Book Summary: Us, by Terry Real

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The book: Us by Terry Real

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1. Chapter 1: Which Version of You Shows Up to Your Relationship?
2. Chapter 2: The Myth of the Individual
3. Chapter 3: How Us Gets Lost and You and Me Takes Over
4. Chapter 4: The Individualist at Home
5. Chapter 5: Start Thinking Like a Team
6. Chapter 6: You Cannot Love from Above or Below
7. Chapter 7: Your Fantasies Have Shattered, Your Real Relationship Can Begin
8. Chapter 8: Fierce Intimacy, Soft Power
9. Chapter 9: Leaving Our Kids a Better Future
10. Chapter 10: Becoming Whole

Chapter 1: Which Version of You Shows Up to Your Relationship?

Real opens with the two ways couples usually get stuck. Some fight over and over without resolving much. Others back off from each other until they are living "alone together." Some do both: one partner rails while the other shuts down, which he calls "hailstorm and tortoise."

His central question is which part of you shows up when you're upset. He separates the Wise Adult, the mature, present part of you, from the Adaptive Child, which his mentor Pia Mellody described as a "kid in grown-up's clothing." The Adaptive Child is the version of an adult you put together as a kid in the absence of healthy parenting. Real lays out the contrast in a chart: the Adaptive Child is black and white, perfectionistic, relentless, rigid, harsh and certain, and the Wise Adult is nuanced, realistic, forgiving, flexible, warm and humble. When you get triggered, "the triggered part of you sees things through the prism of the past." He describes three automatic reactions to stress: fight, flight, or fix. As he says in Relational Life Therapy, "Adaptive then, maladaptive now." The strategy that protected you as a child is the one that hurts your marriage now.

The way out is relational mindfulness: stopping for a moment, noticing what's coming up in you, and choosing something different. "In your close relationships, urgency is your enemy, and breath is your friend." Real's wife, the family therapist Belinda Berman, calls the moment you pull this off relational heroism, when everything in your body is pushing you to do the same old thing and you do something better instead.

Chapter 2: The Myth of the Individual

Real argues that the self-sufficient individual is a story our culture tells, not a fact about people. He describes a session with Ernesto, a man who raged at his wife. As Ernesto calmed down in the room, he "borrowed my prefrontal cortex until he woke up his own." Real's point is that we do this for each other all the time. Our brains, and most mammals' brains, "are built for co-regulation." He quotes Dan Siegel: "The brain is a social organ." In Real's words, "We are individuals whose very existence is predicated on belonging," and "the idea of a freestanding rugged individualist is a cultural story having little to do with the truth."

He contrasts you and me consciousness, where each partner is out for themselves, with us consciousness, where you think about the relationship as a whole. He asks couples to give up the fight over whose version of events is accurate: "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 not for settling which partner's point of view is valid. The relational answer to "Who's right and who's wrong?" is "Who cares?" The real question is "How are we as a team going to approach the issue at hand in a way that works for both of us?"

Chapter 3: How Us Gets Lost and You and Me Takes Over

"When we get trauma-triggered in our close relationships, our Wise Adult shuts off, and we are seized by our Adaptive Child." Real describes how this part of us was formed. If you were abandoned emotionally as a child, you might grow into a charming seducer who is good at getting attention. If you were intruded upon, you might live behind walls. The Adaptive Child can lean toward superiority, toward inferiority, or bounce between the two.

He lists the five losing strategies the Adaptive Child turns to in conflict, which he first described in The New Rules of Marriage: being right, controlling your partner, unbridled self-expression, retaliating, and withdrawing. He also notes that "we all marry our unfinished business." We tend to pick partners who throw us right back into our childhood hurts.

His instruction for handling the Adaptive Child is concrete. When one of your inner children kicks up, put the child on your lap, put your arms around them, listen to what they need to say, "and take their sticky hands off the steering wheel. They are not driving the bus; you are."

