Home > Work > Us: How Moving Relationships Beyond You and Me Creates More Love, Passion, and Understanding
1 " With no one there to help modulate your feelings, you did a very smart thing as that little boy. You shut them down. Closed a door on them. "
― Terrence Real , Us: How Moving Relationships Beyond You and Me Creates More Love, Passion, and Understanding
2 " classed as having an avoidant dismissive attachment style. Paul lives behind walls because he grew up in a family where everyone lived behind walls, so what’s the problem? Being emotionally shut down is normal to Paul. And if he lived alone, he’d be fine, but he isn’t alone. He has a wife and a bunch of kids, all of whom need him. "
3 " we humans cannot be surgical with our feelings. If you open up to one feeling, they all come. Cheryl is knocking hard on Paul’s door. But opening up his heart to her means reopening the door he firmly closed as a child. He is routinely subject to emotions, but he doesn’t have the tools to identify them. "
4 " You left your feelings,” I tell him in a later session. “They never left you. They’ve been percolating the whole time. You just need help connecting to them again and naming them. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " 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. "
10 " 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. "
11 " Before you open your mouth,” I tell him, “I want you to stop and think. Ask yourself: ‘What is the thing I’m about to say going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? "
12 " to move beyond some part of you, you must first get to know it and ultimately befriend it. "
13 " There’s No Redeeming Value in Harshness "
14 " 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. "
15 " Maturity comes when we tend to our inner children and don’t inflict them on our partners to care for. "
16 " 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. "
17 " Whenever a young person encounters trauma, they react to it and they also repeat it. Modeling has elements of identifying with the aggressor. In modeling, you don’t resist the dysfunctional mores of your family—you reenact them. You see yourself as you were seen; you internalize bad behavior as normal. "
18 " making a child into the family hero—the light all others depend upon—is a form of trauma. "
19 " 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. "
20 " Our society mirrors the qualities of the Adaptive Child—black and white, rigid, perfectionistic, unrealistic, and unforgiving. "
