The Meaningful Life

Terry Real: The Five Traps that Undermine Your Love & One Simple Solution

Andrew and Terry discuss five common traps that can undermine your relationship.

Easily our most downloaded episode and a firm favourite with listeners.

Terrence Real is a family therapist and an expert on men’s depression – both professionally and personally. He comes from a long line of angry and sad men and his greatest achievement, he says, is not passing the family legacy onto his own sons.

Andrew and Terry talk about his book: Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship and how we are facing an epidemic of toxic individualism which does not just harm public life but our relationships too.

This episode is not only wise but funny too. More importantly, it will change the way that you argue. Once you understand the losing strategy ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’, it will transform your relationship.

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Episode Transcript

Hello, I’m Andrew G. Marshall, welcome to The Meaningful Life. One of the joys of this podcast is meeting other therapists.

When I started it, one of my must-have guests was Terrence Real. I admired his work on grandiosity on men’s depression, so I’m delighted to welcome him onto this edition of The Meaningful Life.

Terrence is a family therapist, the founder of the Relational Life Institute, a senior faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge in Massachusetts, and retired clinical fellow of the Meadows Institute in Arizona.

His books include I Don’t Want to Talk About It, Overcoming the Secret Shame of Male Depression, and his new book is called Us, Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.

Now, at the centre of your book is the idea that we’re facing an epidemic of toxic individualism, which not only harms public life, but our relationships too. Can you explain what you mean by this?

First of all, thank you for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
What I mean by toxic individualism, well, let’s start with the idea that we’re individuals to begin with, probably one of the most cherished ideas of Western civilisation. And it’s also very dear to masculinity, autonomy, independence, doing it on your own. Raw, raw, raw. Raw, raw, raw. And gosh, back in the 1980s, there was an enlightened group of feminist psychologists, mostly women in the Stone Center, Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, who questioned that and said, look, the autonomy model of human development may be OK for boys, but girls and women don’t exist with that level of separation.

Girls and women find their strength and power through connection to others in relationship. And I’m really proud, back in the 90s when I wrote I Don’t Want to Talk About It, which was really an exploration of masculinity and what masculinity does to boys and men in our culture. I was one of the first of a generation to say, hey, this independent autonomy model, it doesn’t fit for boys and men either. It’s a bunch of nonsense. We all live embedded in the matrix of relationships.

And in this new book, Us, I delve into somewhat the neurobiology of this. The idea that we self-regulate is a myth. Our nervous systems are codependent with other nervous systems. We co-regulate one another in close relationships. Literally, we regulate each other’s brains in close relationships all the time. So this idea of being a freestanding individual in the book, I go into the neurobiology of it, which is nonsense.

I go into the history of the idea of the individual, which is a very specific history that comes out of white male privilege around the Renaissance and the Enlightenment era, has nothing to do with, you know, so-called marginalized people, with women.
It’s a very narrow idea.

You know, one of the things I say, Andrew, is if you want to really look at a freestanding individual and what being a totally independent individual does to somebody, then look at the effects of solitary confinement on the human psyche.

They go mad, don’t they?

Yeah, not can they, do they, over and over and over again. In the absence of absent social cues and social connection, our mind starts to eat itself alive. So we’re not freestanding individuals. We exist in context. And the idea that we don’t exist in context is a delusion.

And let me be clear about this is the aerial view, and then we’ll get to the specifics of relationship. The delusion of individualism is that I am not in nature, that as an individual, I am separate from nature. That’s what it means to be an individual. That’s what the word means, individual, irreducible, not a part of anything else.
And of course, that’s nonsense. We don’t live outside of nature.

If you look at the ecological consequences of thinking like that, it’s really quite alarming. That fuses with the tradition of patriarchy, which says not only am I apart from nature, but I’m above it and control it. God gave Adam dominion over all the things that creep and crawl and fly and walk on this earth. Really bad idea. We do not have a power and control relationship to nature. Whether the nature we’re trying to control is our partners or our kids or our bodies.

You know, I’ve got to get a hard body and lose 20 pounds or our thinking. I’ve got to stop thinking so negatively. The idea of trying to run our relationships, including our relationship to ourselves from a one up power and control model is not only a delusion, but it’s a delusion with teeth. It has very real negative consequences.

