to as therapists.
We're actively taught not to. God forbid you should you know
Thou shalt not take sides. If you take a side, particularly if you side with a woman against a man.
Then you have to go to your supervisor and talk about your mother for a while. And then you can go back into the therapy. No, no, no, no, no. The idea is that all problems are fifty fifty and common sense knows that's just bullshit.
Literally I treated a couple the guy was an untreated
Bipolar manic depressive alcoholic wager.
What was the woman's quote unquote contribution?
She was there. That was her contribution.
And this was the feminist critique of family therapy. You don't say to a an abused spouse, what's your fifty percent of this? I mean that's grotesque. So in RLT we call it like we see it, Tim.
You're not.
Mrs. Tim, you're an even bigger nut, and here's why.
And here's what I think you need to do about it. So
Some problems are forty sixty.
Some problems for ninety nine one. We call it like we see it.
So I wanna bring up some other

Or ways of looking at common problems that I think could help people. Could you discuss
Objectivity battles. Maybe paint a picture of what that looks like. And this is something I found personally very helpful. By the way, not just in intimate relationships, but in all relationships. So could you speak to this, please?
Yeah. I'm glad you said that because relationships are relationships. We're doing a corporate piece.
We're doing a big thing for the general public.
And the same skills in work, with your kids, with your dog.
Although most people treat their dogs better than they treat their spouses. But anyway.
Uh what were we talking about? We're talking about objectivity battles. So what what what does it look like to do that the wrong way?
Actually let me
Go big picture for Shecker.
The essence of my work, the new book, Us
is about correcting
What?
Gregory Bates and the father of family therapy, husband of Margaret Mead called Humankind's Epistemological Error, Philosophical Error.
And here it is.
We stand apart from nature.
And we control it.
We stand apart from nature, that's individualism. We control it, that's patriarchy.
And by the way, control can be one up, that's male.
Do what I say. Or regulating up one down. That's traditionally the female enabling. Don't get daddy off.
Both forms of control.
All bullshit.
Nobody controls anything.
Okay.
Instead we offer a map.
and then tools to live it. But here's the new map.
You're not outside of nature, idiot.
You're inside nature and you depend upon it.
Our relationships are our biospheres.
We breathe them. You're an ecosystem.
You can pollute your biosphere with a temper tantrum over here, but your partner will retaliate with cold distance over here. There's no escape. You're linked.
And the idea that you're not linked is diluted. So once you wake up
to the fact that I'm in it. I'm not above it.
Then
All the rules change.
Who's right, who's wrong, who cares?
So objectivity battle.
Here's the bitter appeal.
Objectivity has no place in personal relations. I'm sorry.
Yeah.
The emotional answer or ecological answer, there are two ways of saying the same thing. The relational answer to who's right and who's wrong is who gives a shit.
What matters is how are you and I gonna work this thing in a way that's gonna work for us. And proving who's right and who's wrong is not the way to do that. But
I've been married forty years.
When my wife and I have a disagreement over accuracy
Who remembered it correctly? Whose feelings are more valid?
You know, she's a very difficult person, Belinda. And she has this nasty way of thinking she's right and I'm wrong. I I don't know why she does that.
It gotta work.
So
Let me give you an example of the new world.
This is a true story.
Okay.
Totally heteronormative.
Heard of him.
You're a reckless driver.
And her.
You're overly nervous. How many of us have been through this one?
And then she everybody starts marshaling their evidence and arguing their case. No, you're nervous. You're nervous about this, you're ner No no, you're reckless. You tailgate
Okay, that's an objectivity. Who's right, who's wrong.
After one session with me, true story.
Her to him.
Honey?
Start with that.
Change the energy.
Honey?
I know you love me.
Right or wrong?
Maybe I'm overly nervous. Whatever. See, she just takes the whole
Battle off the table.
By talking subjectively.
Maybe I'm overly nervous. Nevertheless, when you tailgate and you go switch length and you speed up
I get crazy. I get scared. No, w when you're driving on your own I worry, but it's your life.
When I'm next to you.
You you la you don't really want me sitting here being terrified the whole time we're driving. As a favor to me.
Could you please slow down and dry more conservatively? And him to her
B.
B
But
Okay.
And he does.
What might have been a fight that lasted forty years is done in fifteen minutes.
Because it moves out of objective who's the authority, who's right, who's wrong, what's fair, what's unfair, and it becomes relational.
We're a team.
You
Love me.
As a favor to me.
Could you?
Sure.
New world.
New world and new tools.
And just to underscore that.
I remember hearing you give an example.
And suppose the overarching point that I was gonna underscore is
There isn't a threshold.
Past which your objective data wins.
Typically, right. So So if you think if you think your wife is yelling at a server at a restaurant
It doesn't matter if you have an audiologist sitting right next to you with various of measurement equipment, it's still not gonna work. Applying a scientific method to your relationship, but good luck. Yeah.
So I I'm probably gonna do a
poor job of prompting this, but I found it so fascinating when when I heard you present it once, and that was in effect
The same way that people sometimes escalate problems where they say then you always do this and it's reflective of this character flaw, blah blah blah blah blah, and you could lay it out much more eloquently than I could, is the same way that you can de escalate something.
If you
Apologize for it. If you're out yourself. Yeah. Could you speak to that? Because I just thought that was such a brilliant
Turnaround technique.
When I heard it, that it's stuck with me ever since.
Yeah. This is a step in the critical process of repair.
And either in this one or you invite me back. I would love to lay out some skills. You know, we we did the losing strategy if they want to do some of the winning.
And he was a skill that that's part of repair when
First of all.
Look.
All of us when uh someone we care about confronts us with something difficult.
We move into two orientations.
The first is objective reality. Well, that's true, that's not true, that's accurate, that's not well, you gotta understand that. And then we argue.
In our hands, if not out of our mouths. We don't listen, we rebut.
And then the second orientation we all go to is ourselves.
I can't believe I have to put up with this cry. Belinda, I was just on the road telling thousands of people how to love each other and I come home and you this is Okay.
Let go of objective reality, let go of you.
And take a breath.
And I want everybody to write this one down.
Enter into compassionate
Curiosity.
about your partner's subjective experience. Let me say it again.
Compassion and curiosity about your partner's subjective
Experience. They're nuts. Okay. But
Find out what kind of nut they are.
That feels bad, honey. Help me understand.
Who sounds like that? But that makes peace.
And then
When they tell you.
You did this, you did this, you did this.
Acknowledge it.
Don't deny it. Don't minimize it. Don't rational
That's not an apology, yeah, but
I did it. Land on it.
And if you really want to get slick, here's the deal. Right, this is the advanced course. You went right to the PhD thing.
Here's what I want you to notice.
Generally speaking
Functional moves in a relationship are moves that empow your partner.
To come through for you. Nobody gets the
Functional moves in a car make the car go. Dysfunctional moves stop it.
Functional moves in a relationship empower the other guy to give you what you want.
Dysfunctional moves render them helpless.
So what we do because we're trying to get heard is we go, You did this and last week you did that and ten years ago you did that and you always and you never.
The normal escalation is from this moment
to trend to character. And I teach people to stay particular and not do that. Because every move up that ladder renders the person you're speaking to more helpless. And they're either just gonna get mad or
Leave or you always, you never, you are uh
You're a slave.
Okay.
All right, so stay particular if you're the disgruntled one.
But if you've been confronted
B is yes I did it.
Here's an A.
You walk up the same ladder I'm telling you not to do is the disgruntled one. I did it?
It's not the first time I've done it.
Okay.
The kids and I were waiting for you w you knew dinner was at seven, you come waltz in at seven forty five, you don't call, you don't text.
It was really rude.
You're right.
I did that.
And I can be late as an issue. We know that. And when I do that, I'm being thoughtless. I get caught up in the moment and I'm I stop thinking about the impact I'm having. That's really
Kinda selfish of me.
I do have some selfish uh tendencies. I'm working on it.
Holy shit, now that's an apology.
So
If your partner out you
You did it before, you often do it, you never, you always it's terrible.
But if you
Oh my god, your partner's going.
Wow, there's hope. This is great. It's a funny thing. Yeah, it makes me think of
I think it was Hurt Locker and the bomb diffusing. It's just like You know. It's like wow. Nice job. Nice job with the diffusing. And then of course ultimately you should be working on this issue that you say you're going to work on or pay attention to.
Tell me if this is geotechnical bullshit. Yes. Actually I'm sorry, but I have another story.
One of my class told me this is true story. He said on his wedding day
And I say this, no offense, but particularly per men. On his wedding day his father in law said, Let's go for a walk.
Okay.
He says son
I got two things for you to master.
Your master, just these two things, your marriage is gonna be great.
So okay, Pops, I'll buy. What whatcha?
He goes, You're really sorry and you're gonna work on it.

