JJ: Welcome to the show, everyone. If you’re joining us here on YouTube, know that there is a podcast. You can click below and take us with you on audio only, if you’d like to. And if you’re finding us through the podcast, know that we have a video. Terry is back. Come on over and check us out on jjflizanes.tv. Also, for those of you that are finding me because you’ve searched for Terry, know that I’m a producer and an empowerment strategist. That means this is my show and this is my conversation. If you want more of just Terry, in case you don’t like me, which is totally fine, Terry, where can they find more of just you?

Terry: They can find more of just me just by typing in my name, terryreal.com, and that will take you to my website. And there’s all sorts of courses. There’s an inventory that you can take to get a snapshot of your relationship. And there are lots of goodies for people. So, go to the website.

JJ: Are there videos there? Because they’re typing you in here to find free content that they can listen to you. Is there any other free content that you have? Videos or audios that you have for them?

Terry: Yes. There’s lots of videos, lots of audios. There are articles. As I say, there’s an inventory that you can take to assess your own relationship. And there’s not free, but not too expensive, a five-week online course for individuals and couples, but the general population, not for therapists, called “Staying in Love.” And it’s chockfull of concrete skills: how to talk, how to listen, how to respond, what to do when you’re in your mature self and your partner is being a jerk, and how to cherish each other.

JJ: Excellent. Okay. I just want to get that out of the way, for those of you finding us on YouTube, because I will be talking. All right. So, let’s continue. That’s my disclaimer. So, last time we were together, we talked about the CNI, the core negative image, and we touched on a little bit about doing inner child work. And I wanted to take that further because there haven’t been anybody else on the show that I’ve talked at length about inner child work, what it is, why we should be doing it, who should be doing it and when, how it affects a relationship, and all that good stuff. So, with that as our topic, Terry, why don’t we first start off by explaining, I mean, in brief, if you will, or at length, whatever feels better, what inner child work is?

Terry: Well, let’s talk about what an inner child is. An inner child is just a handy, fanciful, easy-to-personify way of describing triggered early childhood trauma states. Your inner child is the you that got arrested in that moment of arrested development, that gets revisited when you get trauma triggered. So, your inner child is all about trauma. It’s about the states that you get into when your trauma is revisited and/or when the adaptation to the trauma gets triggered. So, let me say something about that. I’m with Gabor Maté on this. You don’t see the trauma per se that often. You do it sometimes as a clinician. What you see is you see the scar tissue. You see what the person did in the trauma to adapt.

And in our work, as you know, we speak about the three parts of the human psyche. We talk about the wise adult part of you, the part of you I’m talking to right now. It’s present-based. It’s here and now. It’s prefrontal cortex in the brain, the most mature part of the brain. And it’s the part of us that can stop and think and be reasonable, be deliberate. The part of us that is not taken away by automatic reactions, but can feel an automatic reaction and take a breath and go, “Wait a minute. I don’t think I’m going to yell at my kid. I think I’m going to tell my kid to put the block out of the sand before he hurts somebody.” You want to yell at him. Your first knee jerk response, I call it first consciousness, is to yell at the kid. But second consciousness cuts in and says, “I think I better do something different.” That thoughtful second consciousness is the most mature part of us. I call it the wise adult part of us.

There are other two parts of us. And in the work I do, relational work, the most important question that we have is “Which part of you am I speaking to?” Am I speaking to the present-based mature part, or am I speaking to some triggered part? So, the triggered part that most people think of when we think about trauma is what we call the wounded child part, very young, first moments of life up to four or five years old. And this is the part of you that’s just on the receiving end of the abuse or neglect, overwhelmed, wants to crawl up on somebody’s lap and cry for about a thousand years. It’s just the totally reactive, immature, little part of us.

Between these two, the present-based thinking part and the very young, reactive part, is a modulating piece that I call the adaptive child part of us. And this is an inner child that tends to be older: five, six, seven, on up through 18, 19, 20. And the adaptive child part of us is the part of us that adapted to what was ever going on. So, for example, let me bring it to real life. You’re in the middle of a fight with your partner. Your partner says, “I don’t need this shit,” and walks out of the room. That is a shaming move on your partner. So, I’m going to make you a gay woman for the moment.

JJ: Okay.

Terry: That’s a shaming move in your lover’s repertoire. “I don’t need this shit. I’m out of here.” You then react to the giant sucking sound of their leaving, not with a present-based feeling of “Oh, shit. We’re having an argument,” but with a very young part of you that feels abandoned, desperate. “I’ve got to go after them. I’ve got to make this right.” Just the upset of sitting there is overwhelming to you. Now, the upset of sitting there is overwhelming to you because you’re not in your present-based prefrontal cortex. You’re in your wounded child, and you’re feeling abandoned. A lot of reactive couples have an internal wound of abandonment that they’re fighting.

So, you’re feeling abandoned. I would say to you at that point, “My dear, adults don’t get abandoned. Adults get left.” Unless somebody drops you off on a desert island with no food, you’re not abandoned. You’re left. Children get abandoned. Abandoned means “Without you, I die.” And that’s the feeling. I don’t know if you ever felt it in your life. I certainly have. But that feeling of abandonment is not like “Oh, I’m 42 and I’m being rejected.” It’s “I’m three. I’m lost in the supermarket. I’m never going to get out of here alive unless somebody comes to get me.” It’s that anxious, cold, jagged, lonely, desperate, awful feeling of abandonment.