Let me give you a very specific. Let me bring it down to relationships. I have a saying. You can be right or you can be married. What’s more important to you? Yes, you can be right or you can be happy. Yeah, that’s right. Same thing, although I put it in the relationship. You know, the relational answer to the question who’s right and who’s wrong is who cares.

The problem is, and you know, I do it, you do it. You can sit quite happily. Well, not happily, but the couple can quite happily spend a whole hour playing. I’m right and you’re wrong. Not a whole hour, maybe five minutes worth. And then I’ll interrupt it because the relational question is, Andrew, how are you and I going to work through this issue? Kids, parents, sex, whatever it is. How are you and I going to work through this issue in a way that’s going to work for both of us? Because we are together. We are us. We’re an ecological system. If one of us wins, for example, and the other one loses, we both lose.

And that’s not some pie in the sky idealism. We both lose because the loser will make the winner pay for it. Count on it. We’re not apart from each other. We’re in the same.

Here’s what I say. Our relationships are our biosphere. It’s the atmosphere that we live within and we breathe that atmosphere. You can choose to indulge yourself and pollute your biosphere, say, with a temper tantrum over here. But you can breathe in that pollution and your partner’s unhappiness or withdrawal over there. You’re connected. It’s inescapable. The idea that you can do something over here and it won’t have any effects on you is a delusion.

So once we start thinking with what I call ecological humility, once we realize that we’re not above and in control, we’re in and dependent upon the whole thing changes. And we stop thinking like I talk about the difference between us consciousness, the whole, the team. This has to work for everybody versus you and me consciousness. You win, I lose, zero sum game, adversarial contest.

You have a great question at the beginning of your book. Which version of you shows up in your relationship? Because it’s very easy to take the best part of ourselves to work and then bring the tired and rather craggy version of ourselves home. And in fact, one of the things about lockdown and Covid has been people have heard their partners at work and they’re these charming creatures that they hear on Zoom conferences. And they think, why can’t I have that version of them?

I mean, so how do you answer that question? What part of you shows up in your relationship? When you read the book and you and you do this relational work, we talk about three parts of the human psyche.

The first part I call the wise adult part of you. It’s prefrontal cortex. It’s the most mature part of the brain. The parts that develop last in terms of our evolution and the part that develops last in terms of an individual’s development. Not until 24, 25, 26 years old does the prefrontal cortex, which gives maybe some relief to a lot of, you know, woven on parents. It takes a while for this to kick in.

The wise adult part of us is present here and now, nonreactive, able to stop and think and reason and choose and decide. And see the us. And see the us, the whole that we are related.

When you are trauma triggered, and that’s what’s key here, the autonomic nervous system scans the body four times a second. Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? If your answer is, yeah, I feel safe, then you can stay in that wise adult part. You can remember the whole. You can remember the relationship. You can remember the ecology that you’re in.

If the answer is no, I’m in danger. Boom, a different part of our neurology kicks in. We lose that wise adult self and we move either into what I call the wounded child part of us, which is very, very young, or more likely what I call the adaptive child part of us.

You know, Gabor Mate once said, you don’t see the injury, you see the scar. And in relationships, you don’t often see the naked wound from three or four or five. What you see is the adaptation to the wound, which you then carry on for the rest of your life.

So these are the sort of automatic knee jerk reactions that you go into, which is often either becoming terribly critical or withdrawing, bursting into tears. It just comes up before you even realize it’s happening.

Yes, I talk about five losing strategies. Being right, controlling your partner, unbridled self-expression. Just let me tell you, retaliation and shutting down. And any one of all of these.

Let’s just repeat those because they are really good. Give them to us again. OK, these are losing strategies. This is what your adaptive child part will gravitate toward. And I ask the listeners to do a little soul searching as you’re listening right now and ask yourself, where do I go? What strategy or combination of strategies is my knee jerk response when I’m stressed?

OK, so number one. Being right. We are going to solve this problem by determining which of us is correct. Good luck.

Number two. We’re laughing because we recognize these so much. Number two. Controlling your partner. I would be happy if only you would dot dot dot. Good luck on that one too.

Number three. Unbridled self-expression. Ventilating. Let me tell you just how miserable I am at what you just did and what you did a week ago and two weeks ago and 10 years ago and blah blah blah. And let me tell you three times just in case you didn’t hear on the other two versions. And let me make it louder each time I speak. That’s unbridled self-expression.

