The Intimacy Merchant

Terry Real and me.

Over at the New York Times Magazine I have a new story about the experience my wife and I had doing couples therapy with eminent couples therapy guru Terry Real. Think of this as a kind of prequel to that story.

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David Hilliard for The New York Times

There’s a story that psychiatrist Irvin Yalom tells at the end of Love’s Executioner, his classic book of therapeutic case studies, that has been haunting me for years. It’s a vision of where I fear I’ll end up—approaching death without having ever truly lived, decades of missed chances for true connection piled up in a forlorn heap behind me. At 48, I am more than halfway to the end, with sufficient reason to worry. My eight-year-old son jokes that my “crying machine” is broken. My 17-year-old daughter hasn’t yet forgiven me for some fits of rage, over the years, that I can’t bring myself to describe to you. To my wife I remain, after all these years, a puzzle that seems bent on never allowing itself to be fully solved.

Yalom’s story is about “Marvin,” a 64-year-old man who comes to therapy, for the first time in his life, because he’s been having mood swings, migraines, and trouble sustaining erections during sex with his wife. When Marvin arrives in Yalom’s office, he is not a promising candidate for serious psychological growth. He is a hollow man, with “owl eyes which never blink” and an infuriating resistance to looking deeper at his problems. Whatever strategies Yalom adopts—joking, prodding, empathizing, asking Marvin about his childhood, exploring recent events in his marriage —Marvin deflects. He drones on about his hobbies. He makes dumb jokes about shrinks. He denies that any major events in his life, including his childhood abandonment by his father, were a big deal at all. There’s no deeper cause to his headaches or sexual dysfunction. They’re just local problems that need local fixes.

After weeks of this, Yalom is ready to give up on the kind of depth therapy he likes to do. Not every client is available for the deeper work, and there are other types of help to be given. He’ll recommend that he and Marvin focus on a short term course of cognitive behavioral therapy targeted to his symptoms. Then, “almost as an afterthought,” Marvin mentions that he’s been taking notes on his dreams. In their first session together, Yalom had suggested Marvin do this, but hadn’t expected him to follow through. But he has, and the dreams are dense with meaning and symbol in a way that is rare, in Yalom’s experience, even in his clients’ dream worlds. There is a voice inside Marvin, a strikingly poetic one, that is desperate to be heard but has been ruthlessly repressed. It can only reach out through the vehicle of dreams that the dreamer himself can’t make anything of.

“I asked Marvin whether he had any associations to any aspect of these dreams,” writes Yalom. “He merely shrugged. They were a mystery to him. I had asked for dreams, and he had given them to me. That was the end of it.”

Over the course of the next year, these dreams prove the lever with which Yalom is able to pry open Marvin’s inner life. The hollow man fills out. He confronts his fears of death. He looks directly at the pain his parents caused him. For the first time in more than six decades of life, he comes alive. The climax of the chapter is a session in which Marvin is finally strong enough to confront how dead inside he has been, and how very much this has cost him: children, a satisfying career, real intimacy in his marriage, deep friendships, a rich emotional life.

“He cried in my office that day,” writes Yalom. “He cried for all that he had missed, for all the years of deadness in his life. How sad it was, he said, that he had waited until now to try to come alive.”

I am haunted by that story for the reason you might imagine. Am I too a hollow man? Is it too late to come alive? And if it’s not too late, what’s the plan?

I don’t want to paint too bleak a picture. I’m a good father, by and large, and a good friend. I’m not the best husband in the world, but I try to become a better one. The face I turn toward the world is an appealing one. But far too often there’s a flatness I feel, and a tropism to anger, that calls out for some kind of diagnosis or label. Avoidant attachment? Depression? Fear of intimacy? Toxic masculinity? Normal masculinity? I don’t know. I don’t lack for words in general, but how can I describe in words what is going on when the incapacity to feel what’s going on is precisely the problem, and when words have so often been my first line of defense against feeling?

My wife Jess, I should mention, is a couples therapist. Quite an exceptional one, too, to judge by the loyalty and affection of her clients. There are many things to say about being married to a couples therapist, but it’s less of a head trip than you might imagine, or at least no more of a trip than being married to me must be. We both came into the union with a lot of baggage as well as an inclination to analyze it. I had my terror of being engulfed by someone else’s neediness. She had her terror of abandonment. We both had the duffel bags of dysfunction our parents had handed down to us, bequeathed to them by their parents in turn, backward unto the generations. The result was always going to look something like what our marriage has looked like, no matter her profession: intense, volatile, complicated, interesting, exhausting, surprising, and subject to endless interrogation and disputation.

What her job has added to the mix, though, has been a more explicit theoretical overlay to our married lives than might otherwise have been the case. We have had as our conceptual companions, at various points in the marriage, many of the major figures, paradigms, and movements of the last 75 years of American psychology.

