The National Healthy Masculinity Conversation Series
Conversation #3
“A Mental Health Approach to Primary Prevention: Exploring the Intersections of Healthy Masculinity and Self-Esteem”
The third conversation featured:
Terry Real, founder of the Relational Life Institute (RLI) Jeremy Hardy from MCSR
What happens when we as a culture tell boys to “man up”? Those who work closely with boys and men—parents, teachers, therapists, youth serving professionals—can see first-hand how the pressure to be a “real man” tethers their self-esteem to invulnerability. For MCSR, healthy masculinity means developing healthy self-esteem as part of preventing men’s violence against women and girls. This conversation is an opportunity to talk with Terry Real – one of the nation’s most innovative voices in thinking about and treating men and their relationships in the world today – about how healthy masculinity, self-esteem, and prevention intersect.
Terry Real is an internationally recognized Family Therapist, Speaker and Author. Terry founded the Relational Life Institute (RLI), offering workshops for couples, individuals and parents around the country along with a professional training program for clinicians wanting to learn his RLT (Relational Life Therapy) methodology. A family therapist and teacher for more than twenty five years, Terry is the best-selling author of I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression (Scribner, 1997), the straight-talking How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women (Scribner, 2002), and most recently The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Make Love Work (Random House). Terry knows how to lead couples on a step-by-step journey to greater intimacy — and greater personal fulfillment.
A senior faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge in Massachusetts and a retired Clinical Fellow of the Meadows Institute in Arizona, Terry has worked with thousands of individuals, couples, and fellow therapists. Through his books, the Institute, and workshops around the country, Terry helps women and men, parents and non-parents, to help them create the connection they desire in their relationships.
Terry’s work, with its rigorous commonsense approach, speaks to both men and women. His ideas on men’s issues and on couple’s therapy have been celebrated in venues from the Good Morning America, The Today Show and 20/20, to Oprah and The New York Times.
A proponent of “full-throttle marriage,” as described in The New Rules of Marriage, Terry has been called “the most innovative voice in thinking about and treating men and their relationships in the world today.”
The New York Times Book Review described Terry’s work as: “A critical contribution to feminist psychology (that) brings the Men’s movement a significant step forward.” Robert Bly hailed it as “moving onto new ground in both story and song. Exhilarating in its honesty.”
Terry’s Relational Life Institute grew out of his extensive and empathic experience. He teaches people how to make their relationships work by providing products and services designed to teach the principles of Relational Life™, so that everyone can enjoy full respect living and craft a healthy life legacy.