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Let's Talk Love | A Real Love Ready Podcast

Advertise on podcast: Let's Talk Love | A Real Love Ready Podcast

Rating
★★★★★
4.9
from
10 reviews
This podcast has
156 episodes
Language
English
Explicit
No
Date created
2022/01/14
Latest episode
2026/10/27
Average duration
72 min.
Release period
8 days

Description

Let’s Talk Love brings you advice and insights from trusted experts to help you expand the ways you love, relate, and communicate. Real Love Ready founder and host Robin Ducharme invites guests into conversations that get to the heart of what makes relationships joyful, challenging, and fulfilling. Together, we dive into the big questions around relationships—including all the messy, sexy, awkward, complicated parts of love. New episodes drop every other Thursday. Don't forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a conversation.

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Check latest episodes from Let's Talk Love | A Real Love Ready Podcast podcast


Graham Finochio – Choosing Love Over Hate After 21 Years | Real Love Ready Ep 26
2026/10/27
Is it possible to find real belonging inside something built on hate? At 12 years old, Graham Finochio was homeless. By 14, a group of skinheads had taken him in, giving him something he desperately needed: a place to belong. What began as belonging became a white supremacist identity, years of violence, and more than two decades in and out of the California prison system. During his final stretch in prison, Graham joined Success Stories, where he began questioning what he had been taught about masculinity, power, accountability, and love. Today, he returns to the same prisons where he once served time to help other men examine the beliefs shaping their own lives. In this episode, Robin and Graham explore how our need for belonging can lead us into harmful places, the difference between accountability and shame, and what it means to believe that no person is disposable. Graham opens up about self-forgiveness, raising his son differently, and what it means to hold someone accountable without losing sight of their humanity. This is a conversation about the kind of belonging that pulls us away from ourselves — and the kind that can help us find our way back. IN THIS EPISODE (00:03:13) Graham’s Earliest Memories of Love (00:06:14) Becoming Homeless at 12 (00:09:32) Finding Belonging With Skinheads (00:14:40) From Juvenile Hall to Prison (00:22:24) The Beginning of Change (00:29:21) Success Stories & Questioning Masculinity (00:36:00) Leaving His Gang Identity Behind (00:38:38) Love Without Disposability (00:43:16) Life After Prison & Raising His Son Differently (00:47:46) Bringing the Work Back Into Prisons (00:51:26) The Difference Between Hate & Love (00:54:54) Belonging, Community & Self-Forgiveness (00:57:24) White Supremacy, Accountability & Seeing Humanity (01:00:31) Survival, Solitary Confinement & the Cost of Hate (01:04:11) What Prison Gave Him — and Took Away (01:06:24) What We Need to Unlearn About Love QUOTES “You can’t authentically love if you deem someone disposable. That doesn’t forego boundaries. That doesn’t forego healthy restraint on the relationship. But no one is disposable.” — Graham Finochio “You were a child. You really just wanted to be loved. We need belonging. We need community to thrive.” — Robin Ducharme “I found community in places that were super unhealthy. I was so desperate for connection that I was willing to accept it.” — Graham Finochio “I was deemed a problem child instead of a child with a problem.” — Graham Finochio ABOUT THE GUEST Graham Finochio is the Director of Programming at Success Stories Program, a transformational feminist organization that began inside California prisons and now supports people impacted by incarceration through accountability, healing, and leadership development. After serving over 21 years in prison and doing deep personal work around harm, identity, belonging, and repair, Graham now helps others examine the beliefs and behaviors that have shaped their lives. His work is rooted in the belief that people are capable of change when they are met with honesty, community, accountability, and love. Website: https://www.successstoriesprogram.org/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Laura Berman – Love after Loss | Real Love Ready Ep 25
2026/10/20
