Thomas Hübl: I have the great pleasure and a warm heart for my dear friend, Terry. Terry Real. Welcome Terry to our Summit again.
Terry Real: We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Thomas. It’s like—
Thomas: Yes, that’s right. We are meeting all the time in live or recorded interviews. That’s so beautiful. I really appreciate our growing friendship over the years and the deep resonance with it. Now, some courses together over the years, and it was really a pleasure for me. I love our depth and our fun and our growing friendship. Thank you for that, Terry. It’s really beautiful.
Terry: Oh, it’s a blessing. I want to acknowledge my spiritual work with you, and the healing work that you’ve done with me, Thomas. It’s really been a life-changer. We’re colleagues, we’re friends. In some ways I feel like a student. It’s a really multifaceted relationship. I’m glad [inaudible].
Thomas: Yeah, I’m glad we are having it. Right. Terry, speaking of relationships, so you have been working on intimate relationship, couple relationships, with families or family systems. I want to ask you first about your personal development. When you look at … Since you’re doing this for a very long time and you got a lot of experience and a lot of depth in your work, and I think when we develop a path we are also from time to time meeting our creative edge.
So how do we update our work? Maybe you can speak a little bit to your own updating. What helps you, or how do you experience the updating? Sometimes also how we let go of certain parts in order to make a step into a new version of ourselves that is more timely, that is more sharp, that is more accurate for this level of our evolution. Maybe you can speak a bit to that since you do it for such a long time, I mean, you must have met that multiple times on your path.
Terry: Yeah. There’ve been many versions. The edge for me and what I feel most alive and juiced about—to be honest—as much as I love sitting with a particular person or couple, I’m more alive teaching. My favorite way of working these days is what we call the couples experiential. Everybody’s invited. I just did one. Two days, five couples and about 300 observers tucked away in the background.
I work for 60 to 90 minutes with couple number one, try and get to the heart of the heart of what’s stuck and what their next step in transformation and development might look like. Then the other four couples give them feedback. Very deep, moving. As the work progresses the group gets deeper and richer. Then I break at lunch and at the end of the day, and I debrief with the therapist observers about what they just saw.
It is very sort of live wire, live ammo. These are real couples and many of them are on the brink of divorce that no one has been able to help. That’s my beat, is couples on the brink that nobody’s been able to help. I’m a turnaround guy. I love the complexity of doing live work and teaching this method all at the same time. That’s what juices me up and keeps me alive. I will say this, it’s interesting.
One person said—and many people echoed—that I seem different this time, but they’ve seen me do many of these couples experientials over the years, and that I seem softer. Less sort of in your face, confrontational, able to change people and move people in the same way, but with less muscle and more finesse. Here’s what I said, at 72 and having just been through two cancers, I’m a different person than I was 10 years ago.
I’m a better therapist than I was 10 years ago. This is one of my favorite stories about doing therapy—not to lord it over anybody, but still—the story is, there’s a great Taoist master, and there’s some young kid. There’s always some young kid who wants to be enlightened. He goes to the master, climbs over mountains and fights tigers and gets the … And the master happens to be the king’s chef. He’s a renowned cook.
The young guy says, “Teach me about the Tao.” The master says, “Okay. Grab a knife, grab a fork and cook with me.” As these stories go, a year goes by—I love how that works—and the kid is finally getting fed up after a year. He throws down his stuff and he says to the master, “I’ve been with you for a year. You haven’t taught me a thing about the Tao. I climbed mountains and faced tigers. When am I going to start learning?”
The master looks at him and goes, “Stupid, boy.” He said, “Let me ask you a question.” He says, “How many times do you sharpen your knife?” The young man says, “A couple, three times a day.” Goes, “Yeah.” He says, “How many times have you seen me sharpen my knife?” The boy goes, “I’ve never seen you sharpen your knife.” The master goes, “That’s right, because your knife cuts things, my knife finds the space between them.”
Thomas: Beautiful, lovely.
Terry: Yeah.
Thomas: Lovely.
Terry: So 10 years ago, I was cutting things. Now I’m better at finding the space between them.
Thomas: That’s good.
Terry: I once said … Somebody asked me, “Can you summarize Relational Life Therapy?”—the method I’ve created—in an elevator. I said, “Yes, I can summarize the whole method in two sentences.” Do you want to hear it?
Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Terry: Here it is. “Oh, you don’t want to do that, do you? You want to do this.” That’s it. That’s my summary.
Thomas: It’s so lovely. It’s so lovely to hear also how your own awareness of your own change process and how your whole being was changing over this time. It’s beautiful. Also, your own reflectiveness of it and the humility that you bring into it. It’s beautiful. It’s lovely.
Terry: We have this opportunity to keep working on ourselves and melting what’s frozen and connecting what’s disconnected. The recent health challenges that I find myself in have been a tremendous impetus to melt more deeply, and it’s affected how I work.
Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can also feel that. That’s right. It’s beautiful.
Terry: I feel you feeling me, Thomas.
Thomas: Let’s say, so in your massive experience over the years, I mean, you come across how trauma plays an effect in couple relationships and family systems, also in intergenerational or transgenerational systems. Do you want to share with us a little bit what are the effects that you see every day in your work, also in your teaching, in your groups or your experiences that … How does it show up and how do you work on integrating the trauma?
Terry: It’s a fascinating thing. I talk about the mysticism of marriage. We all marry our unfinished business. We all marry our mothers and fathers. We all become our mothers and father. Falling in love is the conviction, if you’re too sophisticated to say it or not, but that this person is going to heal me. This person’s going to complete me.
Being in marriage or a long-term relationship comes with the realization that not only is this person not going to give it to me, what I didn’t get as a kid, but they’re exquisitely designed to throw me right back into the wound. They’re going to re-traumatize me in precisely the ways I thought they would deliver me from. That doesn’t mean you’re in a bad relationship. That’s what intimacy is.
Well, there are plenty of people who would not have done that, but they don’t blip on your screen. We pick people who are going to tangle with us. I think the reason why we do is because we want to heal. What happens is that we have this very—I mean, my heart goes out—we have this very human impulse to just get it from the son of a gun. Just give it to me, goddamn it. It’s what you promised me when we were courting. Where’d you go?
Therein is the road to hell. The transformation comes when we let go, as is so true in so many of these spiritual moments. We let go of this getting it out of them. We tend to ourselves, and I’ll talk more about what that looks like, and then we do something different. We don’t demand that they do something different in the old drama, we do something different in the old drama. We’re not that little boy and they’re not our towering mother or father.
Then when we do something different then they may do something different and the drama changes and that heals us. That’s how it works. It’s one of these paradoxes. When we let go of that ego and control—tend to our own wounds enough to show up in the relationship in a non-triggered, grown-up way—then the old wound can heal as we tend to each other in more grown-up ways. It’s beautiful.
The alternative is that we get triggered, we go into our knee-jerk response—I’m going to go into more detail on that—we just replay the same old, same old unto death or divorce. There’s a psychiatrist in Boston who described a client’s life as 30 years of repetition misnamed experience. So the choice is ours, and that’s what my work and my book is all about.
The work of relationships is not day by day, it’s moment to moment. In this moment right now am I going to go with my knee-jerk triggered response—which I’ll describe in more detail—or am I going to take a breath, get centered, and access a more mature part of me and do something different? And if I do something different, can I change the dynamic between us? That’s the opportunity of being intimate with another human being.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s beautiful. Also, how you described how to disentangle and change and then when we grow, the relationship can grow. But we can’t make the relationship an ‘it’ that grows. Right. That’s beautiful. Very powerful. In your book, it’s called Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, right?
Terry: There it is. New York Times best seller, I’m really proud to say. It made the—
Thomas: Good. Good. Congratulations, Terry. So getting past you and me, so maybe you can speak a little bit about that sentence. What happens if we get past me and you, and how do we do that? What’s the space that we enter then?
Terry: It’s all about trauma. Our mutual friend, Gabor Maté, has a saying I like, I quote a lot. “You rarely see the wound but you see the scar.” In relationships, you rarely see what I call the wounded child part of the person, very young, the part that just experienced the trauma. You work with that. In relationships, what you often see is what I call the adaptive child part of the person; what you learned, how you coped with the wound.
The characteristic thing that you did over and over again, fight, flight, or fix. I would ask people watching this to take a moment, and when you’re in that automatic knee-jerk response, are you a fighter, a fleer, or a fixer? It’s usually one of these three. I’m a fighter. Thomas, what are you?
