Intimacy as the Antidote to Autocracy

You cannot love from the one-up, superior; you cannot love from the one-down, inferior. Love demands democracy.” —Carol Gilligan

“So, this is it,” Maria muses, crossing her legs and taking in my office—the books, the art—I can’t tell if she’s unimpressed by my décor or if she means I’m the last stop before divorce. Probably both.

Maria is a sharp, self-made Latina who fought her way up from, as she puts it, “a shit-kicker town halfway between San Antonio and Corpus Christi” to the C-suite of a Dallas oil company. She’s smart, successful—and done with her husband.

“I fell for Lloyd right off ’cause I knew he was even more of a hellraiser than me,” Maria says, not looking at the tall, pale “drink of water” beside her—boots, jeans, cowboy hat perched on his bobbing knee. “What I didn’t get then is he’s also industrial-strength meaner than I’ll ever be.” She leans back, arms folded: “And that is why we’re here.”

“Lloyd,” I begin, “I’d like to check in…”

“Thing is,” Lloyd brushes me off, eyes fixed on the floor, “we’ve been to several … uh, counselors,” he says like it’s a foreign word. “Can’t say much changed.”

“What would you like to see changed?”

“Me? I’m fine. I just want Maria to be happy.”

“How’s that goin’?” I ask.

He half-smiles. “Guess we’re here, ain’t we?”

Lloyd’s no fool. From rural Louisiana, he built and sold three companies, hoping to take a fourth public. Warm at work, he’s a tyrant at home—yelling, sometimes throwing things. “Just meanness,” Maria says.

In Relational Life Therapy (RLT), we say, Generic weak, specific strong. So when a partner calls someone “mean,” I go after specifics. They’re the arrows I’ll need in my quiver for later confrontation. “Give me an example,” I ask.

“Sure,” she says. “Last week, our son Bobby stayed at the lake house with friends. At breakfast, Lloyd tells them, ‘Step forward, all those lookin’ to get laid tonight—not you, Bobby, you’re a loser.’”

“You said this?” I ask.

Lloyd shrugs. “Kidding around.” Even he doesn’t sound convinced. And now, instead of arguing about meanness, we’re dealing with a fact—much harder to dismiss.

“How do you respond, Maria?”

Maria sighs. “I used to scurry around. Get the food on the table, keep the kids well-behaved. Don’t set Dad off.”

“You’ve been to three therapists before me,” I say. “So, if this doesn’t work?”

She shakes her head. Silence.

“But you’d rather this did work,” I offer. “You’d rather keep the family intact if you can.”

Maria nods, cautiously. “If I can.”

I look at Lloyd, who appears dejected, but he doesn’t argue. “I lose my shit,” he allows, “when I see her kids disrespecting their mother.”

“Her kids?” I interrupt.

He corrects himself: “Our kids.”

“And if I were to ask them, my friend,” I say, “I wonder where they’d say they learned that?”

Lloyd starts to speak, then closes his mouth. Silence again. His jaw tightens.

Good catch, Lloyd, I think. I might actually be able to help you.

Becoming “The Turnaround Guy”

Let me tell you how I arrived here, sitting with the Marias and Lloyds of this world, couples on the brink of divorce that no one else had been able to help.

Back in the mid-’90s, I published I Don’t Want to Talk About It—the first book ever written about male depression, a disorder then seen as primarily affecting women. I’m proud of my role in bringing men’s depression—different from women’s in both the way it manifests and in its etiology—into public awareness.

There are millions of depressed men in the U.S., so as one can imagine, the book was popular. And I began getting calls from all over the country—some from men, more from their partners—asking if there was someone nearby who did the kind of work I described. For some, the depression itself was the problem. For most, its manifestation—the drinking, affairs, rage, or withdrawal—had pushed the marriage into crisis.

At first, I referred them out. Then one day, I thought, Why not invite them to Boston? So couples began flying in for what became my two-day relational interventions. And at the end of those two days, we’d decide if they were back on track or getting a divorce. This was the end of the line.