Number four. Retaliation, which I have a warm spot in my heart for. My wife Belinda, also a family therapist, has a beautiful frame for the human impulse of retaliation. She says it’s a perverse wish for healing. It’s a perverse wish for community. Let me hurt you the way you hurt me so you’ll understand what you did to me. But of course, punishing someone will never increase their empathy. It’s a loser.

And then the last losing strategy is shutting down or withdrawal. So let’s be honest, which is yours? Because even marital therapists and family therapists have old wounds and have old strategies. What’s yours?

Of course, you must understand I’m in my wife’s adult 364 days out of the year. January 23rd, I think I lost it. And no, that’s not true. Anyway, when I lose, I move toward control and retaliation. You see, I have love addiction parts. I can be a boundaryless and love dependent and grandiose. So I would be happy if only you were more loving. And this is how you should be more loving. And God help you if you’re not.

That’s me on a blind day. OK, I’ll confess as well. I’m the sort of disappear version.
So I just shut down and shut up. We would be a classic heterosexual marriage if we were at different sexes. Which is not to say that a gay marriage can’t replicate this dynamic. But control and retaliation meets shutdown is an endless pursuer-distancer dance between the two of us.

Once you know what your losing strategies are, what your adaptive child is up to,
and once you identify what your partner’s adaptive child is up to, you have a pretty clear idea of what the dynamic is going to be between the two of you.

And I’m going to say this is the only thing you’ve got to do, but it’s a really big thing.
But you’ve actually got to somehow put the brakes on so that you don’t automatically go into your old knee-jerk behavior.

So how do you do that? Well, I speak about what I call relational mindfulness. And the beauty of relational mindfulness is that it can be cultivated.

You know, in our individualistic culture, our relationship to relationships, including our relationship to ourselves, tends to be passive. You get what you get and then you complain about it.

That’s got to be the worst behavioral modification program ever. And the revolution here is you don’t have to be passive about it. You can be active about it. You can change how things go.

So can I give you a concrete example of changing how things go?

Please do.

Harshness. If your listeners get nothing from today or nothing from my book, please go get the book.

And I recommend it as well. It’s got some beautiful ideas in it and it’s very, very, very accessible.

Thank you. Yeah, I’m proud of the writing. Anyway, if your listeners get only one thing from this whole talk and this is what they get, I will be very happy. Here it is.
Harshness is a quality of the adaptive child part of us. The wise adult part of us is not harsh. And what I want your listeners to get today is that there is no redeeming value in harshness.

In my own life, in my marriage, in my family, and certainly in my work with other human beings, I talk about de-harshifying your life, getting harshness out of your life. A lot of people think that harshness spurs them to excellence or that it’s an inevitable thing after bullshit. There is nothing.

I’m going to say this twice.

There is nothing that harshness does that loving firmness doesn’t do better.
There is nothing that harshness does that loving firmness doesn’t do better.

Now, when you move out of a harsh moment to something that’s more accountable, but human, forgiving, not relentless, you have moved out of that adaptive child into your wise adult, and you can practice that shift.

And here’s one of your quotes that I really loved, and I think that will help you move out of the automatic response. And you say, in your close relationships, urgency is your enemy and breath is your friend. I mean, that’s worth putting on the mirror.
So expand that out for me. Why is it important to take a breath rather than be urgent?

Yeah, yeah.

I actually think that I don’t remember because we’ve done so much together,
but I actually think that comes from my pal Thomas Ubel, the German mystic I’ve done a lot of teaching with. Urgency is your enemy. You know, it’s that knee-jerk response. The adaptive child triggered response is automatic and very fast.

And relational mindfulness, the practice and cultivation of relational mindfulness,
let me say again, you can get better at this as you do it, just like meditating. The practice of relational mindfulness is when you’re triggered.

I talk about whoosh, W-H-O-O-S-H. Whoosh comes up from the feet. It’s that automatic response. Fight, flight, or fix for most of us. When that whoosh comes up, instead of acting it out, instead of opening up your mouth and letting those demons come out, instead of shutting down and breaking connection, you take a breath, you summon some courage, you allow yourself to move into vulnerability, and you stay present with the person you’re with and present with your own feelings.

And the blessing here is particularly in community, particularly with help, but you can do this on your own, that capacity, I call it second consciousness, can be actively developed and strengthened.