Thomas: Maybe a fixer in this regard.
Terry: Oh, good. Good. Okay. You adapt as a young child. I don’t know whether—this is one of those moments, Tom—I don’t know whether I said this, or I stole it from you, but here’s the language: I teach my students to always be respectful of the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child. I don’t know which of us that came out of. It was in our teaching together. You did exactly what you needed to do back then to preserve yourself.
I have a saying, adaptive then, maladaptive now. You’re not that little boy, your partner is not that towering figure of your parent, and it’s time to do something different. What happens is that we get wounded by our partners. Our wounded child gets triggered. Most of us have about two seconds’ worth of tolerance for that. Then the adaptive part of us comes in and takes over and repeats the same old same old that we do.
The trick is to shift into the prefrontal cortex, which has gone offline in those triggered moments. What I call the wise adult part of us that’s here and now that can be thoughtful and reflective and make deliberate choices. I will quote you. I know this quote. I love it. “To observe is to have choice.” But that’s because the observing part of you is literally a more mature part of the brain that can remember that we’re an us, that this isn’t about … When we move into that adaptive child, it’s you versus me, a power struggle.
One of us wins, one of us loses. A zero-sum game. It’s only the prefrontal cortex that gets shut down in those triggered moments that remembers the relationship. Literally. We don’t have it in our neurology to remember the context, the whole … That shuts down and it’s all about me, me, me, and survival. What I teach my couples—and what I go into in the book—is the first skill, the skill from which all other skills come, is what I call relational mindfulness.
Take a breath or 10, take a break. I’m a big fan of breaks. Take a walk around the block. Set up with your partner in advance what a break looks like. They know what’s going on. Get back into the part of you that wants to make things better and only then go back into the fray and talk to your partner. The bitter pill here is when you’re in that adaptive child part, that part doesn’t want to be intimate. That part’s about self-protection.
And when you’re coming at your partner from that part, you will never resolve anything. The first skill is recognizing that. I think both you and I have different ways of doing this, but we both agree you can cultivate shifting out of that reactive state into a more mature, centered state. You can build that muscle with practice over time. That’s the way out of this mess. I’ve been telling the same story to all my … But may I tell you a story that illustrates this moment?
Thomas: Oh yeah. Yeah. I love stories. Yeah. Yeah.
Terry: Okay. True story. You know I deal with couples on the brink of divorce, this couple is on … The guy was a chronic pathological liar. He lied about everything and he was amazing. He was the kind of guy, I say to him, “The sky is blue.” He says, “Well, it’s aquamarine.” He was not going to give it to me. He won’t give me blue. I figure out very quickly what we call his relational stance, the adaptive child thing he does over and over again, which is: the guy has a black belt in evasion.
He’s a liar. He’s an evader. I think relationally, the minute I get what the adaptation looks like, my next question is, who are you adapting to? I ask a question that if you’re not thinking relationally, you seem brilliant, but it’s really pretty straightforward. I said, “Who tried to control you growing up?” Right? Show me the thumbprint, I’ll tell you about the thumb. If you have a black belt in evasion, who were you evading?
He says, “My father.” Sure enough, military man, how he sat, how he ate, how he drank, the whole thing. I said, “What did you do with this controlling father?” He looks at me and smiled. I love the smile. That’s resistance. He looks at me and smiles and he says, “I lied.” All this comes out, absolutely true story. That weekend she sent him to the grocery store to get 12 things. True to form he comes back with 11. She says, “Where’s the pumpernickel?”
He says, “Every muscle and nerve in my body was screaming to say they were out of it. In this moment I thought of you, Terry. I took a breath, I found my courage, and I looked at my wife and I said, ‘I forgot the pumpernickel.’” She burst into tears. She said, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for 25 years.” That’s a true story. That’s healing. That’s how we heal, by shifting who we are in the interaction with the relationship.
Thomas: That’s very touching, very beautiful. Yeah.
Terry: Then to get to the larger context, that moment isn’t just about healing us, or our marriages and relationship. It’s about healing the legacy. This is intergenerational. Who knows what that father was reacting to, and his father, and his? You’ve heard this quote many times, it’s my most often quoted piece from my first book, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, if I may.
“Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods 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’s a great couples therapist, Hedy Schleifer, and when she sits with a couple she asks them to bring pictures of their children and she takes chairs and she circles the couple with chairs. One by one, she puts the pictures of the kids on the chairs. She says to the couple, “Just remember, they’re watching.”
Thomas: That’s also powerful.
Terry: The best gift we can give to the next generation is our own recovery.
Thomas: That movement that you very poetically described, like the movement to turn around and face the flames, can you tell me a little bit about—in your experience and your work—two things. What makes one person in the family system turn around? What is it in us that has the power to do that? The second thing is, the transgenerational trauma transmission, how can we approach that so that there are patterns that are echoing through the generations? When somebody already recognizes that and has enough strength to face it, to face flames, what works when we look at transgenerational trauma that actually brings peace to the ancestry? How does the process look like in your work?
Terry: We may have some differences on this one, we may work a little differently. To me, the beauty here is you don’t have to go after it. It finds you. That transgenerational legacy is in your raised hand as you’re about to hit your child the way you were hit. Or your withdrawal. It shows up through trauma. I learned that from one of my great mentors, Pia Mellody.
As a family therapist I’d learned forever about this idea of multi-generational legacies and projections, but it wasn’t until I did work with Pia that I realized the transmission of these legacies is through trauma. In that moment, when you are triggered and you respond with your knee-jerk adaptive child response, you are the next iteration of the pattern.
And in that moment—just like the liar guy I was talking about—in that moment if you can take a breath, engage your prefrontal cortex, reach for your Y cell and do something heroic, something different, you release—not just you—but you change the legacy for the generations. The work is in this moment right here. That’s my experience of it. What about you?
Thomas: Yeah, I agree. It’s definitely work that is in this moment, and I think also maybe raising our awareness that we are part of a bigger system. So for many people not just seeing the individual aspects but seeing that the individual aspect is bigger already raises a bigger space of awareness. Say, “Oh, wow. I’m part of something that is beyond my individual self.” I think that already opens a big space. It’s also a bigger witnessing space, and that’s definitely important.
I would also see in my work … Like I often say we have this individual and ancestral nervous system, that our ancestors are not just separate in space time, but they’re living encoded in us. And so we have access to them in our sensing. I’m sure in your work, when a grandfather comes in or a parent or some ancestor, sensing that, being aware of that, or feeling that is for sure part of the healing process too. Like in the therapy work, when you do it with clients, I’m pretty sure. I even have seen it when you do it, so how you … And I think that awareness building is really … That sensing is something crucial.
Terry: Yeah. I think that’s right. Also cultural and social elements. Culture doesn’t impact us. People impact us. There’s no such thing as culture. It’s your mother, your father, your uncle. I’ve written for 40 years critiquing the culture of patriarchy. I was dealing with a guy—he was a sexual offender, he used to masturbate in public—and we rolled back into his trauma and he remembered being four.
He had a blankie, as kids do. His father assembled his entire family, big family, on the porch and took his blanket and burned it. He was too old for that now. Four. That moment was not just personal trauma. That was the imposition of patriarchy on this family, on this boy. That was a cultural act of violence, just like racism or homophobia or something else. So we wake up to our ancestors and we also wake up to the larger context that we live in.
Thomas: Maybe you want to expand a little bit. How do you see, like with all your therapeutic understanding and all the wisdom that grew from this? We are in a very specific time now and we are living in a lot of collective dynamics, also collectively traumatic dynamics, a lot of old collective trauma comes up. So maybe you want to speak a little bit to the time we are in and how we apply what the two of us talk about to the bigger context.
Terry: Well, I’ve written against patriarchy for 40 years. In the book I also take on what I call the toxic culture of individualism, and both combined feed us a poisoned delusion that we stand apart from nature—that’s individualism—and that we stand above nature and control it—that’s patriarchy. Whether the nature we’re trying to control is our partners, or our kids, or our bodies or our thinking, or the planet, that we dominate. We’re in control. That’s an insane delusion.
What I say at the personal level is our relationships, or our biosphere—you’ve heard me say this a million times—we’re not outside of it, we’re in it. We breathe it. We depend upon it. I call that ecological humility. So I can indulge myself and have a temper tantrum and pollute my biosphere over here. But I’ll breathe in that pollution in my partner’s withdrawal or lack of sexuality over here. We’re an ecosystem. We’re connected.
