The Peter Attia Drive - #119 - Terry Real: Breaking the cycle of shame, anger, and depression

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

Terry Real, a renowned family therapist and best-selling author, helps people create the connections they desire in their relationships. In this episode, Terry describes how his upbringing with an abusive father forged his path to become a therapist, develop his Relational Life Therapy (RLT) framework, and write I Don't Want to Talk About It—a book that reveals the hidden legacy of male depression. Terry discusses the link between childhood trauma and the deep-rooted shame, anger, and depression, which can result in feeling disconnected. Using real-life examples, Terry explains how he implements RLT to confront trauma, discover its origin, and teach the skills to break the cycle of pain, in order to live a satisfying life.   We discuss: Terry’s upbringing with a depressed and abusive father [3:15]; The importance of the repair process, after relational disharmony, to break the trauma cycle [15:15]; The impact of a patriarchal society, and relational growth as the next step for feminism [19:00]; Origins of deep-rooted shame, and the difference between feeling ashamed and feeling guilty [27:15]; Preventing the propagation of trauma without over-coddling kids [35:30]; The one-up/one-down cycle from grandiosity to shame [37:30]; Covert depression—Steps to fixing the secret legacy of male depression [40:00]; Three forms of false self-esteem [50:00]; Narcissism—A misunderstood concept [51:45]; The interplay of shame, anger, and grandiosity, and how to break the cycle [54:15]; The Relational Life Therapy framework [1:06:30]; How the adaptive child becomes the maladaptive adult [1:15:30]; Speaking the language of social relationships [1:21:45]; When does it make sense for a couple to separate? [1:26:30]; Witness abuse—Consequences of screaming at your partner in the presence of children [1:28:15]; Cases of instantaneous change, and other behavioral changes that may take more time [1:30:45]; Reconciling with his father—Terry’s final conversation with his dad [1:33:45]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/terryreal Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content and health and wellness. Full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peteratia MD dot com forward slash subscribe.

Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guess this week is author, speaker, and family therapist Terry Reel. As a family therapist and teacher for more than 25 years, Terry's the best-selling author of a number of books, including I don't want to talk about it, overcoming the secret legacy of male depression. How can I get through to you? Reconnecting men and women. And I believe his most recent book is the new rules of marriage, what you need to know to make love work. Terry also founded the relational love institute, offering workshops for couples, individuals, and patients around the country, along with a professional training program

for clinicians. Now, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, I think on at least three or four episodes, I have brought up Terry's name and his book, I don't want to talk about it, and I think I've even alluded to it as probably one of the books I have gifted more than any other. I have wanted to interview Terry for quite some time now because I just think that the way he thinks about the relationship between anger, depression, and inter-relational strife is so illuminating. And, you know, I sort of sheepishly worked up the nerve to ask him at some point, hey, Terry, you know, would it be okay if I interviewed you?

And I was just delighted that he agreed to it. And he agreed to it on a very short notice, like in a matter of days. In this episode, we talk about Terry's background. He grew up with an abusive father and that has turned out to be a well and offland unfortunate thing that happened to Terry, probably the greatest gift that came to many of us

who have been helped by Terry, because it was that relationship with his father that really forged his path to become a therapist and to better understand male depression and anger. We talk about how trauma during a child's upbringing can shape them later in life and how it can be passed on for generations over and over again. We talk about why people sometimes need to be in painful situations to have breakthroughs, what it means to hit rock bottom, how to live a relational life and the importance of living with healthy, satisfying, rich, emotional connections. We talk a lot about narcissism

and touch on David Foster Wallace and the idea of how we don't truly know what someone is going through in life, this idea of being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. We talk about a lot of other things, but I think in the end, I hope you'll just take my word for it, that this is worth investing a time in listening to. I enjoyed this discussion immensely, and I look forward to sharing it. So without further delay, please enjoy my discussion on the Terry Real. Terry, thank you so much for making time to speak with me. It's been a long time that I've wanted to, I don't know, turn the tables a little bit

and ask you the questions. Yeah, well, it's a great pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to an interesting conversation. I think I just want to kind of jump into some stuff. Maybe for the listener, I'll tell a little bit of a story about how we were connected and then jump into you telling your story. So about 18 months ago, a woman who I have yet to interview on the podcast, but certainly will as Theraparel, who I was working with at the time and still continue to work with said Peter, you've got me and Laurie as these

two amazing therapists in your life, but you don't have a male therapist and you need one. And I'd already worked with two or three guys, but I just didn't have that connection. And she said, I want you to read a book. And next week when we meet, I want you to tell me what you thought about the book and if the book resonated with you. And if it did, I will introduce you to the author. And if it didn't, that's okay. We'll keep looking.

And the book was, I don't want to talk about it. And so I went home, bought the book, read the book, and came back in a week and said, even if not one other person has read that book, he wrote it for me, and it was worth the effort he put into it. And the rest is sort of history. So can you start with a little bit about your background, how you grew up? Well, I mean, it's a little glib, but people always ask me how I became a family

therapist and my stock answer is I started about four. I grew up at poor and came to New Jersey, a little hang on by your fingernails, middle-class enclave in a town that was rapidly becoming a ghost town. My parents were under a lot of stress. My father was a loving, smart, violent, emotionally brutal man. I went to therapy school. I already spent four years in a doctoral program in the literature, and then I went to therapy school

after that. And I had to go to therapy school to get the skills I needed to talk to this man, to get him to open up to me. And I needed to understand what the hell had happened to him. I needed to make sense out of my father and his violence so that I would not repeat it. And I have.

Terry, you described him using three phrases. I might be paraphrasing a little bit, but I could have sworn you said loving, smart, and brutally violent, or at least violent, those people don't think of those as going together. That seems like a contradiction in some way. Yeah, it does to me to imagine what it felt like to a four-year-old. It's confusing, but real life is confusing. There are many, many parents who are warm and nurtured when they're warm and nurtured when they turn on you and they're brutal.

That's not an uncommon pattern. What that does for a child is it's confusing. It's very confusing. It brings a great deal of mistrust because the rug is always being pulled out from under you. When did that first occur to you that something wasn't right? I mean, it sounds odd that a four-year-old could be even perceptive that anything that they're experiencing is not the norm.

We've glossed over this, but I do want to go back into it. I mean, you weren't exactly the perfect child. You were kind of a bad kid growing up if I recall, right? Well, I became a bad kid. I didn't start off as a bad kid. I guess nobody does, right? Yeah. I was invited to be a bad kid

and I took the invitation. And then I was punished for it. You know, I was a scapegoat child, Peter. There are three, it is old 12-step. The hero child, the good one, the achiever, the scapegoat child, the bad one, the rebel, and the lost child, the one that nobody pays any attention to at all. And I was a scapegoat child. And scapegoat child, the one that nobody pays any attention to at all.

And I was a scapegoat child. A scapegoat child, I'm really happy. I feel it's a gift to have been a scapegoat child. A scapegoat child is the one that wants to bring up to the surface all of the pathology and the truth that's being denied and suppressed. And they usually do it through action, other than verbs, but they express the family dysfunction or pathology or ill-ease and then they get punished for it or they tell the true They literally tell the truth about the family and they dads in alcohol. I only you would say that

So I was escaped. Go and I was a true teller and now I'm a professional true teller. And it's what I do for living. And instead of getting punished for it, I'm getting paid for it. So there you are. So it's not a given that when you were sitting there in high school, you were gonna quote unquote make it. Tell me a little bit about that transition from high school into college.

There's a story in your book about, I think your dad even accompanied you off to college. Didn't he that first trip? Yeah, they did I first of all Oh my gosh, let me go back of my schooling if the whole thing really started in about second grade I came home with bad report card and You never know what my dad was gonna do. I was scared to death, but he looked at it and he threw it on the floor and He left I was scared to death, but he looked at it and he threw it on the floor and he left

And he said it's just because those assholes are so stupid and you're so bright. They don't know what to do with you Okay, now the technical term from my father was doing just things called false Empowerment he was pumping me up. It was no favor to a little boy. I didn't get good grades in school until I got the college. I went through elementary, junior, and high school. I figured out that if I showed up every other week, that would be enough to get a D average. And that's what I did. And then I went to the boardwalk in Atlantic City,

and I sat down at Woolworth, and I'd spend the whole day writing and I would show up at school once every 10 days to two weeks. I was going to go to Europe and be a writer, but I got a 1A in the draft, which is a whole other story. I was scared to death and I went to college to get out of the draft. And I had no grades, so the only college that would accept me was the Atlanta Community College. And that's why I spent my first year and I needed to get out. And I got all these because I wanted to get out.

