Fierce Intimacy

Terry Real —

June 15, 2021

Fierce Intimacy

Terry Real — June 15, 2021

View Transcript

Terry Real is a family therapist, author, and founder of the Relational Life Institute, which hosts workshops on family and relationships throughout the country. He has written several books, including The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work. With Sounds True, he is the creator of Fierce Intimacy, an audio training in essential communication skills for couples. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon talks to Terry about the inherent challenges of being in relationship and the many approaches to addressing those challenges in couples therapy. Terry discusses how men and women relate to one another in different ways, as well as the steps necessary when couples are badly out of sync. Finally, Terry and Tami speak on the Relational Life approach to therapy and the skills we need to develop in order to take our interpersonal relationships up to “full throttle.”

TERRY REAL is an internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and author. He founded the Relational Life Institute (RLI), offering workshops for couples, individuals, and parents around the country along with a professional training program for clinicians wanting to learn his RLT (Relational Life Therapy) methodology. A family therapist and teacher for more than 25 years, Terry is the bestselling author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, the straight-talking How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women, and The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Make Love Work.

A senior faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge in Massachusetts and a retired clinical fellow of the Meadows Institute in Arizona, Terry has worked with thousands of individuals, couples, and fellow therapists. Through his books, the Institute, and workshops around the country, Terry helps women and men, parents and non-parents to help create the connection they desire in their relationships. His ideas on men’s issues and on couple’s therapy have been celebrated in many venues, including Good Morning America, The Today Show, 20/20, Oprah, and the New York Times. For more, visit terryreal.com.

Author photo © Hans Robertson

Posted June 15, 2021

900 Episodes and Counting…

Subscribe to Insights at the Edge to hear all of Tami’s interviews (transcripts available too!), featuring Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Adyashanti, and many more.

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Each week on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon interviews leading voices in the Mind/Body/Spirit space about a vast spectrum of fascinating ideas. Since 2009, Tami and her guests have been exploring the edge of understanding, nearly 1,000 episodes on the honest work of change, including spiritual discovery, awakening, intuition, purpose, trauma, and grief.

Photo © Jason Elias

Products By Author

Fierce Intimacy

Audio Bundle

Starting at: $44.07

Also By Author

See All

podcast

Post Views: 16,316

Soft Power: Moving from You and Me to Us

Terry Real — August 16, 2022

In this podcast, Sounds True founder Tami Simon speaks with “the relationship turnaround guy” and bestselling author Terry Real about: the origins of his two-day relationship intervention; the groundbreaking—and rule-breaking—approach of Relational Life Therapy; dealing with shame and grandiosity, and the contempt underlying both; the skill of “joining through the truth”; what healthy self-esteem looks like; why “there’s nothing that harshness does that loving firmness doesn’t do better”; speaking to and from the mature, wise adult instead of the adaptive, wounded child; relational mindfulness; recognizing your tendency toward “fight, flight, freeze, or fix”; our toxic culture of individualism and the shift to “soft power”; why an invitation works a lot better than a complaint; the essential rhythm of relationships: harmony, rupture, and repair; honoring the ecological system of your relationship while having your individual needs met; and more.

podcast

Post Views: 32,678

Fierce Intimacy

Terry Real — June 15, 2021

podcast

Post Views: 5,711

Terry Real: Standing Up to One Another with Love

Terry Real — August 29, 2018

Terry Real is a family therapist, public speaker, and the founder of the Relational Life Institute. Terry’s written works include I Don’t Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You?, and The New Rules of Marriage. With Sounds True, he has created the audio program Fierce Intimacy: Standing Up to One Another with Love. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Terry about his somewhat unusual, do-or-divorce approach to couples therapy. They talk about deal breakers in relationships and why they don’t necessarily need to end a partnership. Terry explains what it means to hold a “core negative image” of a partner, why this is all too common, and why recognition of that core image can actually strengthen a relationship. Finally, Terry and Tami discuss what “fierce intimacy” truly entails and why canny relationship skills are the very same qualities that will help the human race rise to meet the challenges of the future. (64 minutes)

You Might Also Enjoy

podcast

Post Views: 6,039

nico and devon hase: Buddhist Volcanoes In Love

— May 19, 2026

What if everything you believed about a healthy relationship—the harmony, the peace, the perfectly matched wheels—was the very thing getting in the way?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with nico and devon hase—married Buddhist teachers, longtime meditation practitioners, and co-authors of the new Sounds True book This Messy, Gorgeous Love: A Buddhist Guide to Lasting Partnership—about what it actually takes to build a partnership that transforms rather than just endures.