Terry: I call that ecological humility, as opposed to the grandiose delusion of being apart and dominating. I literally believe, Thomas, that globally we are in a war, a cultural war. And there are progressive forces, like I imagine virtually everyone listening to this, who understand that relationships in the whole and cooperation and collaboration and humility is sane.
There’s been a resurgence of power and control on steroids, of traditional masculinity and strong men and autocrats and tyrants around the globe, and certainly in my country. And I honestly believe that which of these two parts of us as a species wins will determine the fate of democracy and the fate of our planet. We must trade in the delusion of dominance and control, which is often … Underneath that is a core of wound and fear. We must trade that in for the wisdom of collaboration and cooperation or I fear for the fate of our species. I think the stakes are high.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s so, so powerful what you’re saying because that deeply underlines that underneath a lot of that collective behavior is actually trauma. The need to control life is because we don’t feel safe. We are hurt. There’s a lot of fear in us stored, or there’s a lot of … And on top of that, there is a lot of exactly what you described. That’s why to develop a systemic trauma awareness is so important, and I think you summarized that beautifully.
How do you see us … How can we respond? What’s a skillful response to the current resurgence? What are the things that every one of us can contribute to actually make a transition and strengthen the democratic powers, basically, in the world so that they become more resilient? And that, over time, shows more and more the intelligence of that system globally. How do you look at that?
Terry: Well, to me, it’s the same thing collectively as it is individually. One of the lessons I’ve learned, later in my life, but one of the things I teach is that there’s no redeeming value in harshness. There’s nothing that harshness does that loving firmness doesn’t do better. Gandhi is one of my great heroes, and Gandhi taught us to stand up to power. I mean, put your body on the line and be willing to die if need be. Civil disobedience.
We must stand up to these forces. Just like in a relationship, if there’s a power imbalance and one of the two partners is grandiose and abusive, they need to be stood up to. Bullies need to be stood up to, whether it’s our government or your husband. I believe in that. I don’t believe in throwing marshmallows at bullies. But you also need to remember that they’re also human.
The trick is standing up and being loving at the same time, whether it’s in your family or whether it’s reaching out to the other side of the aisle. See, I’ll just say this, under patriarchy you can either be connected or you can be powerful, but you can’t be both at the same time. Because power is power over, it’s dominance. When you move into power, you break connection.
You see that sometimes when I work with couples, heterosexual couples, or even same-sex couples, with women who move from being disempowered to being so empowered that you can’t listen to them because they’re so harsh. That’s not a step up. The trick is to be what—and what I’m teaching my clients, couples—is what I call loving power, soft power, where you stand up for yourself and you cherish the other person in the same breath.
Look, you uber-conservative who just took away Roe v. Wade, I believe in my heart that you believe you’re saving little babies, or your work is righteous. Okay. Let me try and understand where you are. At the same time, let me fight like hell and hit the streets and push back on your restrictions of my freedom, but not by dehumanizing you or turning you into the enemy. I just think it’s so powerful to stand up to what is pushing at you and not become them while you’re standing up to them.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s very powerful. Especially right now, when you see a new war in Europe—there are multiple wars going on on the planet that are not so reported about—but let’s say in the heart of Europe, we see how the domination, how it is … In effect, how it’s working when it’s full on unleashed. How does this affect you, what’s happening now in Europe, in Ukraine? What are your feelings and thoughts about it?
Terry: It’s easy to feel disempowered. One of my two kids doesn’t want to have kids, doesn’t want to bring kids into this world because they don’t want to subject somebody to what they think is coming. Man, as a father that is really hard to sit with. I, myself, am very hopeful. There’s a Jewish tradition of tzaddiks, of the few righteous who tip the scales, and I think we can all be tzaddiks in our lives and in our work.
I have a great faith in the younger generation. Younger men are the least patriarchal that this planet’s ever seen. They tend to be feminists, they tend to be in support of gay rights and gay marriage, more expressive. I think things are changing. Call me Pollyanna, but I really see this resurgence as a kind of death throws of an old system, because it doesn’t work. We are interconnected. There is climate change.
