Stop working on yourself as an individual and start working on your relationship as a couple, with the help of renowned family therapist Terry Real, the bestselling author of The New Rules of Marriage.
You've probably heard some variation of the idea that before you can love someone else, you first have to learn to love yourself. Our self-help and therapy industries run on the idea that healthy self-esteem is the foundation of healthy relationships. Renowned family therapist and marriage counselor Terry Real says that we got it all wrong.
In fact, the way to save your relationship is not by working on yourself, but instead by working together with your partner as a unit. Continuing to focus on yourself will in fact just feed the problem, which is that most of us learned to survive our imperfect families of origin through a set of adaptive techniques that we needed at the time (Real calls this our Adaptive Child) but that do not tap into our wiser, more collaborative capacities, which can only emerge in relationship with other people.
Using psychology, history, and stories of actual couples who have entered his office, Real helps readers move beyond their past traumas and stressors to shift from the individualistic "me and you" consciousness, which is reinforced and rewarded by our individualistic culture, to the relational "us" consciousness.
The Hail Mary family therapist for couples on the brink of divorce, Real offers a new set of science-backed relational skills that have saved real marriages on the brink so that people can learn to speak up for themselves with love and build relationships-not just romantic, but also with family, friends, and coworkers-that are authentic and interdependent. Terry Real is an internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and author. He founded the Relational Life Institute, offering workshops for couples, individuals, and parents along with a professional training program for clinicians to learn his Relational Life Therapy methodology. He is the bestselling author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You?, and The New Rules of Marriage.
