One thing I’ve learned from being married to my wife, Jess, who is a couples therapist, is how vast the distance is between the masks people show to the world and the messy realities that live behind them. Every couple knows its own drama, but we still fall prey to the illusion that all other couples have seamlessly satisfying relationships. The truth about marriage — including my own — is that even the most functional couples are merely doing the best they can with the lives that have been bestowed on them.This past spring, Jess and I had the first of eight sessions of couples therapy with Terry Real, a best-selling author and by far the most famous of the therapists we’ve seen during our marriage. Real, whose admirers include Gwyneth Paltrow and Bruce Springsteen, is one of a small number of thinkers who are actively shaping how the couples-therapy field is received by the public and practiced by other therapists. He is also the bluntest and most charismatic of the therapists I’ve seen, the New Jersey Jewish version of Robin Williams’s irascible Boston character in “Good Will Hunting” — profane, charismatic, open about his own life, forged in his own story of pain. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: How did Daniel realize the problem in his marriage was himself?
Every marriage has periods of disconnection, but what if you could have fewer of them? That's what I wanted for my marriage and what I wrote about for today's Sunday read. I love my wife, Jess, deeply. From the start of our marriage, though, we've just had a lot of conflict. Jess has always sprinted toward intimacy and vulnerability at a thousand miles an hour. I'm pretty much the opposite.
And along the way, we've done a lot of couples therapy to try to smooth things out. My name's Daniel Oppenheimer, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. I'm 48 years old, and I write about art, culture, and politics, also my marriage. Jess is also 48. We've been married 18 years and have three kids. The oldest is about to go off to college.
A few years ago, in our eternal search for a theory or person to help improve our marriage, we heard about Terry Real, who's pretty famous in the therapy world. I always like to point out to people that he's Bruce Springsteen's couples therapist. Terry's great, but he is really expensive to see. He charges like 30 grand for a weekend intensive.
He does sometimes offer low-cost therapy, but there's a catch. You have to be okay with having your sessions observed by other therapists and recorded for training purposes. Jess and I signed up. We thought if he can help Bruce Springsteen, he can help us.
We both had a lot of issues that we were bringing to therapy with Terry, but it became clear pretty quickly that my anger and how I deal with distress in general was a special kind of problem. I can blow up, and I've been dealing with that for years. Pretty early on, Terry told me, she's not going to leave you tomorrow, Dan, but if you don't get a handle on this, she is going to leave you.
And so we started eight sessions with Terry to try and make progress on that. And surprisingly, we did. So here's my article, and it's from the magazine's love and sex issue. It's read by Robert Fass, and our producer today is Tali Abacasis. The music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. Also, there's some adult language in this article, just so you know. Thanks for listening.
One thing I've learned from being married to my wife, Jess, who is a couples therapist, is how vast the distance is between the masks people show to the world and the messy realities that live behind them. Every couple knows its own drama, but we still fall prey to the illusion that all other couples have seamlessly satisfying relationships.
The truth about marriage, including my own, is that even the most functional couples are merely doing the best they can with the lives that have been bestowed on them. This past spring, Jess and I had the first of eight sessions of couples therapy with Terry Real, a best-selling author and by far the most famous of the therapists we've seen during our marriage.
In November, I watched the recording of that session for the first time since treatment. In the footage, I see Jess and me as real might see us. I look worn down, a little pained. Jess looks to me like the same beachy blonde who dive-bombed into my life 20 years ago.
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Chapter 2: Who is Terry Real and why did Daniel and Jess choose him?
When it's not flowing, you get scared and lonely. I've been there. I call it a self-esteem well-being crash. Empty, dark, jagged, cold, sharp, agitated. It's not until the fourth session that Real really fillets me. We've been talking about my anger and the ways it manifests. Sarcasm, yelling, quiet but venomous contempt. Real has just told me, bluntly but compassionately, that I need to stop.
I have two words for you, he says, and I say this with love. Wake up. I need to learn how to deal with my distress in a way that doesn't involve dumping it all over my wife, and I need to do it now, not next month or next year. This is nuts, he says to me, that you get to yell and scream at her and she is supposed to stay close to you? That's nuts, Dan.
But it doesn't feel nuts because it's what you grew up with. This lands, I grew up in a family that didn't know how to deal straightforwardly with feelings. We could talk about almost anything, as long as we could analyze it with limited emotional vulnerability. Politics, ideas, sex, faith, family, people, it was all fair game.
So much of the talk, however, was a way of smuggling feelings into ostensibly cerebral conversations. When we were hurt, we yelled a lot. Often, we didn't talk at all. For me, as a sensitive boy, it was devastatingly confusing, and I retreated into anger, withdrawal, and intellectualization. Anger was a defense against being sucked into someone else's chaos and also a means of seeking recognition.
Push them away, and if that doesn't work, then have a big raging fight. At least if we're yelling, my needs are being reckoned with. My solace was stories, TV shows, movies, science fiction, and fantasy novels. I was safe and warm tucked away in there with my action heroes, dogged detectives, and young wizards and warriors. And the whole family sought connection in intellectual exchange.
None of this translated very well to Jess. She crumples under the heat of anger and doesn't care much for TV or genre stories. Though she has her own defense mechanisms born of her own trauma, they don't involve sublimating her emotions into cerebral claptrap.
Real talks a lot in his book and in our sessions about the adaptive child, the part of us that evolves to survive in the hostile terrain of childhood. It's what allows us to defer until later in life the distress that we don't have the resources to process when we're young. Now it's later, though. If our adaptive child is still running the algorithms for our adult relationships, we're in trouble.
In the footage, Real tells me to knock it off. I remember hearing him, but only sort of. His observation cut so close to my core stance in the marriage, which is perhaps also my core fear. If I don't scream for what I need, I will not be loved. I said none of this in the session. Instead, I protested articulately, but lamely, that I was making progress.
I'm better than I was a few years ago, I hear myself say in the recording, and I was better a few years ago than I was a few years before that. I'm not trying to excuse my bad behavior, but don't I get some credit for the trend line moving in the right direction? Real isn't impressed. Your expectations of your own progress are pretty mediocre at best, he says. Just transpose it to the physical.
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