This brilliant book has only recently been published and is already a bestseller, unsurprisingly. So much of therapy is about reprogramming the unhelpful things we’ve absorbed since childhood. ‘Us’ helps dismantle the unhelpful things we’ve learned about relationships with others and with ourselves.
Terry Real (aptronym!), founder of the Relational Life Institute, is a relationship therapist who breaks from convention in his client work- he is direct, ‘calls people out’ on their behaviour and unapologetically takes sides. In this book he explains why our culture of toxic individualism (what he terms “you and me consciousness”) damages bonds between partners and deftly offers practical tools for transforming relationships with the thriving intimacy found in close, connected, collaborative couplehood.
I prefer to learn from rather than live in the past but on first reading this book, instantly relatable standout moments ‘Full Respect Living’, ‘Normal Marital Hatred’, ‘Fierce Intimacy’ and ‘You Cannot Love from Above or Below’ make me wish I’d had access to this teaching many years ago.