Us Quotes

“Cognitive science teaches us that what we think of as ourselves derives not from a direct experience but from a collage of sensations and images—self-representations, pictures we have of ourselves.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“individual comes from the term indivisible.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

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

“In our culture, our relationship to relationships tends to be passive. We get what we get, and then we react to it.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“She calls it relational heroism—that moment when every muscle and nerve in your body is screaming to do the same old, but through raised consciousness, insight, discipline, and grace, you lift yourself off your accustomed track and deliberately place yourself on another track.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“My wife, the family therapist Belinda Berman”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“We all know what fight looks like. As for flight, just a reminder that someone can sit inches away from another and still flee—they just do so internally. We call that stonewalling. Finally, the knee-jerk response of fixing is not the same as a mature, considered wish to work on the relationship. Adaptive Child fixers are fueled 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.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“One of the telltale characteristics of the you and me Adaptive Child is that it is automatic, a knee-jerk response.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Now just because the Adaptive Child part of you is rigid does not mean it is always outwardly aggressive. You can have an overly accommodating, people-pleasing Adaptive Child. Your Adaptive Child can tend toward superiority, it can tend toward inferiority, or it can bounce back and forth. But whether it’s more dominating or withdrawn, it will react pretty much the same way whenever you’re triggered. This set point reaction, this relational modus operandi, is your relational stance, the thing you will do over and over again when you are stressed.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“There is no redeeming value whatsoever in harshness. Harshness does nothing that loving firmness doesn’t do better.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Pia Mellody, spoke of the Adaptive Child as a “kid in grown-up’s clothing.” The Adaptive Child is a child’s version of an adult, the you that you cobbled together in the absence of healthy parenting. Here’s a chart detailing the traits of the Adaptive Child, as distinct from the Wise Adult.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“But most of us do not reenact the experience of the trauma itself. Instead, we act out the coping strategy that we evolved to deal with it.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Or am I speaking to a triggered part of you, to your adversarial you and me consciousness? The triggered part of you sees things through the prism of the past. I believe there’s no such thing as overreacting; it’s just that what someone is reacting to may no longer be what’s in front of them.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“And the more trauma you sustained as a child, the more compelling you and me becomes.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Us is the seat of closeness. You and me is the seat of adversarial contest. You and me is great when you are confronting a tiger, but less so when you are confronting your spouse, your boss, or your child.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Us evaporates and becomes you and me, adversaries in a cold world of I win, you lose.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“The good news is that the love is still there. The bad news is that it’s stored in parts of your brain, body, and nervous system that, in those flash moments, you no longer inhabit.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Do you remember it when your body shuts down and, for the life of you, you can barely squeak out a word or two?”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“It teaches men, women, and nonbinary people how to live skilled relational lives—lives of radically honest, fearlessly assertive, passionate connection to themselves and to those they love.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“I’m a couples therapist specializing in male psychology, gender issues, trauma, and power.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“It’s about changing the way you see yourself in relation to your partner so that your life is neither a desert nor a battle.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“It has been said that there are two types of couples in the world—those who fight and those who distance. I’d add a third type: those who do both. One rails while the other shuts down. Hailstorm and tortoise.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“to live relationally, ecologically, you must first learn to identify your repeating pattern, your choreography, which you can describe simply in terms of the more…the more.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

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

“the only person who can with absolute consistency be there for our inner children is us. And that’s okay. That’s enough. Once we learn how to do it.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“to move beyond some part of you, you must first get to know it and ultimately befriend it.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“resolution comes only by giving up that dream and taking in that you and your partner are not, in fact, going to see all things the same way.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Stan’s well-meaning but misguided loyalty to “sorting things out,” that is, to determining the one right reality about it (which was, of course, his), deprived them both of moments like the one they are having now in my office: moments of repair.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

“Objectively” Stan was 100 percent right. At the same time, however, he was 100 percent tin-eared when it came to his wife’s subjective experience. Worse, every time Lucy tried to tell him what bothered her, every time she tried to bridge the gap between them, Stan only retreated more staunchly into his precious rightness.”
― Terrence Real, Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

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