Truly, I would be terrified to be married to a man who rages. How did/ does your wife and children cope? I hope they are all in therapy. I have so much empathy for them. Do you or Real categorize your behavior as abusive?
My wife is a therapist, and we're in couples therapy together. I'm not going to share about my kids, but certainly we are both very thoughtful about their health and well-being.
I’m really curious how it sat with you at the time to have your behavior termed as abuse, and how your perception of abuse as a categorical term has evolved since. To Terry’s point about fault not always being 50-50, I’ve noticed that much of therapy discourse tends to treat issues as equally shared, except in cases of abuse. But abuse can be covert too, especially when therapy colludes with patriarchal norms that push women to overfunction and shoulder disproportionate blame in order to maintain a sense of faultless equilibrium in couples work. That dynamic can be incredibly damaging to the injured party’s self-esteem and moral clarity. I also worry that when we overuse phrases like “your feelings are valid,” we risk treating reality within a couple as entirely mutable, as though no fixed truth exists. That feels like a slippery and frankly terrifying slope.
Also, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all your essays on this subject so thank you for your vulnerability!
Haha, asking the tough questions, sorry! That makes sense. I find it so interesting that in trying to promote nuance around 50-50 accountability (excluding abuse), we often paradoxically end up reinforcing binary thinking. Of course, no one is usually 100% at fault, but as TR points out, treating big issues and small-potato problems the same is harmful. It can reinforce gender roles, erode self-trust, and lead to gaslighting or over-compromising. Framing abuse as the only exception to shared blame makes it seem black and white, when in reality, abuse exists on a spectrum. Someone can show abusive behaviours without being the textbook “abuser.” Also, your point about women not fitting the “shrinking violet” makes me think that often they exhibit more grandiosity when they are at the end of their rope and beginning to get a sense of the ways in which they've been suppressing their needs to preserve harmony.
Thanks for your response. I’ve read several of your Substack pieces and The NY Times piece and it concerns me that your behavior isn’t framed into the larger context of calling it what it is- domestic violence. What you are describing -emotional and verbal abuse, controlling by fear- has lasting consequences for your family. It seems that it would benefit your readers by acknowledging that this is domestic violence and acknowledge the harm it causes to your wife and kids. Your wife did not have to stay with you after the first incident. She has spent decades being abused by you. Considering domestic violence is rampant in our society calling it for what it is in your writing could save lives.
I don't imagine I'll be able to persuade you that my marriage isn't what you assume it to be (it's not), but I guess what I'd say is that even if it is, it could be worth your while to do some research on whether the approach you recommend is the right one. People seem to take it for granted that simply calling out bad behavior in the most direct and unapologetic way is the shortest distance to correcting it, but human psychology often doesn't work that way.
I've done a fair amount of research, in the last year, on how the American criminal justice system deals with men who are accused of domestic violence, and what court-mandated treatment for such men looks like. The default model is in fact quite oriented around what it sounds like you want me to do. It's focused on naming the behavior, reinforcing the idea that it's terrible, and locating it within a larger understanding of domestic abuse as a mechanism of controlling through fear.
Everything I've read about this approach suggests not only that it doesn't work in terms of reducing the bad behavior, but that for most men it has the fundamental psychology of what's going on completely wrong.
Terry Real approach, I'd say, is similar. Accountability, directness, but also love.
I don't expect you to see things my way, but I hope that you'll consider the possibility that I wrote the article the way I did not to evade responsibility but rather to speak to other men in a way they could hear, so that they felt understood rather than shamed, and therefore motivated to take responsibility for themselves and their actions in a new way.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to sell the story I was pitching, but my instinct is that this is an area where there is huge opportunity for improvement. I don't think the people who are pushing ineffective programs are ill-intentioned, but they're not paying attention to the science, and as a result they're not helping people as much as they could.
Not gonna lie: The “privilege acknowledgment” at the top turned me off. As did the incessant use if “patriarchy” as if it were still the 1950s. It’s a big country, and there’s a huge element of self selection in who comes to him, so maybe he really does get a lot of “I work hard all day, so come here and suck my dick”, as he said towards the end. I don’t think hardly any of your listeners are like that, though.
I will also point out that Hawkeye Pierce and Free To Be You And Me were both *50* years ago. Somehow both have been just buried (Slate did a great job of covering FTBYAM’s 40th anniversary).