Yeah.
That'll give you a lot of payoff over a lot of miles. What is uh another term.
that I'd never heard before being exposed to your work, normal marital hatred.

I got this from Ed Tronic, infant observational researcher.

Add along with Barry Brazilton was the first generation
You know.
Since Freud.
What we said about child development all came from listening to adults.
We didn't watch any kids. And you were one of the first people to actually plunk a video camera in front of mothers and infants and then fathers and infants and actually look at what happens.
And what he came up with I borrowed and it's central to RLT, which is the essential rhythm of all relationships.
There's harmony.
Dishony.
And repair.
Closeness.
Disruption.
And a return to closeness.
That's where the skills come in, how to move from disruption to
Prepare.
Our culture doesn't teach it. Our culture doesn't even acknowledge.
A good relationship is all harmony.
Just like a good body is pure. A good body is like a a twenty year old body. A good sex life is like you know what you had when you were two weeks into the relationship. No.
All harm is bullshit.

Share.
One of the things I like about you, Tim, is you tell the truth.
You know what?
You go to a cocktail party.
And you're oh, there's Harry and Shirley.
They're in their eighties, they still have sex, they love each other, blah.
One of these days I'd like to go to a cocktail party in here. There's Harry and Shirley.
They actually split up for a year. He fell in love with another woman. He couldn't take it because she was such a drunk, but then she got into A and got sober. And the two of them are really doing reasonably well, aren't they cute?
Just once I'd like to hear that. So we don't
Deal with reality.
You know
Th the father of couples therapy back in the fifties.
said the day you turn to the person who's next to you, it was assumed it was your
Mary.
This is a mistake.
I've been had.
This is not the person I fell in love with. That said frame O is the first day of your real
Marriage.
So here's what I want to say about disharmony.
Ready?
It hurts.
It's dark.
You can really, really feel like what the hell
Did I get myself into this is such a disappointment.
And guess what?
Your partner's probably feeling that about you too. So I talk about normal marital hatred when you're in that dark.
Faith, you hate your partner, that's okay.
Don't kill yourself or her. It's okay.
Well teach you how to get through it.
But it's part of
The deal for many of it.
Now here's what I like to say.
I've been going around the world talking about normal marital hatred for oh my god what? Thirty years.
This is true.
Now one person has ever come backstage and said, Terry, what do you mean by that?

It's okay, kids. Don't sweat it. You can get through it. It's normal. Relax.
Yeah.
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Yeah.
What are some of the first
steps or tools that you would recommend to someone listening
Who agrees with what you're saying, but has had no models for repair. Has never
learned how to
Use any type of approach for repair.
And this is something that
Your direct help and then also your books have really helped me with because I did not grow up in a household with repair.
Right. It was basically one person screams, then the other person goes to fix, which they don't really want to do, but it's their
their attempt to
Basically quell the
Disaster and fury, and that's it. Then everybody's kind of upset and it never gets addressed. That was the model growing up.
What do you suggest to people who want to start?
With repair.
You know, of course I'm tempted to say so are you a screamer or a fixer, but I won't, I'll leave that alone. I'm a fixer. I'm not a screamer.
Oh, oh, okay. Lucky for your partner, but uh the the problem the problem is the resentment that builds up. Yeah, exactly. Yep.
Yeah.
Okay, so repair.
First of all here's I like to say I have a number of bitter pills to swallow.
But if you swallow them, things will be a lot better in your life. And here's one of them.
Repair is a one way street.
Everybody gets that wrong.
It's not a dialogue.
It's not well these are your issues with me. Well these are my issues with you. No.
You have your turn, but not then.
Take
Cards.
So if you have a disgruntled partner, you are at their service. That's the first thing to master.
You know, I like to say Tim, you're at the customer service window.
Somebody comes to customer service window and says my microwave doesn't work, they don't want to hear you say, well, my toaster doesn't work.
They don't want your excuses. Fix the goddamn microwave.
Tender your partner and bring them back into repair with you.
Tend to them.
Put yourself aside and tend to them.
What does that look like?
Two things. First
Do I get it?
Listen.
Don't argue, don't rebut.
Empty the well.
I'm sorry you feel bad. That's beautiful. Compassion.
I'm sorry you feel bad. I love you. I don't want you to feel bad. Help me understand what feels bad. What's it like for you?
Okay.
And then you reflect. This is what I hear you say, did I get it?
Yeah, good enough.

Two.
Is there something I could say or do right now that would be helpful?
What would you like?
Who says that?
And then if if anything short of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge
Give it to him. Be generous.
Those are the basics. I could be more specific. But let me uh let me ask you
A follow up which is related to this.
When someone is attempting to do this
But they're having trouble.
Biting their tongue because
You ask what's upsetting someone or
You ask them to describe their feelings.
And they say, Well when you did this, this and this
And you disagree with their assessment of reality. We already talked about where objective reality it doesn't exist, but nonetheless it could trigger
Visceral response.
What is your advice to
People who struggle with that. Where it's like, that isn't a reflection of reality. Come on. And they want to rebut, but they're not supposed to.
How would you suggest they table it? Like what should they say to themselves, or do you have any other
Pieces of advice.
Well, we both know you're a nut. Let's investigate exactly what kind of nut you are.
Let's get curious. And actually let's get compassionate. You know, one of the things I say is no one's a nut to themselves.

You know? The paranoid who's crouched under the desk because the Russians have put germs in the ventilating system.
knows that we're all gonna die. And if you knew that there were germs, you'd be under there with'em. No one doesn't make sense to themselves.
They don't make sense to you.
So let go of you and see if you can enter into the world of the person when you show up.
To our interview with a T shirt.
These are the rules of speaking.
I make up. We teach people to say what I make up is. No objective reality. What I make up is you have a very casual
feeling about this interview, don't you know that you're talking to the great Terry Rio? How about a little formality and I feel really insulted.
Oh yeah, you're sitting there going
Fuck. Give me a break.
If we were partners.
You would take a breath and you would go, Okay
Help me understand
What is it about the T shirt that was so upsetting to you?
And then, okay, so you think it was disrespectful. Did I get that right?
It's like I know you're a nut. I know that Russians didn't put germs in the ventilating system, but I want to understand you. But I'm sorry that hurt your feelings. I didn't mean to be.
overly informal.
And then if you really want to A plus.
This is really parking your ego at the door.
I can understand how you might feel like
And really what it is is I can understand Pran thinking the nutty things you think.
If you think that way, then you would feel like that.
So give it to them. Be generous. I can understand how you might feel like that.
Is there something I could say or do that would help you feel better?
Mm-hmm.
Got it. All right.
Very helpful.
I wanted to
Shift gears just a little bit. And we can go in a lot of different directions, and we can also come back to repair because

As you said already, I mean this is
practically universally neglected in terms of any type of
Education that
People tend to receive. But we'll park that for a second. I wanted to know
What types of
Deal breakers exist.
When you work with
clients. And that could include
addictions, psychiatric conditions, et cetera. But I wanted you to maybe run us through
what that list looks like because I might want to double click on a few of them.
So if you go to my website and I'm supposed to put in a plug for social media you can follow me. May I say how? Of course.
Let me get it right. You can follow me at
All socials.
Uh
Capital R real, capital T Terry, Capital R real. So at real Terry Real.
Or you can go to my website, TerryRill dot com.
Anyway.
So I have