And then I transferred from there to Rutgers. My mother and my father came to visit me. They stood out like sore thumbs. I was completely embarrassed by their blatantly blue collar out of placeness. The last word my father said before he left me was, keep your nose to the grindstone and your pecker dry, which to this day I don't really quite know what the hell that was supposed to mean. And my mother, who was six foot in obese, banged on the car that I was driving off in with friend, banged on the car so the guy jammed on his brakes and then she gave me a little

wave and I kissed goodbye. Were you the oldest of your siblings? No, no. And in true birth order, the older one is more the hero child usually and the second one is the scapegoat. Older one goes to father, second one goes to mother, if you have two boys. So the story goes anyway. That's what happened to me. I have a fraternal twin brother, he's six minutes older than I am, and he's every inch the older brother, and I'm every inch the younger brother. How much did you know at the time of your father's pathology in his upbringing, what brought pain into his life? Oh, nothing.

He wouldn't talk to me. He wouldn't talk to me about anything of consequence, let alone his own life. And it wasn't until I was in my late 20s and I'd already become a therapist that I finally had enough skill to persist and get through it be gentle enough to get through his Desenses and finally at about 28 29 years old he told me his Story which is a pretty horrific story in his own right. Can you tell us some of that story? Sure

My father's mother died when he was nine. It was during the Depression in America. He had a younger brother. He was 11. His younger brother was nine. His mother was dead. His father who he describes as a passive loser of a man. Undelittle candy store and lost it. The family broke up and lived in various people's houses. And one day, in a fit of depression, my father's father tried to kill him and his brother and himself. He tried to gas him in a garage with his car.

My father remembers his father craving him in his arms and saying, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh and that woke his father up, but he grabbed this little brother and he got out of the car. And according to my father, that was the last real authentic contact he had with his father from the rest of his life. So it's safe to probably assume that his father also inherited a legacy of pain that may have gone beyond just the experiences he had in the loss of his wife. Yes, I think that's right. I think depression runs up and down my family.

I struggle with depression in my day. I am gratefully on anti-depressants, as we speak, and happily so, I'm sure that my grandfather was subject to depression and in circumstances were dire. So when you talk about your dad, you said brutal, loving, smart, but you didn't say depressed. So how does depression fit into what your father was experiencing and also it lashing out? Well, there's a saying in AA, they say hurt people, hurt people. And as you know, central to my work on masculinity is the translation of shame into grandiosity of feeling less than unadagrid,

unlovable somehow to the one down of shame. And then you flip into the one up of grandiosity, superiority, better than attack, avenging angel righteous indignation. And this, I believe, is the dynamic of use and most violence on this planet. And it's central to masculinity and traditional manhood, the flip from the one down victim to the one up of injury. Anyway, what's devilish about shifting from shame and the grandiosity from injury to attack is it works. It makes you feel better in the short run.

It just creates havoc in your life. And that's what happened with my father. My father despised vulnerability because he despised his own father. He saw this father as weak, and he despised weakness ever since. And so when I was in his eyes weak, precisely when I was vulnerable,

is when he would attack. He was punishing his own father and punishing his own vulnerability. It was a hyper-masculine response to trauma. Does that make sense to you what I'm saying? It does. How prevalent do you think this is? I mean, it's possible. I think if I just consider the sampling of my own population of male patients, which maybe males

make up two thirds of my patients, 60% say, I wonder just how prevalent this is in the lives of people who haven't been maybe so literally abused the way your father was. Yeah. Well, I was actually, my father did give sense of old, but there are many, look, one of my great mentors, a woman named P. Mellody, defined trauma or injury as any significantly less than nurtured transaction between parent and child. Any significantly less than nurtured transaction between parent and child injures the child. Now that's a whole range of course, and we're all imperfect and it's exactly our parents

imperfections and how we adapt to them, that shapes what most people would call our character. I call it our adaptive child self, but at any rate, we're all shaped by injuries. The question is, are they part of the imperfect dealings of being a human being with other human beings? Is there repair? Is there accountability? Is there something beyond the rupture? Or is it just injury and rupture? My model for relationships comes from Ed Tronak, who was the pioneer of infant observational research. He actually stuck a camera in front of mothers and babies and saw what they did. And Ed believes that the basic rhythm of all relationships is harmony, disharmoning, and repair.

Closeness, disruption, and repair, closeness, disruption, and return to closeness. And in my dysfunctional family, and in all the dysfunctional families I've treated over the years, there's little to no repair. The repair process has gotten jammed up somehow. And so there's just injury,

and then you live with it until the next injury. So it's not the disharmonie you're saying. It's not the harmony to disharmonie that's the problem. It's the inability to go from disharmonie to repair. Right. At the upper levels, we all heard our kids were all imperfect. And I told a story about putting Justin's hockey shoes on the wrong feet. Why don't you tell that story actually? I think it is a great illustration that any parent can relate to. Yeah, well, we were really rushed. Justin was a hockey player, which is sports in general is completely not my domain. My kid is a total jock. He's been really disappointed in some ways that he doesn't have a Boston sports dad.

And I appreciate that. He says, I'm going to go to South Boston, Irish, South Boston. And I'm going to find a beer-drinking, Trump supporting real father, which has nothing but sports all day. That ain't me. Anyway, we were playing hockey. I was already feeling a little overwhelmed because it's not my domain. We were late. He was whiny. I was putting his shoes on. The parents were trying to talk to me. I was trying to get him out on the ice. He goes out on the ice.

Comes back. He must have been like, I don't know, eight or nine. Comes back. Ten minutes later, said, my feet hurt. My boots are killing me. They'll come on, Justin, just go out there and play. I think he's got his skates on right now, you're saying? Yeah, his skate. Yeah. And then he does, obedient little boy, and he plays his little hard out. And when I'm taking his skates off at the end of the game to my horror, there are two red pre-blisters on his feet. I had put the damn shoes on the wrong feet. Oh, God. But here's what I say when I tell this story.

If it had been justina instead of justin, would I have been so firm, or would I have listened to my daughter? And I think the honest answer is I would have listened more. This is masculinity. In that moment, I was the voice of patriarchy, inflicting itself on my son. You've spoken about this patriarchal model that is, I mean, it's really everything you rail against, isn't it? You're not a fan of this. Can you vent a little bit more about this? Because You're not a fan of this. Can you vent a little bit more about this? Because for many men, it's all we've known.

I mean, it is you described, we're gonna get to what relational living means, which is, I mean, I think prior to meeting you, I just couldn't have fathomed what you were talking about. So... If you pause for a moment, that's a hell of a sentence to just get out of your mouth. Sure. That's a big sentence. And you speak for an awful lot of men. Most many, many, many of the men that I see simply don't know what living in healthy,

satisfying, rich, emotional connection feels like. They just don't know what do you tell you? It's like. They just don't know what, what do you tell? It's Greek. Yeah, it is a little bit abstract and it's, if it hasn't been modeled for you, which it's not generally, that's not a common model. I would say it's the less common model, I guess I would say. I don't can't speak to prevalence again, but say a little bit more about this. What is it that you're talking about as the norm? Let's start with what this traditional model is. Sure. Well, there are a number of ways of saying it. The simplest way of saying it is when I mean patriarchy, I'm talking about traditional gender roles for men and women. And I mean traditional

pre-feminism, but still very much with us. So the traditional role for women is everybody's written about for the last 50 years, is to be accommodating and resentful, to lose their voice. Carol Gilligan wrote this back in the 80s in a different voice. And she wrote about women's loss of voice, loss of authentic connection about the edge of adolescence, 13, 14. They fall prey to what Carol calls the tyranny of the nice and the kind. And they lose their voice, they stop telling the truth, they start being to be honest, manipulative. That's part of the traditional scene now, role. So traditionally what you've got is an accommodating resentful woman.

is an accommodating resentful woman. And on the other side, you have a shutdown driven, inwardly haunted, outwardly successful. One of the things I say, Peter, maybe you'll be able to read this. One of the things I say is an inwardly shame-based, outwardly driven man, coupled with inwardly resentful, outwardly accommodating warmen. That's America's power, couple, man. We're a successful couple in the world. Well, it's a dangerous combination because there's not enough inertia to question and

or challenge it internally. That probably doesn't make sense what I'm saying, but I think you know what I mean. It doesn't have enough of a forcing mechanism to call into question, whereas at least if one of those two phenotypes is different, there could be more tension that drives a change potentially. And then feminism hit, and there was tension

that draws the change. And I'm gonna say something, and maybe some of your listeners will push back on us, but I believe that in the 670s and 80s, And I'm going to say something and maybe some of your listeners will push back on this, but I believe that in the 670s and 80s, here's a question, Peter. What value is shared by mainstream patriarchal culture and almost virtually all of the so-called counter-culture personal growth movements? What value is shared by mainstream and counter-culture?