That’s not your present-based feeling. It’s an old early feeling from childhood that you felt when you scraped your knee on your tricycle, and instead of your mother coming and helping you modulate, “Oh, it’s okay. You’ll be all right,” your mother turned and had herself a second martini and left you sitting there to bleed. That’s abandonment. Now, when your lover does that in the present, you’re not sitting there and thinking, “I’m in the present, remembering when I was a child.” You’re flooded with that child state. We don’t remember trauma. We relive trauma. This is really important to understand. The combat vet who hears a car backfire, spins around like he’s got a gun in his hand, he’s not thinking, “I’m walking down Main Street remembering combat.” His body, as my friend Bessel van der Kolk says, “The body keeps a score.” And his body is back in combat. There’s a superimposition of present and… So, that’s the wound that comes up.

And the next question is when you felt abandoned as a kid, what did you do? “Oh, well, I had a temper tantrum.” I see. And when your lover walked out the door just now, said “I don’t need this shit,” what did you do? “Duh. I had a fit. I was running around, yelling, screaming, throwing things, calling her names, blah blah blah.” Okay. That’s also an inner child, but it’s an older one. It’s not the one that got abandoned. It’s the one that said, “Fuck you. I’m never going to get abandoned again. Nobody stabs me. Give me the knife. I’ll stab you.” That’s the adaptive child part of you. Also, a young part of you.

And one of the things that I think makes the work I do, relational life therapy, so effective is that we deal with all three parts of you. We deal with the adult. We deal with the flooded, wounded part. And most important, we deal with the adaptive part, because it’s the adaptive child part of us that, by and large, makes a mess of our intimate relationships. And so, a lot of therapy doesn’t do any inner child work. A lot of trauma therapy works with that wounded child. Because I’m a relational therapist, I will work with the wounded child, but it’s really on the way to helping the adaptive child, because that’s the one that keeps screwing up in your relationships.

JJ: Since we last spoke, I actually started my own certification, Empowerment Strategist Certification, because I was approached by people who would come to my events and said, “I want you to teach people what you do.” And I said, “I can’t teach people what I do. It’s my brain. I can’t give you my brain. How I put things together and assess things and strategize, I can’t. And intuition, I can’t teach that.” And then I started to think, “Well, I could teach people how to strengthen their intuition. Oh, but I could teach people how to use the tools that I use.” And so, from there, I’m having like another point of view. I was watching last night, Doug and I were looking for something to watch, and Hulu had…I don’t know if you’ve heard the show called Couples Therapy. Have you heard of it?

Terry: I was supposed to be the couples therapist for that show, but then they changed their mind.

JJ: Oh my god. It would have been so much better with you. No disrespect to the woman who did it, but she’s terrible. And I’m watching this, and I had to pause it every five seconds because I said to Doug, “Oh my god. Can we just stop and talk about what’s really going on right here and stop having the story about…?” Because it was all of that. The very first couple that they profiled was a black couple who…the guy, his wife was calling him 20 times a day. And not even the therapy work. Just going back to like Alison Armstrong’s work, or understanding the difference between men and women, and being single-focused versus diffused awareness, and that idea of focus, and the difference between men and women. And I’m like, “We can stop this conversation right now.” But her issue was that she was feeling insecure and abandoned, and wanted that connection, and she was grasping at straws for that. And it just went on too long. I’m going to keep watching because I’m going to take notes. I want all my trainers to watch it so I can test them on it, like “How would you handle this? What tools would you use for this?” Because I think it’s terrible so far. I know I’ve only watched the first show.

But it’s the idea that the perpetuation, which is why today’s show is dealing with what is inner child work, and how can someone… Yes, ideally, you should work with somebody else to do this. But know that there are also things that people can do to decrease… So, for instance, you were talking about the vet, and I know that that’s PTSD. And that brain gets wired, that neurological programming gets wired, when that trauma happens. And so, that neurological, electrical, chemical response that happens, that is not conscious, that people do not have choice over in that current state, needs, to me, tools like inner child work, EMDR, EFT, things that are designed to change and repattern, and neural plasticity for the brain, create new neural pathways to decrease and… Correct? Right? Don’t we need to do something, create new neural pathways? So that way, when that stimulus happens, our body doesn’t fire anymore, or it fires less, and we have that conscious space to make a decision. Like you said, using the third part of the brain, right? Was it third or fourth? The adult part, the reasonable part that starts to well up with the feelings and emotions if I want to yell at you, but then quickly can realize, because they’re not being controlled and overwhelmed and flooded with those feelings anymore, now they can take a breath, step back as an observer, and say, “Yeah, that’s not going to be effective. That’s not what I want to do.”