Should I stay or should I go?
And the tool I use is what I call a relational reckoning.
And it's a question you ask yourself.
Here's the question.
Am I getting enough?
In this relationship.
To make grieving
What I'm not getting
Worth my while.
Let me say that again.
Am I getting enough in this relationship?
To make the pain of what's missing.
Okay with me.
And if the answer is yes, it is okay, then stop whining and embrace what's good.
You know, work the change to get more, but embrace what's good and stop walking around like a big angry victim. If the answer is no, it's not enough.
Then do something about it.
lean in and fight. And if it doesn't work, drag your partner to hopefully an RLT therapist, they're the ones I believe in, and get an ally and get some help. And if that doesn't work.
You're done.
So okay.
So in answering the question what's a deal breaker
Let me be clear. Deal breakers come only after
You've dragged your partner to a couple therapists and one that actually
Helps.
And you know you've heard me say I don't think most do, but
Get one that will find with you and be an ally and take that person on.
Okay.
Deal breakers.
Basically
Do they want to work or not?
If you want to work and they don't.
You could be done.
And that could be an addiction.
Could be sexual acting out.
Could be anger, could be lying, could be withholding and passive aggression.
But if you're not getting what you want
And the truth of the matter is your partner isn't gonna do the work of
Giving you more of what you want.
You're done.
And there are a lot of variations on that. Obviously
If somebody's got an active addiction and they don't want to work on it, I would not
And people do. People go to Al Anon and manage, but
I'd prefer you.
Break up. If uh somebody's a rater.
Who are mistreating you if they violate contracts, particularly monogamy.
If they're chronic liars.
And if they have an untreated psychiatric.
Condition anxiety, depression.
And then this is interesting.
And I would really
Not trust yourself, I would only trust a professional.
If there's a
Massive.
Difference.
in the maturity level of the two people.
The evolution of the two people.
The immaturity of the
One of Off One will start to feel too painful.
To the more
Mature one. And
The
Should leave and find a different partner.
So
When you
I guess a few questions related to everything you just said. The first is
I have to imagine that in many instances
It's one partner who not necessarily drags the other person, but convinces them to do therapy. They're not equally enthusiastic about
Perhaps being in front of the therapist.
So I would imagine there's a a grace period of sorts to
In the list.
The other person.
One session.
Once how do you do that?
If one person is res more resistant or
stoic and the other person is the one who's more
enthuse who sort of initiated that first session.
It's not a carrot and stick.
I talk about leverage, negative and positive leverage.
Tim.
Your partner is saying you this, this, and this.
She's pretty fed up.
Are you fed up?
Partner of Tim.
Yeah, I'm fairly.
How fed up are you exactly?
Do you believe or?
Why should he believe you?
And what I'm doing is I'm amplifying the negative consequences. There's
But you're not looking at'em. So my first move is to empower your partner.
to be firm and speak up to you and I use that as leverage.
to get your interest. So this is the negative thing that I can help you avoid. And here's the positive thing I can deliver.
Would you like a happier, warmer, sexier partner?
Okay.
And if you have kids this is a big one.
Hey Tim, what kind of father did you have?
What kind of father do you want to be?
I got bad and good news.
If you don't do this work.
You're gonna do some version.
Of what got done to you.
To them.
You wanna do that?
Would you like to be a better father than the one you grew up with?
Okay.
Well
You gotta let me help ya.
And a lot of particularly men who won't do it's hard work, this work.
They won't do it for themselves, they won't do it for their witty wise.
They will do it to spare their children.
So I get buy in.
And it's a combination of
Uh this is what's gonna happen to you if you don't change and this is what could happen.
For you if you do.
Here's the consequence, here's the reward.
And when you're talking about deal breakers, could you just clarify in what sense they are deal breakers? Does it mean that you will not work with them as clients until they address
One of those deal breakers, for instance, they have addiction to
Alcohol or gambling or whatever it might be. I found it interesting that you mentioned the anxiety and depression, because one of the topic I wanted to talk to you about is male depression.
And I guess
I'm curious.
If you work with some of those in tandem or if
People are kinda left.
To their own devices to figure it out.
No, never. Never do that.
I never confront somebody and then l let them swing in the wind. I'm I'm always right next to you.
Telling you okay.
This is what you're doing, it ain't working. Let me take your hand and teach you what
Does work. And that's different.
And a lot of other therapies. We get roll up our sleeves and get granular.
Him.
This isn't you, I'm just Tim, do you notice that
Your face is kinda frozen when you talk and you speak in a monotone?
And your wife is out of her mind right now because nobody's ever said this to you, but she
She's bored as hell next to you. Look, this is what I want you to do as we learn.
Uh to be learn for you to start speaking about your feelings. I want you to go like this with your faith.
Animate it.
Oh yeah.
It uh let me see a little umph here. I mean, that's what I call micro coaching.
And we roll up our sleeves to get right next to you and teach you how to do it.
Better.
We call them preconditions.
Addiction acting out.
Psychiatric conditions.
Acting out either violence or
The sexual acting out.
We will not take couples if there's domestic violence.
You go off to a safety program, you go off to a perpetrator program.
I don't ask
People to tell the truth to power if it's dangerous.
No, safety for
About the others.
Sexual acting out, addictions, uh psychiatric disorders.
R L T therapist will meet with the couple, but only to talk about
The issues.
What are you gonna do about your depression?
What are you gonna do about
you're weaponizing. How are we gonna settle this?
The idea is
It would be bullshit for me to pretend
that I can help you and your partner get closer
While you're still engaged in this stuff.
So sobriety first.
I will meet with the couple, but to deal with what you're not.
Dealing with.
Then we can work on your relationship.
So let's
Double click on
your first book. I don't want to talk about it because I know
Peter Tia, who's an old friend of mine, of course, very well known doc these days.
is a huge fan of this book. I have not yet read it. I apologize for that. But
I would love for you to
Perhaps.
describe what people get wrong about male depression, or we could dive directly into covert depression, because I'm wondering how many of these preconditions
might be explained.
By depression as opposed to being
Separate problems.
First of all, for those who haven't, please read Peter's book Outlive. It's great. And the last chapter
It's about his work with me.
And that's there Perrell about his own psychological work.
And uh also, if I may, Peter had a podcast that we did together and he talked about his work with me. It was very moving.
So look those few things up. Male depression.
When I wrote that book, it's thirty years old. It's selling as well as my new books, by the way. It's been really been a keeper.
Depression was seen as a woman's disease.
And I argued against that.
And what I said is that
A lot of men have the same kind of depression that we normally think of. I call it overt.
Depression.
But a lot of men, unlike women, have what I call covert.
Depression.
You don't see the depression.
You see what the man is doing to defend against the depression.
And many of the problems we think of as typically male may be fueled.
By depression. So self medication.
Rage.
Philandering.
radical withdrawal, all of these may be symptom of an underlying depression.
A lucky guy gets what we call a dual diagnosis. You're you know.
Forgive me, I can't be you know the joke. You're terminal, I want a second opinion, okay, you're ugly. It's like it's like okay, the bad news is you're addicted and the worst news is underneath the addiction you got a depression.
Lucky guy gets a dual diagnosis. Unlucky guy gets one or the other.
If you stumble into an addictions person, they'll clean up your addiction, but they won't deal with them. If you go to a psychiatrist, they'll give you meds for your depression, but you're drinking like a fish.
First you have to deal with the defenses.
When they settle down and move into some level of sobriety, then the underlying depression comes to you don't even have to go after it. It comes up.
I say the cure for a covert depression is an overt depression.
Once the pain comes up, you deal with it.
But
I think part of the reason why that book has lasted for thirty years.
is there's a third piece, which is not only do men express depression differently, but the ideology is different.
Girls and women get depressed because
They famously lose their voices.
And blame themselves and
Turn inward.
Boys and men
get depressed because of what I call
Normal boyhood trauma.
under patriarchy.
We are taught at three, four, five years old.
To deny our vulnerability.
To disconnect from our feelings.
To disconnect from others, all in the name of autonomy.
We
Cut off.
Half.
of our humanity.
The feelings, the vulnerability, connection.
Really in some ways to most
rich, nourishing parts of what it means to be a human.
And that
Cut off.
Which is imposed on boys have story after story.
That cut off.
is traumatic.
And
It also
renders you
Isolated and lonely.
So
There's a lot of trauma.
That trauma becomes depression, that depression becomes acting out or self medication. And if you really want to heal someone,
You hit all three layers.
First the defenses.
Then the depression.
Then the childhood trauma.
How do you think about
Teasing out.
When for instance addiction is
paired with underlying depression, maybe downstream of it.
versus independent.
Because I suppose there's
A risk of
Asking a barber if you need a haircut in the sense you go to the surgeon, they tell you you need surgery. You go to the fill in the blank, right? They tell you that you need whatever their specialty happens to be. Just like you mentioned with getting the single diagnosis versus the dual diagnosis. So how do you determine if something is actually
Paired with underlying
Depression since that's the
sort of example we're talking about in men.
versus independent.
It's really simple. When the person starts to get sober, do they get depressed?
And the depression that they get looks just like
Psychiatric depression. I see what you're saying. So if they're workaholic and they pare that down, does the depression then have room to breathe and express itself, basically? When the coping mechanism is removed.
In some capacity.
Yeah. As opposed to you remove the coping mechanism and oh my god, I'm so much better.
However.
You can cut out the middle piece, depression.
But ninety-nine out of a hundred
You go from sobriety to trauma.
You have to deal with
With the underlying.
Trauma. My great mentor, PM Melody.
Oh great.
legend in the twelve step community, ran the meadows for seventy years.
First addiction.
Then the personality issues.
and then underlying childhood trauma. If you don't deal with the underlying trauma
It's gonna be hard for that person to stay sober.
What type of
approaches or modalities do you favor for
Working with trauma.
When you get to that layer.
We like to do trauma work with your partner sitting next to you.
And we're unique in that.
And I gotta tell ya, I've argued against what I call toxic individualism in this culture and psychotherapy is up to its eyeballs.
In supporting individualism.
Uh supporting patriarchy.
I wanna ask you about this word patriarchy because you have so many messages that I think
I want to convey to
Not just a male audience, but I have a a very large male audience and I feel like
Patriarchy can be a very loaded term.
And that there are matriarchal or matrilineal, there are patrilineal societies, both of which function pretty well. And I'm just wondering how you think about
using versus not using that term.
Because I feel like there's a risk that you might
Turn off men who actually need to hear a lot of what you have to say. How do you think about that?
It is what it is. So let me talk about what I mean.
And then we can talk about the marketing of it.
I'm making decisions between what I call political patriarchy and psychological patriarchy.
And political patriarchy is the oppression of women by men. It's all over the globe and
Yeah, i it's deadly in some cultures. It's a very real thing.
Psychological patriarchy.
is basically traditional masculinity w
Large oh double back.
But psychological patriarchy
Traditional masculinity
Guys, listen up.
is a system that does damage to everybody.
Everybody.
It does.
D.
Okay.
Damage to our
relationships.
What do I mean by that?
Let me just take traditional masculinity.
The essence of traditional masculinity under patriarchy is the overarching system.
is invulnerability.
The more invulnerable you are, the more manly you are, the more vulnerable you are, the more girly you are, and that is not a good
Yeah.
And of course, we both know there's been a huge resurgence.
You know, a backlash. Don't tell us we're bad people.
I'm not talking about not being powerful.
I'm talking about not being
Dominant.
There's a difference.
Ryan Eisler talks about power
over versus power with.
I want men to be powerful. I also want women to be powerful. I want all of us to be whole.
And what patriarchy does
What Carol Gilligan calls the binary.
These human qualities are feminine
A good man has none of them.
These human qualities are masculine
A good woman has none of them.
And it's what Olga Silverstein called the having process. You take a whole human being
It all line down the middle.
half of humanity say goodbye to.
That is not healthy.
That's not good for anybody.
So vulnerability, for example.
What we do, the way we quote unquote turn boys into men under patriarchy is through disconnection.
We teach them to disconnect from their feelings.
There's hard research.
Three four five.
Little boys have more feelings than little girls, actually. They're more sensitive.

