Terry Real: Us

 Contents

Chapter 1 Which Version of You Shows Up to Your Relationship? 1

Chapter 2 The Myth of the Individual 3

Chapter 3 How Us Gets Lost and You and Me Takes Over 5

Chapter 4 The Individualist at Home 8

Chapter 5 Start Thinking Like a Team 9

Chapter 6 You Cannot Love from Above or Below 10

Chapter 7 Your Fantasies Have Shattered, Your Real Relationship Can Begin 11

Chapter 8 Fierce Intimacy, Soft Power 13

Chapter 9 Leaving Our Kids a Better Future 16

Chapter 10 Becoming Whole 16

Epilogue: Broken Light 17

Chapter 1 Which Version of You Shows Up to Your Relationship?

It has been said that there are two types of couples in the world—those who fight and those who distance.

But in order to be present with your partner, you must yourself be in the present, not saturated by your past.

Avoidance learnt by modelling growing up, or by a relationship that was controlling.

 

Adaptive Child fixers are fuelled by an anxious, driven need to take anyone’s tension away from them as quickly as possible. Their motto is “I’m upset until you’re not.”

 

One of the telltale characteristics of the you and me Adaptive Child is that it is automatic, a knee-jerk response.

 

Relational heroism: when every sinew of your being says do the old thing, and you do the new instead.  You move from you and me consciousness to Us.

Non triggered us consciousness wise adult.

We want to move from reactionary individuals (you didn’t give me what I want, gave me what I don’t) to relational teammates: relational mindfulness.

 

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

 

Chapter 2 The Myth of the Individual

Individual comes from indivisible, like atom\cell etc I guess.

Rubber hand: stroke it with your hand unseen, you will feel ownership of the rubber hand as yours

Bateson, blindman and stick, stick part of his mind.

Effects of the past, before you act on the past because of x, get a photo look at them, and say to yourself its more important for me to be like you than my partner is.

 

Minds and CNS exist in social context, our relationships, affect our immune system, and our emotions.

Still face, Ed Cronick, PCG and baby play, then PCG still face, infant, tries to elicit behaviour, seduce behaviour, and then protests

 

Reciprocity between PCG and infant produces oxytocin, cements the relationship

Messiness of relationship Disharmony, repair, harmony

 

Dysregulation 2 ways, frazzled mum, glares at child, child not getting what they want protests.

Infant regulates parents, you’re as happy as your least happy kid.

Closer relationships closer mimicry. Rats in pain, will copy licking behaviour.

Exert as little energy as possible whilst still staying alive: law of the jungle: economy of action

 

PFC off loads jobs to habit, to other parts of the CNS, to do things automatically, we also offload processing to other people! Eg Co regulation

Our brains assume we are in a rich environment where tasks are spread out in the group, I tend the fire, you are on lookout.

 

PFC slow down on interaction with others.

Having a human connection leads to group mind, reduces distress, that can be stranger, friend or partner. Increasing analgesic.

However we marry our unfinished business, a partner will press every button we have.

 

Relational consciousness moves us from individual dominion to collective humility; we are part of a large system.

 

As with climate disaster, it happens in relationship where reactive parts of the brain take over, and that is precisely the model we revert to: “I’m right, and you’re wrong. You win, and I lose. I can let you in, or I can protect myself.” The real question is how we as a team are going to deal with this in a way that works for both of us.

 

Domestic life plays out on a small stage full of gigantic emotions.

There is no place for objective reality in personal relationships. Useful to get trains running on time, but in a relationship leads to objectivity battles.  Like a dog chasing its tail. Here you have a negotiation of two subjective realities.

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.

 

Do you want to be right, or do you want your wife to feel better.

 

“I’m sorry you felt bad. I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. Is there anything I can say or do right now that would help you feel better?”

 

The problem is that their model of resolution is to come to agreement—

But you live in a relational world, of two subjective realities not one objective one.  The resolved world is owned by one person but not how both people see the world.

 

Remedial empath: think before you speak what it’s going to be like for the person you’re speaking to, to hear it.