Can I give you an example? I’ll give you two, actually. The first is me. I come from a violent family, unfortunately. So did my wife, Belinda. Our knee-jerk response is fight. Fight, flight, or fix. We’re fighters.

So back in the day, 25 years ago, when the kids were little, and Belinda and I have been doing this practice for decades, and we’re very different than we were when we started. We were quite rageful in our early years as a marriage, and we’re not now.

Back in the day, I could be on the road for five, six days, and I’d come home. The kids were little. Belinda has a full-time practice. So I basically abandoned her with the kids. I’d come home, and she’d be angry. And she would literally meet me at the door with overwhelming, I can’t believe you left me here. The kid, Justin, was horrible, and Alexander was, uh, fight.

Welcome home.
Yeah, right.

Self-righteous indignation would be rafting my way. And my knee-jerk response to that stimulus, my adopted child, would be to fight. I like to say my body wanted to bop her in the nose, but being a feminist and a gentleman, I would regale her with verbal abuse.

Uh, well…
Thank you for that.

I can’t believe I was put up with this bullshit from you. I was just on the road, teaching everybody how to love each other, and I have to come home to Litchbrook, and we would be off to the races.

Then on a good day, Belinda would meet me that way, and I would have the whoosh that the wave would wash over me. That doesn’t go away. It gets less intense as you do trauma work, but it’s still with you. The whoosh came over me, and I took a breath, and I reached for a different part of myself.

Literally, a different voice came in my head that said, Terry, shut up. Breathe. Calm down. Get centered.

And then from that place, I was able to look at my wife and say, you sit down, honey, have a glass of wine, I’ll take care of the kids. And the whole evening went a very different way because of that moment.

People say relationships take work. The work is in this moment right now. Which path am I going to choose? Same old, same old? Or am I going to breathe, reach for a different part of me, and try something more functional?

And another thing you can do in that breath is just actually identify what the feeling is, because one of the things that feels so overwhelming is you’ve probably got seven or eight feelings happening at the same time.

And actually, if you can begin to name some of those feelings to yourself, it might be anger, or it might be fear, or it might be sadness or disappointment.

And suddenly, if you know what the feeling is, I think it’s much easier to deal with it
rather than going straight into the trauma.

So if you actually have got a moment, perhaps you haven’t got to speak straight away, actually if you can think, what is this whoosh? What’s in it? I think that can really help you step back and not go into the automatic behaviour.

Yeah, I agree. And that’s a particular example of you tending to you.

You see, when you have the whoosh, I will quote Thomas Ubel, this is a good one,
to observe is to have choice. When you go into that whoosh, rather than being swept away by it, by acting it out, you put your arms around that part of you, and you kind of tilt your ear in its direction. What’s going on with you?

And you tend to that triggered immature part of you. You know, one of the things I say, Andrew, is that maturity comes when you tend to your inner children and don’t foist them off on your partner to deal with.

Actually, let’s look at that inner child stuff, because one of the things I thought was really good was that when we talk about trauma, we’re very good at identifying what could be described as obvious trauma.

You know, if your parents are throwing things around the house or throwing things at you, then we can see that trauma quite easily. But there’s another kind of trauma that ends up with what you call or what therapists call grandiosity.

So perhaps you can tell us about that, because people might not recognise they’ve got that kind of trauma.

This is from one of my great mentors, a woman named Pia Melody. I was working with men back in the 80s and 90s, and there was this split. There were domestic violence programs and 12-step programs and feminist programs that held men’s feet to the fire, but they weren’t very empathic.

And then there was traditional therapy, which dealt with men’s wounds, which acted as if they never heard the word sexism or offensive behaviour before. And I, having been raised by an angry, violent man, I needed to find a way to hold men accountable and lovingly in the same breath.

And it was really this idea from Pia that unlocked that. There isn’t one form of abuse, there’s two. The one we normally think of is disempowering abuse, abuse that makes you feel small, impotent, unlovable, defective. That’s what we normally think of.

The other form of child abuse we call false empowerment. This is pumping up a kid’s grandiosity and not shaming them and bringing them one down, but actually lauding them and bringing them one up.

And for 50 years psychotherapy has done a great job of helping people come up from shame, but we’ve done a terrible job of helping people come down from the one-up of superiority and control and entitlement.

