This Tantric Life with Layla Martin

This Therapist Taught Me How to Go from Hot Mess to Girlfriend of the Year

8 snips
Oct 19, 2025
Terry Real, an acclaimed family therapist and bestselling author, shares insights on relational dynamics and intimacy. He introduces his trauma-informed grid and discusses how self-esteem affects relationships. Terry emphasizes the difference between relational empowerment and individual empowerment for stronger connections. Listeners gain valuable boundary practices and participate in an inner-child exercise to heal abandonment issues. Terry also explains how relationships serve as ecological systems that require mutual nurturing, fostering deeper understanding and connection.
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INSIGHT

Relationships Are Our Biosphere

  • Relationships are our biosphere and you live inside them, not outside them.
  • If one partner 'wins' the other loses because you function as an ecosystem.
INSIGHT

Health Lies In The Self-Esteem Center

  • Healthy self-esteem sits in the center of a vertical axis between shame and grandiosity.
  • Intimacy requires being neither one-up nor one-down but centered in equal worth.
ADVICE

Choose Loving Firmness Over Harshness

  • Avoid harshness because it never has redeeming value and always harms connection.
  • Use loving firmness instead: be firm without cruelty to get results without violence.
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