Quotes from Terrence Real

Before you open your mouth," I tell him, "I want you to stop and think. Ask yourself: 'What is the thing I'm about to say going to feel like to the person I'm speaking to?

There's No Redeeming Value in Harshness

Through the mechanism of carried shame and carried feelings, the unresolved pain of previous generations operates in families like an emotional debt. We either face it or we leverage our children with it.

Maturity comes when we tend to our inner children and don't inflict them on our partners to care for.

The particularities of your parents' limitations and dysfunctions became the imperfect "holding environment" you adjusted to. That adjustment, that adaptation, becomes your particular version of you and me consciousness, the imprint on your limbic system of your unique Adaptive Child.

Whenever a young person encounters trauma, they react to it and they also repeat it. Modeling has elements of identifying with the aggressor. In modeling, you don't resist the dysfunctional mores of your family—you reenact them. You see yourself as you were seen; you internalize bad behavior as normal.

Good parenting requires three elements: nurturing, limit setting, and guidance.

relational mindfulness—stopping for a brief moment and centering ourselves. Observing, just as in all forms of mindfulness, the thoughts, feelings, impulses that arise—and choosing something different.

Before we can provide corrective emotional experiences for each other, we must learn how to tend to our own immature parts, to our own reactivity, to our avoidance, our long-suffering frustration. We must master the art of relational mindfulness and retake the reins.

The real work of relationships is not occasional, or even daily: it is minute-to-minute. In this triggered moment right now, which path am I going to take? Rather than being overridden by your history, you can stop, pause, and choose.

With no one there to help modulate your feelings, you did a very smart thing as that little boy. You shut them down. Closed a door on them.

The preservation of individualism—of either type—has historically required the suppression of less privileged voices. The unacknowledged social underpinning of both forms of individualism is caste, privilege, and exclusivity.

classed as having an avoidant dismissive attachment style. Paul lives behind walls because he grew up in a family where everyone lived behind walls, so what's the problem? Being emotionally shut down is normal to Paul. And if he lived alone, he'd be fine, but he isn't alone. He has a wife and a bunch of kids, all of whom need him.

we humans cannot be surgical with our feelings. If you open up to one feeling, they all come. Cheryl is knocking hard on Paul's door. But opening up his heart to her means reopening the door he firmly closed as a child. He is routinely subject to emotions, but he doesn't have the tools to identify them.

individual comes from the term indivisible.

Cognitive science teaches us that what we think of as ourselves derives not from a direct experience but from a collage of sensations and images—self-representations, pictures we have of ourselves.

In this regard, we are all a type of narcissist. None of us sees ourselves directly—our self-perceptions are filtered through acquired knowledge.

I believe there's no such thing as overreacting; it's just that what someone is reacting to may no longer be what's in front of them.

The romantic love story is a paradoxical fusion of two extraordinarily potent messages. The first is that love, deep connection, is the most important, indeed the only truly important matter in the world. And the second is that true love cannot exist in this world.

Does tension exist between our perfect longings and the imperfect world?

Only after giving up 'the truth' can we learn to speak our truth.

Like so many of the men I treat, Stan was being instrumental. His focus was on the task at hand, not on the subjective feelings of his partner. He was looking after her; he was not attending to her emotional needs.

Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed." When

Objectively" Stan was 100 percent right. At the same time, however, he was 100 percent tin-eared when it came to his wife's subjective experience. Worse, every time Lucy tried to tell him what bothered her, every time she tried to bridge the gap between them, Stan only retreated more staunchly into his precious rightness.