And as a relational therapist, if you don’t know how to help people come down,
you will not know how to help many, many couples, because what ails a lot of couples is not just shame, but entitlement, control, revenge, grandiosity, aggression. These are the things that drive people insane.

And the beauty of thinking this way is you did not ask to be falsely empowered. You deserve a parent who taught you how to be a social human being. They either neglected you or they actively pumped you up and now look at you.

So give us some of the things that pumping up parents would say so we recognize those messages.

Well, in terms of a message, I have a saying. Do you know what the most destructive phrase in the English language is?

I don’t.

Honey, you understand me better than your father.

Ooh.

And sometimes those things aren’t actually said, they’re just acted out. And that’s almost more powerful than actually saying it.

Well, most forms of abuse are actually both disempowering and falsely empowering at the same time.

For example, when my father was being physical with me, when he was in a rage,
on the receiving end of his rage, that little Terry was disempowered. Made to feel small, shameful, defective, impotent.

At the same time, through modeling, particularly a same sex parent, he was giving me a message. This is what a pissed off man looks like. This is what you can look like when you get angry and you’re an adult.

And sure enough, I was never physically violent, thank goodness. But I was a rager in my early years because I’d internalized that. That internalization of that entitlement, that’s false empowerment.

And it’s not just the parents that’s doing the abuse. It’s the reaction of the other parent as well that’s important.

Yes, that’s right.

And sometimes it’s reinforcing and sometimes you get mixed messages from both.
Your daddy’s little girl and your mommy’s little rival. So you’re falsely empowered by dad and you’re shamed by mom. That kind of cross-current is very confusing and very damaging to a little psyche.

And if the father is violent and the mother sort of turns away and doesn’t actually support, that’s also incredibly damaging for the child too, isn’t it?

Yes, I talk about active abuse and passive abuse. Active abuse, like my dad, is what was there that shouldn’t have been there, like his rage. Passive abuse is what should have been there, like my mother’s protection, but wasn’t there.

So abandonment and withdrawal can be equally damaging to a child. You know, most children are removed from their homes for issues of neglect. More that than violence. Emotional neglect is a very real issue that can do great damage to people.

Now you have a beautiful way of putting this. You cannot love from above or below.
So you can’t love from a position of weakness or that grandiose, I’m all that sort of kind of approach. You’re lucky to have me. So how do you get away from above or below love?

You know, this is the essence of the book. What I call the great lie, which lies at the core of Western civilization. And the great lie is the lie that a human being could be superior, essentially, in their being superior or inferior to another human being.

I come from the United Kingdom where we have a queen, who’s obviously going to be superior to all of us because she’s the queen.

Yeah, well.

You have a president.

You’re a Brit, so I don’t know how this is going to go. But I love the Irish proverb. No matter how high or great the throne, what sits on it is the same as your own. Queen or no queen, you know, it’s part of being a ruler that you have utter respect for the dignity of your subjects. And that’s the difference between being a leader and being a tyrant.

No, no one escapes us. We are all humble human beings. There’s a beautiful quote from the poet Auden. I will love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. We’re all imperfect human beings and we deserve one another’s fundamental respect. From the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.

Ah, beautiful, beautiful.

And actually, I find that quite comforting because, you know, when I screw up, which is, you know, fairly often, then I sort of can be a little bit kinder to myself because actually I’m crooked timber just like you are and everybody else. And that sort of takes a bit of pressure off.

That is what healthy self-esteem is.

Healthy self-esteem is feeling badly about whatever your bad behavior has been. If you don’t feel bad about it, then you’re grandiose, then you’re offensive. The sociopaths don’t feel bad about their bad behavior. We want people to feel bad as long as they don’t move into a self-attack.

But if I feel guilty about something I’ve done, you know, if I steal the church money or something, I should feel bad about it. But I don’t take myself apart. It doesn’t turn into a personal attack.

And being able to hold yourself in warm regard in the face of your imperfections and screw ups, that’s what a healthy, loving relationship to the self looks like. And I teach that in the book and I teach that in the work I do.

So, thank you very much for some really excellent thoughts. In a moment, I’m going to put one of your dilemmas to Terry. And let me remind you that if you would like to write in to me, to have one of my guests and myself looking over something that you’re dealing with, go to my website andrewgmarshall.com/podcast. And you’ll find details of how you can support this podcast. And we’ll be eternally grateful if you do.

