How to Stay in Love

Transcribed from Webinar Course with Terry Real & Esther Perel, Oct 2016

Complicated situations that couples find themselves in today its a paradox that
you have to manage rather than a problem you have to just solve.
Some of the questions:
How do we bring back desire that has faded?
Can you create a desire that has never existed?
Can you repair when love has been broken and damaged?
Do you need to trust to take risks or is risk-taking in itself that which engages
you to trust?
Terry says, any fool can fall in love, but it takes two grown ups to stay in love. Most
couples in our culture dont get that far. In fact, most couples arent even aware
that they have to work at love at all. Love should just be spontaneous, come
naturally.
To stay in love, you have to adopt some core principles. Principles that help guide
your actions and are always present. With these principles in place, you are able to
go places that may be uncomfortable, initially, but which give you access to the
truthto a space that allows for real growth.
These principles help couples live a full relational life. A life that helps foster
connection to themselves as people and to one another. I tell my couples that Im
inviting them on a rarified path, an artful path, but one that requires patience &
discipline. But a path, that if followed, can give your clients a relationship so superb
that it leaves this culture in the dust.
Three principles that are at the heart of not just helping your clients fall in love, but
helping them stay in love.
First Principle: Fierce Intimacy
Its an antidote to too much coziness, inertia & ultimately resentment. Its daring to
take one another on. Its learning to stand up for yourself while at the same time
cherishing yourself and cherishing your partner. Too many of our clients stop telling
the truth to one another. In fact, Id say thats true for 95% of the population. We
tell ourselves that were compromising but what were really doing is
accommodating, settling. And for every issue that is not dealt with, resentment
grows.
What is the first casualty of our resentment? Passion and the sexuality of our
relationship. As resentment grows, vulnerability, generosity, playfulness dry up,
triggering a cycle. Unvoiced hurt breeds more and more distance.
Women in particular carry dissatisfaction with the relationship. Across the board,
women want more emotional intimacy from men, than most boys have been raised
to deliver. The very quality imposed on boys with or without their consent, like
independence, invulnerability, inexpressioness will be insured that by todays
standards, they will be viewed as flawed husbands.
Theres a role disjuncture between traditional masculinity, which is very much alive
and well, and the emotional sharing and sensitivity that it takes to sustain lifelong
lover relationships. Faced with this asymmetry of emotional unavailability, women
have historically had two choices: the accommodation strategy, the voiceless
resentment of early to mid 20th century traditional marriage or the empowered, but
often shrill or angry speaking up or standing up typical of the women who grew
up in the early days of the feminine revolution, in the 70s and beyond. Neither
strategy breeds long term happy relationships. Not disempowerment, not personal
empowerment. We need a new strategy speaking up with love. Its the art of
standing up for yourself and cherishing the person youre standing up to in the
same sentence.
So why do people not tell the truth in their relationships; the reason is simple. Most
of our clients back away from telling the truth to their partners for one good reason
they meet failure when they try. Faced with such failing attempts, most of us
fall back on character explanations. Were not heard because our partners simply
are_______________(fill in the blank selfish, cold, unaccountable). We dont ask
ourselves if we might approach things differently. This is where fierce intimacy
comes into play. And where you as therapist can help couples develop what I call,
trust for the truth. Creating a space in which our clients can feel safe to BE
fiercely intimate.
Second Principle: Working on yourself through the relationship
My wife, Belinda, often says to me, Terry, thank you for this opportunity to work on
myself. The issue here is Triggering. We all marry our unfinished business. We
all become our mothers and fathers. We all marry our mothers and fathers.
To understand triggering, you have to understand 3 parts of the psyche (this is a
map I inherited from my mentor, Pia Melody). We talk about the functional adult
part of the person, the pre frontal cortex, present based, non-triggered part of you.
We talk about the famous wounded child part of you, which most of trauma works
with. Between these two parts, very present and adult/very young and childish is a
second inner child, which we call the adaptive child. This is a part that learned to
adapt to the family and the craziness that was in it.
Teaching our clients how to BE in the adult part of themselves is a practice I call
relationship mindfulness. Its moving out of the automatic knee-jerk response into
something learned, something cultivated, something more constructive. I also call
this remembering love.- remembering that the person youre speaking to is
someone you care about. And if you cant get there at least remembering that
theyre the person you have to live with.
Thinking relationally is synonymous with thinking ecologically. Youre not above the
system working on it, youre in the picture, youre part of it. What this means is
that we all have to do our inner work. Its important that both partners are doing
that work. Weve all seen couples where one person is working on himself or
herself, while the other is resistant to any kind of change.
Third Principle: Embracing relationship Jiu-jitsu:
What is Relationship Jiu-jitsu? Its the embodiment of the sentiment, When they go
low, you go high. Its meeting immoderateness in your partner with moderateness
in yourself. Immaturity with maturity; aggression with vulnerability, even love.
When your partner comes to you in a state of disharmony and dis-repair, the only
relational goal is to help them come back into harmony and closeness with you.
Who cares whos right and whos wrong? I want to teach our clients to let go of
pride, stiff neck defensiveness, counter-attack.
In the West the way we fight is to let your opponent take his or her best shot and
you take it full in the chest, then you take yours. The last person standing wins. In
Eastern martial arts, when your opponent comes at you, instead of opposing the
force, you step a quarter inch out of the way, give their wrist a flip and watch them
move past you. Relationship Ju-jitsu teaches us not to oppose what coming at it,
rather to yield to it, thereby disarming it.
Im sure some of you right now are thinking, if someone comes at me, I dont want
to be a wimp. I want to fight back. But this is where the art of remembering
love comes in. You have to remember the person youre interacting with is not the
enemy. The person youre interacting with is the person you loveis the person
you have to transact with every day. It is in your interest to make peace. Sure, you
can win, but at what cost?
In this moment, in this evening, what is your real deepest goal? Wouldnt you
rather make peace? The relational answer to the question, Whos Right or Whos
Wrong? Is Who Cares? The real question is, how are you and I going to solve this
in a way that works for both of us? Or said more simply, How would you like to
spend your time? Would you rather fight? Or would you rather move back into
harmony?
You know that now-a-days, on a good day anyway, Belinda (Terrys wife) and I get
into a fight, sometime after a 15 or 20 minute break or time out, one or the other of
us will walk over and say something like this, Hey honey, do you want to fight? I
dont want to fight. What do you need? Im sorry. You tell me what you need, Ill
tell you what I need. Lets get over this.
You know what Im thinking when I do that with my wife? Im thinking, how do I
want this evening to work out. Do I want to have fun? Or do I want to spend my
time fighting and proving my point?
For people in general, and especially for men, Relational Ju-jitsu represents a real
paradigm shift. I tell the guys I work with to give up being strong and instead
replace it with the ideal of being elegant.
These principles open the door to shifting love from a feeling and ideal to the lived
in, minute to minute everyday practice.