I noticed two things off the back of these interventions. First, they were remarkably effective. Couples weren’t “fixed” (they all went home with treatment plans), but roughly 19 out of 20 came back from the ledge. Something was working—and dramatically so.

Second, I broke nearly every rule I’d learned in school about couples therapy. I took sides. I judiciously self-disclosed. I told my clients the difficult truths about their behavior right out the gate—just as I did with Lloyd.

Like Maria and Lloyd, most couples who wind up in my office have seen multiple other therapists (the record so far is eight), and none has been able to help them. Because when you’re sitting across from someone like Lloyd—resistant, entitled, defensive—the traditional approach of neutrality and nurture just doesn’t cut through. In cases like this, we need to focus less on nurture and more on truth.

I began articulating what was working so effectively in these interventions, and what emerged was the foundation of RLT, which uniquely combines three phases of treatment—loving confrontation, deep trauma work, and skill-building—to produce profound, rapid, permanent change in the relationship and in the characters of the people within it.

Phase One: Loving Confrontation

I was taught, especially when dealing with grandiose clients, that you first form an alliance—and then maybe, sometimes years later, you dare to confront them. In RLT, we form the alliance by confronting them up front. But it takes skill. Anyone can clobber someone with the truth. We do it in a way that’s so accurate and loving that clients feel closer to us, rather than recoiling.

I call this joining through the truth. It’s healthy self-esteem in therapeutic action: the ability to feel proportionately bad about bad behavior while still holding yourself in warm regard as a flawed human being. You’re a good person who’s behaved badly, not a bad person who needs fixing.

When I confronted Lloyd about his words—“Her kids?”—I wasn’t shaming him; I was inviting him back into integrity. I’m not saying, “You’re cruel.” I’m saying, “You can do better. Will you let me rescue the real you from this mess?” Who says no to that?

Daring to Take Sides. I learned very early on that not all couples are 50/50. For every couple that is, there are five or six that are 70/30 or 80/20—one partner holds the power; the other walks on eggshells.

Yet traditional family therapy treats all problems as equal. Is it fair to ask an abused spouse what their “contribution” to the dynamic is? No, it’s grotesque. That’s why in RLT, we take sides. We confront the offensive partner as many times as it takes to get through. And when we do, the other partner almost always cries with relief. They’ve dragged their impossible mate to several therapists, and no one’s taken them on. We do—and in doing so, we’ve saved thousands of relationships.

Treating the “Untreatable.” We don’t shy away from working with the “narcissistic” partners that popular opinion writes off as hopeless. The current advice seems to be: if your spouse is narcissistic, get out. I disagree—as a couples therapist, one of the banes of my existence is individual therapists empowering clients out of potentially workable relationships.

What most call narcissism, RLT calls grandiose and selfish. Narcissistic personality disorder is like us handing them a mental-health death sentence. Saying they’re grandiose and selfish gives us leverage for change.

I do agree that highly grandiose people rarely change in individual therapy. But that’s not a reason to deem them untreatable, rather to rethink how we’re treating them. RLT treats “the untreatable”—but not in individual therapy.

Why? Because, as I came to understand after I Don’t Want to Talk About It, the wound in many men is disconnection, and the healing move is reconnection. I began doing couples therapy to treat these men because where better to restore connection than in the crucible of their own relationship?

Yet traditional psychotherapy closes the door and tries to heal people through their relationship with the therapist. I’m less interested in clients having a corrective emotional experience with me than in them having ongoing corrective experiences multiple times a day with their own families.

To understand how we help them do that, let’s consider the different characteristics of shame and grandiosity.