Hmm. Probably some semblance of independence or freedom. Yeah, you're close. The individual, the sanctity of individualism, personal growth is personal growth, not relational growth. And so I summarized personal growth or personal empowerment as I was weak, narrow and strong, go screw yourself. And it was big. I lived through that revolution in the 70s and the 80s and women were mad at us guys and I was weak now I'm strong. I'm going to stand back and say it in the old way I want to, and you best listen and like

it. Okay, that's a step in the right direction, but I think there's another step, and if I can be so bold as to be a male therapist, but I haven't been doing feminist family therapy for 40 years. Look, the next step is loving voice. When women move from voicelessness and resentment to finally, I call it stash and blow, I see it all the time in my office. Finally, when women do speak, they often speak in ways that are so aggressive that nobody in the right mind can listen to them.

So relational empowerment is the next step. Relational empowerment is, I'm going to be strong and loving at the same time, in the same breath. You see, I believe that under the patriarchal system, there's a little bit abstract, but let me say it. Under the patriarchal system, one can either be connected or powerful, but you can't be both at the same time. Let me say that again. Under patriarchy, which is a system we're all in, we're fish and patriarchy

is the water. Under the system we're all in, you can either be connected that's affiliative, feminine, or you can be powerful, that's independent, masculine, but you can't be both at the same time. When women do become powerful and when they did as a movement back in the 70s and 80s, it was a lot of the women in my office, I say to them, you after 50 years of feminism, you have earned the right to be as obnoxious as men have always been, congratulations. The next step is loving boys. And that's true for both men and women, that's standing up for yourself and cherishing the other person relationship in the same breath. Honey, I love you to pieces. Could you please tone down the way you're speaking to me right now so I can hear you versus I don't like how you're talking to me. You're raised the same thing. Yeah, you've talked a lot about this idea of enlightened self-interest.

This might be one example of it. Yeah, because under the Patriot, patriarchy is linear. And there are two aspects of patriarchy. For men, the essence of traditional masculinity is twofold. One is the denial of vulnerability. The more invulnerable you are as a man, the more man you are, the more vulnerable, the more girly you are. It's like physics.

It's just straightforward. It's misogyny. It's my dad. It's despising the vulnerable. And then the second issue is the delusion of dominance. God gives Adam dominion over the earth, which is really a bad idea. The Greeks knew better.

The Greeks spoke about Eubress, placing yourself above nature was the tragic flaw in every Greek tragic figure. They knew better. They knew about humility. The delusion of dominance, feeling that you are over nature, that you have the right, the entitlement, and even the responsibility to be above nature, is a court delusion that will kill us. If the nature that you're above is your wife or your kids or your body or your own thinking or it's the planet at

large. Mother Nature, don't worry about it. We'll cook up something in a lab and take care of it. We'll kill ourselves if we don't come out of this delusion. That's the masculine part of the traditional gender role. Cut off and false and palerna. You alluded to shame earlier. I want to go back to that because I think it sets the stage for some of the other concepts that I want to explore. Can you explain the difference

between shame and guilt? Yeah, well, this is Brunei Brown. I used to say healthy shame and unhealthy shame, but she kind of ruined that, shame bad all together. So for simplicity's sake, healthy self-esteem, let's start off with that. That's one of those things that everybody talks about and who really defines it. What do they really mean, healthy self-esteem? It means the capacity to cherish yourself, to esteem yourself, healthy self-esteem, to esteem yourself in the face of your imperfections and screw-ups. What you do, and I have to teach this to people in general men

in particular, what you do is just what we want to do with our children when they screw up, you hold the person in warm regard, you cast a very sober eye on the bad behavior. So you're bad about the bad behavior you've done, but don't take yourself apart as a person. You're a good, flawed person who's screwed up, you're fine. Learn from it, make amends, and get on with it. Shame is, I'm a bad person. Shame if I feel bad about the behavior, I feel bad about who I am as a person. And it easy up a lot. It is for many of us a constant companion. For those of us who are unloved or ashamed of children, we contend with that a lot. And the shame is the feeling of unworthiness, impidence,

helplessness, unloved ability to fact it once. Why does it happen though, Terry? Is it something we are born? Is it the default setting that we're born with? I don't believe so. I believe that we're shamed. We're shamed as children by either being neglected and abandoned somehow and or by being mistreated and misaligned somehow.

And we take on that shame and we feel bad about our cells usually. Now guilt is feeling bad about the bad behavior and one of the things that I teach particularly man is when you go from some sort of acting out some offensive behavior, when you're in doing that offensive behavior, you're in a state of grandiosity, you're entitled, you're better than, you deserve it. So you're in a state of grandiosity and you're in a state of self-intitlement and self-reoccupation. When you go from that, when you go from inflation to deflation, from I deserve to, I'm a big shit. What I tell my guys is you go from one form

of self reoccupation to guess what? Another form of self reoccupation. Just went from positive to negative. You know what, here's what I want you to do, Bill. I'm sitting with Bill and his wife and Bill just screwed up. Here's what I want you to do. What I want you to do is what my kids tell me, I want you to get over yourself. I want you to stop thinking about what a shit you are and start thinking about how you hurt your wife. Pay attention to her. Feel bad for her. Make a man to her. Let the energy

go out to her. Now, shame is really hard to get over. I understand that. I'm going to give you 60 seconds. Ready, go. And they do. They come out of Shane. But do they need your permission? I mean, do you think that, and again, we could even use examples of patients, is there a sense of, I feel guilty about what I've done. I feel guilty about what I've done. The right thing to do is to dwell on it for a very long period of time and despise myself for it. It's all the good it does. Well, not withstanding the lack of productivity, but is that the underlying sort of emotional

logic behind shame, or at least in the example you gave of bill. Oh no, it goes way beyond that. Look, my shame starts in childhood. And there are big forces that play first of all, I was an exception. Most children, if you mistreat them, if you're harsh to them, if you don't meet their needs, they will blame themselves and they will try to contort themselves into whatever the parent needs in order to win that connection and love, or love seeking animals. And you blame yourself, you try and get that parent back in the connection with you.

You start reading them. This is the gift of the drama of the gift of child, this is the gift. You read them. You blame yourself. And you see Peter, it's compassionate to blame yourself because you're feeling bad. When my father would beat me, I would feel bad for him. That's a mess. I was so sorry for him. He was pathetic to me.

At what age, Terry, does that a four-year-old would experience that or is that a 10-year-old's experience? 5-6. The point being, for most children, it's safer to blame yourself than to come to grips with a random hostile universe. It makes a lot more sense than I brought this on myself. That means that if I do something different, I might be able to control it. Versus the people are supposed to protect me from the world, are inflicting me with the brutality of the world, and I'm completely in their care and in hopeless. That is a scary thought.

So people do shame to protect themselves and people also do shame because this is complicated. It's a multi-generational legacy. My father beat his depression into me with a strap. beat his depression into me with a strap. His father beat the depression into my father with gas. We pass this on from generation to generation until somebody does something about it. One of the most profound things I remember you've ever said to me and again I think I don't maybe you were paraphrasing but it's I wrote it down and I see it often in my journal is every man is a bridge spanning two legacies the one he inherits and the one he passes on did I get that about right. You got that absolutely right. Let me give you another one. They say I had a pretension to quote yourself, but I do it in this one. I'll butcher it, but here it goes. Family pathology, roles 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 his ancestors and spares the children that follow.