But by three, four, or five they know better than to open their mouths and say anything.
They've read the code.
So no vulnerability, no emotion.
Not too connected to others, you're independent.
Great.
Here's what I say.
I would say it to you if you showed up in my office. Tim, the things you learned as a boy about what makes a good man
are the very qualities that will ensure that by today's standards you'll be seen as a lousy husband.
Across the board
I'll just deal with heterosexuals for a moment. Women want
Man.
Hearts.
They want connection. Tell me what the fuck you're feeling. Open your mouth and d share with me. When I come to you with a feeling, be compassionate and not dismissive.
Well guess what?
All of that goes against what was imposed on you as a boy about how to handle yourself as a man. But one of the things I say is.
Moving men, women, nonbinary folk into
True intimacy.
It's anonymous.
with moving them beyond traditional gender roles, beyond patriarchy. Men have to move into vulnerability and open their hearts.
Women have to move into assertion with love.
Not with harshness, but with love.
Um
Doing that on both sides moves beyond
Anything that this culture teaches us. It's pioneer work.
Thank you for
Unpacking that. We might come back to it. I'm happy to talk about that more. I have follow up questions, but I don't want to take us off track with the trauma question, because you were talking about one of the
So defining an unusual characteristics by conventional therapy standards is that
R L T.
Does trauma work with the partner present?
That's where I then took us on a side quest with the question about patriarchy.
Yeah, it's a relational therapist who argues against exaggerated individualism.
Look, here's the thing.
We've never wanted more from our relationships than we do right now.
It's historically new. We don't we don't think historically, so we don't get this, but
Our parents, grandparents, great a companionable marriage was plenty good enough.
But we want more.
We want real intimacy.
And sustaining. We want to
Hold hands, walk on the beach, have heart to hearts, have great sex in our sixties and seventies. We want to be lifelong lovers.
This is new.
Marriage was never built for that.
Go go into Western literature and find me a passionate marriage. All passion is adulterous. It's new. Yeah, it's new.
But we live in an anti relational culture. That's patriarchy.
We live in a culture.
That's about up, down, wind, lose, right, wrong.
No.
We have to wake up to ecological wisdom. We're a team
We're in this together. What do you need, honey? It's in my interest to keep you
Happy.
That's the new world order.
And you know, not to dishon man, but I do get these big burly guys.
And they say, Why should I have to work so hard to please my wife?
And I go, knock knock.
You live with her.
It's in your interest.
That's what I teach people.
It's in your interest to learn how to do this, though.
And also I would just say
for clarification that you mean to keep someone happy but in a
Interdependent, not codependent way. Right,'cause it's easy to go into that fixing mode.
And people think they're making someone happy.
You're right. And I didn't say it's in your interest to make them happy.
What I really say is it's in your interest to take care of your biosphere.
If you ride in the one up.
At some point we should talk about this. If you're more into one up.
And you're more entitled, demanding, dominant.
You don't listen.
You gotta come down off your high horse.
If you rhyme in the one down like a fixer, oh my God, oh my god, my my partner's upset. Oh I'm an uh
Codependent.
You need to take a breath.
What your biosphere needs is for you to be assertive.
And be more
conflictual fight a little more.
Stand up for yourself.
So
You have to correct what's off.
It's not one size fits all. It's what's all for you. If you're one up, come down. If you're one down, like a fixer, then assert yourself and take some risks.
But both are vulnerability.
When we think of vulnerability we think of sensitivity, but for
A fixer like you standing up for yourself and Oh my God, they may get mad at me, that's vulnerability for you.
So what does my biosphere
No.
You know, Carol Gilligan says there can be no voice without relationship.
So come down off your high horse if you're dominant.
There can be no relationship without voice.
So I would work with someone like you and I would have you okay.
I want you to identif what you're feeling. I want you to identify
What you want and need right now. Don't worry about pleasing them. What does Tim want?
And I want
to teach you how to articulate that in a way
Yeah.
Mike uh
Listen to.
May I hypothesize about you?
Sure. Go for it. Could be wrong, but here we go. What I make up as we say.
Yeah. So you have this dominant fat I'm assuming father. Yeah, his father.
And this codependent, unhappy mother.
This is what I call the unholy tryout of patriarchy.
You wonder why so many men are love avoidant.
Or avoiders.
Well, here's why.
You have an irresponsible or shut down father, you have a unhappy mother.
You have and I guarantee this was you.
A sweet
Sensitive, big hearted young boy.
The mother doesn't have to do a thing.