Full disclosure: The first job I ever knew my mom having was as Farrell’s assistant, sometime around 1977. I, as an avid reader of Marcotte-era Pandagon, thought Farrell had Rightist cooties for a long time (his current association with Jordan Peterson does him no favors there), but he surprised me in that interview, particularly wishing that at a young age in school he had had instruction on ESL (he doesn’t use the term, but I think that’s the gist). Ironically, given how you and Real ended your conversation, Farrell seems more interested in getting past current roles than Real, who seems hung up on “smashing the patriarchy”
I had to stop listening to it. I've since gone back and read the transcript. All of Daniel's points were completely valid and Terry didn't seem to have any real answers that weren't awkwardly shoe-horned into his model of "blatant" or "latent". One wonders how many of Terry's clients come to him because of his reputation for "calling out blame"? He certainly doesn't describe many modern marriages that I see in my middle class, London existence. How many visits are instigated entirely by "blatant" wives intent on seeing a therapist that entirely fits in with their misconception that they are "Latent"?
Oh, and one other thing: While I appreciate Deal bringing up the strongest non-violent civil rights leaders at the end (Mandela, Ghandi, King), the “Malcom was getting towards that after his Haj” stuff could only apply if you thought that forcing everyone to convert to Islam was an acceptable way to reach a Brotherhood Of Man. That’s what he espoused in his autobiography.
I feel like both of your responses point to a lot of why it's been such a challenge of writing about Real. I don't mean that to be critical of you. He's using a lot of language (patriarchy, cishet, etc.) that is very alienating to a lot of people (including me, usually). But I also think he's got a lot of wisdom, which sometimes is obscured by that language.
I mean, is there any doubt that men don't know how to be these days? And that the standard issue answers from the left and right are pretty useless? I don't believe that we, as a culture, know how to raise boys these days, and maybe it's a mistake to frame the problem as one of patriarchy, but surely we need better ways of moving forward? Do you disagree?
There’s a longer answer, but I’d just point to role models like Hawkeye (and many of the Jewish leading men of the ‘70s) and Free To Be You And Me. Perhaps with a dash of “The Sexual Revolution didn’t mean every woman you were interested in was interested in you”
Dan Savage’s advice to adolescent boys is also good: Don’t worry about getting laid so much, keep working on yourself, and learning and growing (he says “become more interesting”, but that can lead into a trap of popularity, though I think it’s more like the John Waters “if they don’t read books, don’t fuck ‘em” kind of way)
There will also need to be a return to respect of judicial process, and perhaps even a narrowing of the definition of sexual harassment at colleges (pre-2011 Title IX). Also allowing everyone to say stupid shit online before they’re 25 without fear of losing job opportunities would be nice (whether that’s more male coded is up in the air)
Bring back critical thinking, dial back Critical Theory: Cultural artifacts like Mansplaining and Manspreading were thoughtlessly accepted because “power differentials” when we could have easily kept the kernel of truth in Mansplaining instead of letting it spread to “man I disagree with” and questioned whether a few pictures posted on uncrowded NYC subways were truly an epidemic.
I admit some of this is trying to get back in full to a saner time, and the palimpsest of society won’t make that possible, but for now just pulling things back to “reality based” would be helpful for men, and people more generally.
Daniel, did you ever feel that he pigeon holed you into his world view? It surprised me a bit that his assessment of you perfectly aligned with his own model of the world, and I worry that he might shoehorn couples into his framework. That may work often, but not universally and his confidence in his methodology made me wonder if he might ever acknowledge its limitations. And specifically, if he was helping a couple that didn't fit his pattern, he might think they were not being honest with him rather than acknowledging the limitations of the generalizations he makes.
I also feel generally skeptical of people who claim to help people surface hard truths quickly. Connecting current behavior to latent childhood trauma (what I'd call "little t trauma) can take time, and when it happens so quickly, it makes me think of those surreal videos of church services with people clearly feeling social pressure to speak in tongues and act in other wacky ways. He is so articulate that I be he could spoon feed someone a narrative of their life and they could easily be convinced of its veracity.
I substitute taught elementary school for five years and one great part of that job was that in order to do it effectively you had no learn how to assert yourself while doing so with care and compassion.
If only it were so easy to do in every aspect of our lives.
Truly, I would be terrified to be married to a man who rages. How did/ does your wife and children cope? I hope they are all in therapy. I have so much empathy for them. Do you or Real categorize your behavior as abusive?
All interesting questions.
My wife is a therapist, and we're in couples therapy together. I'm not going to share about my kids, but certainly we are both very thoughtful about their health and well-being.