How do you keep loving someone when they are no longer here? Dr. Laura Berman has spent more than three decades helping people understand love and relationships. But in 2021, when her 16-year-old son Sammy died from fentanyl poisoning, everything she knew about love became inseparable from grief. Her own healing led her to found the Grief Healing Collective and write Crying Out Loud, a deeply personal exploration of what it means to live with loss rather than try to outrun it. In this episode, Robin and Laura explore what happens when we allow grief to move through us instead of asking it to disappear. Laura shares why pain needs somewhere to go, how loss can change the relationships around us, and why being able to sit with someone’s suffering without trying to fix it is one of the deepest forms of love. They also talk about how Laura continues to feel connected to Sammy and the surprising truth she discovered through her own grief: making room for sorrow can also expand our capacity for joy. This conversation is about love after loss — not moving on from the people we love, but learning how to carry that love differently. Because grief, as Laura says, is “love longing to be expressed.” This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:02:16) Introduction (00:05:13) Laura’s Earliest Lessons About Love (00:08:11) Belonging, Family & Becoming a Therapist (00:17:00) What Grief Does to the Body (00:24:59) Who Was Sammy? (00:31:10) The Geography of Grief (00:37:42) Robin on Losing Her Mom (00:46:19) What Happens When We Avoid the Pain (00:49:54) How Loss Changes Your Relationships (00:57:47) Letting People Mourn Differently (01:00:39) Staying Connected to the People We’ve Lost (01:11:18) Making Room for Grief & Joy (01:15:17) What Love Looks Like After Loss QUOTES “When you stretch your capacity for pain, you’re also stretching your capacity for joy.” — Dr. Laura Berman “The part about being able to feel joy while you’re still in pain — it’s like the human condition. We can be in so much sadness, but also in gratitude for that love. The joy with the pain.” — Robin Ducharme “I don’t think life is meant to be without pain. Pain is one of our greatest teachers and transformers.” — Dr. Laura Berman “The amount of grief that you feel is equal to the love that you felt.” — Robin Ducharme “Grief can be very patient. But there is always, always, always a reckoning.” — Dr. Laura Berman  “When you’re crying out loud, you are living in a way that lets grief move through you instead of getting trapped inside.” — Dr. Laura Berman ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Laura Berman is one of the world’s most recognized experts in sex, love, and relationships. A New York Times bestselling author of 10 books and an award-winning television and radio host, she has spent more than three decades helping people create deeper intimacy and more fulfilling relationships. After the loss of her son Sammy in 2021, Laura expanded her work into grief and healing, bringing together her clinical expertise and lived experience to help others move through loss and heartbreak. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drlauraberman/ Website: https://drlauraberman.com Crying Out Loud: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/787584/crying-out-loud-by-laura-berman-phd/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Jessica Zucker – Miscarriage, Grief & the Things We Keep Quiet | Real Love Ready Ep 24
2026/10/13
What does love look like when there is nothing you can do to make the pain go away?  Dr. Jessica Zucker spent years working as a clinical psychologist in reproductive and maternal mental health before experiencing a miscarriage herself at 16 weeks. The loss changed the course of her life and work, eventually leading her to create the #IHadAMiscarriage campaign and write I Had a Miscarriage and Normalize It. Through her own experiences with pregnancy loss and breast cancer, Jessica began to see just how often grief is made harder by everything surrounding it. The silence, the shame, the pressure to be okay, and our discomfort with pain we cannot fix.  In this episode, Robin and Jessica explore what happens when we stop trying to tidy up each other’s pain. They talk about the instinct to reach for silver linings, the ways women are taught to question or minimize their own experiences, and why emotional intimacy requires us to stay present even when we don’t have the right words. Jessica also reflects on how loss has shaped her relationships, her work, and her understanding of what it means to truly be there for someone.  This is a conversation about making room for the things we cannot make better. About telling the truth when silence would be easier, asking people what they actually need, and allowing ourselves to be fully known in the hardest chapters of our lives. Because sometimes the most loving thing we can do isn’t to take the pain away — it’s to stay with each other through it. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:02:14) Introduction   (00:03:23) Jessica’s Earliest Memories of Love   (00:09:15) Experiencing Miscarriage at 16 Weeks   (00:11:11) Breaking the Silence Around Pregnancy Loss   (00:17:10) The Cycle of Silence, Stigma & Shame   (00:26:33) Jessica’s Breast Cancer Diagnosis   (00:35:06) Creating Rituals Around Grief & Loss   (00:39:12) Loving Someone Through Pain You Cannot Fix   (00:46:12) The Things Women Are Taught to Keep Quiet   (00:49:20) Aging, Desire & Letting Go of “Should”   (00:52:00) What We Teach Our Children About Love   (00:52:49) Being Seen & Finding Our Way Back to Ourselves   (00:57:05) How Love Changes Over Time   (00:58:41) What Is Love? QUOTES “Can we replace silence with storytelling? Can we help women not go to that place? And can we see pregnancy loss as normative, albeit heartbreaking, so that we can talk about it?” — Dr. Jessica Zucker “We have to go through it. We have to feel it.” — Robin Ducharme “I think that true emotional intimacy only exists when we can be present through pain and through roadblocks and through joy, of course, as well.” — Dr. Jessica Zucker “I really want to remove ‘should’ from our language. It’s not productive. It’s not helping.” — Robin Ducharme “Time helps with healing, but talking really helps us find our way back to ourselves.” — Dr. Jessica Zucker ABOUT THE GUEST Jessica Zucker is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in reproductive health and the award-winning author of Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women’s Lives and I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement. She is also the creator of the viral #IHadAMiscarriage campaign. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ihadamiscarriage/ Website: https://www.drjessicazucker.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mary Bonnet – Beyond Selling Sunset: Learning to Heal and Love | Real Love Ready Ep 23
2026/10/06
How do you heal when your hardest moments become entertainment? For six years, Mary Bonnet shared her life with millions on Selling Sunset. Viewers watched—and scrutinized—as she built a career, fell in love, navigated fertility, and grieved in real time. The cameras captured a lot, but they never captured the whole story. Mary became a mother at 15 and has lived through an abusive marriage, financial control, sexual assault, pregnancy loss, and the deeply complicated experience of having private pain become public conversation. In this episode, Robin and Mary talk about the intuition that has guided some of her biggest decisions, the ways trauma can remain in the body long after the threat has passed, and the difference between pushing through pain and actually healing it. Mary opens up about reaching a point where Selling Sunset was taking more from her than she was willing to give—and realizing she wanted her life to feel like her own again. Mary’s story isn’t powerful simply because she survived. It’s powerful because survival was never where she wanted to stay. Through heartbreak, loss, reinvention, and years of public scrutiny, she has continued to trust her instincts, choose kindness, and believe in love. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:01:19) Introduction (00:03:22) How Mary Learned About Love (00:08:16) Becoming a Mother at 15 (00:13:23) When Drive Becomes Tunnel Vision (00:16:45) Surviving Financial Abuse (00:22:05) How Trauma Lives in the Body (00:26:19) Self-Love, Reality TV & Public Scrutiny (00:30:30) Miscarriage, Grief & Being Watched (00:35:00) What Healing Looks Like Now (00:37:03) Walking Away From Selling Sunset (00:41:42) Life After Selling Sunset (00:49:12) Choosing Kindness (00:52:12) Loving Yourself Through Heartbreak (00:55:25) What Is Love? QUOTES “I think in so many ways, you just have to trust yourself. I think we all have intuition, and we have it for a reason. It’s to help guide us and to help protect us.” — Mary Bonnet “When you follow your intuition, it’s like everything in you—your soul, your spirit—is saying, ‘This is it.’” — Robin Ducharme “I feel like I just had this big fake smile on for a while because I had to. But inside I was kind of dying.” — Mary Bonnet “I think our tolerance for b******t changes as we get stronger and more whole in ourselves.” — Robin Ducharme “People don’t understand that you’re still human. If you’re on TV, you still have feelings.” — Mary Bonnet “Everything that’s been done has been done… I’m not going to dwell on what I can’t change. I’m saving the f*****g dogs.” — Mary Bonnet ABOUT THE GUEST Mary Bonnet is a luxury real estate agent, Vice President at The Oppenheim Group, longtime cast member of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, and author of Selling Sunshine: Surviving Teenage Motherhood, Thriving in Luxury Real Estate, and Finally Finding My Voice. With more than $140 million in career real estate sales, Mary was also named one of Variety’s 40 Most Powerful Women on Reality TV. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themarybonnet/  GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vienna Pharaon – Origin Wounds: Why the Past Keeps Showing Up in Your Relationships | Real Love Ready Ep 22
2026/09/29