Science is science. Two plus two equals four, it doesn’t equal five. So I have faith that we’ll win, over generations. We just have to survive as a species getting there. But, you know, one of the things I say, Thomas, is let’s start with our own lives. You may not be able to bring peace to Ukraine, but you can damn well bring peace to your living room and your bedroom. Let’s start there. I’ll tell you a story. I like to tell stories.
I was sitting Zen with a Zen master here in Boston. I would come once a week and lock up my life and then we meditate for 45 minutes together. It was fantastic. I was just writing I Don’t Want to Talk About It and what was revealed to me was this shift from shame to grandiosity, from trauma to attack that we’ve been talking about. I’m meeting with my teacher and I said, “Oh my God, I’ve been so excited. I haven’t been able to sleep for a week. I have gotten to the core of the dynamic of male violence in the world and how to stop it.” I said, “What would you say to that from the Zen perspective?” He looks at me and smiles and says, “So how have you been treating Belinda?” I was so high on myself, I was a fucking asshole with Belinda. I was nobody anybody could live with, but here I was curing the world’s ill. Let’s start with our own lives.
Thomas: Wow, that’s very powerful, very powerful. Coming back to the grandiosity, when you look at the work on victimization and perpetration maybe you want to share with us your thoughts about how victimization leads to new perpetration, and how can we dismantle that or stop that vicious cycle and bring something new? How does that work, and how do you see the impact of creating trauma on the perpetrator?
Terry: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the things these days, I’m a little bit [grunting noise]. It is like everybody’s dealing with shame, nobody’s dealing with grandiosity. Everybody’s a victim and nobody’s a perpetrator. I said, “Well, wait a minute. Where are all these victims coming from? [inaudible] punching themselves?” I mean, somebody’s victimizing them. I don’t want to just deal with the effects of trauma. I want to deal with the cause of trauma.
Trauma is about violence, emotional or physical violence. Let’s understand what makes somebody behave in violent ways and help them, not just deal with the results. For years, I’ve written and worked about … I mean, I’d like everybody listening to just get real honest with themselves. That moment when you shift from the wound to the adaptation, from shame and feeling inferior to righteous indignation and feeling superior, from implosion to [inaudible].
We all do it. We all have it in us to do it, some more than other. I think we healers and therapists must start dealing with grandiosity, not just shame. We have to help people come down from the one up, as well as up from the one down. We must deal with grandiosity per se. It’s not always a defense against shame. Often it is, but sometimes it’s just learned behavior. It’s modeled.
When my father … I talk about two forms of abuse—again, this is Pia Mellody—there’s disempowering abuse, which is the one everybody thinks of, but there’s also false empowerment. You’re the greatest thing since sliced … You get to do this. Therapists don’t think about this, but social psychologists write a lot about modeling and how modeling gets passed on generations and generations.
When my father was beating me, on the receiving end of his abuse I was disempowered. I was made to feel small and unloved, and that led to shame. But particularly same-sex parent, he was also modeling. He was teaching me, “Hey, this is what a grown man looks like when he gets angry.” And as a young man I was subject to rage, and I had to deal with that in myself and get help. I think that we have to deal with the dynamics of violence in the world. We cannot just look at everybody as a victim.
We have to be square about those parts of us that can escape our feelings of shame and helplessness and inadequacy by getting pumped up into the delusion of power and fury and attack, and we have to understand this impulse in us and deal with it. Dissolving the underlying trauma is critical, but oftentimes you won’t get to the underlying trauma until you confront the adaptation of grandiosity and attack. Bullies have to be stopped.
It’s a combination of the two, I think. And at least in the therapy profession, confronting the offender is really not done very much. We protect the offender. We feel sorry for the offender. I think we have to do both. We have to say, “Look, these are the things from your childhood, or these are the unresolved issues from the war.” I know you’re doing work with East-West integration in Europe. Beautiful. These are the wounds that have set you up.
I mean, Putin grew up on the streets, rat-infested streets, starving. Mao was tortured as a child. I mean, these people were tortured as children. That’s true, and also they’re mass murderers. It’s both. It’s not either/or. We have to hold both in our consciousness and help them heal from both sides of it. There’s work now on what’s called moral injury, the particular trauma of the perpetrator. We’re beginning to understand that committing violence traumatizes somebody, dehumanizes somebody, and we have to work with both sides of this, not just the victim’s side.