To to use him.
That boy looks at his unhappy mother and says, What can I do to make her happy?
And he lets go of what he wants and needs and becomes her caretaker.
Emotionally.
Grows up.
And his template for relationship is I'm a caretaker, I'm a fixer, I gotta take care of them.
My knees nobody gives a shit.
So what that breeds, maybe you maybe not.
is what we call love avoidance.
You live behind walls.
Because relationships mean I surrender my
You know, my needs and to caretake them.
I'm a human, so I need relationships, I pull them in, but once they're in, I gotta keep them at arm's length or they'll eat me alive.
So you're you be you live behind walls to protect yourself. That's that adaptive child.
How how am I doing?
I mean you're a hundred percent spot on
I think
At the very end.
I had a question in my mind as to
whether I have those types of walls because I don't know what they might look like.
So perhaps could you give me an example of what those might look like and then I could tell you
How good are you at identifying what you want in a relationship and assertively going after it?
I'd say pretty good at identifying.
Could be a lot better at
Proactively going after it.
And requesting it. Tend to be very indirect. That would be accurate to say for sure.
Yeah. And the cost of that indirectness is you don't get your needs met and then resentment grows and then whatever.
So
I have a progress, making progress. I've improved a lot. I can feel that, by the way. I can feel that.
Uh I would teach you
The cure for love avoidance is negotiation.
I would teach you to identify what you want and lean in and have the daring break the rules.
And say, Hey, you know what? I don't wanna eat.
Indian
Tonight I want to eat Japanese.
And
The last two nights we ate what you wanted and
Tonight we're doing Japanese.
Well, I don't like that, Tim. Well, okay.
And you know, for your fixers, I say let the bad thing happen.
You know, that adaptive child part of you is petrified of conflict.
You don't wanna make dad.
Angry and you don't want to make mom unhappy.
You're a fixer. You're a good boy. You want to bring peace.
Well, this is where trauma
And it was into our relationship.
That adaptive child party has no model
For healthy conflict.
It's either yelling and screaming or giving in.
You know, we children, we look at mom and dad, we go, I'll be that one.
You looked at mom. I'm I'll be that one.
I don't wanna be dead. I don't wanna be that aggressive.
So you don't have a healthy template for healthy aggression.
Didn't have that model. Yeah.
Yeah, me too. I had a violent father.
Yeah, I would teach you.
how to have healthy conflict and feel good about that. But it w would be very scary initially.
Mm-hmm.

So you nailed a couple of things that I want to
revisit. So the first and this will come back into the patriarchy thing too, because what you do, Terry, is so powerful and so important. I want as many men to listen to it as possible, which is why
I'm talking about the patriarchy piece. It's not because I disagree with a lot of what you're saying, although I do have some clarifying questions. So
One thing you said is
You hypothesized, right? The story you make up is that I was very, very sensitive or I was a very sensitive
young kid, which is true. I was very sensitive, much more so than my schoolmates. And then
For a host of reasons really also including some pretty
Terrible childhood abuse, not from my family.
Ended up trapping it.
Uh yeah, I've written about it extensively, but yeah. Maybe another time. But
The
Upshot of it is that I turn that off.
Right, emotions insensitivity reliability. So I completely compartmentalized that.
Locked it.
Put it away.
And that continued to be the case, and I paid
A lot for that.
There was some upside. There's some upside. I had a very high pain tolerance. I could handle certain things. I could be very aggressive and take a lot of shots in the course of doing various things.
competitive sports business, whatever. So I had s some quote unquote success.
From that, but there was a lot of collateral damage. And then around two thousand
Thirteen?
For a number of reasons, including a relationship I thought was gonna end in marriage and kids.
Coming to a halt.
decided to
Reopen the doors.
and sort of reactivate that sensitivity.
So that's been a that's been a project for the last
twelve years or so. And courageous both.
Thank you.
Thank you.
An incredibly
rewarding and challenging.
Path thus far and it continues. I don't regret having done that.
When you're talking about
Men
being available to their partners and emotionally attuned. And I I know I'm using different vocabulary. I agree with
Yeah, I agree with all of that. But
I suppose some people listening might feel like
Men and women might be
positioned as equivalents in a lot of ways, sort of emotional
Doppelgangers, and I'm just wondering if you feel like there are any patterns in terms of male and female differences.
that you spot again and again that don't need to be fixed, that they're actually just whether intrinsic or otherwise sort of differences to an embrace. And I'm just curious what your thoughts are there.
I tend to think there are, but I'm curious.
What your position is on that.
I don't know.
Who are we?
Beyond our socialization. I don't know.
But I do know.
Is that the bifurcation
of men and women under patriarchal culture which is virtually ubiquitous in the world.
It is so strong.
You gave up your sensitivity.
Because
Your sensitivity was punished.
Um
The playground is the greatest enforcer of traditional roles.
You learn three, four, five year old boys.
Learn to keep their mouth shut.
Or they're gonna get punished.
And for the guys out there, I gotta say
For a girl to cross the into Boyland is like, no, she'll get some shit.
For a boy to cross into girl land.
Evokes violence.
Emotional and
I'm sorry, at times even physical.
Violence. It's dangerous.
To break the rules.
It's dangerous to stand up for being whole in this culture.
And I talked to
Parents about having their boys be literate.
Gender literate.
Can I tell you a story?
Of course. I love your stories.
So when my kids were little, I I've got two kids, one's a massive jock.
Justin and one is a gay doctor, ballet dancer, p dance professionally and
Scott Five Anyway, they're both amazing and very, very different kids.
And we went off to vacation like uh the Dominican Republic and they had cornrows.
Put in their hair.
The kids did that.
My little one, Alexander, who turned out to grow up to be gay, did his whole head
In Cornrows and they were like green and no pink and gold his favorite color. His older brother, Jonathan, the doc had a couple of like Keith Richards cool rock and roll, you know All right. It's time to go to school. We're back from vacation.
Well and then I sit him down and I go, Here's the deal.
If you go to school with that in your hair
You may get crap from the other kids.
If you don't go to school with that in the air, you may feel like you've missed out on expressing yourself. And it could be the kids are gonna love that stuff in your hair. I don't know.
What do you guys want to do? It's not my decision, it's yours. And we talked to boys about
Do you wanna express yourself and deal with the crap you're gonna get?
Or do you want to comply and deal with the inauthenticity of that?
It's your choice, not ours.
I don't make those choices for my boys, but it's a on the table conversation.
So they've also sure
Yeah.
As the older one, Dustin, the Keysbird.
Puts his foot in the car, he goes, I can't do it.
And we wind up cutting his hair. It looked terrible. His brother, Mr Pink and Gold, looks like the toast of the town. But it could have gone another way.
So I would teach young Tim.
How to negotiate his sensitivities.
So that when they were welcomed
They were
Overt. And when when they were unwelcome
You put up a shield of
Toughness to protect yourself.
And having some sense of which moment is which.
How did you navigate that with your boys? Like how did you raise your boys? I'd be so curious to hear more about it because

There is a time to
It's not limited to
men, of course, or boys, but I think there's a lot of value placed. And I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing on competition and winning and so on and so forth. And I'm just so curious, since you mentioned the jock in particular,
How did you think about raising those two boys and did you raise them any differently?
I did. No. They they were both praised.
Similarly,
to one another, but they're very different from the culture at large.
It's funny, we just had our first relational life therapy annual conference and my son got on stage with me.