So, I want to be able to empower people. Because, of course, I’m going to recommend everybody work with you, and work with your trainers, and work with me and my trainers, and work with whomever you need to find a connection with to do some of this deep inner work, because I feel like it’s a huge key in freedom when it comes to all relationships. And if you go into couples therapy, it’s what I hate about couples therapy generally is the blame game and the surface conversation about “What happened yesterday?” and “What happened last week?” And it’s like “Could we cut the shit and go deeper?” because that’s what’s running the circuitry of all of this, and this top-level conversation is useless to me. It's useless. It takes a long time. It’s why I think people are in therapy for years and years and years, and then do nothing different. Maybe they have an awareness, but they don’t react differently. They don’t live differently. They’re just aware now. And so, I’d love to get to that core of how I can empower people, and you can help me empower them to start some of that work on their own. What are some of the things that they can do to help their inner child and do some of this inner child work on their own before they come and meet with you or somebody else?

Terry: Yeah. Great. So, first of all, the first thing is to get to know your inner children. And rather than try and exile them or control them or be harsh with them or kill them off, I want the people who are watching and listening to begin to form a relationship with these immature parts of us. We judge them so harshly. They’re just young parts of us. Calm down. Don’t meet harshness with harshness. Meet harshness with loving firmness. But you don’t want them to grab the wheel. You don’t want them running the show. As my friend and colleague Dick Schwartz puts it, “You want to speak for a part, not from the part.” You don’t want an immature part of you grabbing the wheel. Or said differently, I have a saying: “Maturity comes when we deal with our inner children and don’t foist them off on our partners to deal with. We’re the ones in charge.” And so, the whole work is to put your arms around these inner children in us, and love them, and be empathic to them, and hear them, and contain them. They are not driving the bus. We are. So, the first order of business is getting to know who these parts of us are, and forming a firm, parental, loving relationship with these parts, so that we’re not overrun and flooded with reactivity all the time. We have something to say.

And I speak about the cultivation of what I call second consciousness. And your first consciousness, which is the adaptive child part of you, which many people think is their adult, but they’re wrong. Your first consciousness, I call it whoosh. It’s the automatic wave that comes up from the sea. Anger, fear, fixing. And in terms of getting to know this part of us, I talk about three automatic responses. And I want everybody listening to out themselves and to name one of these things in your intimate sexual relationship now. Okay? Keep it focused. Not everybody, not what you were 10 years ago. With your sexual partner now. Fight, flight, or fix.

Everybody gets what fighting is. “Screw me, screw you. I’m going to give it back to you just as good as you gave it to me.” Flight. Let’s be clear. You can flee someone and be standing six inches in front of them at the same time. That’s called stonewalling. It’s like that Charlie Brown cartoon. His big mother is hovering over. “Charlie, go do that.” And his brain is going “wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.” That’s stonewalling. That’s fleeing. And then the third automatic response that you’ll get into is fixing. You could be a fixer. And a fixer is different than somebody who’s working on the relationship. The fixer is anxious. “Oh my god. There’s something bad happening here. I have to make everybody happy.” “Oh my god. Somebody is upset. I can’t be happy until you’re happy. Let me take your upset away. I’m a co-dependent pleaser. Let me make sure you’re okay.” Fight, flight, or fix.

JJ: Will you use me as an example?

Terry: Yeah.

JJ: So, when you first said it, you said I’m fixed. My definite core wound, one of them anyway, is feeling… I’m not going to say lack of… Yes, definitely, there’s a worthiness issue, right? That’s the bottom for all of us: a certain sense of worthiness. But my parents don’t get me. And they always have loved me and listened to me, but the gap has gotten wider over the years because I expand and evolve very quickly. And for a long time through my marriage, my last relationship, I was trying to teach my mother through my marriage, and try to fix her through him, because they were very similar, and pull her along. And I realized, and I knew that she didn’t want any of that, and that my ex-husband didn’t want any of that. And so, when you said fight, flight, or fix, yes, I was trying to fix, trying to teach. And you talked about this in the last time we talked, about my podcast helping to heal me, because I’m getting an outlet for this wanting to help, and to make a connection, and to be seen and heard, and to be validated or reflected back to that I am worthy because of what I know or who I am, and trying to find that connection. And so, I know I’ve worked on that in my current relationship, but at the same time, I just got triggered by my mother a week ago.

Terry: Oh, no.

JJ: Because it’s that inner child. I’m like, “Okay, I’m not done with this.” And I’ve done so much great work, and most people think I don’t get mad or upset about anything. I get excited and very passionate, but I don’t get upset. And when we were back on the East Coast, something happened, and it was, again, that gap is so wide vibrationally between us that I miss and I can’t fix, and I know that. And it’s the first time I actually just took my hands off the wheel. But I was really sad. I was really, really sad because I don’t have that kind of relationship with my parents, or with my mother especially. Now, because of he and who she is, I am who I am. I’m the exact opposite in many ways. And I take all of the contrast from what I see from her, and I have flipped it in terms of self-respect, in terms of being able to receive, in terms of feeling of value to myself, in terms of doing and honoring who I am. So, I’ve done all of that, but then I look back and I go, “I feel so alone. I feel so alone that I don’t have a mother like I would want to be, like me.” And I know she probably doesn’t feel like she’s a daughter who is like more like her, although she’s proud of me. So, in the case of me, what kind of inner child work would I be doing at this point that I know, while it’s not in my relationship, but it might rear its ugly head at some point? Because you can’t outrun it, so it hasn’t yet seeped in. The best relationship of my life. We’re awesome. We’re great. He keeps growing. I keep growing. But this is still there, and it’s absolutely inner child. So, how would I handle this?