Join Tami, nico, and devon to explore:

Why relationships are inherently rough—and why accepting that is the first act of real intimacy
The three conflict styles (volcanoes, diplomats, and dodgers) and how to work skillfully with your own
The tightrope principle: why lasting partnership means always finding your balance, never holding it
The daily check-in practice nico and devon discovered during three years of solitary retreat—and why it’s deceptively powerful
How death contemplation can dissolve petty resentments and bring fierce clarity to what actually matters
The “third space” in relationship: listening to the partnership itself as its own living being
Body shame, shifting desire, and sexuality as an awakening path—from devon’s own retreat discoveries
Why bodhichitta—the awakened heart of service—might be the most honest metric for whether a relationship is worth tending

Whether you’re navigating a decades-long partnership or wondering if intimacy and spiritual depth can coexist at all, nico and devon offer both radical honesty and genuine hope.

Listen now →

This conversation offers genuine transmission—not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together. Originally aired on Sounds True One.

This episode is sponsored by Omega Institute, a global gathering hub for lifelong learning and spiritual exploration. Located in upstate New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley, Omega offers weekend workshops, special events, rest and rejuvenation retreats, professional trainings, online learning, and more. Discover what calls to you at eomega.org/true.

podcast

Post Views: 8,493

Geneen Roth: It’s Not About Your Mother—Finding Lo...

— May 7, 2026

What if the relationship you’ve been trying to fix your whole life isn’t actually broken in the way you think?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Geneen Roth—author of 11 books including the New York Times bestseller Women, Food, and God—about her newest and most personal book yet: Love Finally: Untangling the Knot Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food. After 70 years of carrying wounds she believed came directly from her mother, Roth stumbled into a teaching that cracked everything open: the pain isn’t about your mother. It’s about what you concluded about yourself.

Join Tami and Geneen to explore:

Why the most painful legacy of childhood wounds isn’t what was done to us—but the lies we decided were true about ourselves
The six steps to freedom that Geneen learned from her mentor Coco, and how to begin working with them
How self-rejection—not the original wound—is what keeps us trapped, and how awareness dissolves it
Why affirmations and forgiveness meditations don’t work—and what actually does
The surprising transformation of Geneen’s relationship with her 97-year-old mother, and what it reveals about how we change
A candid revisiting of Geneen’s foundational teachings on intuitive eating—and what she’s learned to say differently now
What it means to be “the one you’ve been waiting for”—and why that’s not a platitude but a practice

Whether your relationship with your mother is tender, complicated, estranged, or something in between, this conversation offers a genuinely new way to understand where the real work lives—and why it might finally be possible to do it.

Listen now. →

podcast

Post Views: 5,693

Richard Schwartz and Tamala Floyd: Healing Across Gene...

Richard C. Schwartz — April 23, 2026

What if the anxiety, grief, or fear you’ve struggled with for years is a burden you inherited—not one you earned?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Richard Schwartz—founder of Internal Family Systems and author of the bestselling No Bad Parts—and Tamala Floyd, psychotherapist, IFS lead trainer, and author of Listening: When Parts Speak: A Practical Guide to Healing with IFS Therapy and Ancestor Wisdom. Together, they explore how IFS and ancestral healing converge to help us release intergenerational trauma at its root.

Join Tami, Dick, and Tamala to explore:

What “legacy burdens” are in IFS—and how to recognize when what you’re carrying came from someone else
How personal, ethnic, and cultural legacy burdens operate differently—and why racism, historical trauma, and collective suffering require their own healing
The concept of the “well ancestor”: why every lineage has one, and how to invite them into your healing
Heirlooms vs. burdens: how our ancestral lines carry gifts as well as wounds—and how to receive them
Why legacy burdens are often easier to release than personal ones—and what fear most commonly gets in the way
Tamala’s guided ancestral meditation, offered live: a practice for releasing what no longer serves you
What we offer future generations simply by doing our own inner work

The episode includes a full guided meditation led by Tamala Floyd—drawn directly from her ancestors—that listeners can return to again and again.

Listen now and begin your own healing across generations. →

Fierce Intimacy

Fierce Intimacy

Terry Real — June 15, 2021

900 Episodes and Counting…

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Products By Author

Fierce Intimacy

Also By Author

Soft Power: Moving from You and Me to Us

Fierce Intimacy

Terry Real: Standing Up to One Another with Love

You Might Also Enjoy

nico and devon hase: Buddhist Volcanoes In Love

Geneen Roth: It’s Not About Your Mother—Finding Lo...

Richard Schwartz and Tamala Floyd: Healing Across Gene...

Menu

Listen to Sounds True playlists on

Connect With Us