That's what I'm about. I'm about facilitating that. What's the natural history of not doing anything about this? I mean, is this literally something where you could say, look, shame, will the laws of entropy basically dictate? Shame will always propagate unless there is deliberate and active Attention brought to halt it Yes, because Even the best of parents will injure will neglect oh, honey. I'm sorry you skin your knee Let me just oh

Dars let me call you back. Okay. And you know what? You should have hung up the phone and dealt with the knee on the spot. That's a little misalignment. That's a little injury. That's normal. It's part of human development. It's okay to child cries. Maybe in a very safe house, the child says,

Mommy, why don't you just bang up the phone and, I'm sorry, I'm sorry sorry honey, and there's repair. And this is the kind of traffic that is part of being human. That part's fine. But when you start going lower down on the spectrum, then things get a lot less fine. How does one differentiate between preventing the propagation of shame or trauma and the over-coddling of kids. Because right now, the pendulum has really swung the other way in society where there

are books about this entire topic of how we've coddled an entire generation. And as a result of that, there's an entitlement and a whole bunch of other things that are the result of it. Internally, I have my own litmus test, but I don't know that it's worth much. I'm very curious as to how an expert thinks about this. I don't know that I have a particular formula. I would say trust your gut and civilize the little creatures. The thing is that you have to understand self-esteem. Like the California no-sense, the California drive for self-esteem was so misguided, it just made me pull my

hair out. What most people think of a self-esteem is confidence andguided it just made me pull my hair out. What most people think of a self-esteem is confidence and mastery. Okay, that's fine. That's what it is, but that ain't self-esteem. Self-esteem is spiritual, it's ontological. You have worth and dignity as a human being because you're here on this planet, and you're worth cannot be better or worse than the guy to the left of the guy who arrived, no matter what you say or do,

it can't be added to, it can't be subtracted from, it's a spiritual fact. You know this as a doctor, Peter. This is part of the Hippocratic O. If one guy is pulled into the ER, and he's a Skid Row bomb, and the other one's state senator by the book at any rate,

it's triage based on need because you don't triage based on status that's grotesque every person is equal. We know this in the abstract but we don't live it unless you do some of the work that I'm inviting you to do. You don't live like that. You judge other people it's better than or less than, and you judge yourself. It's better than or less than all day long. I have to tell you, I've been doing recovery work for 30, 40 years, ever since I was a teenager. At 69, I don't do that anymore, inside my head. I don't go up, and I don't go down.

Not much. It's not my baseline. If I do nine out of ten times, I'll catch it. It's a lot better living like this than it was living like that. I help a man and women move from that to this all day long. That's what I do for living. Same more about the up and the down, you've alluded to it already with the one-up, one-down cycle, but say a little bit more about that. I suspect that resonates for people when it's described in some detail. Yeah, the field of psychotherapy and self-help and all that. For 50 years has been a great job of figuring out how the people come up from the one down of shame. Hope will win for you all this stuff has been great in the trauma techniques in therapy. We've done a terrible job of the other self-esteem disorder helping people come down from the

one up of grandiosity and their flip sides of the same coin, one down one up, inferiority, superiority. And it's our grandiosity that gets us into so much trouble in our relationships. Shame is an implosion. Grandiosity is acting out, or some kind of explosion. The great secret that I run around the country telling therapists to say, country telling therapists to say, shame feels bad. Grandiosity feels good. That's the open secret. It feels good to get drunk.

It feels good to get high. It feels good to make out with your secretary. It feels good to tell your boss to shove his job. In the moment that you're being grandiose, it's like an intoxicant. It feels good. So you have to think your way down from grandiosity. It takes a smarter person. And you think your way down, you come down from grandiosity,

even though it feels good, because it's in your interest to come down from it. Are men more susceptible to grandiosity than women? Well, men's grandiosity in this culture tends to be more overt. Men tend to lead from the one-up grandios position and have covert shame. Tent to their tons of exception, whereas women tend to lead more from the victim one down position and have covert issues of grandiosity. So we're compliments for each other. Yeah, let's go over that a little bit more

because in the book, I don't wanna talk about it. You talk a lot about overt and covert depression and it's the opposite of that, as you said, the on average, for what it's worth, men tend to be more covert in their depression, women more overt. Explain that distinction. Well, when I first wrote, I don't want to talk about it, depression we're seeing as a woman's disease. This was the first book that had ever been written about male depression. Nobody said that phrase, male depression.

What year was the first edition of that early 90s, 97, 98. And the idea was that women were two to four times more prone to depression than men. The subtitle of my book, I don't want to talk about, is the hidden epidemic of depression and men. And it's hidden for two reasons. The first is the manner ashamed of it. It's not unwomingly to be depressed. It is unmannedly to be overwhelmed by feelings and vulnerable. So, women face the stigma of a mental disorder, but men feel that very personally. It feels like they're unmanned by this disorder and they're shamed of it.

And they hide it. And the people around them will often collude with their hiding. Family physicians are the first line of defense in depression, and 70% of them do not diagnose a patient with depression. Do the studies indicate? And I believe it's because we're afraid to unmask that poor man and further shame him. Wives, or like that kids, are like that, everybody gets very protective. Some men do such a good job of hiding the depression that they hide it from themselves, and this is what I call covert depression. And what you see is not the depression so much, but the defences the man is erected to defend against the depression and you see acting out you see sexual acting out

You see porn addiction. You see self-medication. You see anger. You see a sudden isolation and withdrawal I talk about the unholy triad of covert depression radical isolation anger and acting out sexual acting out and medical isolation, anger, and acting out, sexual acting out. And of course, the self-medication includes drinking and drugging. If you look at women and men, look at what I now call overt depression, it's like two to four times more women than men. If you add into the grid domestic violence and alcoholism and drugs, it comes right back up to equal. And we know things like, for example, in areas where men lose their job, there's a dramatic rise in domestic violence. And the missing billiard ball in the middle between those two points is depression, most self-esteem.

And what happens to men with covert depression is what I've been talking about all evening, which is the transliteration of shame and the grandiosity of helplessness into righteousness of victimhood into attack. And that translation of shame and the grandiosity helplessness into attack is a central motif of traditional American masculinity. Look at all the adventure of movies. I wrote about this and I don't want to talk about it. Rambo. These guys are innocent guys who are pressed to the wall by bad guys. And then finally, about halfway through the movie, they pick up a museum, start blowing people away. And we cheer. We cheer. The move from shame to grandiosity feels like the swell of empowerment.

And we get drunk on it. But it's violent. It's emotionally violent. It's violent to the person your grandiosity has to, and it does violence to your own soul. And this comes back to the sort of patriarchal society which places a value on that strength. I mean, what do you think biologically or socially accounts for that distinction? We could wrestle around this one for a long long. Most of the people in my field are not saying, is it biological or is it cultural and social? That's not the question for almost anybody anywhere. The question now is how to interact because it's both. It's both. Of course it's both. But just because something biological doesn't mean necessarily mean that we should to aggression in biological, Freud said, the first man to hurl an epithet instead of a rock

was the creator of civilization. We have all sorts of impulses that are biological, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're supposed to go with them. The thing between our raw biological impulses and our behavior is called civilization. Yeah, you've talked a little bit about this idea in the past that you've written about it, that the steps to sort of fixing this. So if everything we've talked about is recognizing this.

How hard is that? How long does it take for you with a patient? I know you work a lot with couples. Do you work individually with men and women equally or disproportionately with one or the other? Now I work disproportionately with man. I'll see a woman now again, but I do mostly couple. You see, and I don't know, somebody may correct me on this, but what I do is I teach people how to live relational lives, how to open their hearts, how to open their voices, how to listen, how to respond without getting defensive and ego-tistical, how to do this, how to live relationally. It's what we're born for.

It's the only thing that really makes us happy. And I do believe that the best way of teaching somebody how to live a relational life was to get their partner and maybe their kids in and work on the relationship, rather than do it abstractly on the side? Do you find that most men need to be in crisis to hear what you're saying right now? Yeah. I had a guy and older gentleman, a very successful businessman, and we started talking about men and grandiosity, and he got very resonant with it. And he came to me and he said, I have a young colleague that I just, I brought on to our team, and he's the most brilliant young man I've ever met, but he's so narcissistic it's impossible to work what do I do and I sadly said to him I think he's too young I think that life hasn't roughed him up enough yet you have to start to get it

that your old tricks are not working and for some men particularly if they're successful wealth either shielded from those consequences but it's but it doesn't do them good. Yes, you want a crisis. Look, the so-called midlife crisis in man is, this is my read on it. The midlife crisis comes at whatever age when you've peaked, when you're at the top of your game. And you either feel that the masculine agenda is something that

you have failed. You have not caught the brass ring. You're not rich enough. You're not smart enough. Or you feel that the agenda's failed you. You have the brass ring ideal a lot with high rollers. You have the brass ring. Guess what? You're as miserable as you were before. So that's kind of a damned if you do damned if you don't realization that seems to suggest as you said, once you reach a point at which either you've reached or achieved whatever success is supposed to be, if you deem it to be hollow, you're hosed. And if you haven't achieved it, you're hosed because you're Willie L loman or pick your favorite example, right? Right. That's right. You fail or the agenda fails you and that's a great opportunity. I like crisis as a family therapist the other crisis of course for men

Is their women or if they're gay to male partners? I like to say that most of the men I treat are what I call wife mandated referrals like to say that most of the men I treat are what I call wife mandated referrals. They've been sent or their marriage is some crisis or they've already separated from their wife for 30 years and their erect, but there's some sort of crisis in their relationship as driving and deeper. In your book you certainly most of the case studies fit that description right. I'm trying to remember is there an example of a man in the book who just showed up on his own doing sort of self exploration and introspection? Yeah, there are a few.

