Terry Real is an internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and best-selling author committed to helping you build the lasting, loving relationships you deserve.
The author of four books, including the recent New York Times bestseller Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, Terry knows how to lead people on a step-by-step journey to greater intimacy and personal fulfillment.
His revolutionary approach to couples therapy, Relational Life Therapy (RLT), underpins all his books, courses, and teachings. RLT equips people with the powerful relational skills they need to make love work and cultivate authentic connections—to themselves, each other, and the planet as a whole.
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 has worked with thousands of individuals, couples, and fellow therapists. His extraordinary ability to save couples on the brink of divorce garnered Terry the reputation of “the turnaround guy,” and demand from other therapists to learn his RLT method skyrocketed.
To bring the remarkable results of RLT to as many people as possible, Terry established his Relational Life Institute. To date, thousands of mental health practitioners have benefited from a whole new perspective on couples therapy that has transformed their clients, their practice, and their own relationships.
Terry is passionately committed to empowering us all with the essential relational skills for meaningful relationships.
Michelle Esrick is an award-winning filmmaker and sought after speaker whose storytelling weaves together narratives that transcend the surface and touch the depths of the human experience. Michelle understands and feels great empathy for people at profoundly deep and dark places because in her own dark nights of the soul, she has been there. As a trauma survivor and recovering addict for nearly four decades, Michelle is passionate about using her own story and how she has recovered herself as a way to connect and help others know they are not alone. She has come to know the power of love and connection as the most potent tool in healing trauma and the salve for getting us through it all. Love and connection will boost your immune system and are essential to our healing, to being a full, rounded human being.
Her current project, a Docuseries about renowned therapist and best selling author Terry Real, is a searing and illuminating look at his groundbreaking Relational Life Therapy. The series will reveal how living in a state of authentic connection to oneself, to those we love, to other people, to nature and to spirit is essential to our survival. The series also features Black Therapists Rock founder Deran Young, collective trauma expert Thomas Hubl and legendary feminist, psychologist Carol Gilligan.
Michelle’s last film, Cracked Up, The Darrell Hammond Story, focuses on the impact of childhood trauma, and was instrumental in getting a bipartisan law passed in the US Congress to implement trauma-informed care into treatment centers around the country. In May 2020, Michelle produced one of the first trauma-informed web series, Cracked Up,The Evolving Conversation with Bessel van der Kolk, Darrell Hammond, Gabor Mate, V (formerly Eve Ensler) and Jane Fonda. In 2023, Michelle received the Mental Health Hero of The Year Award from Didi Hirsch Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Services, along with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Secretary of State Xavier Becerra. Michelle and her producing partner, Keith Garde, speak around the country including Berklee College of Music, a business of entertainment course entitled What Would Love Do?