 

your relationship is your emotional biosphere; It’s the environment we live in and depend upon. Sure, you can choose to pollute your biosphere over here with a flare-up of temper. But you’ll breathe in that pollution over there in the form of your partner’s withdrawal.

 

Chapter 3 How Us Gets Lost and You and Me Takes Over

 

There’s a spiritual principle at work here: to move beyond some part of you, you must first get to know it and ultimately befriend it.

He sees himself, in triggered moments, as an aggrieved party. He is a professional angry victim. The idiot at the checkout line, with his lackadaisical tempo, made him late. The moron who picked him up at the airport kept him waiting for fifteen minutes and barely spoke English. The lid on the mayonnaise jar thwarted him by not unscrewing. Daniel moves through an adversarial world out to get him. But man, he goes down swinging.

 

offending from the victim position.3 When we offend from the victim position, we feel like a victim while acting like an offender. “You hurt me, so I get to hurt you back twice as much. And I have no shame or compunction about what I’m dishing out because you victimized me.”

What is your dysfunctional stance, your adaptive child, victim, martyr, tyrant?

Where was it learnt, who did you see do this, what did it do to you, who did you do it to and no one stopped you.

Kids are like gas they grow to the container they are in. If no one stopped them then, then they will act like that now.

Abandoned is a child ego state, if I’m abandoned, I die. Adults, get left, rejected etc but they will survive.

 

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

 

Vertical line is self-esteem, too much, too little

Horizontal lines are boundaries too many, not enough

Trauma by abandonment or by intrusion.

 

Parental nurturing

Were you physically, intellectually, emotionally, sexually nourished.

Passive trauma is like water on a rock

 

Health is in the centre. Healthy transactions leave the child feeling neither superior nor inferior to anyone else. That’s healthy self-esteem.

False empowering:

Make the child the family star.

Enmeshment: parent uses the child whilst elevating you understand me more than your mother does.

Children are naturally grandiose and selfish and this needs to be moderated by an adult.

him. “If you want to do exactly what you want to do, be alone. The minute you let somebody into your world; you have to at least pay some attention to what they want to do.”

 

Some injurious transactions are clear examples of disempowerment (You little shit!) while others are clear examples of false empowerment (You’re the only good thing in my life!). But most relational trauma empowers and disempowers at the same time.

When a parent elevates a child and at the same time uses them, we call that enmeshment.

It’s typical to resist intrusion or neglect while simultaneously internalizing it: you take in the dysfunctional ways you and the world were seen. Those two forces—reaction and modelling—combine to forge your Adaptive Child.

 

 

In reaction mode, our Adaptive Children tend to do the opposite of what we ourselves experienced. Intrusion breeds walls. Abandonment breeds intrusion.

Freud regarded all neurotic symptoms as compromises between the expression and repression of illicit impulses.

 

               Many children face a different response from each parent. In those instances, the child chooses.

 

Chapter 4 The Individualist at Home

Rugged individualism, Hobbes, Locke, enlightenment, American constitution and French revolution. The government serves the individual

The individual born with unalienable rights, life, liberty the pursuit of happiness.

Aristocracy links everyone bottom to top.

Democracy breaks the link and says everyone can do their own thing. 

Pre WW2 a rational individualism, then post Goethe, a romantic individualism, i.e. led by passion\emotion.

If the Enlightenment individual thought, the Romantic individual felt.

 

 grandiose women have advanced degrees in offending from the victim position: “You hurt me, so I have no shame or compunction about hurting you twice as hard back because, after all, I’m your victim.”

Rugged individualism: don’t tell me what to do, unfair in my eyes is awful: big government.

Romantic individualism: I must be free to express myself, share myself, manifest my full potential. Authenticity is the big item, being dominated is the worst.    

rugged individualism has become the modern right, while expressive Romantic individualism has become the modern left.

In the absence of any objective criteria of right and wrong, good or evil, the self and its feelings become our moral guide … The right act is simply the one that yields the agent the most exciting challenge or the most good feeling about himself.24 … Utility replaces duty; self-expression unseats authority. “Being good” becomes “feeling good.”

 

The extension of individualism is loneliness.