There are a few, and I love them dearly. There was a young fella, Kurt, who came from the Midwest, he was the farmer's son. He came to me because he couldn't get girls. who came from the Midwest, he was the farmer's son. He came to me because he couldn't get girls. He couldn't get past the first date. This is deconstructing patriarchy, so I said, well, what do you do? Because he was a good-looking guy, and he was intelligent.

He said, well, I just, I tell him that I do this, and I do that, and I'm capable of this, and I've won that award and I said, wait a minute, what are you doing? That's not a date, that's a resume. And he said to me, I just figured I've only got one shot so I better make it good. It's funny, but it's sad. Well, it's patriarchy.

Men are taught that just being who you are is not enough that you have to earn connection to achievement and turn your back on relationship. I call this the Icarus syndrome. You have to leave, hearth and home, go flying to the sun to be worthy of, guess what, hearth and home. You're the one that left to begin with.

They're waiting for you. This happens all the time. Guys go off and work a hundred hours a week to be worthy of the white and kids who just want to become home already. Where does that come from? Where is that drive coming from? Where is this inferiority coming from? Is it all stem from this shame that you've talked about, the seeds of which are sown in little boys? Yes. We're taught to supplement the lack of inside-out healthy self-esteem with outside-in false self-esteem. And there's three. This is Pia. There's three. There's performance-based esteem. I have worse because of what I can do and that's a big one's a man There's other based esteem. I have worse because you think I do and

Of course push to extreme that's love addiction and that's big for women and Then you have I have worse because of what I have I have big muscles I have a beautiful wife I have in Boston. I have a kid at Harvard That's the be all in the attribute base to seem is what our culture runs on. If everybody woke up tomorrow with healthy self-esteem and full recovery, our economy would collapse. The whole advertising industry is built on, uses deodorant, be a special person. What was the first one, the second one was other-based, the third one was attribute-based. What was the first one? The second one was other based, the third one was attribute based. What was the first one?

Interesting, you forgot a performance based. I have work because of what I can do. Okay, I get funny guy. It's ironic that I forget that. Yeah, the kind that is. I can't be frightened or anything. Well, while we're on the topic of deconstructing people like me, let's talk about narcissism a little bit. You've already alluded to the Greek gods. You write very eloquently about this. Yeah, thank you. Narcissism is largely misunderstood. Narcissism is not a disorder of too much self-love but too little. Narcissus is an addict. If you remember the myth, he pisses off, I forget, who do you know I think, doesn't fall for any of her

nymphs, and she curses him and says, you're going to fall in love with the first next thing you see, wily curse. The next thing you see is he bends over well to get some water is the image of himself. He is rooted from that moment to the well, bent over, endlessly sighing as he tries to grasp the beautiful creature in the well and every time he tries to touch it it dissolves. The great thing about Narcissus is if an Arcisus had self-love, he could leave the well. He's rooted to the well because he's addicted to his image, not the internal self, but the image, the constructed self that comes when you have no internal self. That's what he's addicted to. And he

dies. He dies on that well. He stars to death. An echo, beautiful echo, is placed next to him. This is to me the essence of heterosexual relationships, traditionally. Narcissus has been over as well. An echo as been over as well and echo has been over Narcissus. And Narcissus has no motility and echo has no voice. And Narcissus endlessly sighs at his own beautiful reflection and echo endlessly repeats those sighs as she sighs for him. There we are. Is there any benefit in narcissism? Is it always pathologic?

No, we talk about healthy narcissism, healthy entitlement. That's good. Does your healthy entitlement get strained through patriarchy? It goes back to what the great anthropologist, Ian Heister, speaks of, is the difference between power over and power withs. Is your narcissism about agency and assertiveness and power withs fine? Is your narcissism about superiority and contempt not so fine? These concepts, they resonate. I think you and I, we've spoken about David Foster Wallace.

I'm such a fan of the commencement speech he delivered 2005 at Kenyan College. This is water and so much of what he's talking about is the sort of grandiosity one upmanship that he describes as being the root of so much misery And that's the interesting side of it, isn't it right which is in the short run misery. And that's the interesting side of it, isn't it, right? Which is in the short run that grandiosity is an amazing anesthetic, but it has a very bitter aftertaste. Well, it's like drinking three martini if he really would have been better with just one. And that third one makes you feel better in the moment, but oh boy, do you pay for it? This is how I describe it to my usually my guys into audiences. Bear

with me, I'll meander a little bit. So Boston, I'm convinced, and I think statistically as the worst drivers in the United States, and I come from New Jersey, I've lived for 10 years in New York, in New York, where Jersey, somebody will cut you off because they're kind of a pig, and they'll speed up and keep going. In Boston, somebody will cut you off because they're kind of a pig and they'll speed up and keep Boeing. In Boston somebody will cut you off and then they'll drop down to 20 miles an hour because they're passive aggressive and they'll just stick their fanny in your face and make you sit there. All right, so I got one of these guys, pulls that move on me, pulls out an enemy and then slows down. I'm looking through the windscreen at that fat little head in front of me. And I'm doing that Star Wars laser beam thing,

you know, I'm like exploding that fat little head. And I'm way into grandiosity. I mean, this guy is the shit. This guy is a moron. This guy is whatever. Their barely deserves to breathe. In a former day, I would have pulled up, rolled down my window, and let them have it. Now, as I'm looking at that fat little head through the windscreen, I start

breathing myself down from my anchor, from my indignation, from my superiority, from my contempt. And I say to myself, as I look at that head, this isn't for you, this is for me. You may deserve to have somebody pull next to you and blow you away, but I deserve to not be that person. And here's what I say, Peter, I grew up in a contempt-grinched family. I internalized that contempt and it became depression I've wrestled with for four years. I played out that contempt and I did damage to a lot of nice relationships that way. You know what fat little head, not today, not today. I've had enough contempt in my life. I can do

without it. So that's an interesting take. That's the take that is coming out in a very self-interested way, which is just from a pure self-preservation standpoint, there is no upside to you being upset about this. And to just preserve your own sanity, you're saying, look, assume the worst about this person, which is to say they've done this deliberately or they've somehow done this despite me and it's all about me, even if that were true, I'm not going to give into it. Now, the flip side to that, the thing that is, you know, I work on and I think I'm batting 50% at this now. I'm batting 500 to use baseball terms, which is a hell of a lot better than what I used to bet, which was zero. Just straight up zero is I go through that sort of foster Wallace narrative of I don't

know the story of what's going on. I don't know that maybe that person that's as fast as they're able to drive. Maybe there's something else going on in that person's life. Maybe that person's wife just left them today. Or maybe that person lost their kid and they're so distracted they can't driving around or something is mundane is that it's so trivial. And I actually want to share with you an interesting story because I had a pretty interesting example of this couple of months. I don't think I told you this story, but we have this thing. It's a grocery delivery service.

I'm blank on the name of it, but it's like Instacart, something like that. It's awesome. You literally on your phone pick up what the groceries are going to be and the groceries show up. This is a bit of an embarrassing story. So bear with me. It's embarrassing in the sense that as I tell it, it highlights what a sort of grandiose prick I can be. So it's 4 o'clock and I pull out the InstaCart and it says you know it'll be here in 90 minutes and I think that's perfect because it'll be here at 5.30. It's a Saturday I got to make dinner and it's got to be ready by 6. So it's perfectly timed and to make a very long story short at every step of the way Terry this thing just keeps dragging it out. Sorry, it's gonna be 15 minutes late.

The store is crowded. Sorry, it's gonna be another 20 minutes late. The store is really crowded. Sorry, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da- I wish I was making this up. I actually pace around the kitchen for about an hour, just waiting for the updates. Because now I realize I've lost my window to go and work out, which was what I was planning to do or something else. And so it's now seven o'clock. It's a full three hours late.

So I've blown my window to make dinner. I sort of feel like I screwed up and whatever, whatever. And if I get one more text message from this thing giving me one more dumb excuse, like I'm gonna lose my mind. And my wife who is now sort of hovering around me has a real practical concern, which is this person is going to come to the door and get blasted by me, being the idiot that I am. And sure enough, the doorbell rings.