When we began dating at the end of our twenties, Jess was finishing up her dissertation on the history of the humanistic psychology movement, a mid-20th century movement that furnished many of the ideas, and vibes, that set the tone of 1960s and ’70s America. Think encounter groups and Big Sur, peak experiences and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I was just starting to work on a very psychologically minded book about the lives of political heretics. We talked a lot, during those years, about the tensions between self and other, the personal and the political, individuation and obligation. We also lived uneasily in those tensions, always coming fiercely at each other, or turning coldly away from each other, with our rival demands for intimacy and autonomy.

Our therapist in those early years was Dr. Dickey (really), who was both a product of the 1960s and ’70s and a figure out of it: goateed, brilliant, overflowing, a dead ringer for the actor Rip Torn. He had been Jess’s individual therapist before we started dating, and had in many ways saved her. By the time we began working with him as a couple, however, he was well into a self-destructive spiral that would eventually end his marriage, his career, and his life. He could have been my Yalom, perhaps, had he not been so fucked up himself.

After finishing her degree and adjuncting for a few years at a nearby university, Jess went back to school to get trained as a marriage and family therapist. Since then, it has been couples therapists whose ideas have most shadowed our marriage. John Gottman and his love lab. Stan Tatkin and his psychobiological theories. Esther Perel on sex and the erotic. Harville Hendrix and his “imago” model. CBT. EFT. IFS. Let’s call the whole thing off.

In our 18 years of marriage, which now includes three kids, two figures have loomed larger in our theoretical lives than any of the others. One is the late British-Canadian psychologist Sue Johnson, whose system of “emotionally focused therapy” (EFT) has had the most straightforward influence on Jess’s practice of couples therapy. The other is Terrence “Terry” Real, author of popular relationship books like The New Rules of Marriage and Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.

Johnson was a systematic thinker and an empire builder. Through her work on adult attachment theory, the hordes of therapists she trained through her International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy (ICEEFT), and her endless stream of publications, she profoundly changed the contemporary practice of couples therapy.

Real, who’s now 74, cuts a very different kind of figure. The product of a hardscrabble Jewish family from Camden, New Jersey, you can imagine Larry David casting Real to spar with him, in Curb Your Enthusiasm, if Larry wanted a therapist who could match his life force and idiosyncrasy. Johnson was very British-Canadian protestant in her vibe. Real is working class New Jersey Jew. Funny, blunt, masculine, unusually directive with clients, very open about his own life and marriage, Real seems the kind of therapist I suspect most of us secretly want: a daddy figure who will lovingly but forcefully take us by the scruffs of our necks and mold us into the people we need to be flourish, then tell us how proud of us he is and how loved we are. He is a wizard, in particular, with men, able to confront them in a way that doesn’t bypass their defenses so much as it seizes them and holds them in an oddly compelling force field, where they can be surgically dismantled.

“I think there’s a deep love of men in Terry,” says the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, who first met Real in the late 1990s, after she positively reviewed his book on male depression, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, in The New York Times. Gilligan had just returned to the US from England to accept a chair in gender studies at Harvard, and Real was teaching and practicing nearby at a family therapy institute in Cambridge. She was invited to visit the institute, and while there she observed Real, through a one way mirror, working with a married couple. She was struck by the intensity of his therapeutic presence, and by the way that his confrontation of men was able to simultaneously draw in both halves of the couple.

“I hadn’t seen a therapist who had the ability Terry had to talk with men,” she says, “and to name what was going on. I think men could hear it, and I would watch the woman, and her eyes would open wide: ’Oh my god, somebody’s saying it.’”

Soon Gilligan and Real began seeing couples together. At the time, Gilligan was also working with psychologist Judy Chu on a project observing four year old boys in pre-school. What she and Chu ended up charting was a kind of inverse of the psychological stunting process that Gilligan had identified in her earlier, groundbreaking work on the development of girls. Where girls, beginning in adolescence, would often suppress their “masculine” assertiveness and voice, boys, at age four or so, would begin to suppress their “feminine” capacities to perceive and respond to the internal states of themselves and others. Under pressure from their peers and parents, they’d begin to go emotionally dumb. Gilligan wondered if many of the romantic conflicts faced by adult couples were rooted in these parallel failures of development, and whether one could heal adult relationships by bringing these earlier selves into relation to each other in therapy.

“Where was the emotionally honest 11 year old girl who said what she saw and felt?” she says. “And where was that emotionally intelligent four year old boy from my studies with boys who would say things like, ’Mommy, why do you smile when you’re sad?’ I thought: if you could get these two people in the room, they could work out the problems in the relationship.”

The therapeutic system that Real has formalized since that work with Gilligan, which he calls Relational Life Therapy (RLT), is less an overarching system, based in a unitary view of the psyche, than it is a melding of his various influences, his clinical experience, and his own backstory of severe childhood trauma and recovery. Freud is its great grandfather. Gilligan’s work on gender and psychological development is a major influence. Substance abuse and trauma thinker Pia Mellody mentored Real for many years in her philosophy and techniques of recovery. Real’s graduate work as a comparative literature student at Rutgers, which he abandoned in his mid-twenties (along with his first marriage), shows up in his skill with language, which is saltier than is typical in the therapeutic realm.