And the older one, Justin, the jaw was very funny. He looked at the crowd and he said, You know
Being the son of two therapists.
The way I grew up, you wanna talk to me about how your nanny had sex with you when you were five or your deepest anxiety
On there.
No problem. It took me into my twenties to learn how to sit on a barstool, have a beer, and talk to guys about a game. Nobody's perfect.
You know
The thing is
I want whole
People.
Uh going back to people may be turned off by what I'm saying.
It absolutely kills me when people describe my work as Terry's trying to feminize men. Just
No.
I want whole human
Yeah.
I want
Smart, sexy, competent women I want
Powerful, big hearted, compassionate.
Man.
We don't need to have ourselves.
Yeah, compliance to
The world
Order. We can be whole. And the issue is
Pool.
And
Adaptable.
What is this moment calling for? And I gotta tell the story. This is one of my favorite stories.
So.
So I had the privilege of going to Maasai land in Tanzania with another family
Who knew this particular
These guys.
Very well. It took ten hours.
of driving to get to them. They were remote. And this is the real deal.
I mean, you know, we're talking you know, earlobes down here and everybody had the then they have spears and they kill lions and these are real warriors.
So
I had a men's group with the elders for four nights running.
And we talked about everything.
So
I go like this to that.
In the United States there's a debate about what makes a good man, Mirani warrior, or one word. What makes a good Mirani?
Some people say a good Mirani is sensitive and thoughtful and kind.
Some people say Godmarani is fierce and tough and
No bullshit.
What do you guys think? Which is it?
Truy Tim. So this little guy's gotta be four foot three and a thousand years old, cooks his finger, and he sounds like he's
Totally pissed at me. And it goes from Maasai to Swahili to English to Swahili to this is what he says.
I have no interest.
In talking to you about what makes a good Marati.
I could care less.
But I will talk to you about what makes a great Mirani.
He said when the moment calls for fierceness
A good Mirani will kill you.
Don't mess with them.
I mean he'll kill ya.
When the moment calls for tenderness
A good Mirani will lay down his sword and shield.
And be sweet like
A baby.
A great Marati.
It's a man who knows which moment is which.
That's good. Yeah, that's very good.
I want whole people
Who can adapt to what's in front of them.
That's
Help.
How did you
And your wife think about
Changing how you would raise your kids from how you were raised. How'd you think about that?
And
Just be curious to hear you.
Approach that from whatever angle makes sense.
Well, as you probably know, both my wife and I came from terrible trauma.
Terribly violent families.
I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
Four books.
Forty years. Here's probably been my my single most famous quote.
You know, they say it's the hate of pretension to quote yourself.
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.
That follow.
Linda and I
made a rock solid commitment that we were not gonna leak.
The kind of reactivity and violence that we grew up with on our
'Cause and we didn't.
We did it on each other.
We had a real Rock'em Sakum marriage for
Years.
We're both fighters.
But we spared the children.
And they know that.
And they're really robust.
Radiantly healthy.
Boys.
I am the son of an angry, depressed father.
Hmm.
was the son of an angry, depressed father.
I have two boys.
Neither of them say that, and neither were their children.
And that
Is the greatest achievement of my life.
I mean it's an amazing achievement and I
I'd love to get a little more
Not microscopic, but granular in the sense that
A lot of people say they want to change.
lot of people have near resolutions and they say, You know what, I'm not gonna be the diabetic, my parent
was because I can fix it, I can change it, and they don't change. So I'm wondering how especially since you had the rock em Sakum.
experience in your marriage, what were the actions you took or the
strategies you had to check yourselves.
And
Ensure that you weren't letting those older inherited behaviors bleed into your parenting.
Well first of all
Get help.
Men don't get help. In the book on I said a man is about as likely to get help for depression as he is to ask for directions.

You know.
If you come from a tough background
I say this to the people I work with all the time.
You can't come from what you came from.

Have the happy, healthy family you want.
Without doing a shitload of therapy. A shitload of work.
Men's groups, women's groups, twelve step groups, therapy, but therapy that works.
But
The first thing I want to say is and thank God you don't have to do this on your own because you won't know what to do. Get help.
And get help that helps.
So you guys had help.
Years and years of spiritual work.
I've been meditating over fifty years and all stripe of therapy work.
There's a saying therapists or people who need to be in therapy forty hours a week. I became a professional therapist.
To heal myself.
And then I became a family therapist to learn how to have a relationship.
I mean I was so far behind the starting gate.
In twelve step.
One of these folks say is the last phase is gratitude.
I was so on the ropes.
Unlike a lot of people.
If I did.
My default.
I'd be dead now.
That's true. A lot of my friends that grew up with are dead.
If I did what I learned, I'd be dead.
I had no choice.
But to go under or
reconfigure myself.
And that's a gift.
The same with Belinda.
And we are. We're reconstructed human beings. Belinda calls us retreads.
You know, like a tire.
And I love
Reconstructed.
human beings. We have a a lot of depth.
And if I can do it, you can do it.
There's a way to do it.
No matter where you come from.
But you gotta be willing to do the work. And it's hard goddamn work.
What do your group therapy
experiences look like. I remember I don't think you would mind me saying this, I'll double check with them after we finish recording, but Kevin went through
A group.
I wanna say
for lack of a better way to describe it, sort of therapy experience with seven or eight people. He didn't tell me anything. Men. Men. And he didn't tell me anything about the content, of course. But it had a really big impact on him. And I'm curious what the format was, what the rules looked like.
Four.
A men's group like that.
We start off with check-ins. How's everybody doing? What's on your mind?

And then either
We move into a theme.
That emerges.
So my practice is uh ten full pay people and four pro bono at any given time and
And the ten who pay are
They tend to be high rollers. So here's a group of some of the bigger mover and shaker guys in the world right now. We had a hilarious time of talking for two hours about how we were all petrified of our wives. It was So sometimes a theme will emerge. Bathers, anger.
Uh, self medication, being afraid of our wife.
And or as a check in

One person will like pop.
And I'll go
The
Do trauma work with you.
We're not gonna do it.
Just go around anyway, but
If you were in the group.
At some point
I would say
I wanna go back.
To that little boy who learned how to be a fixer.
How old were you when you first adopted that?
Yeah.
Four or five is
Whatever it was.
Close your eyes, go into your body.
Find that four year old boy.
Ask him to come out and sit in a chair.
Facing yeah.
What's he look like?
How do you feel toward him?
What do you want to say to him?
What does he need to hear from you?
What's it like for him? How does he respond to what you just said? And I get into a dialogue between you and this little boy.
Of course it's very emotional.
And it ends
Always.
With you saying to that little part of you.
I'm here now.
I can take care of you.
You're angry.
Partner.
May not be available.
And that's frightening to you.
But
I'm available.
We don't need her.
You turn to me.
And that's transformative.
So I do deep trauma work in the men's group, or we do a theme, or we just all hang out.
Talk about what's going on in our lives.
And you were all the above.
Are there any guidelines for how people can respond to what someone else says
Or discloses or I'm just thinking there's sometimes rules in organizations like the entrepreneurs organization.
And in forums and things like this, in these smaller sized groups.
If somebody was
Thinking about it
creating something like this for themselves. And it would be good to have a professional involved, of course. But are there any other
Any other rules or guidelines that you think are helpful in these types of groups?
As you know I have eight million sayings and here's one of them. Generally speaking, unsolicited advice doesn't go very well.
Yeah.
We all learn to have good boundaries in these groups.
Which we can double back and talk about.
A core principle of RLT is what we call full respect living.
I may disagree with how you think.
But I hold you in respect.
It's a part of the culture of the group.
That we speak to one another with humility.
This is what I'm making up, Tim.
And with respect.
No one
in these groups that well a fucking asshole, how can you do that?
We just don't talk to each other that way. And I've never had to make that explicit. It just happens.
When you were talking about
identifying the age of the little boy and having him sit in the chair. For some people listening, they might
hear echoes of say internal family systems IFS. Does your approach is it similar to that? It does it differ from it?
How do you think about that?
Let's do this briefly because this could be a whole there are some similarities. For example, there's a three part
Part of the psyche.
What I call the wise adult has some correlation to what Dick calls self.
What he calls protectors and managers has some correlation to what I call the adaptive child and his exiles my wounded child. So there's some similarities, but there are also some very distinct differences.
I don't believe that the
adaptations that you learned as a kid are all
defensive or are all about protecting the
War.
And I believe there are bad parts. Dick is uh almost a religious fervor that there's no such thing as a bad part.
No, there are grandiose retaliatory parts of you that you really need to corral.
And there's also entitlement and privilege and it's not all
grouped around protecting a vulnerability. That's we think that in psychiatry too. We think all grandiose behavior is a defense against
Shame. No, some grandiose behavior is just
Entitlement and hatred. That's part of our humanity.
Well, I don't think Hitler killed
Millions of Jews because he was protecting a vulnerable part of himself.
There's more to it than that.
So
We take on some of the issues of
grandiosity and entitlement and some of the
Less savoury parts of our
Humanity.
In a way that I don't think IFS quite does.
Broadly speaking, do you think
There are any
new or particular challenges with
Modern relationships.
Whether it be dating or marriage, anything that is relatively kind of new on the scene.
In your opinion?
Well polyamory is interesting.
Yeah, let's talk about it. Far away.
Valinda and I spent three months in Costa Rica and amongst the young expats you can't find a monogamous.

