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Enhance Your Expertise and Expand Your Practice with Terry Real (CEs are not offered)
Welcome to Real Life!
As new cases and challenges arise in your practice, navigating them alone is overwhelming. Real Life is a safe place to turn in those moments when you wonder, “What do I do now?” Consider this community your lifeline—an encouraging network to call upon for fresh perspectives and creative solutions.
In our live calls, you’ll come together with senior RLT therapists and educators, like-minded peers, and myself. Each month, we dive deep into a particular aspect of your work with couples—topics from recent months include working with two blatant and protecting yourself from burnout. You’ll also have the opportunity to receive input on your cases from the faculty and me.
Our Real Life community is designed to accelerate your professional growth, helping you strengthen your skills and deliver improved outcomes for your clients.
Not only that, we also recognize the importance of providing you with all the support you need to build a thriving therapy business. This is why we host a monthly business call to help you establish a new practice or grow an existing one.
Real Life is the only place I share my latest thinking on the most effective strategies for transforming relationships. It’s where you can seek my advice and guidance on your specific cases as you grow your skills as a couples therapist or coach.
When you join Real Life, you unlock the supportive connection, continuous learning, and business knowledge you need to build a thriving couples therapy practice.
As a Real Life member, you will grow your skills as a relationship professional, receive input on your difficult cases, and access training on the business side of your practice.
Real Life is the closest access you can get to Terry Real and get his answers to your questions and support on your clinical cases. Via one 90 minute LIVE call each month, you’ll access Terry’s latest thinking on specific aspects of working with couples to enhance your skills and improve client outcomes.
Our community comes together for five live 60-minute calls each month. Four of these calls are where you explore the month’s topic in-depth, centered around a particular aspect or challenge of your work with couples. Each call consists of dedicated teaching time from either Terry or the RLT faculty and also Q&A.
Terry hosts 1 90munite call each month. All members can watch the call live and access the recording; however, questions and case consultations will be exclusively from advanced RLT practitioners (those who have completed RLT Level 3 or are Certified RLT therapists).
Our fifth call provides training on the business side of your practice, delivered by Terry’s wider team.
Search the library of short recorded videos from Terry to receive his advice on pressing and challenging topics outside of your regular calls. You’ll find answers to challenges such as what to do when you take the wrong side or have an overly compliant client.
We currently have 37 videos for you to search and we’re adding more each month—these will include standout responses to questions from the Real Life calls, so a great resource to check if you’re short on time.
A look at what we’ll be exploring together in the coming months.
In this extended 3-hour annual update, Terry and Desirae reflect on key developments in the RLT model over the past year. They’ll also bring clarity to several core areas of the model and share an exciting look ahead to the training and events coming in 2026!
This month, we’ll bring relational wisdom to the very alive wounds from systemic oppression as they show up in our work. We’ll look at how culture and power dynamics shape our clients’ experiences and our own. Along with how to approach these realities with openness and relational skill to support healing and repair, both personally and collectively.
In March, we’ll explore why the idea of “safety” in relationships is a myth – and why being willing to take the risk is essential to intimacy. We’ll look at how to help clients open their hearts to vulnerability and build distress tolerance for relational rupture and disharmony. We’ll also help clients strengthen their psychological boundaries to know where they end and others begin.
In April, we’ll examine how partners’ Core Negative Image (CNI) shapes recurring conflict, and how we can use this awareness as operating instructions for the relationship. We’ll look at how each partner’s CNI represents an exaggerated version of the other at their worst, and how it can also serve as a roadmap for repair. This includes helping clients stop arguing against their partner’s CNI of them and instead learn to acknowledge the grain of truth within it to diffuse conflict.
This month, we’ll focus on how to bring appropriate discrepancy into your work to skillfully discern the gap between where clients are now and where they are being invited to go. Then, to move them toward lasting change, we’ll look at the practice of joining and challenging – and how to know when to do which.
In June, we’ll discuss why moving into healthy intimacy is synonymous with moving beyond patriarchy. We’ll look at the cost of traditional gender roles, how patriarchy is a system that harms everyone, and how RLT offers a roadmap toward ecological wisdom. We’ll also explore how to help clients unlearn dominance and compliance patterns so they can meet each other as same-as, equal partners.
This month, we’ll explore how somatic practices can deepen the work of RLT. Building from a neuroscience foundation, we’ll look at how the inner child shows up for both clients and practitioners, and how to use somatic awareness to help shift into the Wise Adult. We’ll explore how to use somatic practices to slow down a session and regulate the room, as well as ways to incorporate somatic awareness into the three phases of RLT.
Choose the plan that best suits your needs.
A former senior faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge in Massachusetts and a retired Clinical Fellow of the Meadows Institute in Arizona, Terry is renowned for his ability to save couples on the brink of divorce using the progressive approach he created, Relational Life Therapy. RLT equips people with the powerful relational skills they need to cultivate meaningful connections—to themselves, each other, and the planet as a whole.
Via his esteemed training school, the Relational Life Institute, Terry has trained thousands of mental health practitioners in his RLT method to date. His original insights on couples therapy, relationships, and men’s issues have been featured in outlets from Oprah and Vogue to The Today Show and CNN. His latest book is the New York Times bestseller, US: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.
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