And at the very bottom, there is a form that you can send in a letter. And this is the letter I’ve got for today. I’m 30 and my husband is 32. We’ve been married for four years and together for 12 years.

About a year ago, we decided to start trying for a family. He freaked out for the next few days. And we decided to leave it a bit longer until he felt he was ready. I really do want a family, but it has to be right. We need to both want it. And I haven’t put the pressure on him.

Looking back, I believe this is when things started to slip. He started skydiving, exercising lots, spending lots of late nights out with his friends, which he never did before. I wanted to give him space and don’t want to be a stereotypical nagging wife.
So supported him in all of this.

I really thought he was having an affair because his personality and our relationship has changed so much. But I confronted him on this and he told me he wasn’t having an affair. And I believe him.

It even got to the point one night when I was so upset because he wasn’t answering my calls or texts and it was late and I don’t know where he was. So I went to stay at his sister’s for a few nights because I couldn’t bear the rejection and uncertainty.

I hope this would make him realize how upset I was and snap him into making an effort. But really, it made him shut down more. He’s told me he loves me and that I will always be special to him. But he isn’t sure we are good together anymore.

He says he doesn’t trust his feelings. So I can’t push him to make a decision. I believe he’s depressed. And my leaving did push him into going to the doctors. He’s been on tablets for two weeks now. I know I need to wait and see how this affects things. But I’m struggling.

I guess my question is, how do I know if his depression is causing the problems in our relationship or if the problems in our relationship are causing his depression? I really want it to be fixable. But I need to start to see an upward spiral rather than what feels like never-ending heartache and rejection.

Terry, there’s so much to talk about in this letter. Where do you want to go first?

You know, the first thing I want to say to this woman is, I’m really sorry. This is just dripping in pain. And it’s a very painful moment. And I’m sorry that you’re going through this. I’m sorry that your partner is acting like this and treating you this way.

So my heart goes out to you. That’s the first thing I want to say.

The second thing is, I’ve never laid eyes on you. I have no idea what the hell is going on. Let me tell you some of the things that I’m imagining. I’m not sure your partner is depressed. I’m sure your partner is having a crisis in your marriage. I’m also not sure to be completely blunt that he’s not having an affair.

That’s what I thought as well.

You know, he’s out at night. He doesn’t answer your phone call. He’s not sure whether you’re the gal for him, whether he’s having an affair with another woman
or whether he’s having an affair with skydiving and adventure. The critical mass of his emotional energy is not in the marriage.

And that’s what you’re feeling.

He also, if I may, you continually accept terms that if I were working with you, I would not have you so readily accept. You know, he goes off at night by himself,
does whatever the hell he wants, and I don’t want to be a nagging wife and crimp his style.

Excuse me. No.

There’s a difference between being a nagging wife and saying, I don’t want you out night after night after night skydiving without me. There’s a middle ground. I think you’ve been too over accommodating.

The fact that he says, oh, I’m not having an affair, and you immediately believe him,
I would do some thinking about what it is in your background, your makeup that is allowing you to be, I don’t want to say naive, but so trusting and so accommodating,
because I think this guy is leading you on quite a merry chase at this point, and I don’t think that you’re holding him accountable.

Now, you may intuit that if you were to hold him accountable, he would walk, and you’re afraid of that. I would suggest that you drag his butt into a couple’s therapist,
and I think that you should stand up for some of the basic requirements of being in a marriage, which he’s violating, and if you do, you may lose the marriage, but my intuition is if you don’t, there’s a good possibility you’re going to lose the marriage anyway.

Do you think that she’s right, that the discussion about children is what’s brought this all to a head?

Possibly, but it isn’t the children. If that’s the case, it’s the nature of commitment. This guy might be commitment-phobic or have issues of feeling suffocated, enmeshed and trapped, but independent of what’s causing it, he has what I call in the book CID – chronic individualism disorder.

He’s not acting like a family man. He’s not acting like a married man, and he’s in a marriage, so that is a real problem, and it’s a problem I would wish his partner would stand up and deal with in a forthright way.

I was doing the maths that if they’re 30 and 32 and they’ve been together for 12 years, they were 18 and 22, do you think that it’s possible to somehow not have updated your relationship from when you’re 18 and 20, because actually you’re a very different person at 30 and 32?