And I be lined to the door with every intention of obliterating this person. I have no idea what I'm actually going to say. By the way, it's not like I've rehearsed what I'm going to say, but it's, how does it take you? Yeah, I know what I'm capable of. Let's put that way. And Jill is on my heels basically thinking to herself, how am I going to mitigate this damage?

Because this person, even though they're an hour and a half late, does not deserve what's about to come. And I open the door and it's this overweight woman who's sweating profusely and she's got the three, five, whatever bags of groceries on the ground. And she says, I'm sorry I'm late. It was really crowded and I broke the eggs. And I'm not kidding Terry, I almost started crying. And I thought, my God, you asshole, how could you have almost torn into this person? I don't know how to describe it.

I just in that moment, I couldn't get out of my own way. I invited her in, I said, oh, don't worry about the eggs. I think I ordered them by accident. I couldn't get out of my own way. I invited her in. I said, oh, don't worry about the eggs. I think I ordered them by accident. I don't even want eggs. We don't eat eggs. I hate eggs. Come on in. Do you like a drink? I mean, I practically invited her to stay for dinner in that moment because I felt so bad about how I had been thinking about her. Now, to this day, I don't know what changed in me and how I got lucky in that moment, but I thought to myself, if I could reproduce this at every moment of my life, I would be a happy man. I wouldn't be the piece of shit that I'm probably hardwired to be,

or at least softwired to be. You're not a piece of shit. You're just under arrest of us. Listen, that's a beautiful story, Peter. And what you had was a moment of empathy, of compassion, of humanity. It's like what I teach sex addicts, who stare at women, to remind themselves, this is somebody's daughter, somebody's mother, there's somebody's sister, there's not a pouring queen or a blow up doll, there's the person. And that's what you did.

You got past your entitled indignation. The thing about it is, it's case in point of what I've been talking about, you felt helpless. You wanted the goddamn food and it was not going to get there until it was ready to get there and you had nothing to say about it. The more helpless you felt, the more angry you got. That's how it works. The helplessness is one down and shame. The anger is grandiosity and righteousness and like a lot of men. The longer that food took, the more helpless you got, the more angry you got. The longer that food took, the more helpless you got, the more angry you got. That's the formula.

When you describe it that way, it seems so obvious and so predictable. Does the knowledge of that in any way help us? I think it does. I think it does. It's funny. Just before I started this, I would spend all day with a couple. And she was about to leave him after 25 years of marriage, both in their 70s.

They have a wonderful time except once or twice a day, he'll scream at her, or he'll yell with utter annoyance and content. What I got, he was raised by two alcoholics. His father would talk to his mother this way all day long. It was a terrible, terrible childhood growing up. And I told him that he had adult childhood alcohol extamped on his forehead and that the issue when you grow up with alcoholics is trust. Why would you trust what is intimacy every time for you? And I know this from my own dysfunctional

family. And what happens to him is he described that he was waiting for her and they were late to get to somewhere and he got annoyed with her. And if she were responsible and if she were competent, then and if she loved him, then she wouldn't be dragging her feet like that. Well, we get to the details of his up and running parents and guess what they're not responsible or competent. But can I pause for a second and ask you a question, Terry? Yeah. When you're doing that type of work with a couple in that situation, does he actually believe

that or is that a subconscious thing that you have to extract that is part of the template of his belief system? Wait, does he actually believe there's wife that's compen and irresponsible? Yes. Yes, he actually believes that. But he hired her because she is a little dizzy. We always marry her unfinished business. So he gets triggered. That's not the issue. We all trigger each other. We all pick people who will trigger us. That's all other conversation. I call that the mysticism of marriage. That's

not the point to point is what happens then. And what happened then to him is he would move into control. Now listen, what I said is, I own bet every time you get angry is a moment when you feel you're dependent on her. And she's not coming through for you because you're anti-dependent. And the more dependent on her and the more she doesn't come through for you, the more helpless you feel and the angrier you feel and then it all comes out. And he got it. He got it and he started to cry. And I say, listen, I have a move.

I have a way out. I have a movie to make. Next time you feel that rush of annoyance, you memorize and he is, he's going to repeat this ten times a day or so. When I'm annoyed, it means that I'm dependent and I don't like it or trust it. That's what this means. I'm feeling helpless and I want you to go to your wife and say one word to her Vulnerable and Honey you're vulnerable you stop on a dime and you go give your husband a hug because he just did a good piece of work

And she said fine, and he said fine. I Honestly believe that after this day with me He's not gonna yell at her anymore. And if he does, if he slips, she can touch him on his shoulder and remind him. Vulnerable? Oh, yeah. Vulnerable. That's leading a couple out of patriarchy.

We talked about relational living. You once explained to me something, you used Dickens as a way to describe it, which is the sort of the ghost of Christmas future, the ghost of Christmas past, and the ghost of Christmas present. And you did it in that order. Do you remember this discussion? Oh, yeah. This is when I tell my therapist, my students. This is the best rendition of the work that I've created.

I call it relational life therapy for obvious reasons, I guess. The essence of that rhythm, well, let me just say it this way. Let me do it straight for us. Relational therapy, as I've created, it has three phases. The first is loving confrontation. This is what you're doing, Peter, to blow your foot off. Take a look at it and feel bad about it. You've been on cruise control. Wake up. The second phase of family of origin were, where did you learn this? Where did

you learn this point up? Who did you see? Do it? Or who did it to you? Or who did you do it to? And nobody stopped you and corrected you? Where did this come from? And I'll do trauma work, deep family of origin, inner child work, in the presence of the other partner sitting there. That's the second phase. And then the third phase is teaching. This is how you do it right. This is how you stand up for yourself in a loving voice, not a large one. This is how you listen to your partner's complaints and don't get defensive, but enter into their experience and be compassionate, like you did with that woman. These are skills. So the third phase of skill, so to go back to Dickens, I said the best

rendition of RLT, Relational Life Therapy, is a Christmas story. You've got Scrooge, his anti-relational, and self-medicating with attribute-based esteem, the more money he has, the more self-esteem he feels he has. And he's visited by three ghosts. I don't know, Dickings Order, but I'll do it mine. The first is the ghost of Christmas Future. And he takes Grudge to his own funeral and everybody's delighted that he's dead. That's the naked of consequence.

That's the confrontation. Then he goes back and do his past and he had a miserable child, an admirable sad childhood. That goes back to the family of origin and where all this comes from. And then he goes to Bob Cratchett's house, a tiny Tim, where he sees what a functional family looks like. And he learns what connection looks like. Then he goes by a whole bunch of turkeys

and he's a transformed human being. What is the transformation? He's relational. He's in connection. It seems that that order is necessary. It doesn't always occur in that order, but it goes back to sort of a question I asked you earlier, which was, how do you get somebody to do this if they're not in crisis? And my own personal experience in that of the people that I've known is everything you're talking about Terry is really hard. It's harder than anything I've ever described or tried to do. If you said to me, Peter, just go run a marathon.

I'd be like, okay, I know how to do that. You put one foot in front of the other and you just keep doing it until you're done and you'll get blisters and it won't matter. But at least for me, the type of work that you describe is so challenging that the activation energy to get there, the barrier to overcome that, you have to be an incredible pain. You have to be incredibly miserable, incredibly depressed, incredibly angry, or an incredible pain. You have to be incredibly miserable, incredibly depressed, incredibly angry, or see incredible pain in others that you've caused. I mean, it's some combination of these things, and that's why I do like the way that that story, the way you tell that story. But I mean, let me tell you another story, which I think illustrates the work. It sort of digins in the flesh. May I

can I tell you a story of Harry? Absolutely. So Harry comes to me, his marriage is in crisis. You're absolutely right about that. His wife is about to leave a life. She becomes a couple. And it's a typical, he said, she said, a couple never prevents from the presenting problem. There are always two, his and hers, or his and his, hers and hers. Anyway, his problem with her was that she was a deaths, quote unquote.

Okay, and her problem with him was that he was brutal, quote unquote. Okay. Harry, give me some examples of Shirley being a death. Well, she's often 10, 15, sometimes you're in 20 minutes late, she never apologizes. She's in the store for five things she'll come back before, and she's just a death. Okay. Shirley, tell me about Harry being a brute.

Well, in just the last two weeks, he called me the C word. He stood in the doorway and physically barged me from leaving and he spit on my windshield. This is the steps which we started. I got a hairy. I say to him, I picked the most egregious one. I say you spit on her windshield? Oh yeah. First of all, let me pause and say, in the work that I do, I take sides.