Yes, Terry did use the word abusive.
I’m really curious how it sat with you at the time to have your behavior termed as abuse, and how your perception of abuse as a categorical term has evolved since. To Terry’s point about fault not always being 50-50, I’ve noticed that much of therapy discourse tends to treat issues as equally shared, except in cases of abuse. But abuse can be covert too, especially when therapy colludes with patriarchal norms that push women to overfunction and shoulder disproportionate blame in order to maintain a sense of faultless equilibrium in couples work. That dynamic can be incredibly damaging to the injured party’s self-esteem and moral clarity. I also worry that when we overuse phrases like “your feelings are valid,” we risk treating reality within a couple as entirely mutable, as though no fixed truth exists. That feels like a slippery and frankly terrifying slope.
Also, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all your essays on this subject so thank you for your vulnerability!
Whoo that’s a tough one. I don’t think of myself as an abusive person but I also don’t want to deflect the ways in which my actions have been abusive.
Haha, asking the tough questions, sorry! That makes sense. I find it so interesting that in trying to promote nuance around 50-50 accountability (excluding abuse), we often paradoxically end up reinforcing binary thinking. Of course, no one is usually 100% at fault, but as TR points out, treating big issues and small-potato problems the same is harmful. It can reinforce gender roles, erode self-trust, and lead to gaslighting or over-compromising. Framing abuse as the only exception to shared blame makes it seem black and white, when in reality, abuse exists on a spectrum. Someone can show abusive behaviours without being the textbook “abuser.” Also, your point about women not fitting the “shrinking violet” makes me think that often they exhibit more grandiosity when they are at the end of their rope and beginning to get a sense of the ways in which they've been suppressing their needs to preserve harmony.
Thanks for your response. I’ve read several of your Substack pieces and The NY Times piece and it concerns me that your behavior isn’t framed into the larger context of calling it what it is- domestic violence. What you are describing -emotional and verbal abuse, controlling by fear- has lasting consequences for your family. It seems that it would benefit your readers by acknowledging that this is domestic violence and acknowledge the harm it causes to your wife and kids. Your wife did not have to stay with you after the first incident. She has spent decades being abused by you. Considering domestic violence is rampant in our society calling it for what it is in your writing could save lives.
I don't imagine I'll be able to persuade you that my marriage isn't what you assume it to be (it's not), but I guess what I'd say is that even if it is, it could be worth your while to do some research on whether the approach you recommend is the right one. People seem to take it for granted that simply calling out bad behavior in the most direct and unapologetic way is the shortest distance to correcting it, but human psychology often doesn't work that way.
I've done a fair amount of research, in the last year, on how the American criminal justice system deals with men who are accused of domestic violence, and what court-mandated treatment for such men looks like. The default model is in fact quite oriented around what it sounds like you want me to do. It's focused on naming the behavior, reinforcing the idea that it's terrible, and locating it within a larger understanding of domestic abuse as a mechanism of controlling through fear.
Everything I've read about this approach suggests not only that it doesn't work in terms of reducing the bad behavior, but that for most men it has the fundamental psychology of what's going on completely wrong.
See Casey Taft's work on this: https://strengthathome.org/
Terry Real approach, I'd say, is similar. Accountability, directness, but also love.
I don't expect you to see things my way, but I hope that you'll consider the possibility that I wrote the article the way I did not to evade responsibility but rather to speak to other men in a way they could hear, so that they felt understood rather than shamed, and therefore motivated to take responsibility for themselves and their actions in a new way.
Thanks for the info. I’m very interested in how to treat the epidemic of DV. If this approach is working I am all for it!
Unfortunately I wasn't able to sell the story I was pitching, but my instinct is that this is an area where there is huge opportunity for improvement. I don't think the people who are pushing ineffective programs are ill-intentioned, but they're not paying attention to the science, and as a result they're not helping people as much as they could.
Not gonna lie: The “privilege acknowledgment” at the top turned me off. As did the incessant use if “patriarchy” as if it were still the 1950s. It’s a big country, and there’s a huge element of self selection in who comes to him, so maybe he really does get a lot of “I work hard all day, so come here and suck my dick”, as he said towards the end. I don’t think hardly any of your listeners are like that, though.
I will also point out that Hawkeye Pierce and Free To Be You And Me were both *50* years ago. Somehow both have been just buried (Slate did a great job of covering FTBYAM’s 40th anniversary).