Chapter 4: The Individualist at Home

Real describes two versions of individualism through a couple, Jim and Brit. Jim is a rugged individualist, whose view goes back to Enlightenment ideas about rights and self-reliance. Brit is a Romantic individualist, moved by honest self-expression and being fully herself. Each believes in their own version of individualism, and neither one is thinking much about the relationship as a whole.

He asks Jim about his childhood: "Were you the star, the hero child?... Or the rebel?" Real uses these questions to show how each partner's stance comes out of their family.

He also names privileged obliviousness, the blind spot of someone who doesn't register their impact on others because the world has mostly worked for them. And he is clear that grandiosity is not only a male problem. Grandiose women "often inhabit the role of angry victim, a righteously indignant avenging angel," and he says they can be harder for therapists to work with than grandiose men. His mentor Pia Mellody called this "offending from the victim position": feeling like a victim while acting like an offender.

Chapter 5: Start Thinking Like a Team

Here Real moves from diagnosis to practice. Partners who think like a team stop waiting for the other person to change first and start asking what they can do together.

Sex is one of his examples. He asks the reader to listen to the difference between "I won't live without sex for the rest of my life!" and "We both deserve a good sex life. I miss you. What do we need to do as a team to set this to rights?" The first is a demand. The second invites your partner in. One wife in the book describes her husband's idea of foreplay as "a public service announcement that he's horny." Real tells him what he says to "a dozen men each week": "If you want her, court her."

Chapter 6: You Cannot Love from Above or Below

"Healthy self-esteem is a stance of same-as, regarding oneself as neither better nor worse than anyone else." Unhealthy self-esteem can look like shame, feeling less-than, or like grandiosity, feeling above others. Real admits how automatic ranking is: "Most of us have an exquisite sense, in any setting, of just where we are in the pecking order... The only problem with that type of judgment is that it's one hundred percent nonsense."

He says contempt is at the root of both, and "contempt is emotional violence." His answer is full-respect living, a minute-to-minute practice: "Before words leave your mouth, you pause and ask yourself: 'Does what I'm about to say fall below the level of basic respect?'" If it does, don't say it. On anger, he writes, "That son of a gun who just cut you off on the highway may deserve your rage, but you deserve to live a rage-free life."

He gives an exercise. For ten days to two weeks, keep a self-esteem journal. At the end of each day, jot down moments when you were one-down and moments when you were one-up, what triggered them, what you thought and felt, and what you noticed in your body.

He also separates shame from guilt. "While shame is all about you, guilt focuses your energy on the person you hurt." Repair doesn't come from berating yourself. It sounds like "I'm sorry I hurt you. What can I do to help you feel better?"

Chapter 7: Your Fantasies Have Shattered, Your Real Relationship Can Begin

Real describes relationships as moving through harmony, disharmony and repair. Disharmony hurts, and he has spoken for years about what he calls "normal marital hatred." That isn't a sign of a bad marriage. "What renders a relationship bad or good is not the depths of disharmony, but the presence or absence of repair." Drawing on the infant researcher Ed Tronick, he writes, "It isn't unbroken harmony that makes for trust in relationships, whether parental or marital. Rather, it is precisely countless repetitions of surviving the mess."

Much of the chapter follows Mike and Angela after Mike's affair. Real wants to use the crisis "as a springboard for fundamental transformation," in each partner and in the marriage. He notes that "two-thirds of marriages survive the hit" of infidelity. Mike was living out what some therapists call a love-lust split: home was stable, good and dead, and the affair was exciting and alive. Real tells them, "The marriage you once had is gone. The only question is, can you forge a new one?"

He explains repair with memory reconsolidation, a negative expectation from childhood being contradicted by a new experience. He calls this "the gift of discord." He also has a "seventy-thirty no-quibble rule": if what your partner says is seventy percent accurate, it's good enough to work with. The first step of repair is "remembering love, getting seated in a part of you that wants to repair to begin with."