We were taught as a couple of therapists to never take sides and always be even bullshit. This is a problem. This is not surely a problem. It's a Harry. Me name names and we tell them like it is in this work. Anyway, Harry, you spit on her windshield? Oh, yeah, well, yeah, but you should have heard what she was saying. You don't expect me to take that kind of bullshit and just... So I look at him for a little bit. B, B, B, B. And they say to him, Harry, I don't know.

I barely know you, but it occurs to me. You don't know the difference between standing up for yourself and attacking somebody. That stopped them a little bit. Now listen, where did you get this from? Who was the angry person and your family growing up? You said my father. So tell me about it. He was horrible. He would come home and man, you scattered.

You didn't his way, you wish you had. In fact, my mother was never around. She worked three jobs, so she was nobody to count. I took care of my little sister. What did you do? I protected her. I kept her out of my father's way. I locked her in the basement.

He said, no, don't get me wrong. There's a finished basement with TVs and videos and coloring books and all that, but I would lock the door so dad couldn't get her. I said, how old was she? Three. How old were you? Five. True story. I said, I don't know Harry, I wasn't there, but I'm part of my friends, but I imagine there was some five-year-old version of looking at your father and saying to yourself something like, you lay a fucking hand on my sister and I'll kill you. He said, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

That's exactly what it was. I said, Harry, how did I know that? It's okay. I'll bite. How did you know that? I said, because you defend yourself like an angry 5-year-old, will you let me teach you how to do this in a more civilized way? And he looked at me, this is not a sensitive, do-hage guy. He looked at me and he said, I think you better. And we did. That's how this works. So in that situation, I'm amazed by at least one element of that, which is maybe you just glossed over it,

but what was the pain point that got him to so easily be willing to put, I mean, I'm going to come back to the language of wounded children and adaptive children and maladaptive adults in a moment, but in that parlance, you very quickly got him to at least agree to put the adaptive child in another chair. And we'll come back to that inner child stuff because I really want to dig on it. But I mean, is that normal that in such a short period of time, you can get, in particular, an angry man to accept the error of his ways? Yes, I call it waking up the client.

You'll wake him up. And is that in part just because you took sides, named names and didn't mess around? Yes, in large part. I run around the country, Peter, telling the therapist that there's some serious design flaws in therapy. And the biggest design flaw is that we're all taught to be terminally nice to our clients and people don't tell the truth. I tell therapists what you tell each other at the water cooler after the session. Oh, I can't believe what a bitch you are. I can't believe what a milk dose a sky that's what you should be saying in the session.

Find a responsible way to say it there, because that's the damn issue. But we therapists are taught to hold back, and I think it's a great, great service to everyone. So let's go back to Harry. So you've got a pretty quick pass on the ghost of Christmas future. You talk straight to him.

Some people, certainly me, need a lot more than that. I needed to literally go to some funerals before I could get my head out of my ass. And then you go back and you do the family of origin and the trauma work. You pose to series of questions. Can you repeat them? Yeah. Who did this to you? Or who did you see? Do it it or who did you do it to and no one stopped you? And basically, I mean, I've thought about this so much, Terry. It's hard for me to come up with too many examples of behaviors that don't have at least one of those three types of mirroring.

This is how this stuff gets transmitted from one generation to the next. This is exactly how it's done. So Harry was, I mean, that's just an awful example of how wounded he was as a kid. Fortunately, most kids don't need to go through something that extreme. How did Harry respond to that? How would you take, use this language now of what was his adaptation to that? And then what's that little adaptation serving him today? Well, I have a saying, adaptive then maladaptive now.

I mean, I always teach my students to have great respect for that adaptive child part of the person. The adaptive child part of you, when people do trauma work, we always think of the young wounded child, and one of them was on the receiving end of the abuse or neglect. But between that child and the functional adult, there stands an older child part of us, older children, but I can collaborate them. And that's how you adapt it. So for example, but I can glomerate them. And that's how you adapt it. So for example, I have an intrusive mother say, okay, my adaptation is I defend myself

from her intrusion by coming behind sick walls. I erect sick walls. Interesting me not all that unlike my fathers when he deals with my mother. I marry a woman who of course is highly emotional just like my mother and when she gets highly emotional with me, guess what you think I do, I put up all. So she's my interest in mother, I'm that little boy and I'm using the same adaptation that I used when I was four now at 45. It was exactly what I needed to do at four. It's getting me into a world of trouble at 45.

When we do that in your child work, I think that what you just said is an important part of it that sometimes maybe if you're on the outside, you miss this distinction, which is sort of one of the first things you do is you thank the adaptive child, right? Yes, you saved my ass. I have an exercise and your listeners can do this exercise if they want.

When I do a workshop, I do a two-day workshop for a general public or a basic skills and I give people a homework assignment on the first day and I'm giving away my secrets here but this is what I tell you to do. And everybody does it. I want you to take at least an hour on that. I want you to write a letter to your doctor, child. Dear little Peter, dear Pee Dee or whatever you call them. First I want to thank you. You really saved my ass. You protected my autonomy. You preserved me from, you taught me this. Okay, this is what you did for me.

Thank you. This is what you gave to me. You gave me drive. You gave me intelligence. You gave me discernment. You gave me ambition. You gave me goals. This is what you cost me. You cost me ambition, you gave me goals. This is what you cost me.

You cost me me. You cost me connection. You cost me love. You cost me being honest with myself. You cost me getting comfort from anybody else. And then the last one, I'm here now, the adult, the inner adult. And I can take care of both of us. And from now on, what that's going to look like is.

And then you sign, love, Peter. That's the assignment. This type of work is very emotional. Yeah. Does one heal enough from sort of inflicted wounds to ever, does he adapt to child ever vanish? No, never vanishes and we're always, we often mistake our adapt to child for an functional adult, but let me just say the functional adult has nuance. Now the functional adult is forgiving. The functional adult is warm and supple. The adaptor job is rigid and harsh and black and white. It's a kids' version of a grown-up. Anyway, no, there are always with us. I don't believe some

problem people say they're gone forever, but I think we contend with these little parts of this. The difference is, as you move into deeper and deeper recovery, the baseline is not this little boy, the baseline of my adult. And the little boy takes over episodically, and as you recovery work deepens less frequently, and you catch it earlier, and you bring yourself down from that one up, or up from that one down. So that the net net is you're spending, it was that health was the island and peaks of grandiosity and chains, for example, were the norm. And over time, as you tame those peaks and spend more time in the house, that becomes your life and up and down become episodes.

So too with fighting and the couple, so too with any of it. You start off all over the place and then you know what it's like? It's like physical training. It's like core work. This is core work. And the stronger your core, the more you spend your time in health, and the more ill health becomes the exception. That's how it works. I mean, this might be kind of a dumb question, but how long do you think it really takes to go from a state of pathology? So you're a person who is really quite dysfunctional.

You've really reached a nader in terms of your misery and the misery you inflict on others. But you've gone through the first two stages, meaning you've confronted what the world in your continued state is going to look like. And you've gone back and looked at the family of origin. You've gone through the inner child work as appropriate or as necessary. And you're now at the teaching skill development stage, which strikes me as the most difficult stage

and the one that takes the longest. Is this a journey of years? Yes, but it doesn't mean you have to be in therapy for years. Look, it's like once we get to the skill phase, it's mastering what I call a relational technology. It's a technology. It's like any adult mastering a new skill set. It's like learning to ski in your 40s or learning to play the piano or learning how to speak French. It takes about the same amount of time. If you're as serious as that, it takes about three to five years. You don't need to be in therapy all that time, but it takes about three to five years

of practice until you're really pretty fluent. I remember we had an interview once and I said that relationality was my second language, my first language is selfishness, which is true, I thought it was great. But I feel pretty fluent in relationality. I've lived in the world of relationality for decades, and I speak it pretty well. Is it my native language? Deeply, deeply, deeply, but in terms of what hits the surface, it's my second language. But it's the country I've met. That's actually a really great analogy, because I think most people who have tried to learn another language can appreciate that it's doable. It's not just something you can decide you want to do without practicing it. It's one thing to say, oh god, I'm going to Italy this summer,

I can't wait to learn Italian. Oh great, did you hire an Italian teacher? No. Oh, did you download one of those Italian teaching apps? No. Did you buy a book about it? No. Exactly. How do you hope to learn Italian? I mean, there's truth by fire. You could just simply go to Italy and burst yourself in it and not allow yourself to speak English. And eventually, I suppose you'll learn Italian. But for most people, a little bit of structure can help that. But you'll probably never speak it without an accent, and that doesn't mean you're not functional, but yeah, I think that analogy is a great one. So let me say, it takes about three to five years before you're really pretty comfortable speaking this new language of relationality.