Shame vs. Grandiosity. Shame feels bad; you’re motivated to get out of it. The problem with grandiosity is that it feels good. Yelling at your boss, having that third martini, losing restraint—it all feels good in the moment but makes a mess of your life. The psychiatrist George Vaillant said there are two kinds of people: the one who gets in an elevator and turns green from claustrophobia, and the one who lights up a cigar and makes everyone else turn green. Implosion and explosion—shame and grandiosity. Grandiose people aren’t in pain; they’re in trouble. The people around them are in pain.

If you were to ask the person smoking the cigar if they realize everyone else is coughing and spluttering, odds are they’ll say, “Well, they’re wimps. Not my problem.” Because the more grandiose someone is, the more their judgment and empathy are impaired. Grandiosity specifically impairs a correct assessment of negative consequences and sense of what they’re doing to those around them.

So how do we motivate someone who doesn’t think they have a problem?

We bring in the other people in the elevator.

Bringing in the System: Data and Leverage. Working with grandiose clients means focusing on truth—and you don’t get to that truth in one-to-one therapy. Bringing in partners (and sometimes children) provides the data and leverage you need. Because if you’re going to join through the truth, you need an accurate truth to join through.

Think back to Lloyd. All he would give me was “I’m alright,” but with Maria there, we got the data I needed—specific examples of his behavior toward her and the kids.

And once we have the data, we find leverage—the motivation the grandiose partner needs to change. We do that by empowering the non-grandiose (“one-down”) partner to stand up to the grandiose (“one-up”). One-down partners often deliver their one-up partners to us to fix. We will—but with them, not for them. I will go out on a limb with you. I’ll affirm what you’re saying. But if I do it alone, your partner will saw off that limb.

Here’s the ten-thousand-dollar question for the one-down partner: “What’s going to happen if this therapy doesn’t work?” Their answer is your leverage.

We use both negative and positive leverage. Negative leverage is what I can help prevent—divorce, estrangement from your kids. Positive leverage is what I can help you gain—a happier partner, a longer life, that you won’t damage your children the way you were damaged. That last one is often the most powerful.

Deconstructing Patriarchy, One Couple at a Time. In RLT, we want the weak to stand up and the mighty to melt. We do this by empowering the one-down partner to speak up and inviting the one-up partner to connect and come down. And, when that happens, we’re deconstructing patriarchy.

What do I mean by that? Traditional psychotherapy doesn’t take on one-up offenders because, under patriarchy, they’re protected. You don’t tell truth to power. And our field reflects the individualistic, anti-relational bias of the culture at large and replicates the mores of patriarchy.

Under the rubric of winning trust, we therapists replicate the disempowered partner role—cajoling, reasoning, nurturing, everything but putting our foot down. Just like a traditional partner does. And we get about as far as they did, too.

Why do we do that? Because we’re afraid three things will happen if we confront them: that they will retaliate, leave, or fall apart and it will be our fault. These are the same fears the disempowered partner has under patriarchy.

If you confront a grandiose person without knowing what you’re doing, those things may happen. But there are more sophisticated ways of getting through. In RLT, we’re not so intimidated by the force of grandiosity because we have leverage. We can move in and connect with them. It’s one of the great contributions of our model.

Phase Two: Deep Trauma Work

Once we have the truth on the table—the grandiose partner’s difficult behavior and the other’s reaction to it (think Maria’s long over-accommodation that eventually swung into under-accommodation), we move to trauma work. To do that, we ask three questions: Who did you see do this? Who did this to you? Who did you do it to, and no one stopped you?

Most trauma work in our field is done behind closed doors—another example of psychotherapy’s saturation with individualism. In RLT, we do trauma work with your partner sitting next to you. It opens their heart. They live with the trauma reaction. Now they get to see where it comes from and, often for the first time, have compassion for it.

There are some contraindications—active acting-out, addictions, or if we believe your partner will use your vulnerability against you—but 99 percent of the time, we do it in the couples context.