In a couple if one loses we all lose.

 

Chapter 5 Start Thinking Like a Team

When you see yourselves as two distinct individuals, when you are in you and me consciousness, you are pulled into a linear control model. Either Rick controls Joanna, or she controls him. When

Angry complaint is not seductive, playing the victim in sexual desire.

Standing up for your rights but cutting your throat

I need sex

I need a clean house

We both deserve a good sex life

We both deserve a nice place to live in what do we need to do to achieve that.

When you feel safe, you can be wise.

Believing in essentialism gives away your power, you want something from your partner, they have the control and even with a gun you can’t make them do it, as they may prefer to die. But if you see yourself relationally you can affect them. You can change yourself and that can affect your partner and they will change, as you are a team, an interwoven duo.

 

There’s an old saying in family therapy that most couples have the same fight over forty years. Why? Because they fight the caricatures of their partners.  Core Negative Image are exaggerated caricatures; there is a grain of truth and a deep exaggeration.

The more you fight your partners core negative image, the more theirs gets entrenched. The way to do it is to relax, admit and apologise for the grain of truth in it.

 

Trend thinking (she always, he never) and from there to Essential character (she just is cold, he just is a child).

 

Functional actions in a relationship are moves that empower your partner to come through for you. Dysfunctional actions are those that render your partner paralyzed. In

The farther from the particular the more impotent your partner will feel.  Macro level analysis is fine, but just not in the heat of the moment.

 

 But don’t try to grapple with relational issues from your Adaptive Child. Get yourself reseated in your Wise Adult before attempting repair.

 

If your agenda in that moment is to be right, to gain control, to vent, retaliate, or withdraw—then stop, call a formal time-out, if need be, and get yourself recentred.

What’s the more and more pattern. The more man does x, the more the woman does y.

 

Passive-aggression, acts out the feelings he doesn’t address,

 

redistribution.5 You take a quality that is supposedly lodged in one person—like badness—and you move it around.

Negative image, overly dramatic\emotional, exaggerating, scared, overly protective, messy, lacks care.

 

Chapter 6 You Cannot Love from Above or Below

You can be better at something than someone, but you are not a better person. You both have the same rights from a democratic point of view, one vote, the law applies equally to both of you. (Although money is affecting both of these principles)

Culture rewards competition, me and you, individualism and your adaptive child.

Successful in your one up career, disaster in your one down marriage.

We all marry our unfinished business.

 

Remember, two paths of internalization form the Adaptive Child. One of them, reacting, tends toward resistance. But the other pathway is modelling, and often, unconsciously, we model ways of being in the world that we consciously despise.

Be close to a person who can’t be close to them by modelling them

Shame you know you’re in it as it hurts, Grandiosity you don’t as it feels good.

 

Remember, two paths of internalization form the Adaptive Child. One of them, reacting, tends toward resistance. Bruce’s drive to succeed where his father had so spectacularly failed—his drive to resist his father’s fate—fuelled his workaholism. But the other pathway is modelling, and often, unconsciously, we model ways of being in the world that we consciously despise.

 

The emotion driving both shame and grandiosity is contempt.

 

“Does what I’m about to say fall below the level of basic respect?” If you judge what you’re about to say as disrespectful, I have great advice for you. Shut up.

If you’re down, in your mind’s eye you literally reach down with your arms and scoop yourself back up into same-as,

If you’re up, reach up and pull yourself down. Pia Mellody gave us a mantra to use for this moment: “Each person has inherent worth. No one more than. No one less than.”

You are perfectly imperfect, as pia melody would say      

When a client shifts from shamelessness to toxic shame, they move from one form of self-preoccupation to another. You’re still preoccupied with yourself, even if you’re telling yourself that you’re a terrible person.

 

“A boy’s question to the world is: ‘What do you have for me?’ A man’s question is: ‘What does this moment demand of me? What do I need to give?’”

Once you let go of hubris, you can relax. You’ll find you’re more able to let things emerge, hear other voices, listen for the unsaid.

You’ll begin to develop, at any age, the basic trust that psychologists would wish you to have in your twos and threes, the simple trust that things will work out on their own without the stamp of your will.