I decided to make this a dyad, and listened to Warren Farrell before this episode: https://youtu.be/StSeMVywv4o?si=U-HMDa-v1WDXW-Ga
Full disclosure: The first job I ever knew my mom having was as Farrell’s assistant, sometime around 1977. I, as an avid reader of Marcotte-era Pandagon, thought Farrell had Rightist cooties for a long time (his current association with Jordan Peterson does him no favors there), but he surprised me in that interview, particularly wishing that at a young age in school he had had instruction on ESL (he doesn’t use the term, but I think that’s the gist). Ironically, given how you and Real ended your conversation, Farrell seems more interested in getting past current roles than Real, who seems hung up on “smashing the patriarchy”
I had to stop listening to it. I've since gone back and read the transcript. All of Daniel's points were completely valid and Terry didn't seem to have any real answers that weren't awkwardly shoe-horned into his model of "blatant" or "latent". One wonders how many of Terry's clients come to him because of his reputation for "calling out blame"? He certainly doesn't describe many modern marriages that I see in my middle class, London existence. How many visits are instigated entirely by "blatant" wives intent on seeing a therapist that entirely fits in with their misconception that they are "Latent"?
Oh, and one other thing: While I appreciate Deal bringing up the strongest non-violent civil rights leaders at the end (Mandela, Ghandi, King), the “Malcom was getting towards that after his Haj” stuff could only apply if you thought that forcing everyone to convert to Islam was an acceptable way to reach a Brotherhood Of Man. That’s what he espoused in his autobiography.
I feel like both of your responses point to a lot of why it's been such a challenge of writing about Real. I don't mean that to be critical of you. He's using a lot of language (patriarchy, cishet, etc.) that is very alienating to a lot of people (including me, usually). But I also think he's got a lot of wisdom, which sometimes is obscured by that language.
I mean, is there any doubt that men don't know how to be these days? And that the standard issue answers from the left and right are pretty useless? I don't believe that we, as a culture, know how to raise boys these days, and maybe it's a mistake to frame the problem as one of patriarchy, but surely we need better ways of moving forward? Do you disagree?
There’s a longer answer, but I’d just point to role models like Hawkeye (and many of the Jewish leading men of the ‘70s) and Free To Be You And Me. Perhaps with a dash of “The Sexual Revolution didn’t mean every woman you were interested in was interested in you”
Dan Savage’s advice to adolescent boys is also good: Don’t worry about getting laid so much, keep working on yourself, and learning and growing (he says “become more interesting”, but that can lead into a trap of popularity, though I think it’s more like the John Waters “if they don’t read books, don’t fuck ‘em” kind of way)
There will also need to be a return to respect of judicial process, and perhaps even a narrowing of the definition of sexual harassment at colleges (pre-2011 Title IX). Also allowing everyone to say stupid shit online before they’re 25 without fear of losing job opportunities would be nice (whether that’s more male coded is up in the air)
Bring back critical thinking, dial back Critical Theory: Cultural artifacts like Mansplaining and Manspreading were thoughtlessly accepted because “power differentials” when we could have easily kept the kernel of truth in Mansplaining instead of letting it spread to “man I disagree with” and questioned whether a few pictures posted on uncrowded NYC subways were truly an epidemic.
I admit some of this is trying to get back in full to a saner time, and the palimpsest of society won’t make that possible, but for now just pulling things back to “reality based” would be helpful for men, and people more generally.
Daniel, did you ever feel that he pigeon holed you into his world view? It surprised me a bit that his assessment of you perfectly aligned with his own model of the world, and I worry that he might shoehorn couples into his framework. That may work often, but not universally and his confidence in his methodology made me wonder if he might ever acknowledge its limitations. And specifically, if he was helping a couple that didn't fit his pattern, he might think they were not being honest with him rather than acknowledging the limitations of the generalizations he makes.
I also feel generally skeptical of people who claim to help people surface hard truths quickly. Connecting current behavior to latent childhood trauma (what I'd call "little t trauma) can take time, and when it happens so quickly, it makes me think of those surreal videos of church services with people clearly feeling social pressure to speak in tongues and act in other wacky ways. He is so articulate that I be he could spoon feed someone a narrative of their life and they could easily be convinced of its veracity.
This was great. One of your best.
I substitute taught elementary school for five years and one great part of that job was that in order to do it effectively you had no learn how to assert yourself while doing so with care and compassion.
If only it were so easy to do in every aspect of our lives.