The Three Parts of the Psyche. My colleague Gabor Maté says, “In relationships, you seldom see the wound; you see the scar.” As couples therapists, our focus is primarily on the Adaptive Child—the scarred, reactive part. The part that learned to adapt, that you brought into your relationship, thinking it’s an adult, but it’s not. It’s subcortical, automatic: fight, flight, or fawn (fix).

The Wise Adult is your prefrontal cortex—the part able to stop, think, and choose.

The problem is that when the heat is on, you’re in your Adaptive Child, so if we just teach you skills, that part will throw them out the window. I like to say other therapies teach you skills; in RLT, we deal with the part of you who won’t use them.

Relational Mindfulness. Relational Mindfulness is the first skill: moving from your Adaptive Child to your Wise Adult.

The spiritual teacher, Thomas Hübl, says, “To observe is to have choice.” The same part of the brain that can observe is the one that can choose. The hallmark of the Adaptive Child is that it’s automatic and compulsive: If you’re a fighter, “I’ve got to stand up for myself.” If you’re a fleer, “I’ve got to shut this down.” If you’re a fixer, “I’ve got to make this better.”

We always respect the intelligence of the Adaptive Child. It kept you safe—you did what you needed to survive. But what was adaptive then is maladaptive now. Through trauma work, we help clients re-parent their inner child parts over and over. This is relational work rather than release work: it’s an ongoing practice of moving from automatic reactivity to centered, thoughtful choice. The part of you who can say, “I don’t need to fight, flee, or fix. Let me just be here.” And the beauty is, this skill can be cultivated and strengthened.

The Road to Recovery. A man once came to me on the brink of divorce—a chronic liar. The kind of guy who, if I said, “The sky is blue,” would answer, “Well, it’s aquamarine.” I quickly saw that his Adaptive Child had a black belt in evasion. Show me the thumbprint and I’ll tell you about the thumb: if you have a black belt in evasion, who were you evading?

I asked, “Who tried to control you growing up?”

“My father,” he said. A military man—how he sat, ate, drank, everything.

“How did you deal with this controlling father?”

He smiled—the smile of resistance—and said, “I lied.” Brilliant little boy. You did exactly what you needed to do to preserve your integrity. But adaptive then, maladaptive now. You’re not that four-year-old boy, and your wife is not your father.

Two weeks later, they returned, holding hands. “We’re cured!” they declared. She’d sent him to the grocery store for 12 things. True to form, he came back with 11. “Where’s the pumpernickel?” she asked.

He told me, “Every muscle and nerve in my body was screaming to say they were out of it. In that moment, I thought of you, Terry. I took a breath, looked at my wife, and said, ‘I forgot.’”

His wife burst into tears and said, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for 25 years.”

In that moment—when he borrowed my prefrontal cortex, my Wise Adult, and said, “I forgot”—that’s recovery.

Phase Three: Skill-Building

Once your Adaptive Child is calm enough that you don’t get overwhelmed every time you’re triggered, we arm your Wise Adult with skills.

It’s almost downright abusive to tell someone what they’re doing wrong and then ask, “What do you think you should do about it?” If they knew, they wouldn’t be coming to you!

So, we teach fundamental relationship skills. How to speak up with love, not harshness. How to lean into your inner critic and say, “Please don’t speak to me like that.” How to make a genuine apology, how to repair. The essential—but rarely taught—skills for sustaining intimacy.

We don’t assume you know these things—or that once we heal the trauma wounds, people instinctively know how to be intimate. You have to learn. As I tell my clients: intimacy isn’t something you have; it’s something you do. And you can learn to do it better.

I’m thrilled to say Maria and Lloyd learned. In a later session, they resolved a fight they’d been having for a decade: her anxiety about his driving. “You’re reckless,” she’d say. “You’re overly nervous,” he’d shoot back. Ten years of that loop.
Here’s how they sounded by the end:

Maria: “Honey, I know you love me. Maybe I am overly nervous, but when you drive 10 miles above the speed limit and weave through traffic, I get scared. You don’t want me petrified every time we drive together. When you’re by yourself, drive how you like. But when I’m in the car, as a favor to me, could you please slow down and drive more conservatively?”