 

Chapter 7 Your Fantasies Have Shattered, Your Real Relationship Can Begin

Harmony, then disharmony, then repair is the essential rhythm of all close relationships. It’s like walking. You have your balance, then you stumble. You catch yourself and rebalance.

Trauma as shattering your assumptions in life that made you safe, if this has gone what else.

 

love addicts simply move from one honeymoon phase to another, after the real people show up

 

Honeymoon phase=>Mundane phase

You hoped your partner would heal you.

You hoped your partner would agree to the unspoken marital contract; they don’t.

The person you let in closest is the person that hurts you most.

 

In family therapy, we are taught to think of couples as having a “marital contract,” usually unspoken.

 

Falling in love means that whether you acknowledge it or not, you think, with this person I will be healed, or at the very least I will avoid and compensate for my earliest lacks and injuries.

 

Affairs are flattering, new, exciting, sexually pleasurable. We ask someone why they don’t cheat. What makes someone say no?”

 

The unfaithful partner has insufficient constraints in themselves. In other words, their selfishness trumps their relationality.

 

The relationship has become so unsatisfying—so contentious, or distant, or dead—that the cheater feels there isn’t enough worth protecting.

 

I call the harmony phase of a relationship love without knowledge; I call the disharmony phase knowledge without love. Now you know exactly and precisely all your partner’s flaws and blemishes. You see them all. But you don’t love your partner very much. You are utterly in you and me consciousness, facing an adversary, fighting for your psychological survival.

 

Empathy can heal, if indirectly. The best way to open another’s heart, it turns out, is to open your own.

 

harmony, disharmony, and repair.

which gives her a sense of resiliency. Listen, all ye anxious helicopter parents: resilience originates not in the absence of disharmony and discord but in its survival in you as a pair.

 

The neuroscientist Stephen Porges posits that feeling safety in another person with whom we interact consists of two important qualities—the absence of an agenda, and the absence of judgment. I will neither intrude nor disappear.

In mainstream individualist culture, our relationship to relationships is passive. We get what we get and react.

 Disharmony is to your relationship as pain is to your physical body.

you and me consciousness knows just what to do in times of disharmony:

(1) wrap yourself in rightness

(2) attempt to control your partner

(3) give vent to every emotion and infraction

(4) retaliate

 (5) shut down—or some combination of all five of these losing strategies.

 

We stand grounded in the humility of our own imperfections. Who are we to get high and mighty? The poet W. H. Auden wrote in his beautiful poem, “As I Walked Out One Evening”: “You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart.”

 

Chapter 8 Fierce Intimacy, Soft Power

They never went from harmony through disharmony to repair. Instead, they went from harmony to each his own corner.

 

A good woman lives to serve others. But a man, like Phil, has no voice either. With the exception of a supposedly ever-ready lust, a strong man should have no emotional needs, certainly nothing vulnerable.

 

Fierce Intimacy

Fierce intimacy is the essential capacity to confront issues, to take each other on.

Aim for bland harmony but no intimacy, which requires relational rupture and repair

Affair as narcissistic entitlement or getting some vitality back.

Fighting couple, re-find what was good

Distant couple, work through their arguments to rejoin.

Do you tend toward fighting or towards distance? Do you need to find more constructive ways to talk to one another—less blaming and criticizing and more humble sharing of your own experience along with real curiosity about the experience of your partner? Or would a good fight, like a summer storm, shake a few leaves and clear the air?

I want that for them, both passion and stability. The challenge, of course, lies in having both in one relationship.

Dealing with each other. What does that phrase really mean? At its most basic, it signifies taking each other on. Airing your dissatisfactions, articulating your desires, making concrete suggestions about how things might work better for you, and then, if all goes well, working like a team to make things right. Repair demands assertion (not aggression) from the unhappy partner met with care and responsiveness (not defensiveness) in the other. There is a technology to repair,

First, repair is not a two-way street. Almost everyone gets this wrong. When you are faced with an upset partner, this is not your turn. This is not a dialogue. Liz doesn’t air all her grievances as an invitation for Phil to then air his. You must take turns.