Yeah, my pal, Esther Perel, has a saying. She says, I expect in my lifetime to have six marriages, and I hope they are all to the same men. And clearly this is a marriage
that has grown confining to the male partner, but the way he’s choosing to deal with it is not going to support the marriage long-term and needs to be dealt with.

Well, I hope that has been helpful. If you would like to write a letter in as well,
as I say, go to my website, andrewgmarshall.com/podcasts.

Well, thank you very much for being my witness today on The Meaningful Life. So I now have to turn the tables on you and ask what makes your life meaningful?

Speaking very personally, I have a spiritual practice. I’ve been meditating almost 40 plus years, and that gives me a great sense of meaning and purpose and support in a very lonely world.

When I’m connected to the spiritual, I don’t feel as alone, and it’s a great source of comfort.

In terms of meaning, I’ll tell you this. It’s the height of presumption to quote yourself, but I will. This is from my first book. Not to grandiose. No, no, no. Those other grandiose people we worry about.

Here’s the quote. “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 his ancestors
and spares the children that follow.”

So this is what I want to say, Andrew. I am the son of a depressed, angry father. He was the son of a depressed, angry father. I have two boys, now 31 and 34. They do not say that, and that is one of the proudest things of my life.

I think that changing the legacy from the defaults that you were handed to a more enlightened, humane, loving way of being in the world and passing that on to the next generation has got to be one of the most meaningful aspects of one’s life.

That was really beautiful. Thank you very much for that. I’m actually still quite emotionally touched by the beauty of what you just said, and it resonates very strongly because, in a sense, with my family wound, I sort of almost have a similar story because my great-uncle died on the Somme. And so my great-grandfather went upstairs once the telegram came telling the family of this terrible news and came down seven days later, refused to speak to anybody, and when he came down seven days later, said, no one will ever speak of our son again.

And my grandmother didn’t speak about difficult things. My mother didn’t speak about difficult things. Guess what I’m doing?

You mean speaking about difficult things your profession?

Yep, and when I couldn’t reach enough people one by one, or with books, I started a podcast to go and start encouraging them to talk about difficult things.

Now, let me tell you something, if I may, Andrew. This is for you, and I want you to feel this with your body. This is a quote from the poet Shelley.

Mighty poets are cradled forth, are raised in.
Mighty poets are cradled forth in wrong.
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Mighty poets are cradled forth in wrong.
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

This podcast is a transformative event, and I congratulate you.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

And I’m a little bit overcome at the moment, but it’s interesting, I suppose, how we have completely opposite wounds, but we’ve ended up in exactly the same place, because therapists become therapists for a reason, don’t they?

Yeah, someone said therapists are people who need to be in therapy 40 hours a week.

But to be honest, I learned how to be a therapist in hindsight, to gather the skills I needed to speak to my father about what the hell happened there. And I needed to have that conversation, which I didn’t have until my 30s.

How did that conversation go?

Well, I write about this in my first book, I don’t want to talk about it, which is largely biographical. What I learned in my 30s, Andrew, is that in a fit of depression,
during the depression in America, in the 30s, when my father was 11 years old and his brother was nine, his father tried to kill him.

His father, in a fit of depression, put his kids and himself in a car, stopped up the garage, turned the car on, and told my father to go to sleep. And my father knew that there was something horribly wrong, and he literally beat his way out of that car.

But he never, ever healed the damage of that moment, and he lived that moment for the rest of his life.

And if your father had been your client, let’s imagine somebody comes with that sort of material to you today, that sort of almost unbearable pain, how do you help them deal with it?

I would have the adult go back to that 11-year-old boy and tend to him,
form a relationship with him. That’s the essence of the inner child work that I do with people over and over again. The bottom line comes after the child has been heard, and their story has been voiced, after they see the light of day, which they didn’t in the trauma, they weren’t allowed voice.

Once the child is heard and listened to, the adult says literally out loud to that child,
I am here now. I can take care of you. You don’t have to be alone, okay?

And I can see that you’re feeling emotional at this point as well.

Yes, I am. It’s very beautiful work. It’s work I’ve done in my own life.

And this is another thing you say that is particularly beautiful in the book, that what we see often is not the trauma, but the coping mechanisms to deal with the trauma. And I think that is really beautiful for two reasons, because I think it helps the partners of people who’ve had trauma to understand the coping mechanisms, and it gives people who’ve got the trauma a way of dealing with it in the here and now, rather than it all about being in the past.