Chapter 8: Fierce Intimacy, Soft Power

Real describes Liz and Phil, a couple who "had it all" except each other. He calls them a "Silenced 'good woman'" and a silent "strong man," neither able to say something as simple as "Hey, I could use a hug." He tells them that "smooth-functioning avoidance is romantic death. Partners need to rough it up now and then, to go deeper." With distant couples, he says, you first hand them "a mallet to demolish the stultifying edifice they've constructed."

He has advice for both sides: "If you are used to big, angry reactions, go small, go vulnerable, soften up and lead, not with righteousness but with your own open heart. If you're more often avoidant, or an inveterate pleaser, find courage. Dare to rock the boat."

His main tool is the feedback wheel: "1. This is what I recollect happened. 2. This is what I made up about it. 3. This is what I felt... 4. This would help me feel better." The fourth step matters most: "You have to help your partner come through for you." When your partner brings you a complaint, he says to think of yourself at the customer service window. If someone tells you their microwave doesn't work, they don't want to hear that your toaster doesn't work. "Take care of your customer first." He also has a saying from Relational Life Therapy: "Tone trumps content."

Soft power is his phrase for standing up for yourself without giving up on the relationship. "Soft power gives voice to the I and cherishes the we at the same time."

Chapter 9: Leaving Our Kids a Better Future

Real asks how we pass on something better than we received. "Even the intensely personal work of your own relational recovery is not for you as a lone individual." He describes a men's group session where Ted speaks to his father in an empty chair and grieves what his father taught him. With another client, Ernesto, Real asks who the angry one was in his family. Ernesto realizes he has become, in his own family, "the very person he most despised growing up." Real writes, "What stops offensive behavior is healthy guilt."

He explains why people repeat a parent's dysfunction: "For many clients, keeping spiritual company with their problematic beloved parent is their only way of feeling close to the parent." Growing up means "sorting through the legacy, passing on consciously, deliberately, the positive traditions and beliefs you are proud of, and laying to rest the negative traditions lodged in your body's reactivity." He sums up how harm travels through families in three words: "Hurt people hurt people."

He also warns the partner who has been hurt. He describes Julie, whose partner is finally offering what she asked for, but she "wraps herself in a self-protective cloak of disbelief and steadfastly remains in complaint mode."

He closes the chapter with a summary of the practice. Lead with appreciation. State your intention. Use the feedback wheel. Give your partner a way to repair. And then, which he admits is hard, "let go of outcome." Finally, "Digest each other's imperfections, and grieve the things you wanted in your relationship that this partnership will not afford." In fraught moments he asks, "Which will you choose: vulnerable closeness or protected distance? Your right to express yourself or our duty to find a workable solution? Will you choose you or us?" And: "There is no redeeming value whatsoever in harshness. Harshness does nothing that loving firmness doesn't do better."

Chapter 10: Becoming Whole

Real works with Charles and Diane. Charles has "the abiding relational stance of disgruntled customer." Real uses the three family roles first described in AA, the hero, the scapegoat and the lost child, and asks Charles, "Did you get to be much of a kid growing up?"

Charles doesn't ask his wife for comfort, then makes her pay when she doesn't give it. Real tells him, "You really can't be mad at not getting what you never asked for," and "Charles, you have more emotional needs than just sex. A lot of men are a one-note song. You feel insecure, you want sex." He suggests Charles walk over to his wife and say, "Hey. I could use a hug." And he teases him: "Grown men are usually sexier than seven-year-olds."

The last chapter widens out to the culture. Real discusses moral injury, the damage people do to themselves when they act against their own values, and how some people ease that guilt by dehumanizing the people they hurt. "The cost of disconnection is disconnection." He reminds readers that secure relationships are linked to better immunity and less depression and anxiety, and that "intimacy is not something you have; it's something you do. And you can learn to do it better." It is "in your interests to behave skillfully in, to be a good steward of, your own relational biosphere." He ends with a line from Robert Ingersoll: "Nature has neither rewards nor punishments; it has consequences."