Unhappy partner, deal with that. No objective facts, not about you, but about them, it’s their turn, they are in disharmony, and you get to get them to harmony. If they complain, this isn’t an invitation for you to complain, then you have two disharmonies.

Stay on your side of the street. Don’t accuse them—talk about yourself. Not “Liz, you’re avoidant,” but rather, “Liz, I don’t feel met.”

 

Janet hurleys feedback wheel

1. This is what I recollect happened.

2. This is what I made up about it.

3. This is what I felt. And that all-important fourth step most speakers leave out:

4. This would help me feel better.

 

Soft Power: Strong and Loving Simultaneously

Power with not power over

Dominance does not breed intimacy.

In the gender binary of patriarchy, affiliation is “feminine” and power is “masculine.” Cooperation is nowhere in sight.

I want us to blow up the gender binary, moving beyond the false dichotomy of power or belonging.

Soft power: By asserting in virtually the same breath his own needs and also the value of our connection,

There’s an old cliché in family therapy: one partner talks to the other in order to get them into bed with them. The other partner drags them into bed in order to get them to talk.

Soft power. When you need to speak up, be artful. Take care of your partner as best you can by explicitly cherishing them and your relationship.

If that is not your intention, you are probably in your Adaptive Child. Stop! Take a walk around the block, journal, and splash some water on your face. This won’t go well until you are self-regulated.

 

If that is not your intention, you are probably in your Adaptive Child. Stop! Take a walk around the block, journal, and splash some water on your face. This won’t go well until you are self-regulated.

 

Feedback wheel

1.       what happened

2.        what you made up about it

3.        how you felt about it

4.       what you’d like now.

When you share your feelings, skip over the emotion that first comes to you, your go-to emotion, and lead with others.

if you are used to leading with big, powerful feelings, like anger, or indignation, soften up—reach for and lead with your vulnerability.

 

Changing your stance changes the dance between you.

Detach from the outcome, you did a fine job of speaking, your outcome will vary dependent on the day, but you’re not in charge of that

Be specific, don’t go for trend or character. General makes you helpless, makes it dirtier, more of an insult.

Apologies get more powerful going up from specific to trend.

Respond with what you can do, not what you can’t.

Don’t discount your partners repair, let it happen, not I don’t believe you.

 

“Tone trumps content.” Tone reveals which part of your brain you’re in, us consciousness or you and me consciousness.

 

Chapter 9 Leaving Our Kids a Better Future

There’s an old line in AA: “Pass it back or pass it on.”

Was one of your parents intrusive? In reaction, you erect thick protective walls. Was someone controlling? In reaction, you develop a black belt in evasion. Were they needy? You become expert in giving care.

 For many clients, keeping spiritual company with their problematic beloved parent is their only way of feeling close to the parent.

 

Desiree and Juan: “You Cannot Rage at My Husband”

Chapter 10 Becoming Whole

Narcissism: outside in self-esteem, performance, what other thinks, what you possess, being better than others at being

Self-esteem: inside out selfself-esteem, I value myself, care for myself

Passive aggressive: put out a stink, punish people by what you don’t do

the simplicity of the three family roles first described in AA: hero child, scapegoat child, lost child.

You grew up good, and you grew up hungry.”

“Emotionally alone,” I correct. “Psychologically alone.”

 “You really can’t be mad at not getting what you never asked for.”

We will never experience collective healing until we undo the dissociation and compartmentalization that is required of us to do collective harm.

Everyone thinks themselves in a group that is better than some people worse than another: we have never been a lonelier people.

Intimacy is not some blended egoless amalgam. Intimacy is an endless dance of I and US, the needs of each vital part of the relationship called myself or yourself as those individual wants filter through the needs of the relationship itself.

 

Epilogue: Broken Light

Individualism bids us to see ourselves as separate and dominant. Ecology, relationality, invites us to see ourselves as neither dominating nor dominated but part of.

Couples: some have too weaker skin and they are too reactive, so you can thicken their boundaries. Some have to thicker boundaries and they have no connection, so you need to weaken their boundaries.