And uh polyamory is a real uh challenge.
Monogamy is the challenge too.
I used to say monogamy is unnatural and open marriage is a
Wow, hold on.
So people trying to uh there are people experimenting with
different models of intimacy.
Um
Okay, open the doors and
They're challenges.
Yeah. I remember uh
I was chatting with someone who had
Experimenting with everyone
variant of
Polly Amory and she referred to it as Polly Agony. That was her


But I would love to know.
Are there challenges for monogamy now that didn't seem to exist twenty or thirty years ago that or that are just much more
Exaggerated though.
Yeah, a number of things.
First of all
We men are trying to figure out what the hell we are.
And
Yeah, someone wants described my work as women have had a revolution and now men have to deal with it and no one knows what to do.
Women have had a revolution.
And they are speaking up, and they are insisting on intimacy from us guys.
In ways that are exactly
In conflict.
With our traditional role as men.
Yeah, Eric Erikson said it's a sign of a healthy culture.
That
Socialization practices in childhood equip you
To succeed in your adult roles.
And it's a sign of a culture in transition when there's a disjuncture between the two.
And for men there's this juncture.
What traditional
Masculinity teaches you as a boy whether you want it or not, often through punishment.
by today's standards will give you problems in your relationship.
You gotta be vulnerable. You gotta open your heart.
Literally you have to reconfigure masculinity in order to be a good partner these days. And
People need help with that.
Yeah.
Cultural
Response to feminism and women's empowerment.
That's been a big backlash.
You know, Man The Manosphere and that sobering movie I w Adolescence.
There's a big resurgence of I'm a man and I'm tired of being told I'm dead and go screw yourself.
Ain't gonna work.
The toothpaste ain't going back in the tube.
So what I say is I don't want women to stand down, I want men to stand up and meet these new demands. Look.
I've been saying this for forty years and research has finally caught up with me.
Relationality, intimacy, open hearted connection.
The ace that we R L T therapists have in our backpacket is that's what we human beings are designed for.
We're designed to be intimate.
Not being intimate
I know you do a lot of great work with health on your podcast.
Not being intimate is as bad for your body as smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day.
This is a hard black and white research.
We are born.
To be
Intimate.
Moving beyond traditional gender roles is the only way to get there.
So
Stop whining.
Stand up.
and learn a few relational skills. It's good for you. It's good for your body. You live longer.
It's good for your marriage and it's good for your children.
And
Let me help you learn how to do this better.
That's revolutionary. You got a lot of people out there.
I'm so happy to be on this podcast with you, truly.
You got a lot of people out there
I'm mad as hell and I'm not putting up with it. We men need to reclaim our power and
No.
We need to open our hearts and listen and listen, here's the simple way. You don't like patriarchy, here's what it's
I teach the men I work with
To learn to become
Family men.
Tell you a family man.
You decentralize yourself.
I wrote this and I don't want to talk about it. A boy's question of the world is what he got for me.
A man's question of the world is what's needed here.
And I teach men to show up as men and not boys.
What's needed here?
You know.
Research on happiness is I like black and white research.
If you get a gift, you're happy.
To get happier.
For a bit.
If you give a gift
You're even happier and longer.
And if you get it.
What men need to understand is it's
Good for us.
To be empowered.
Be assertive.
And also
To be connected and show up.
And
Ask ourselves.
What's needed here?
How do I need to show up here?
That's a man.
I like that framing.
the questions and how they differ for boys and men. It does, I think, perhaps to some listeners sound like
Men have a lot of heavy lifting to do and women have had this revolution and all is well in woman land. Is there such a thing as toxic femininity? Are there
Is there collateral damage to all these societal shifts?
Yeah.
I'm going to brought this up.
Because
In family therapy we talk about first and second order change.
First order change is just a rearrangement.
You know, Tommy's true in.
Yeah, Tommy to not be true and then Sally starts pooping her pants. It's like okay, well
Rearranging the furniture.
Second order change is a revolution.
No kid has to be symptomatic.
In our culture.
There's a lot of what I call individual empowerment.
I was weak.
Now I'm strong. Go screw yourself.
I am woman, I have found my voice, hear me roar, no
And you get a lot of
I'm gonna get into trouble, but too bad. You get a lot of people in that traditional feminine side of the equation.
Doesn't matter what body you're in, you're
As a fixer on that feminine side.
You get a lot of uh the people on the feminine side move from disempowerment
to individual empowerment. I call it I was weak, now I'm strong, go screw yourself.
And
Everybody will cheer.
Mom, dad
Therapists, twelve step sponsors.
Your man's group.
No.
Relational
Empowerment.
Is the next step.
I was weak, now I'm strong.
I'm gonna go toe to toe with you.
I'm gonna tell you just what I want and need. Now listen to this.
What could I give you to help you to do that for me?
Who sounds like that?
We're a team.
I love you.
What do you need?
Let's work together.
That's the next step.
And a lot of women
early stage feminism move from disempowerment to individual empowerment.
Yeah, as a couple of therapists
Often the bane of my existence is an individual therapist.
who's individually empowered their client right out of a workable relationship.
No.
I was weak. Now I'm strong. I love you. We're a team.
Let's roll up our sleeves and work on this together.
That's
The New World Order.
We've covered a lot of ground. I'm looking at all my notes.
There's a lot that we I'm sure could cover, but are there any other tools?
That you would like to cover.
Yes.
Uh I wanna go back and talk about the relational empowerment versus individual empowerment.
Right.
Because
Here's how I say it. Under patriarchy
You can either be connected
That's you, the fixer. Accommodating, self sacrificing
Mm-hmm.
uh peacemaking.
Or you can be assertive. That's more traditionally m quote unquote masculine.
Independent, competent, aggressive.
But you can't be both at the same time.
Because power is power over when you move into power you break connection. That's individual empowerment.
I was weak, now I'm strong.
I don't care how I felt.
Just
Listen, no.
You do care how you sound, or you're not gonna get listened to.
I teach people and particularly women in this one or whoever's coming up from the one down.
What I call loving power.
And could you just for the sake of revisiting just describe one up, one down one more time, because uh people may not have gotten that.
It's what Peter called my great mentor.
Coming out from under the great lie.
That a human being could be
inherently superior or inferior.