Terry: When you’re with your mother and she doesn’t get you (I mean she really doesn’t get you), what is the feeling that gets evoked in you?

JJ: Anger.

Terry: Okay. Speak it. You can pass on any of this in any point.

JJ: Well, I think the frustration… I just want to put this out there. I was planning on having a conversation with her. I haven’t seen her in two years because of COVID, and they’re not traveling, and I’m traveling. And when they came, I asked them to come for Doug’s birthday. They live in Pennsylvania, and Doug is from Baltimore, and he deejays. He’s a bar mitzvah DJ. He’s kind of phasing out of that. He’s a podcast producer. And it was his birthday. And so, I don’t normally go with him, but I decided to go. And I said, “We’ll come down and come for Doug’s birthday.” And in my mind (and I had been talking to Doug about this for a while), it’s like “I’m going to have a conversation with her about our relationship.” And Doug got very nervous, thinking she was going to react bad. I’m like, “What do you think I’m going to say?”I said, “It’s coming from my heart.” I want her to know, and I want to see, besides me freaking out about COVID stuff at one point with them in not a good way (which that’s a separate issue), our relationship has changed since my marriage.

I realized that I used my relationship with my marriage to stay connected to my mother. And it was normally some kind of complaint or working out. And so now, all of a sudden, I don’t have that. So now, I looked at what’s the content of our conversation? I’m not trying to work anything out. I’m not trying to teach you. I’m not trying to complain about anything, because everything is awesome. And I don’t share with you about my business because you’re not… You listen. She listens great. She’ll listen to anything I have to say. But it doesn’t land. You know what I mean? She doesn’t take it. So, I feel like “God, where can we connect now?” Because I can only say “How’s Grandma? How’s Dad? How’s Brian? How’s church?” so many times. And I’m not interested in having that every week. Would I do it for her if it was important for her? I would. But that was a conversation I was going to be having.

Well, we get there and she totally upper limits. I think her soul knew we were going to have this conversation, this heart to heart, because she just made herself sick so she couldn’t come once they got there, and avoided the whole thing. And seeing that, knowing that, knowing she made herself sick, knowing that she was afraid, and I just said, “This is unacceptable. I haven’t seen you in two years.” But she wasn’t budging. And I just thought, “Oh my god. I don’t know what to do.” So, it’s not that I have to control…because I don’t spend that much time with her in person. And I do that worry thing of when your parent is… Again, on a conscious level, she’s really not. She lives in a victim mentality most of the time. She means well. She’s loving. She has no self-confidence. She doesn’t know how to receive anything. She pays for dinner because she can’t receive anybody else giving it to her. So, terrible receiver. And so, I look at that and I feel sad for her, and then I get mad. I think I get mad because I go, “Well, haven’t you seen me grow? Don’t you value yourself enough to allow some of this to change, or to not worry so much, and worry your hair loss, and worry your joint pains, and worry yourself into sickness?” So, help me. I didn’t plan on this being a therapy session. I want to use myself as an example because you’re giving an example, so here’s a real example. And how this, I think, plays out into a relationship, if I hadn’t done all the relationship work that I’ve done…

Terry: Or you’ll find somebody who was unavailable, and then you’d struggle with them.

JJ: Right. And so, I think that it affects your relationship because you’re still carrying that with you. And obviously, the mirror was “JJ, this is not done. This is not done yet.” So?

Terry: Well, I have a word for you. You’re not going to like it.

JJ: That’s okay.

Terry: It’s called grief. Your mother does not get you. Your mother has, in some fundamental level, never gotten you. And your mother doesn’t want to get you. And your mother is not going to get you. What’s it like to hear me say that? Just stay with the feeling.

JJ: Well, I can tell you that I have cried immensely about this, so some of that has been let out. But it’s very sad.

Terry: It is sad.

JJ: It’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking to know that I keep getting better and better, and I don’t have someone who can appreciate that.

Terry: You know, you do in your partner, but you don’t in your mother. And in my last book, “The New Rules of Marriage,” I talk about what it means to be happier in your life and in your relationship than your parents were. And it means we’re immigrants, JJ. We leave the old country of our parents’ constriction, fear, depression, low self-esteem, acting out. We leave that behind, and we cross over into health, and intimacy, and a good relationship with ourselves, and success, and happiness. And we leave the old folks behind. And it feels like you’re leaving them behind. It feels like you’re moving to a different country that they can’t join us in. And it’s sad. It often evokes a kind of survival guilt, like you’re abandoning them. But it also closes the door on your ever getting from her what you deserve to get as a little girl and did not get. And you’re not going to get it now. Everybody is too old for it. It ain’t going to happen.