Having said that, this way of thinking, ecologically, instead of linearly, you're in the system, you're not above the system, you want power with, not power over. These ways of handling yourself are so different from the defaults that you were raised with in the culture at large, and they work so much better that doing them poorly will transform your life and your relationship. And you can start doing them poorly will transform your life and your relationship. And you can start doing them poorly right away. That is probably, again, there's probably an analogy there within language, which is if you even spent a couple of months practicing a language, you could certainly get to the

point where the people in the restaurants and the taxis would appreciate your efforts and make every effort to help you. Yeah, I think that's right. And you know what, in terms of how long it takes, it's really simple. It depends on the sincerity of the person. I'm not blown away by diagnoses. I'm not blown away by character disorders. Look, I had a couple. They would be called in psychiatry, borderline personality disorders,

bad people, tough, tough people. I mean yelling, screaming, throwing things, he goes to the hotel, she goes after him, she's banging on the door, she's dragged off by the police. This is true, this actually happened. But here's the thing, she got pregnant. And she was determined that she was not going to do to her kid what was done to her and he came on board. And with my help, these people cleaned up in about six months. I've dealt with neurotics who have attitude and I can't get to them for two years. These people were different people within a matter of months. She went on and became a therapist and she studied. She's now a relational life therapist and a good one. So I don't care how far back you are. I just want

to know if you have heart. Do you ever find in couples therapy that you have to recommend to the couple a separation or just a divorce where you realize one person is really in this to change and the other is not? Is that usually what a breaking point comes down to? Well, it depends on what change we're talking about. I mean, if one person wants to be neater and the other one doesn't, that's survival. If one person wants to be monogamous, then the other one doesn't. That's more of a serious problem.

It depends on what's going on. But there are some deal breakers. I wrote a piece. You can get it off my website, which I would love people to come and check out. Yeah, your website is your name. Is it Terry or Terrence as the website? T-R-R-R-Y-R-E-A-L. Just Google me and I'll take you there. You said you wrote an article. Oh, yeah. Called Rolling to Know Where. You can get it off my website. And it's about, it's four couples therapists, but it's about when to break somebody up and

what we put ourselves through when we do that. But they're deal breakers. If somebody has a drinking or a drug problem, they don't want to do anything about it. Somebody doesn't want to be monogamous and the other one does. And here's an interesting one, which I think is what you were talking about. If there's a serious discrepancy in the level of maturity between the two people, level of health, if one of them gets healthy and the other one doesn't, then eventually the pathology

of the unhealthy one is too hard for the other one to stomach and they leave. So they're deal-breakers. Obviously, violence is a deal-breaker. Not every couple, as I say. And in terms of, I often always recommend a physical separation if there's yelling and screaming in the house and their children in the house. I universally just tell the people about what's called witness abuse.

Children are bound to be less. They're wide open. If your child is listening to you scream at your wife, it goes into them as if you were screaming at them. There's no different. And so since you're screaming and yelling at each other and your children are there, I give you 30 days to clean up. I do this almost every time.

If you're still yelling and screaming each other 30 days for now, one of you leaves, which one should it be? That's an interesting point you alluded to earlier, which is up until a certain age, a child is incapable of differentiating between being screamed at directly versus just being a bystander. How long does that affect persist? Forever. It persists as long as it's exactly the same as if you were standing there on your parent with screaming at you.

You're persistent. So, frankly, until you do some proper work and metabolize it. How long are kids susceptible to that? What's the window in which obviously that I can see that being the case for a five-year old. Is that the case for a 12-year-old as well? Absolutely, the case for a 12-year-old. That's really sobering, especially for someone like me, for whom anger is such an easy

default. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You can go to my website. I did a piece for 2020 with a raging woman and her past of a glass of husband. I said to her, do you have pictures of your kids? And she did.

We had beautiful golden youth, Latino kids. They were gorgeous. And I said, this is what I want you to do before you rage your husband I want you to take the picture out of your children Now I should look in the eyes and I want you to say I know the one about to do is gonna cause you harm But right now my anger is more important to me than you are so screw you And I say shall we try that? This is one TV. You can see it.

And I put my arm around her, I hold up the pictures. Right now, I'm thinking about, as she sobbed, and she puts down the pictures, and she said, I will never yell at my husband again. And that was about 17 years ago, and she's been treated or worked. They're divorced. She got rid of them and whatever on that.

But no more rage after that session. People routinely, there's a thing about three to five years of learning. Let me do the other side. People routinely sit on my couch, swear off behavior. They've engaged in their entire lives, get up and it's gone, permanently, gone. That's what happened today with this man. He realized every time he was quote unquote annoyed with his wife that the contempt coming out of him was 10 times greater than what he experienced it being because he grew up with so much contempt. He thinks it's just a

love tap and she's flat on the floor. And when he got it, when he really got it, he turned to her. This has just happened before we started our call. He turned to her with tears in his eyes and he said, you are the most delicate, precious thing in the world to me. Why in the world have I been punching you?" And he says, never again, never again, never again. Terry, do you find that that type of transformation can also exist when there's an actual chemical addiction involved as well? I mean, you sort of very loosely, we sort of glossed over it quickly about the substance addiction, sex addiction, process addiction, other sort of real numbing medications out there. Is it just as easy to get somebody to stop gambling or stop a sex addiction or an alcohol addiction?

Absolutely not. They need treatment and they need probably intensive treatment. Absolutely not. They need treatment and they need probably intensive treatment. But why is anger different? I mean, anger strikes me as very similar. I mean dopamine producing, it has all of the same, you know, grandiosity, anger, shame. Doesn't that have all of the same attributes as alcohol addiction? Yes. And, you know, Peter, I don't know the answer to this one because you're right. There are many behaviors that will kick out endogenous chemicals that mimic substances that you digest. And why do you have to go to a 12-step program for your anger?

I do send people to 12-step programs for their anger sometimes. I don't know the answer to that. What I look for with substance abuse is you wake up and you say, okay, I'll go to rehab. You wake up and you go, okay, I'll go to 12 step. I'll go to 90 days, 90 meetings. So you get committed to recovery, and that's the transformation, but the recovery takes a long time in a lot of L. So does the rest of it. Look, I'm recounting these marvelous one session turnaround, but let's be clear, when I'm

done with people, I send them back for ongoing therapy 99 out of 100 times. Yes, you've made the turnaround now in order to keep it. You're going to have to have ongoing support for a while. The transformation needs to be digested and made real. Terry, you talked about it the outset that the whole reason you turned your life around, got into therapy was to fix yourself and somehow reconcile your relationship with your dad. How did that end? Sathie and as well as can be expected, I'll tell you two little stories.

My dad died of ALS, which is a great metaphor. He lost his arms and his legs, and finally his lungs, and he died. When he had ALS before he died, he was paralyzed, and my mom was a nurse who was taking care of him. I asked for his blessing and it was very funny because my mom was holding up the phone and he was going to give him my blessing and my mom dropped the phone and my dad said

screaming at her. Ollie, I can't believe it. And then she starts yelling at her and guys guys guys can you stop guys oh yeah sorry can I have my blessing now okay okay that's my family anyway it's so sad and so funny Terry yeah but my father gave me a beautiful blessing you said I remember this you said He said, I remember this. He said, May nothing I've said or done in your life prevent you in any way from achieving your greatest potential. And may your work with man be blessed.

And he was a stony, yeah. May your work with man be blessed. That's a nice blessing. And on his deathbed, as I wrote about, and I don't want to talk about it, he looked at my brother and me, and he said, listen, I'm really sorry, and he apologized for the way he'd been with us. And he said, I got to tell you, when you're looking at this to where I'm looking at this right now in this hospital bed, It's only about love. He said, it's only about love. Everything else is just fucking bullshit. That's probably

the last conversation I had with him. I mean, I don't think you could say it any better, could you? No. No, that's the bottom line. Well, Terry, I promise you, we'd wrap this up at a certain time and we are to the minute at that time. So I want to thank you very much for making the time, especially on a short notice. If I've been wanting to have a discussion like this with you publicly, almost from the day I read your book, which was even before we started working together,

I want to just thank you for everything personally and otherwise. Thank you, Peter. I want to thank you for the service of this podcast that you do. I want to acknowledge, if I may, that it's been very moving for me to watch you change in our work together and the changes, as I'm sure you speak about at times, have been truly transformational. You are one of those people we've been talking about tonight and I'm very, very proud of you if I can say that. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper

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