Quotes from Terrence Real

This everyday practice is 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.

Everyone gets to go crazy in long-term relationships, but you have to take turns. I call this relational integrity. It means that you hold the (Wise Adult) fort while your partner goes off their (Adaptive Child) rails. It's not an easy practice, but it builds strong relational muscles.

In your close relationships, urgency is your enemy, and breath is your friend.

In theory an addictive relationship can be established with just about anything, so long as the substance, person, or activity relieves the threat of overt depression

Perhaps the next step in our evolutionary process is not forward but back to the wisdom of ancient traditions. Perhaps the ultimate wisdom of our Wise Adult selves is not ours as individuals but draws from the collective wisdom of humanity over centuries. It's been called by many names—Chi, the Tao, Buddha Nature, and if you haven't slept through decades of Star Wars films, the Force.

Women are unhappy in their marriages because they want men to be more related than most men know how to be. And men are unhappy in their marriages because their women seem so unhappy with them.

strength is not the absence of vulnerability. Strength is knowing what your weaknesses are and working with them.

Men's willingness to downplay weakness and pain is so great that it has been named as a factor in their shorter life span. The ten years of difference in longevity between men and women turns out to have little to do with genes. Men wait longer to acknowledge that they are sick, take longer to get help, and once they get treatment do not comply with it as well as women do.

The bonds of silence and protection run deeper, for the moment, than his trust in me.

As women shut down their needs, they also shut down their sense of pleasure.

The difference between real acceptance and just backing away from an issue, or away from the whole relationship, is resentment.

The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.

changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.

The rule that surpasses all rules is that you must be connected, willing to see what's in front of you, and willing to move if what you're doing isn't working.

Sustaining relationships with others requires a good relationship to ourselves. Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth that pulls one neither into 'better than' grandiosity nor 'less than' shame.

Love is not for the faint of heart.

Use "and," never "but." "But" cancels out whatever came before it. "And" is roomy enough for all of your many feelings.

the most reliable predictor of long-term marital success was a pattern in which the wives, in nonoffensive, clear ways, communicated their needs, and husbands willingly altered their behaviors to meet them.

We are so busy attempting to manage the result that we fail simply to run the race.

An addict needs shame like a man dying of thirst needs salt water.

Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth that pulls one neither into "better than" grandiosity nor "less than" shame. But the essence of psychological patriarchy is the nonexistence of such middle ground.

The romantic vision promises 'shadowless' relationships, but it is precisely by wrestling with the relationship's shadow, with disillusionment, that deep intimacy is sustained.

There is no place for objective reality in personal relationships. Objective reality is great for getting trains to run on time or for developing an important vaccine, but for ferreting out which point of view is "valid" in an interpersonal transaction, it is a loser.

Learning to listen relationally, listen with cool heads and clear boundaries, listen with the quietness of the heart and the gentleness of the body, means having a self so developed it can afford to yield.