Lloyd: “Well, of course I can.”

What Maria demonstrated is a skill we call loving power—speaking up for yourself in a way that cherishes your partner and the relationship. Her opening—“Honey, I know you love me”—instantly changed the energy. Instead of his usual defensiveness, Lloyd could hear her.

She stayed in her own experience (“I’m nervous,”) rather than blaming him, and made an explicit request: “As a favor to me?” She took away the guesswork and showed him what right looks like.

Learning to Live Relationally. We’ve never wanted more from our relationships. Gone are the companionship marriages of our grandparents’ generation. Now we want to be lifelong lovers. But the deeper I’ve gone with this work, the clearer it’s become that traditional psychotherapy replicates the very systems that prevent us realizing that ambition—patriarchy and individualism.

Regardless of your gender, patriarchy is the water we’re all swimming in. Political patriarchy is the oppression of women by men. I’m talking about psychological patriarchy: the dynamic of patriarchy that can take place between two women, two men, a mother and a child, two races. Trauma treatment expert Pia Mellody called it “The Great Lie” that someone could be superior or inferior to anyone else.

Under patriarchy, the essence of traditional masculinity is invulnerability, but you can’t be intimate and invulnerable at the same time. The tradition for women has been resentful accommodation. And for some, feminism brought a swing to the masculine side of the binary—into individual empowerment, which is strong, but again blocks intimacy. It’s: I was weak, now I’m strong, go screw yourself.

Loving power breaks patriarchy. It’s: I was weak, now I’m strong, let’s work together. I love you. This is what I need. What do you need from me to deliver? This is a new language and a new energy—one that goes beyond our culture and beyond the field of psychotherapy itself.

Just as we must help clients move beyond patriarchy to achieve intimacy, we as a field must move beyond colluding with individualism and take an explicit stand for relationality.

Our Relationships Are Our Biospheres. RLT teaches people to live relational lives. That means correcting what the father of family therapy, Gregory Bateson, called “humankind’s epistemological error”—the belief that we stand apart from nature and above it.

Whether the “nature” we’re trying to control is our partner, kids, bodies, or minds, RLT replaces that illusion with ecological wisdom. You’re not above the system, below it, or outside it. My friend, you’re in it.

Our relationships are our biospheres. It’s in our enlightened self-interest to do what our biosphere needs. If you’re one-up, your biosphere needs you to come down and connect. If you’re one-down, it needs you to stand up and speak up.

When you start thinking ecologically—relationally—new possibilities open up. “Who’s right and who’s wrong?” becomes “Who cares? Instead, let’s work as a team to build something that works for both of us.”

My wish for anyone reading this is to empower you. This is not a time for therapists to be faint-hearted or passive. We are relationship experts—intimacy merchants. The antidote to dominance and autocracy is interdependence, relationality, and cooperation. The political is very personal, and the personal is political.

Every good therapist, no matter what denomination, is a social activist. Intimacy is the antidote to autocracy. Every time we lead a couple, family, or work team out of conflict and into the functional closeness we all deserve we are, intrinsically, offering nothing less than a reconfiguration of traditional gender roles and a movement beyond the mores of individualism and patriarchy. I’d like to see us own that as a field.

Neurobiology teaches us that a neural pathway can miraculously open if two factors present themselves, the implicit must be made explicit and there must be a collision—some sort of discomfirming evidence, or experience. I would like our profession to transform. I’d like us to make our invitation to move beyond patriarchy explicit and stand in the simple but profound truth that intimacy and dominance don’t mix.

If we’re agents of intimacy, then we’re agents of change. Rather than quietly, and perhaps a bit timidly, working this magic as individual practitioners behind our closed doors, let’s support each other as a living community. Let’s stand together in whatever wisdom our training, our experience, and our own hard-won journeys have afforded us. Our superpower is one another.