So, what you feel vis-à-vis your mom is abandonment. And she abandoned you emotionally in some fundamental ways. And here’s how. You’re a seeker. I mean, you just reek it. You’re fully alive, and you’re a seeker, and you look things in the face. Back in the ‘60s, the great existential philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, once wrote,“There are two kinds of people in the world. There are people with good faith and people with bad faith.” People with good faith are people who are willing to stare into the eyes of their own mortality and not flinch. That’s you. People in bad faith are not willing to stare into the eyes of mortality, and they do flinch. They don’t deal. That’s your mom. And that’s a great many people. And Sartre said, “Beware, people of bad faith. They can kill you.” So, it’s not safe to be with someone who isn’t looking. It’s not safe to be with someone who’s choosing not to know.

And as a little girl with your deep soul that is so obvious, you were desperate for somebody to meet you in those deep places. And your mother doesn’t go deep. That’s not what she does, for reasons we’ll get into another time. But she doesn’t. Her defense structure doesn’t allow her to do that. She’s not brave enough to do that. And so, you’re unmet. And when you’re unmet as a little girl, it feels like you’re going to die. It feels abandoning and shaming, like “What’s wrong with you?” So, you have a wounded child that’s abandoned, and probably pretty young. And then you have another child that comes in at about 10 seconds flat that says, “I’m not abandoned. I’m pissed off.” “You can’t fire me. I quit.” And you go from the one down to the one up, and you attack, whether you do it verbally or in your head.

JJ: That’s my adaptive child: the pissed off.

Terry: Right. That’s the pissed off one, usually older.

JJ: And how can I work with that in terms of… How would I start inner child work? And would I start with the adaptive child, or would I go to the abandoned child? I’ve done abandoned child work. That’s what I mean. When we talked last time, I’ve done some of the inner child work on the abandoned child, but I haven’t done it on the adaptive child.

Terry: Yeah. Let me ask you a question. I want you to be as honest as you’ve been, okay? Not in this relationship, but in your previous relationship where you were married to your mother. When your partner would abandon you, what did you do? How did you respond?

JJ: Well, I taught law of attraction, so I utilized that I would take my…what would you call the adult brain?

Terry: Wise adult.

JJ: My wise adult. When I would first get triggered, early on, when we would fight and I noticed my defensiveness, I went and did therapy and did EMDR to work on “If I’m feeling defensive, then what’s my trigger?” So, I worked on those, and decreasing those, so I was calmer and more peaceful. And then I implemented all of my law of attraction tools to literally live in a different frequency. I lived in a different reality, so that when we didn’t have a connection and he was abandoning me, I went high. And maybe I might have cried or gotten upset or dealt with any feelings that came up, but honestly, it got decreased. And again, the gap became really wide, because I lived a happy life that most of my clients or people had no idea what was going on.

Terry: Right.

JJ: Because I literally lived in a different frequency of knowing, 100% in every cell of my being, because I always thought, “I’m going to get the relationship that I want because I don’t know anyone that wants it more than me, because of all the work I had done.”

Terry: Okay.

JJ: So I lived in that state.

Terry: So you were in recovery for a large part of that marriage. That’s recovery. That’s living out of your wise adult, prefrontal cortex. I’ll bet that when you were younger, the answer would have been “I would have gotten angry and gone after him.”

JJ: Yell. And when I did some core wound work, all the pattern was… How did I respond? I yelled, and taught them, and tried to teach them. I yelled and tried to teach them. I yelled and tried to teach them.

Terry: Yeah, angry teaching.

JJ: Yes.

Terry: An oxymoron, if ever there was one.

JJ: Right.

Terry: Right. So, that’s your adaptive child, and that was your losing strategy. That’s the relational stance. That’s what we call your relational stance that you would repeat over and over again, and it would never get you what you wanted. Angry teaching is an oxymoron. It will never get you what you want. And ask your adaptive child. Were you still doing that, I would have you sit down and write a letter to that little girl. First of all, how old do you think that angry little girl in you is?

JJ: That’s a very good question that I don’t know. I would say…

Terry: Just make it up.

JJ: Maybe fifth or sixth grade. What is that?

Terry: Yeah, 11-12.

JJ: Yeah.

Terry: Yeah. That sounds about right.

JJ: Okay. So, write a letter to my 11- or 12-year-old?

Terry: Yes.

JJ: Okay. And what’s in this letter? What am I writing to her?

Terry: There are four parts to it.

JJ: Okay. Part number one?

Terry: I cover this in the “Staying in Love” course in detail. Part number one. Ready?

JJ: Yep.

Terry: This is to your adaptive child, not your wounded child. Dear… What would you call her? Not JJ. What would you call her? You’re 11. What would you call her? Not somebody else.

JJ: Well, I don’t want to tell you what I’m going to call her. It’s not just you. I don’t want to say it publicly. Let’s just say I would call her what my parents used to call me, like a loving name. She used to sing to me and call me a certain… I have to think about which one I’d use, but I’d use one of those names. I know you want me to give you a name right now, but I can’t think of it right now. Okay, so let’s just say “Dear…”

Terry: Dear so and so.

JJ: Yeah.

Terry: There are four parts to this letter. Here’s the first one. “Thank you. You saved my ass. You got me angry. If you hadn’t gotten me angry, oh my god.” Right?

