Terrence Real > Quotes

“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.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“They have learned not to expect their father to attend to them or to be expressive about much of anything. They have come to expect him to be psychologically unavailable. They have also learned that he is not accountable in his emotional absence, that Mother does not have the power either to engage him or to confront him. In other words, Father’s neglect and Mother’s ineffectiveness at countering it teach the boys that, in this family at least, men’s participation is not a responsibility but rather a voluntary and discretionary act. Third, they learn that Mother, and perhaps women in general, need not be taken too seriously. Finally, they learn that not just Mother but the values she manifests in the family—connection, expressivity—are to be devalued and ignored. The subtext message is, “engage in ‘feminine’ values and activities and risk a similar devaluation yourself.” The paradox for the boys is that the only way to connect with their father is to echo his disconnection. Conversely, being too much like Mother threatens further disengagement or perhaps, even active reprisal. In this moment, and thousands of other ordinary moments, these boys are learning to accept psychological neglect, to discount nurture, and to turn the vice of such abandonment into a manly virtue.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“...strength is not the absence of vulnerability. Strength is knowing what your weaknesses are and working with them.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“The covertly depressed person cannot merely vault over the avoided pain directly into wholeness, as hard as he may try. The only real cure for covert depression is overt depression. Not until the man has stopped running, as David did for a moment that day in my office, or Thomas did when he let himself cry, can he grapple with the pain that has driven his behavior. This is why the “fix” of the compulsive defense never quite works. First, the covertly depressed man must walk through the fire from which he has run. He must allow the pain to surface. Then, he may resolve his hidden depression by learning about self-care and healthy esteem.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“As women shut down their needs, they also shut down their sense of pleasure.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Self-esteem is your capacity to recognize your worth and value, despite your human flaws and weaknesses. Your value as a person isn't earned; it isn't conditional; it can't be added to or subtracted from. Your essential worth is neither greater nor lesser than that of any other human being. It can't be. Self-esteem is about being, not doing. You have worth simply because you're alive.”
― Terrence Real, The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work

“The difference between real acceptance and just backing away from an issue, or away from the whole relationship, is resentment.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“An addict needs shame like a man dying of thirst needs salt water.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“...changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Those who do not turn to face their pain are prone to impose it.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“The bonds of silence and protection run deeper, for the moment, than his trust in me.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“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.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“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.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“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.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“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.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Use “and,” never “but.” “But” cancels out whatever came before it. “And” is roomy enough for all of your many feelings.”
― Terrence Real, The New Rules of Marriage

“...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.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“You have to help your partner come through for you. Tell them how you'd like them to be. Help them win. Help your partner succeed, because it's in your interest to act like a team. In our individualistic culture, your partner either comes through for you or they don't. But when you begin thinking relationally, ecologically, you realize that you have something to say about how things go between you. "What can I do to help you come through for me?" is an entirely relational question. Thinking like a team is the clear antidote to thinking like two individuals. It's a shift from "I don't like how you're talking to me" to "Honey, I want to hear what you're saying. Could you please lower your voice so I can hear it?" A shift from "I need more sex" to "We both deserve a healthy sex life. What should we do about it?”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“And I loathed myself. I loathed myself for the state I was in. I loathed myself as an unlovable person. I felt there was something intrinsically monstrous about me, some rancid stink inside my soul that I had barely managed to cover over with the cheap perfume of my charm. I felt mostly dead and deserving of it. I had become an inanimate object to myself. I had somehow misplaced the knowledge that I was human.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Maturity comes when we tend to our inner children and don’t inflict them on our partners to care for.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Good parenting requires three elements: nurturing, limit setting, and guidance.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“The flight from shame into grandiosity lies at the heart of male covert depression.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Love is not for the faint of heart.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“If overtly depressed men are paralyzed, men who are covertly depressed, as I was, cannot stand still. They run, desperately trying to outdistance shame by medicating their pain, pumping up their tenuous self-esteem, or, if all else fails, inflicting their torture on others. Overt depression is violence endured. Covert depression is violence deflected. In either case, understanding depression in men means coming to grips with men's violence. How has the door of the psyche been opened to such a dark visitation? By what mechanisms does violence in the boy's environment become internalized as a stable force inside his own mind?”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“Just as girls are pressured to yield that half of their human potential consonant with assertive action, just as they have been systematically discouraged from developing and celebrating the self-concepts and skills that belong to the public world, so are boys pressured to yield attributes of dependency, expressiveness, affiliation—all the self-concepts and skills that belong to the relational, emotive world. These wholesale excisions are equally damaging to the healthy development of both girls and boys. The price for traditional socialization of girls is oppression, as Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan put it, “the tyranny of the kind and nice.” The price of traditional socialization for boys is disconnection—from themselves, from their mothers, from those around them.”
― Terrence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

“We all marry our unfinished business. We all marry our mothers and fathers. And in our closest relationships, we become our mothers and fathers.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“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.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“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.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation, like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow.”
― Terry Real