Thomas: Right. Yeah. I’m very much with you. And also how the inflicting trauma inflicts a shadow trauma on the perpetrator and in a way kind of reduces the grace, or the support. I think the difference is also that in the victimization trauma, there’s still grace open, so there’s help. Grace is the attractor for help. But if grace is cut because of the transgression of the perpetration, then it needs a lot of internal motivation.
I think that’s a very interesting conversation. That’s pretty much also I think the work on the moral injury is very much looking at that direction. I think that’s a very interesting field to explore deeper, and also the perpetuating cycles of violence that we see over history, they’re very much based on exactly what you said now. I also think that the trauma healing give us … Because sometimes the spiritual field doesn’t have the power to confront bullies.
The spiritual practice is too disembodied. So trauma healing, like a good integration practice and the power of presence and all the compassion and clarity and so that their spiritual practice can give us, they need to be combined that we can also stand up in the world. Otherwise, it’s castrated in the world. It’s floating on top of the world, but it doesn’t have the power to impact. Then it’s being discredited as kind of airy and so … Which in fact—
Terry: It is.
Thomas: It is as a bypassing, but it’s not when it’s cutting and finding the space.
Terry: That’s exactly right. When I confront offenders in my practice—which you’ve seen me do, I mean—I lean into grandiosity and I confront it head on. There are two things about it. One is, I have a … I call it, “Oh you poor perpetrator.” This is how you were set up to be the jerk you are now. But you hold the person accountably and lovingly in the same breath. That goes beyond patriarchy to be loving and powerful at the same time.
Then the other piece of it is to separate the adaptation from the decent person underneath. Over and over again when I’m sitting with, often very difficult people, I would say—if I can role play for a moment, it’s hard to even imagine—I would say—to role play Thomas who’s been, let’s say a philanderer and a liar and a cheat for 20 years—I would say at the end of a session, “You know Thomas, you’re a good guy.” I say this over and over again.
“You’re a good guy. I’ve been with men who are bad to the bone, they’re called sociopaths. And man, they’re cold. What’s so sad is I’m talking to a decent man who’s behaved indecently for the last 20 years. Will you let me rescue the real you from this nonsense?” And people say, “Yes.” Nobody says no to that. So you separate who they really are in their decent core from this exoskeleton and the scaffolding that they’ve lived their whole lives within. “You’re not that horrible. You’ve done horrible things in your life, but you’re not a horrible person.” Holding both at the same time, I think, is what’s so healing.
Thomas: I think you touched on very powerful points, and I think … If there’s anything that you want to summarize or anything that we didn’t talk about that seems important for you at the moment, then please let me know. If there are some conclusions.
Terry: For the healers and therapists and coaches who are listening—you know this because you’ve heard me say it so many times—one of my very favorite quotes is the German poet, Goethe, who wrote once, “If you treat someone as they ought to be, they may become who they ought to be.” So for us healers, have faith in the person you’re working with, and keep the bar high for your expectations of their possibilities of transformation. I say, for us healers, let us be the occasion that our clients rise to.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s beautiful. That speaks also very much to that only what we can embody we can also hold the space for. Or that also speaks to that our words and our inner experience are congruent. That’s what is the healing space about. That was beautifully said, Terry. Terry, it’s such a pleasure and deep, deep time. I really enjoy every time when we dive into these realms together, it’s always illuminating. It’s fresh. I can feel your depth and also your own journey, and the recent journey, how it’s impacting you and the kind of deepening that it created in you and the wisdom that that generates. It’s beautiful to be here with you.
Terry: We just love each other. I think that those of us who watch us together can feel our love for each other. It’s beautiful. I’m very appreciative.
Thomas: That’s very true. Very, very true. Thank you so much for your time. It’s a deep enrichment for our Summit, and I’m sure many people resonate especially with the deep work on couples you do that many people also need. Thank you for doing your work for such a long time and polishing your own diamonds continuously. That’s very beautiful about you also, to see how you walk your talk and you polish your own diamond, like all of us have to do. But that we are not looking at ‘when will it be ready’ but ‘how can we keep polishing as life brings it?’ I think you’re a great example for that, Terry, so thank you. Thank you for being you and all the blessings for you.
Terry: Thank you.