JJ: Mm-hmm.

Terry: “So, this is the way that you protected me.” See, I always teach my students, and I want everybody listening, to respect the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child part of you. “You did just what you needed to do to survive. So, thank you. I’m so glad that you got angry. This is what I imagine would have happened to me if you hadn’t: I’d just be overwhelmed. I’d be in a [35:46]. I’d still be chasing after men who don’t want me. Good for you that you got pissed off and mobilized.” Two. “These are the gifts you have given me.” So, let’s go through that. Name some of the gifts that angry 11-year-old…

JJ: Having a voice, having a passion, feeling empowered, knowing there were tools, asking questions, being curious.

Terry: Oh my god. Look at all those gifts. In fact, I doubt that you’d be on this podcast right now if it weren’t for your adaptive child.

JJ: Absolutely. I would not be interested in healing the world and empowering others if I didn’t come from a disempowered person who also didn’t necessarily know how to empower me.

Terry: Yeah. Okay. Anything else? Any other gifts?

JJ: I just rattled off, like, five.

Terry: I know. That’s an extraordinary list. Okay. And let me ask you. In your mind’s eye, how are you feeling toward that 11-year-old you as you rattle off these gifts that she gave you?

JJ: At peace. Very appreciate. And when you said the respect, the intelligence. What did you say, that exact phrase?

Terry: Respect the exquisite intelligence of the adaptive child.

JJ: So, those words… I had a therapist once, my last therapist, who I really liked for a lot of reasons. But it wasn’t going to be like a long-term thing, because I came in like I am, and I basically had a lot of stuff done, so I was kind of fast. And we did a lot of EMDR and hypnosis. But because she comes from a scholarly family who does ADD testing and brain testing and stuff, she really always felt very… I could feel her love for me. She felt bad for me. She felt sad for me that I didn’t have parents who could reflect me back to me. And she labeled me as gifted from the get-go. And so, that was sort of our relationship. But she’s a Taurus and I’m a Pisces, and she would say things like “Sometimes I think you go too far outside of yourself.” And as a Taurus, that was a very Taurus thing to say. But I explained to her, and I said, “Well, when I go in, then it doesn’t have the perspective. When I go out and I’m connected to all that is, if I’m in my true sense of my right brain, on the emotional side, I’m at peace.” So, when you say that phrase, there’s peace there. So, I like that because it has purpose. It has meaning. It is all connected. It wasn’t a mistake. And I know it’s not. I know I chose my parents. I know that, on a soul level. But that was a really good sentence. That felt really nice.That felt really grounded. That felt really expansive.

Terry: All right. Good. Now we move to three.

JJ: Yep.

Terry: You ready?

JJ: Yep.

Terry: Take a breath. I want you to feel this. “This is what you’ve caused me.”

JJ: You’re just determined to break me on my show. “This is what you caused me.” Okay. I’m going to resist you a little bit. If this was a therapy session, I would have been crying 20 minutes ago. But I’m going to keep it together a little here. I cry enough on my show. I’m kidding. “This is what you caused me.” So, you caused me a marriage because I chose someone like you, because I didn’t know how to model that. You caused me time and feeling like a broken person most of my life, who felt not (okay, here it comes) accepted and weird. You caused me self-respect for a long time in a lot of ways. You caused me fibroids for lack of self-expression and sexual expression, and the idea that I didn’t have any models for healthy sexual energy, and for receiving, and for learning how to receive, and respecting myself at a level that feels right, and for not overgiving, because boy, did I just even do that last week. I thought, “What the hell did I just do? Why did I just spend all day cooking for people that don’t give a shit and aren’t going to love me more because of it?” And I see it, and it’s happening.

And I’ll go through this, and I’ll do more of this, in the essence of time and not completely losing my shit right now. I hope you’re all writing this down because this is the work you need to do in your relationships, whether it be in your marriage, because it will rear its ugly head if you don’t. And that’s why we’re doing this, because I want you all to do this. Because we’re doing it right now, and you’re hearing my story. And just go through it and do the same thing for you. Okay. What’s number four?

Terry: Number four. “I’m here now.” The wise adult. “And I can take care of both of us. And from now on, what that’s going to look like is…” Take it away.

JJ: Okay, that one is going to have to wait a second.I promise I will do it.

Terry: Take your time.

JJ: “I am here now. And from now, what I’m going to do is…” Well, again, because I literally have been working on this in my mind every day since this, I’ve made lots of decisions. What I’m going to do now is always check in with myself first before doing anything, and asking if I’m doing this because I’m trying to get something or if I’m expecting something. And if it’s love, or if it’s attention or connection, to seek it from myself first.

Terry: Beautiful.