Family systems theory, which he studied and taught for many years at the Family Institute in Cambridge, has left a deep imprint as well. “RLT integrates systemic principles, meaning problems take place in a context,” says Esther Perel, a friend and collaborator of Real’s who also trained at the Family Institute. “It is not enough to understand their origin. How is the system organized in such a way that the problem keeps reappearing? What is the figure eight that people create with each other in which, in effect, each person ends up receiving from the other the opposite of what they’re asking for?”

At the heart of all of it, for Real and his system, is trauma—his own, his clients’, the world’s—and the possibility not just of recovery from trauma but of a kind of triumphant reversal of it. What we must aspire to, Real believes, is “fierce intimacy,” the wounds of the deeply traumatized person alchemized into a vital connectedness. It is an heroic, and also quite utopian, vision.

“Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods,” Real has written, “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.”

There is a primal Terry Real therapeutic scene, and it recurs over and over again in his books and in the many videos of him working with couples that one can watch, for a reasonable price, on his RLT website. It’s always riveting. Terry vs. man-boy of one stripe or another. Sometimes the guy is an obvious jerk; he’s so stuck in his sense of rightness and victimization that he can’t help himself even in therapy, with his marriage on the line. The pay-off when this kind of guy is taken apart is extra delicious. As often, though, the guy in these encounters is well-intentioned but rather befuddled, stuck in a fog of overlapping rationalizations and evasions.

The drama in all of these scenes is watching Terry firmly cut off one escape route after another, fixing the men in place as he ratchets up the weight of what they stand to lose—their marriages, real relationships with their kids, their sense of identity as a family man and good guy—along with the promise of what they stand to gain, which is a life of deeper relationships and much less loneliness. It climaxes when they break, usually into tears.

There’s a good example of the genre that Terry plays for his trainees in a workshop he conducted last year on “Working with Grandiosity.” He’s confronting “Michael,” a tall guy in his late 30s or early 40s who zones out when he gets home from work every day, emotionally abandoning his wife, “Tina,” and their kids. Michael is immediately dislikable. The whole time he and Terry are talking, he has his long arm draped possessively around Tina’s shoulders, occasionally rubbing her arm while she huddles in on herself like a hostage. Michael isn’t defiant with Terry, but he’s glib. He and Tina have seen therapists before, he says. He’s heard it all before. He believes it; he knows he’s got issues. But he doesn’t think much can be done about it. His main defense, along with knowingness, is jokeyness. Most of what Terry says to him, he deflects with a (dumb) joke. Terry is relentless.

“You’re a smart man,” Terry says to Michael. “If somebody can’t do something, they can’t do it. They can’t do it across the board. But if I’ve got someone who says, ’I can do it over here, but I can’t do it over there,’ I say, well, maybe you need to work a little harder. I’ll bet if you’re in an important job interview, and you needed to be present, you would be. I’ll bet if I had a gun, God forbid, to one of your kids’ heads, and said, ’Be present or else,’ you would be. I think the thing that I understand that you haven’t understood so far is you do have a gun to your head. It’s called your family. The stakes are really high. So, for whatever it’s worth, I don’t care if you’re depressed. There are a lot of depressed men who manage to show up for their wife and kids. I don’t think it’s your depression that’s stopping you from being present to Tina. I think it’s you that’s stopping you from being present to Tina.”

This goes on for a while, until Michael breaks. He starts crying, at which point the tone of Terry’s voice immediately softens. “Yeah, I got you,” he says. “Yeah. My friend, if those tears could speak, what would those tears be saying? Go on and feel it, Michael.”

Michael doubles over and cries harder. “Go on and feel it,” says Terry. “You have carried so much pain. Unspeakable pain. Don’t try to hold it back. Don’t try to hold it back. Stay with it. Don’t make a joke. Stay with it. Stay with the feeling. Go on and cry.”

It is extraordinary to watch. Who knows what will happen after Michael and Tina go home? Can Mike stay in a generative emotional reality long enough to make real change? Does Tina still want him even if he can? In those few minutes, however, for what is likely the first time in his adult life, Michael is looking directly at how he’s failed to be the man he would like to be. He’s sitting with how this has harmed his wife and children, and he’s considering the possibility that he could become a better man.

If I speak with some authority about how Michael was likely to be feeling in that moment, it is because I’ve been there myself. Early last year, Jess got an email from a fellow therapist that Real was looking for a couple to work with him over zoom. Low cost therapy in exchange for airing one’s dirty laundry in view of a few hundred RLT trainees. She asked if I was willing to volunteer, and I was, notwithstanding the fear that I would spend more than my share of time on the hot seat.

We needed help, as we always have, and I had seen videos of Real doing therapy. He’s a master of the craft, able to quickly size up clients and intervene with a force that is mesmerizing. If the cost of working with him was dropping trou before a group of people I didn’t know and wouldn’t be able to see, that seemed a reasonable price to pay. We applied, were interviewed, and were selected. Eight weeks of sessions with him, one hour per week. Recorded for posterity. Maybe it would be enough to fix us.

Read the full story.