Fierce Intimacy: Standing Up to One Another with Love

What it is

Terrence Real is a family therapist known for two things: naming male depression as a hidden driver of relational damage, and refusing to let either partner off the hook. Fierce Intimacy is about the specific skills of standing up to each other with love — bringing a grievance without contempt, receiving one without defensiveness or collapse, and repairing afterward. In a directory built around sexual betrayal that is directly load-bearing: the marriage does not fail on the disclosure, it fails in the two hundred conversations after it, and most couples have never been taught how to have one. Secular and clinical, published as an audiobook by Sounds True. Real is also notably direct with men about grandiosity and shame, which is useful territory for someone whose recovery has stalled in self-pity.

What it may help with

• We're rebuilding our marriage
• My spouse's porn use has hurt me

How to access it

Audiobook (Sounds True) Purchase from an audiobook retailer

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