JJ: To stop performing for love. That is what I’m going to stop doing. I’m going to stop overgiving. I’m going to stop trying to rescue people or help them beyond what they can see for themselves. I’ve discovered that I’m more of a mentor than I’m a coach. I do coaching, but I’m more of a mentor, because I have vision and I can see things for people they can’t see for themselves. But I also can’t make them do it. And I can lead the horse to water, but make them drink. So, really leaning into that, and acknowledging that, and specializing that in a new way helps me to say I don’t want to work with someone who isn’t willing to love themselves more. And that’s a definitive line for me to change that. So, what I’m going to do, moving forward from here, is also just to make sure that I’m always coming from love and having compassion, which I do. I teach. I teach astrology to help compassion. And I teach all the psychological stuff so people can have perspective on how others are different from you, so that you can always have compassion for yourself and others. But JJ needs to give it to herself a little bit more. I do pretty well. And in fact, I’d say I do better than a lot of people. But it still isn’t enough, and it still isn’t to the amount that I know I can, that will really be self-honoring. So, for me, it’s decisions from a self-honoring first and self-love first, so that I can fill my own cup, so I have stuff for the rest of you.

Terry: How you doing?

JJ: Good. I want to crack open, and I want to go down this line, but again, in the essence of time and the show, and not being a blubbering, crying mess for the next 20 minutes, which I could be and acknowledge that, and I will when we’re done. And I appreciate that. Thank you for working with me. And everybody witnessing this, yes, it was JJ’s therapy session to take you through the steps and to also demonstrate how to do this. Because now that I have your steps, I will go do this. And I will even have witness. I’ll have Doug ask me the steps. And I’ll do it verbally. I’ll do it written. I’ll do it in all the ways until I can really let go of… And it’s funny because I’ve had some chest/breast discomfort for, like, two weeks that I think is something different than hormones. And I looked it up in my Messages from the Body, and it had to do with overgiving. And then, of course, it’s heart chakra, and it’s lungs. When you said grief, I was like, “Yeah.” I don’t have any lung issues, but I have this painright here that’s only started since I was back there. And I thought, “Oh, I haven’t really grieved completely.” I cried for, like, two full days, but I didn’t do this work of the acknowledgment, of the whole picture, of taking the full circle with this. And so, I appreciate this, and I hope this was helpful for everybody.

And I just want to speak to two things. One, Terry is coming back on the show in a couple of months because of his new book coming out called “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.” And we’re going to talk about that book and the work he’s doing in that book. But I want to go back to this inner child work to kind of cap off, so everybody can know exactly how to use it and where to use it. So, is it that we’re recommending people take this letter and these four parts in their adaptive child only, or is it something to go back even further into? Because some of them don’t know the difference, and they’ve never worked with anybody, so they don’t know how to identify that. What would your advice be to them if they wanted to take this and apply it to themselves?

Terry: Well, it’s a two-step process. First, ask yourself, “What do I feel when I get triggered? What’s the wound?” And the wound will take you to the young one. And then the next question is, “And how do I react when I get wounded like that?” And the reaction will take you to the adaptive child. Got that?

JJ: Yep. And then the letter is to be done…?

Terry: The letter is for the adaptive child, not the wounded child.

JJ: Okay. And can we speak to the power of how this can transform a relationship, and how this may fit into, or when it could, or when it should?

Terry: Let me tell you a story. You know I like to tell stories. I may have said this last time because this is one I always use, but it’s so clear. I had a guy on the brink of divorce. That’s my beep. People fly in to see me on the brink of divorce, and I’m the last stop. Now it’s Zoom, but I’m the last stop. Anyway, I had a guy on the brink of divorce because he was a liar. He lied about everything. His wife said, “Ask him what kind of shoes he’s wearing, and he’ll tell you they’re sneakers.” He just lies about everything. Okay. So, there are three phases in relational life therapy. The first is caring, loving confrontation with what you’re doing to blow your foot off. In your case, JJ, it would be angry teaching. I would confront you, and I would say, “Listen, angrily teaching somebody will never get you what you want. It just won’t do it.” So, identify the thing that you keep doing. Then we take it back into your family. Where did you learn to do this?

So, this guy was a liar. He lied about everything. So, I’ve been at this for a while. I have a saying: “Show me the thumbprint. I’ll tell you about the thumb.” So, this guy is a liar. And when I would speak with him, he was enormously evasive. He was like a definist. So, I put those two together, and I said to him, “Who tried to control you growing up?” That’s the adaptation. If he’s got a black belt in evasion, who was he trying to evade? It’s always in relationship to someone. Sure enough, his father was a military man. How he ate, how he slept, his friends, his clothes, his posture, everything. He was all over this kid as a boy. I said, “How did you cope with your intrusive, controlling father?” And he stopped, and he gave me a big smile, and then he said, “I lied. I learned to lie to my father. I gave to my father what was my father’s, and I gave to me what was me. I was a straight A student. I went to church. But I also smoked a little weed, and drank a lot, and hung out with girls. I had a secret life that he had nothing to do with.” I said, “That was brilliant. You preserved your autonomy from your controlling father by lying.” But I have a saying: “Adaptive then, maladaptive now.” You’re not that little boy. Your wife is not your father.

So, they come back about two weeks later, and they’re all smiles. And the guy says, “We’re all done. We solved our problem.” I say, “Okay, there’s a story here. Tell me the story.” He says, “Wife says I’m off to the grocery store with a list.” And in true form, he came back with, like, 11 of the 12 things on the list. And she says to him, “Where’s the milk?” And he said, “Every muscle and nerve in my body was screaming to tell my wife they were out of it. And instead, I took a breath, I screwed my courage to the sticking post, I looked at my wife, and I said, ‘I forgot the milk.’ And she burst into tears.” And she said, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for 25 years,” which she had been.