So perhaps you can explain what you mean by that.

Well, this is the adaptive child. It’s how you adaptive. And I teach my students, Andrew, to always be respectful of the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child part of you. You did back then exactly what you needed to do to preserve the best parts of you in that crazy circumstance.

But I have a saying, adaptive then, maladaptive now. You’re not that little boy, and this is not a parent. So for your father, fighting was incredibly useful, because if he hadn’t fought his way out, he wouldn’t have been here.

But actually, as an adult, fighting everybody wasn’t the best way forward. My father lived in a world where everybody was against him from that moment forward. If I were working with him as my client, I would actually frame the fact that he stayed in that world for the rest of his life as a form of loyalty to his own father.

You know, I talk about keeping a parent’s spiritual company, which means that you live in the same world they live in, a complaining world, a resentful world, a fighting world, whatever you grew up in. And when you step away from all of that and you dare to step into the light and be happy and healthy and in a good relationship, for those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families, you leave your family behind.

I talk about immigrating to a new world, a world of health and fulfillment and happiness. And a lot of the people that I work with have mixed feelings about crossing that threshold, leaving their miserable family to their own resources, even if they’re long gone.

So quite often as you leave the dysfunctional patterns behind and step into the light,
what gets released is grief. You will never ever be able to fix those people as much as you love them. You have to walk your own path and leave them to theirs.

And that’s heroic and not always such easy work. I love the idea of painting it as heroic because I think, number one it is, but I think it’s also much easier to convince men to do this work if you frame it as heroic work, because this is an idea that they can take on board rather than it being a place of weakness.

Yes, that’s from my wife, Belinda. She speaks about what she calls relational heroism,
which is that moment where every nerve in your body is screaming to do the same old, same old, and you take a breath, second consciousness, relational mindfulness, and you choose something different.

And that is a moment of growth and maturity. That’s what recovery is all about or a string of those moments. Can I give you an example?

This is the example I always use because it’s so clear.

True story.

A guy on the brink of divorce because he was a liar. I write about this in the book. His wife says, if you ask them what kind of shoes he had on, he’d say he had sneakers. He just lies about everything. A chronic liar, pervasive liar, and his wife’s about to leave him.

All right.

That’s his adaptation.

The wise adult part of us does not lie, certainly not chronically. So the question, once I understand somebody’s adaptation, is what were you adapting to?

You see, there’s always a relationship on the other side of the seesaw. So being an experienced therapist and working with these issues for a while, I jumped to, tell me, sir, who tried to control you growing up? And he immediately went, his father was in the military, how he’s sad, how he ate, what clothes he wore, what friends he had, what courses, utterly controlling men.

I said, how did you cope with that?

He gets this guilty little smile on his face and he says, I lied.

Here’s what I said to him.

Brilliant.

That was absolutely brilliant.

That kept you sane and it kept your integrity all through that miserable childhood with that jailer you called your father.

It doesn’t serve you any longer.

They came in two weeks later, all smiles.

And I said, OK, there’s a story here. Tell me the story. His wife sent him to the grocery store to get, say 11 things. He came back typically with nine of them. She says, where’s number 10? Where’s the milk and the cheese?

He says, every muscle in my body was screaming to say they were out of it. And on this day, I took a breath. I got centered. I summoned some courage and I said to my wife, I forgot.

And his wife burst into tears and said, I’ve been waiting for this moment for 25 years.
That’s a moment of relational heroism.

The conversation doesn’t end here because we’re going to continue our discussion. And I’m going to ask Terry three things he knows deep down to be true. If you want to hear that conversation, here’s details of what you need to do.

You can follow Andrew on Twitter, like him on Facebook, and please leave a review wherever you consume your podcasts.

Making, editing, and distributing The Meaningful Life comes with substantial costs, and we’d like to ask for your help. Visit our website, andrewgmarshall.com/podcast, where you can join our Supporters Club and unlock bonus material for every program, send in a letter to be discussed by Andrew and his guests, and join a community of other people seeking to make their life meaningful. At the Gold level, you get even more benefits.

Production of The Meaningful Life with Andrew G. Marshall is by Michael Dooney. Social media by Madelaine Healey. Sound engineering and theme tune by Sebastian de la Luz Mendoza. And I’m Suzy Kolik.


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Thank you.

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