Relational Life Therapy
Become Who You Want
To Be In Love.
Move beyond old survival strategies and learn the skills of healthy relationships.
In-Person in Santa Monica & Online Across California
Your relationship isn't being run by love.
It's being run by the automatic.
Most couples don't struggle because they don't love each other.
They struggle because when conflict, disappointment, fear, or hurt show up, old survival strategies take over.
You need to be right.
You control.
You speak without restraint.
You retaliate.
You withdraw.
Not because you're a bad partner.
Because these patterns once helped you survive.
Relational Life Therapy helps you recognize the automatic — and teaches you what to do instead.
Is RLT Right For You?
RLT may help if you...
Keep having the same fight despite your best intentions.
Carry a negative image of your partner and find yourself focusing more on what's wrong than what's right.
Feel stuck between resentment and accommodation and don't know how to find your way back to each other.
Struggle to set boundaries without guilt, fear, or conflict.
Lose yourself in the relationship or feel increasingly disconnected from your partner.
Want more honesty, accountability, intimacy, and respect in your relationship.
Are tired of surface-level advice and band-aid solutions and want deeper, lasting change.
Relational Life Therapy Helps You Live More Relationally.
Most people already know more about healthy relationships than they realize.
The challenge isn't knowing what to do.
The challenge is doing it when you're hurt, scared, angry, ashamed, or overwhelmed.
In those moments, an older protective part of you can take over—one that learned long ago how to survive disappointment, rejection, criticism, neglect, or loss.
You may know the skill.
You may know the healthier response.
And yet something inside you still reacts automatically.
Relational Life Therapy helps you recognize these automatic patterns, understand where they come from, and learn new ways of responding.
Together, we'll work on building healthy self-esteem, setting effective boundaries, speaking with honesty and respect, repairing after conflict, and creating deeper intimacy.
And when a part of you resists those changes, we don't simply teach more skills.
We turn toward the younger part that learned those strategies in the first place.
Because lasting change happens when we awaken to our patterns, heal the wounds beneath them, and practice new ways of relating.
What we’ll work on
With RLT, you and your partner can …
Recognize your automatic patterns so you can respond intentionally instead of react automatically.
Move from complaint to request and ask for what you need without criticism or blame.
Set healthy boundaries without guilt, resentment, or losing yourself.
Replace losing strategies with healthier ways of creating connection.
Strengthen self-esteem so you can show up as a full and equal partner.
Repair after conflict instead of staying stuck in resentment or distance.
Respond generously and become the partner you want to be.
Create deeper intimacy through honesty, accountability, appreciation, and generosity.
The Therapeutic Arc of RLT
01. Waking Up (Joining Through the Truth)
RLT begins with truth.
Using loving confrontation, we'll identify the losing strategies and automatic patterns that keep you stuck. Rather than remaining neutral, we take the side of the relationship itself—challenging the behaviors that create distance, resentment, and disconnection.
Because we cannot change what we refuse to see.
02. Healing Underlying Wounds
Many of the patterns that create problems in adult relationships were learned long ago.
Together, we'll work with both the Wounded Child and the Adaptive Child—the brilliant survival strategies that once protected you but may now interfere with intimacy, connection, and love.
The goal is not to get rid of these adaptations.
The goal is to understand them, heal them, and free you from being run by them.
03. Growing Up (Cultivating Relational Skills)
Insight alone doesn't create change.
In this phase, you'll learn and practice the skills of relational living, including healthy self-esteem, effective boundaries, accountability, emotional regulation, repair, generosity, and intimacy.
Your relationships become the crucible in which you heal, grow, and thrive. Through moment-to-moment choices, you'll learn how to replace automatic reactions with conscious responses that create deeper connection, respect, and love.
LOVE DEMANDS DEMOCRACY
Relational empowerment is Terry Real's alternative to traditional notions of individual empowerment. Rather than power over another person—or giving our power away—relational empowerment teaches us how to remain connected to ourselves while staying connected to someone else.
Healthy relationships are built on mutual respect, accountability, and equality. As Terry Real teaches, healthy relationships require the mighty to melt and the weak to stand up.
As Carol Gilligan reminds us, "There is no voice without relationship and no relationship without voice."
RLT helps you become the kind of partner you want to be.
As equals. More relational.
The relationship you want is built
between equals.
Love demands democracy.
Questions?
FAQs
-
Relational Life Therapy (RLT), developed by Terry Real, is a powerful approach to couples therapy that combines deep emotional healing with practical relational skills. RLT helps partners move beyond blame, defensiveness, and unhealthy relationship patterns by strengthening self-esteem, boundaries, accountability, communication, and intimacy.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is learning how to create a healthier, more connected relationship.
-
Both EFT and RLT help couples create deeper connection, but they do so in different ways.
EFT focuses on understanding the emotional and attachment needs beneath conflict. RLT also explores those deeper experiences, while placing greater emphasis on relational skills, healthy boundaries, accountability, and practical change.
RLT tends to be more active and directive, helping couples not only understand their patterns, but learn how to change them.
-
Relational empowerment is Terry Real's alternative to traditional notions of individual empowerment.
Rather than seeking power over others—or giving our power away to them—relational empowerment teaches us how to remain connected to ourselves while staying connected to someone else.
It means learning how to speak honestly, set healthy boundaries, ask for what you need, receive feedback, repair conflict, and honor both your needs and your partner's needs without domination, accommodation, or withdrawal.
At its core, relational empowerment is built on the belief that healthy relationships are created between equals.
Love demands democracy.
-
Relational Life Therapy is not a neutral model. Terry Real teaches that when power becomes imbalanced in a relationship, neutrality can unintentionally support unhealthy or harmful dynamics. As he puts it, we want "the mighty to melt and the weak to stand up." We "tell truth to power."
This does not mean taking one partner's side against the other. It means helping identify and address dynamics that may be creating harm, disconnection, inequality, or suffering within the relationship. At times, that may involve challenging entitlement, control, defensiveness, avoidance, or other behaviors that undermine intimacy. At other times, it may involve helping a partner reclaim their voice, strengthen boundaries, and stand more firmly in their worth.
The goal is not to determine who is right. The goal is to create a relationship where both partners can stand as equals.
Love demands democracy.
-
Yes.
One of the hallmarks of Relational Life Therapy is that therapists are not positioned as experts who stand above the work. RLT therapists are encouraged to practice the same relational skills they teach—including accountability, boundary-setting, repair, self-reflection, and honest communication—in their own lives and relationships.
Terry Real often speaks about therapists being "in recovery" themselves. We are not teaching from perfection. We are teaching from practice. While my role is different from yours, I am committed to doing my own relational work and walking the same path I invite my clients to walk.
-
Yes.
RLT teaches practical skills such as setting healthy boundaries, making requests, repairing conflict, speaking with love, responding generously, and maintaining a strong sense of self within relationships.
However, RLT recognizes that many people already know what they should do, yet struggle to do it when they feel hurt, scared, ashamed, overwhelmed, or reactive.
As Terry Real often says, many therapies teach skills. RLT helps people understand and heal the part of themselves that won't use them.
By addressing both underlying wounds and practical relational skills, RLT helps bridge the gap between knowing better and living differently.