Attachment theory 2
- A person cannot both protect themselves emotionally and build intimacy with a partner at the same moment.
- A pursue-withdraw dynamic between partners is self-sustaining and does not require either person to be at fault.
Terry Real
Family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy. Author of I Don't Want to Talk About It and Us; argues that the Western idea of the separate individual is what makes couples' work hard.
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What Terry Real says most about
behavioural science 2
- A person cannot both protect themselves emotionally and build intimacy with a partner at the same moment.
- Suppressed hurt hardens into resentment that erodes generosity, and what looks like acceptance can actually be resignation.
Psychotherapy 2
- Opening a fixed relational pattern takes two things: the implicit made explicit, and the person's own recoil from what they see.
- Character is not fixed: therapy works because habitual neural pathways can re-form, sometimes within minutes.