He moved beyond his adapt child into his wise adult in that moment of second consciousness when he caught himself about to do the automatic same old, same old, as your adaptive child, and deliberately chose something more mature, more intimate, more functional. That’s recovery. That’s what recovery looks like. But he had to understand that little boy who lied, and make peace with him before he could stop lying. Just sitting there, going “Don’t lie. Don’t lie. Don’t lie,” that’s not going to do it. You have to embrace these children, understand them, and then contain them. I like to say, when an inner child kicks up, you want to put him in your lap, you want to listen to them and love them, and you want to take their sticky hands off the steering wheel. They’re not running the relationship. You are. You get in the backseat. You’re demoted. That’s the rhythm of working with an inner child. “Love ya. Hear ya. In the backseat.”

When my wife Belinda and I fight, and I say this to all the people I work with, and it’s absolutely true. We’re both fighters. We both come from raging families. And when Belinda comes at me with anger in a fight, I take little Terry (I have about an eight-year-old composite. I know him very well) and I put him behind me. He holds on to my shirt. And I make a deal with him. “Between Belinda’s rage and you is me, my big grown-up body. I’m like Superman. I’ll take the blast, and you’re completely at peace and safe back there. That’s my part of the deal. Here’s your part of the deal. You let me deal with Belinda. Don’t you try and deal with her. You’ll make a mess with things.” And that’s recovery. That’s what recovery work looks like over and over again. First, you feel the whoosh, and then you take a breath, and you choose to do something different than your automatic response. That’s a moment of grace. That’s what we’re after. Cultivating more and more of those moments is what recovery looks like.

JJ: And this four-step process, and more, I’m sure, is in your online course?

Terry: Yes, it’s in the course, “Staying in Love,” and more elaborate.

JJ: And you can get that at terryreal.com. All of the links will be in the show notes, as well as a quiz. It’s a relationship quiz to sort of take check into where you are and what you need. That’s free. And then take a look around at some of the other things that Terry has. And he’s going to be back on. And actually, you can pre-order. If you’re ready and you have all of his books already, it’s called “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.” You can pre-order it on Amazon right now. It won’t officially be out until…

Terry: March 22nd.

JJ: March 22nd. So, please, make sure to get that. Again, the pre-order link will be in the show notes. Anything else? Terry, thank you. I didn’t expect this to turn into my therapy session, but I just couldn’t help, with what had just happened to me, use that as an example in terms of knowing that when I’m shown, and when you’re shown, the mirror, because you’re getting reflected back to what you’re putting out there and what’s still true for you, if you don’t take care of this, it will affect all your relationships. It will affect your business. It will affect your relationships. And so, this inner child work, while it can be done individually (you don’t have to be in a relationship), it’s so important in a relationship. When I was watching that Couples Therapy last night, I just saw their inner children just fighting. And again, I was frustrated with the idea that we’re not identifying that straight away, and giving some really quick information, and assessing things. They were continuing the conversation. It’s like, “This is irrelevant right now.” It doesn’t matter what these details are because they’re not important. We have to get the framework underneath fixed in order for this to change and shift. And so, I was lovingly and excitingly frustrated, and I’m now going to take a lot of notes watching this show.

I want to make sure everyone gets connected with you through terryreal.com. Get your book. Get the pre-order for the book. I know I’m getting mine. I have one copy already. I’m getting ready to get your hard copy. I’m excited. And we’re going to talk in depth about that. Do you want to give a little preview for people who are listening right now about what some of the key elements of this book in our next conversation are going to entail?

Terry: The book is about the culture of individualism and what individualism has done to ruin our relationships at multiple levels: with ourselves, with our bodies, with one another, between races in society, and with the planet. There is a core delusion of individualism and patriarchy, which is that we are individuals (which isn’t true), that we are apart from nature (which isn’t true), and that we can dominate and control nature. None of that is true. And they’re all very dangerous delusions. Once you start operating with the power and control model instead of a collaborative, interdependent model, you’re done. And that’s true if you’re trying to control your thoughts (“Oh, I won’t be…”), your body (“I got to lose 10 pounds”), your kids, your partner, the planet, if you’re feeling superior to another group. That’s all part of what I call the big lie. And this book is about coming out of that big lie into us, into the realization that our relationships, our biosphere, we’re not above them. We’re in them. And the wisdom of operating with that level of interdependence and humility changes everything (how we speak, how we listen, how we feel about ourselves), changes our relationship to nature and the planet entire. So, it’s really about shifting our paradigm, and then a set of very concrete tools that follow from that shift, from power and control to collaboration and interdependence.

JJ: Well, I’m looking forward to our next conversation, and it will be less JJ therapy, I promise everyone. Not that I think it was a problem for you. Hopefully, you learned something. And you’re welcome for me being an example and being vulnerable for you. So, Terry, thank you for being here again. I look forward to our next conversation. And everyone, check out terryreal.com.

Terry: Always a joy. Thank you, JJ.