Healthy self esteem, which I have to teach people in this culture.
Comes from the inside out.
You're here, you're worthy, you're lovable.
You're a good human being.
Because you're breathing, period.
And your essential worth
Can't be added to, it can't be subtracted from.
This is democracy. This is one person, one vote. We're all
equal under the law until recently anyway. This is democracy.
But we don't live like this.
We live in the world of patriarchy which is one up, one down, superior, inferior
Better than less than.
All day long.
And the one down shame, inferiority, helplessness, defectiveness, unlovability.
For fifty years.
My field has focused on helping people come up from that one down. Good.
But we've almost
Totally ignored.
Helping people come down from the one up.
Entitlement.
Anger.
Judgment.
Contempt
Self righteous indignation.
All forms of grandiosity.
There's a lot of ink now being spilled on the so called narcissistic
partner, which is almost always a man. And the idea is they can't be treated. Leave'em. Bullshit.
That's more individual empowerment.
We treat grandiose men breakfast, lunch, and dinner in RLD.
Come down from that entitlement.
Come down from that contempt.
It's poison for you.
Let me teach you how to do it.
You'll be happier.
And we do. We effectively help people come down from the one up.
How do you do that? Just because people probably
This is very unfamiliar territory, as you mentioned, right? Fifty years of bringing people up from one down. But how do you bring someone down a step?
Back to baseline from grandiosity.
You have to wake'em up.
There are three phases to RLT. The first we call waking up the client, which is loving confrontation.
Which most therapy doesn't do.
Once we get
What you're doing.
That will never work.
Uh and if you ride in the one up, your grandiosity.
Then we move into trauma work.
What set you up to do that?
And then we teach you skills.
It's all three.
IFS doesn't teach skills, by the way. A lot of trauma people think you remove the trauma.
You don't need to teach skill then.
Wishful thinking.
Anyway.
So first we confront what you're doing.
Then we go back to your childhood roots and where it came from.
and help you with that. And then we teach you new skills to replace it with.
Why should you come down?
From your rage.
And dominance and control. Why?
Well how's it working for you?
I talk about poison privilege.
And let me say this, and this is particularly true for men.
You know, God in her wisdom has given me access to
The
Dream.
The real American dream is that if you have money and fame, it will transmute you.
You'll become a demigod and you'll be happy.
I treat those people. They're not happy.
They've done well in the world.
But they're not happy between their eras and they're miserable to live with.
Some so called expert got on the television and talked about aspirational masculinity in Elon Musk.
Go to the moon. Great.
Be the richest man of the world. Great.
You wanna be married to that guy?
You wanna be that guy's kid?
Good luck.
All of the people I treat are
Incredible successes in the world and a mess.
Inside.
Why?
The first thing I teach
is the difference between gratification and what I call relational joy.
Gratification is pleasure, short term pleasure. You make a million bucks, great. Pretty girl will flirt with you, great.
I like pleasure in its place.
Relational joy which many of the people I
The grandiose people in particular, I w have no idea what I'm talking about.
Relational joy is the deeper down pleasure of just being
Being there and being connected.
And many of the grandiose people I work with simply don't know what relational joy is. They've lived their whole life for gratification.
And it's empty.
And they feel the emptiness.
And the people they live with are fed up with them.
And they certainly feel that.
So what I have to offer
Is relational
Joy.
That's the ace in my pocket,'cause that's what we're born for.
That's the only thing that will make you happy.
Let me teach you to come down off your perch.
And enter into
Being a human being like the rest of us.
And let me teach you to really look at what you've been
Do it.
Can I tell you a story? Yes, always. A guy came in and he was quote unquote depressed.
Another one of these guys with five therapists under his belt.
Nobody's been able to help him.
Um
He's on the break of divorce.
And I listen to him and I go
I can't help you with your depression, but I can save your marriage.
Okay.
But you know, you have a very n this is a guy, he literally you go to work
Come home, flop on the couch,
His wife would be running around, they'd all have dinner
She do the homework with the kids, she put them to bed, and then you slump off the bed and go to sleep.
Get up the next day and go to work. She'd ready to
The bortum.
So you have a very mysterious depression.
It goes into remission
At eight forty five and it comes roaring back at five fifteen.
When you're at work you manage to function.
When you're at home, you're on the couch.
A million people have tried to help you with your depression. I can't I'm not gonna try.
You're depressed.
Sorry.
Been there.
Here's what I want to tell ya.
True. Here's what I want to tell you. Says what?
Get off the couch.
Go do homework with your kids. Go help your wife with your dishes.
You manage to pull yourself out of yourself.
From nine to five.
You give yourself a pass when you get home.
You're gonna wind up divorced.
Um
You're gonna do great damage to your children.
And he looks at his wife.
And he says, I realize
I've really abandoned you.
In his family.
And I made excuses for myself all these years. And he starts to cry.
That's remorse.
That's open heartedness. I say these come out of the coldness of outer space into the warmth of
Connection. Through remorse.
Oh my god.
I see what I've been doing.
Yeah.
Um so
Sorry.
And I looked at him.
And I said as I say to so many people in that moment, I say to them
Welcome to the planet Earth.
Welcome to the human race.
It's been really lonely up there, hasn't it?
Well, Terry, you have a lot of resources and a lot of books. Who should start where?
In other words,
Do you suggest people start with any particular book or resource if they have a particular
Challenge or issue, where would you point them?
How can we
Provide a
Roadmap for people who want to explore.
More of
Terry Real.
Does it a social media thing?
Uh real Terry Real.
That covers all the social media at Real Terry Real.
Go to my website.
TerryReal dot com.
I'm pleased to say we have a lot of offerings now online for the general public.
a course on self esteem.
Of course on healthy boundaries.
courses on relationship skills.
We have little mini courses how to come back from infidelity. We have particular topic courses now that are followed up by online groups that you can join. So
If you're coming back from infidelity, here's a three hour workshop and here's an ongoing group you can
be part of. We're doing more and more of that.
In terms of books.
I like us.
The new book.
I like I don't wanna talk about it. The old book
Uh and I like Fierce Intimacy, those I like all three of those.
Yeah, Fierce Intimacy, it is quite funny because I loved Fierce Intimacy and I wanted to find a Kindle edition to highlight
And could you explain why there isn't one, at least as it stands right now?
There's an audio. Sounds true asked me to
You know, it's one of those things God was with me. I sat in a booth
No notes.
And I just talked for three days.
And that's intimacy. It's insane for people who want to listen to it. You know, there's certain people maybe
At that point the spirit was
At your back.
And uh similarly, I remember at one point I was using a meditation app designed by Sam Harris, and he had this interlude, which was this commentary, and it was five or ten minutes long, and I said, Could you please send me the text? Could you send me the Google Doc? And he said
What text? I said, What do you mean what text? He goes, I just got got in the booth and riff for ten minutes and I was like, Okay. They're levels and then their levels. So nicely done on fierce intimacy.
Thank you.
Yeah, just a few more questions and everybody should go to TerryReel.com. I'm sure that the socials are also available from terrereel.com and we'll link to everything we've discussed in the show notes.
Outside of your own books, are there any books that you have gifted frequently to other people or reread?
More than once yourself.
That come to mind.
I'm a big fan of Jim Gilligan's book Violence.
It's not an easy read.
What was the name of the book again?
Violence.
Oh violence.
Yeah. Jim was the medical director of the Bridgewater hospital for the criminally insane.
And he worked with serial killers. He worked with like Hannibal the Cannibal.
And he starts off as a young man.
Taking this over and he says to himself
If I can figure out the dynamics of these guys.
I can figure out what violence is. And he does.
In the book.
So th that's been a great inspiration to me.
Why has that been an inspiration to you?
I do with male pilots.
I do with violence.
And both Jim and I agree that violence
Is
The shunting.
From the one down to the one up.
From shame to grandiosity.
From helplessness to
Attack.
Yeah, so it's really
It took'em twenty five years to
Write that book and it shows.
You know.
Not to drift, but
When nine eleven happened
I wrote an op ed piece that nobody published.
In the piece I said, This is the first time we've been hit on American soil. This is a national trauma.
Unlike anything we faced before.
And as a trauma expert, I know.
That you have two choices.
You can tolerate the discomfort of sitting with
The vulnerability and pain of that drama.
And maybe asking some tough questions about
Why?
What needs to happen.
Or
You can escape that discomfort.
By a flight into one up.
Grandiosity.
Judgment, contempt, and attack.
And my hope for this country is
Rejoin together in the vulnerability.
rather than escape into attack.
Nobody published that.
Two weeks later we were in Iraq.
So
I like the book.
I
What
People
To resist
The temptation.
of flying from discomfort into one up.
superiority, contempt, judgment, and
The tag.
On all sides.
The left and the right.
The left is not shy about moving into
Self righteous indignation and contempt either.
We talk about full respect.
Living.
I'll put my body on the line and be on the streets protesting your agenda and still hold you
And regard as a human being.
I don't have to dehumanize you in order to fight you. Gandhi knew that. Martin Luther King knows that.
That wisdom is being lost all over the globe right now.
It needs to be rekindled.
Any other books that come to mind besides violence?
I like Raymond Chandler.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah.
Where would you have people start? Or do you have a favorite?
You know, I love lines. Bel in the made my day by giving me a book called The Great One Liners from Noir. I like Noir.
The big sleep, I guess.
There's a green line.
When Humphrey Brover at least Libracal.
Playing Sam Spade.
She says Oh I see you met my little sister.
He says, Yeah. She tried to sit on my lap. I was sitting up at the time.



Now that's writing.

All right. So speaking of one liners, just a few more questions and then we'll wind to a close. If you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking, just to get a message, a line, a quote
A question, anything like that.
to many, many millions of people.
What might you put?
On that billboard.
Have the courage
To move beyond the defaults you were handed.
And do it with help.
Terry, thank you for taking the time today. It's so nice to see you again.
Yeah, really appreciate you carving out the time, being flexible on start time and uh covering so much ground as well.
You're a wonderful interviewer, Tim. And I'm sure you're gonna edit this out, but if I dare say it.
Even the little I know you I've grown fond of you.
I'm rooting for you. So what a service you're offering.
And uh thank you for having me on.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Terry. And to everybody listening.
We will have links to everything in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash podcast. Just search Terry or Terry Real and it'll pop right up.
And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary.
to others, but also to yourself. Don't forget the last piece. And thanks for tuning in.

Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
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