Have you ever reacted to something in a relationship and wondered, where did that come from? Vienna Pharaon is a licensed marriage and family therapist, founder of Mindful Marriage and Family Therapy, and bestselling author of The Origins of You. Her work explores the origin wounds we carry around worthiness, belonging, prioritization, trust, and safety—and how experiences from our past can continue shaping the way we love in the present. In this episode, Robin and Vienna explore why we can understand our patterns and still find ourselves repeating them. They talk about the moments that activate old wounds, dysregulation as active self-protection, and what it actually takes to respond differently instead of falling back into familiar roles. Together, they explore what changes when we understand not only our own history, but the history of the people we love. Because healing isn’t about never being triggered or never getting it wrong. It’s about creating enough space to make a different choice, repair more quickly, and stay connected through the hard moments. As Vienna says, healing is the shift from survival to choice. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:04:12) Vienna’s Origin Story (00:07:36) Why We Repeat the Same Relationship Patterns (00:09:23) What It Looks Like to Do Something Different (00:15:32) What Are Origin Wounds? (00:20:35) Dysregulation as Active Self-Protection (00:24:54) How a Prioritization Wound Shows Up (00:30:15) Why Awareness Alone Isn’t Enough (00:35:43) Healing: From Survival to Choice (00:36:49) Why Knowing Your Partner’s Story Matters (00:39:37) How Healthy Relationships Move Through Hard Things (00:44:22) Origin Wounds & Inner Child Work (00:48:23) Does Healing Mean You Stop Getting Triggered? (00:51:04) Why Romantic Relationships Activate Our Wounds (00:58:16) Changing Long-Standing Relationship Patterns (01:00:31) Doing the Work While You’re Single (01:04:57) Parenting, Repair & Owning Our Mistakes (01:09:00) The Myth That Healthy Love Should Be Easy (01:12:21) What Is Love? QUOTES “One of the greatest loving gifts that we give to each other is to learn about each other’s origin stories and wounds and histories.” — Vienna Pharaon “I believe that you cannot love better without first understanding what you’re carrying.” — Robin Ducharme “It is not about wishing or wanting for the absence of hard. It’s about being able to go through the hard and stay connected with one another and come out the other side. That is what builds secure, healthy relationships.” — Vienna Pharaon “We have to open our minds to this concept, because this whole thing of falling in love on the first date, second date, third date—you don’t know this person. You really don’t. It’s important to get to know somebody over time and through conflict, through all the things.” — Robin Ducharme “Context doesn’t excuse behavior, but it is the bridge. It really helps us move into that space of compassion while still holding accountability and ownership and responsibility.” — Vienna Pharaon ABOUT THE GUEST Vienna Pharaon is a licensed marriage and family therapist and one of New York City’s most sought after relationship therapists. She has practiced therapy for more than 17 years and is the founder and owner of the group practice, Mindful Marriage and Family Therapy. She received her masters of science in Marriage & Family Therapy from Northwestern University. Her book The Origins of You is a national best seller. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulmft/ Website: https://viennapharaon.com/ Substack: https://substack.com/@viennapharaon The Origins of You (book): https://a.co/d/02lkGkBC What's Your Origin Wound (free) Quiz: https://1wsm6geg69z.typeform.com/to/d981R7Cl GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh – What Shapes the Way We Love? | Real Love Ready Ep 21
2026/09/22
What if the way you love was shaped long before you ever chose a partner? Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh has spent more than two decades studying how people love across cultures, languages, and continents. A social psychologist, psychosexual therapist, author of Love by Design, and creator of the Emergent Love model, her research with couples across 41 countries asks what actually helps love thrive. In this episode, Robin and Sara explore the blueprints for love we inherit from our families, cultures, language, and earliest experiences—and how those invisible influences shape what we expect, accept, desire, and believe we deserve in relationships. They talk about why two people can say “I love you” while meaning entirely different things, whether romantic love can truly be unconditional, and why we may be asking one relationship to give us more than it possibly can. Together, they challenge the idea that love is something we simply find, fall into, or either have or don’t have. Instead, Sara invites us to look at what actually creates love between two people: trust, respect, compassion, intentionality, and the everyday ways we relate to one another. They also explore the difference between knowing about relationships and actually becoming fluent in them—and why, in a world increasingly designed for comfort and convenience, practising human connection may matter more than ever. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:04:14) Our Earliest Blueprints for Love (00:05:34) How Culture & Language Shape Love (00:11:18) Is Love Really Unconditional? (00:17:16) How Culture Teaches Us to Relate (00:21:04) Why Relationship Education Is a Human Right (00:29:31) What Is Universal About Love? (00:31:23) Deconstructing What We Believe About Love (00:34:05) Which Cultures Get Love Right? (00:36:24) Are We Asking Too Much From Our Relationships? (00:41:25) Emergent Love: When One Plus One Equals Three (00:43:47) AI, Comfort & the Future of Relationships (00:48:11) Relational Literacy vs. Relational Fluency (00:52:52) What Sara Had to Unlearn About Love (00:57:48) Being in Love vs. Practising Love (01:01:49) Knowing About Love vs. Actually Living It (01:07:45) What 41 Countries Taught Sara About Love (01:10:07) The Myth About Love We Need to Unlearn (01:10:53) What Is Love? ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh grew up in Iran and went on to create The Whispers, a BBC World Service program that opened honest conversations about sexuality and relationships with Persian-speaking audiences around the world. Today she is a social psychologist, psychosexual therapist, and author known as a Relational Architect, with more than 500 keynotes and workshops delivered across 40+ countries. Her award-winning book, Love by Design, received the 2025 Clark Vincent Award from CAMFT and introduces the Emergent Love Model, a framework drawn from research with hundreds of couples across 41 countries. She has been featured by BBC, CNN, NPR, and Al Jazeera, and was named one of Harper's Bazaar's "Best Love Doctors." Instagram Website QUOTES“When you have clarity of mind and peace of heart, you have arrived.” — Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh “Where you are born shapes the way you love—the rituals, the language, the expectations.” — Robin Ducharme “The ingredients for loving relationships are the same no matter what.” — Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh “It is about the little things. It’s how we treat each other in the day to day. The little details matter.” — Robin Ducharme “We all carry different meanings packed into that word. I say, ‘I love you,’ you say, ‘I love you’ back—but do we exchange the same expectations and rules of engagement within that one specific word? We don’t.” — Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh “You don’t fall out of love; you fall out of loving.” — Robin Ducharme GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBookFollow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashanti Branch – Can You Be Loved If You're Not Fully Known? | Real Love Ready Ep 20
2026/09/15
"Where are you fully known?" That's the question a mentor once asked Ashanti Branch, and it stopped him cold. Because when he really thought about it, the answer was nowhere. Ashanti Branch is the founder of the Ever Forward Club and creator of the Million Mask Movement, a global initiative that has reached people in over 100 countries. Raised in Oakland by a single mother, told at seven years old that he was "the man of the house," Ashanti spent his childhood learning to hide his anger, his sadness, and eventually his whole self behind a mask of toughness. Featured in the Sundance documentary The Mask You Live In, his work with boys and men has taken him from an Oakland classroom to a TEDx stage to the U.S. Surgeon General's office. In this episode, Robin and Ashanti explore what it actually takes for men to let themselves be known, and for the people who love them to become a safe place to land. They talk about the difference between belonging and fitting in, why anger is so often a cover for grief, and how vulnerability, far from being a trait some people are simply born with, is a skill that can be built one honest conversation at a time. Ashanti also leads Robin through his own Million Mask exercise live, a moment that gets right to the heart of what this conversation is about. At its core, this is a conversation about what changes, in a friendship, a marriage, or a family, when we finally let someone see what's on the other side of the mask, built on a simple, powerful idea: we can only be loved as deeply as we are willing to be known. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:04:32) Can You Be Fully Loved If You’re Not Fully Known? (00:08:28) Becoming “The Man of the House” at Seven (00:16:32) From Engineering to Teaching (00:24:06) How the Ever Forward Club Began (00:29:52) The Million Mask Movement (00:32:37) What Boys Hide Behind the Mask (00:35:14) Anger, Heartbreak & the Rules of Masculinity (00:39:14) Creating Safe Spaces for Boys (00:45:50) Why Vulnerability Is a Skill (00:51:09) What Anger Can Be Hiding (00:54:07) Connecting the Head & the Heart (00:58:08) How to Reach the Men & Boys You Love (01:03:21) What Ashanti Wants Men to Know (01:07:58) The Mask Exercise (01:13:58) The Myth About Men & Love (01:15:32) What Is Love? QUOTES "You can only be loved as deeply as you're willing to be known." – Ashanti Branch "Violence is what happens when men and boys don't know what to do with their anger." – Ashanti Branch “Vulnerability is not a trait; it’s a skill.” – Robin Ducharme "Men are loving, caring people who have been trained to operate in a world where they're not allowed to be that all the time." – Ashanti Branch ABOUT THE GUEST Ashanti Branch is the founder of the Ever Forward Club and creator of the Million Mask Movement, a global initiative that has reached people in over 100 countries. Raised in Oakland by a single mother, told at seven years old that he was "the man of the house," Ashanti spent his childhood learning to hide his anger, his sadness, and eventually his whole self behind a mask of toughness. Featured in the Sundance documentary The Mask You Live In, his work with boys and men has taken him from an Oakland classroom to the TEDx stage, and earned him the U.S. Surgeon General's Medallion for his work on youth mental health in 2023. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/branchspeaks/ Website: https://www.branchspeaks.com/ Ever Forward Club: https://everforwardclub.org/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Ingrid Clayton – When Survival Looks Like Love | Real Love Ready Ep 19
2026/09/08
What if some of the ways you learned to love were actually ways you learned to survive? Dr. Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist and the author of Fawning, Believing Me, and Recovering Spirituality. Through both her clinical work and her own lived experience, she explores the trauma responses and protective patterns that can quietly shape the way we relate to ourselves and the people we love. In this episode, Robin and Ingrid explore fawning, the lesser-known fourth trauma response alongside fight, flight, and freeze, and how it can show up as people-pleasing, caretaking, appeasement, and self-abandonment in our closest relationships. They unpack why these patterns can be deeply adaptive in childhood and how they can follow us into adulthood long after the original danger has passed. They talk about the difference between performing love and actually experiencing it, and how addiction, spiritual bypassing, and even 12-step recovery can become ways of escaping what we feel rather than facing it. Ingrid, sober since 1995, shares what it took to build the internal safety she never had growing up, not by finding a self that was buried, but by building one from the ground up. At its core, this is a conversation about learning that real love does not require us to disappear, and that the relationships which let us become more fully ourselves may be where love becomes possible in the first place. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE 03:46 Finding Her Voice and Her Path to Psychology 07:30 What Is Fawning? 13:20 How Our Past Shapes How We Relate 19:39 The Importance of a Compassionate Witness 26:55 When Healing Pursues You 32:03 Performing Love vs. Experiencing Love 36:31 Alcohol, Trauma, and Sobriety 44:35 Spiritual Bypassing 52:13 What Healing Really Takes 01:00:37 Fawning in Our Relationships 01:06:01 How Healing Changes the Way We Love QUOTES "How could I know what real love was if I was never even there to experience it?" – Dr. Ingrid Clayton "I would rather have me in my life than abandon me one more day for anybody else." – Dr. Ingrid Clayton "I am wired to want to love well. And I think we all are." – Robin Ducharme ABOUT THE GUEST Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist with a Master’s degree in transpersonal psychology and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She has maintained a private practice in Los Angeles for over seventeen years, supporting individuals in healing trauma and reclaiming their sense of self. Her work has been featured in Oprah Daily, The New York Times, Women’s Health, and Forbes. She is the author of Fawning, Believing Me, and Recovering Spirituality, and is known for bringing clarity, accessibility, and humanity to conversations about relational trauma and healing. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ingridclaytonphd/ Website: https://www.ingridclayton.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cindy Gallop – The Sex Talk Nobody Gave You | Real Love Ready Ep 18
2026/09/01
What happens when porn becomes sex education by default? Cindy Gallop is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a social sex video-sharing platform built on a simple idea: the problem isn't porn itself — it's what happens when a culture that can't talk openly about sex leaves porn to fill that gap by default. In this episode, Robin and Cindy explore the space between what we see on screen and what sex actually looks and feels like in real life. They talk about why there's no formula for great sex, how mainstream male-lens porn shapes expectations without us realizing it, and why communication, curiosity, and shared sexual values matter more than knowing the "right" move. The conversation also covers body image and desirability, sexual agency, and what it looks like to bring empathy, respect, generosity, and honesty into the bedroom. Cindy shares how parents can talk to kids about sex and porn without shame, how couples can finally open conversations they've avoided for years, and why becoming a great lover starts with a willingness to learn — not perform. At its core, this is a conversation about what becomes possible when we stop outsourcing our understanding of sex to porn, and start treating sex as a place to practice the same values we want in love: honesty, respect, curiosity, reciprocity, and care. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:03:04) From Advertising to Reinventing Sex Culture (00:05:06) When Porn Becomes Sex Education (00:10:50) Great Sex Starts With Communication (00:12:31) Body Image & What We Really Find Attractive (00:15:56) Love, Vulnerability & Real-World Sex (00:19:49) Why Sex Is Part of Who We Are (00:24:35) What Are Your Sexual Values? (00:26:33) The Male Lens & Why Not All Porn Is the Same (00:29:47) How to Talk to Kids About Sex & Porn (00:40:43) What Teenage Boys Really Want to Know (00:45:39) Sex & Communication in Relationships (00:52:19) Teaching Children About Sex, Love & Connection (00:56:43) How Couples Can Talk About Sexual Values (01:02:57) The Future of Sex Education (01:09:00) What Makes a Great Lover? (01:13:16) Romantic Love Isn’t the Only Love QUOTES “We cannot talk about real love and leave sex out of it.” – Robin Ducharme “It’s not porn’s job to educate; it’s society’s.” – Cindy Gallop “Great sex is born out of great communication.” – Cindy Gallop “The values have to be shared in the bedroom too.” – Robin Ducharme “What makes a great lover is someone who absolutely comes to bed with a willingness to learn.” – Cindy Gallop ABOUT THE GUEST Cindy Gallop built her career in brand-building, marketing, and advertising, running the US office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty starting in 1998 and earning Advertising Woman of the Year in 2003. In 2009, she launched MakeLoveNotPorn at TED, one of the most talked-about talks of the conference, and later grew it into the world's first user-generated, human-curated social sex video platform. She's the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn and IfWeRanTheWorld, a vocal advocate for diversity and inclusion in advertising and tech, and author of the TED book Make Love Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cindygallop/ Website: https://cindygallop.com/ MLNP Academy: https://makelovenotporn.academy/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Alexandra Solomon – Marriage 101: How to Get Better at Love | Real Love Ready Ep 17
2026/08/25
What if loving well is something we can actually learn? Dr. Alexandra Solomon is a licensed clinical psychologist, founder of the Institute for Relational Self-Awareness, bestselling author, and longtime professor of Northwestern University’s renowned Marriage 101 course. For more than 25 years, she has been teaching people how to understand themselves more deeply and build healthier, more connected relationships. In this episode, Robin and Dr. Solomon explore what Relational Self-Awareness looks like in practice: noticing the stories, wounds, and nervous-system responses we bring into our relationships, and learning to stay curious about what difficult moments might be trying to teach us. They talk about why healthy relationships are not conflict-free, how to know when to pause, and why real growth requires both acceptance and change. Dr. Solomon reflects on how the way we understand love is changing, what different stages of life can reveal about our partnerships, and why healthy relationships require honesty, curiosity, and a willingness to look at our own part. She also challenges some of the messages we have absorbed about romance, from mistaking intensity for intimacy to assuming that the right relationship should always feel easy. This is a conversation about learning to love with more awareness, intention, and skill. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:05:34) How Our Gifts Grow From Our Wounds (00:14:32) Marriage 101: Teaching Love (00:20:13) What Young Adults Are Asking About Love (00:27:03) What Is Relational Self-Awareness? (00:29:07) Curiosity, Conflict & the Nervous System (00:36:05) Acceptance, Change & Relationship Growth (00:41:41) The Truth Isn’t Cruelty (00:43:22) Empty Nesting & Who We Become Next (00:52:41) What the Movies Get Wrong About Love (00:57:04) Relational Red Flags & Healthy Love (01:03:09) Why Young People Are Dating Differently (01:07:03) The Myth That Love Should Be Easy QUOTES “Love is not something we find. It’s something we build, something we learn, something we can actually get better at.” – Robin Ducharme “You are the through line in all of your relationship stories.” – Dr. Alexandra Solomon “When we view moments as teachers, our partners as teachers, it just opens up all kinds of possibilities.” – Dr. Alexandra Solomon “You know you’re ready to come back when you want to understand.” – Dr. Alexandra Solomon “I want to learn how to love in the best way, because I know what an impact that makes in our lives and the quality of our lives.” – Robin Ducharme “Being loved means somebody celebrating your evolution.” – Dr. Alexandra Solomon ABOUT THE GUEST Dr. Alexandra Solomon is internationally recognized as one of today’s most trusted relationship experts. As a licensed clinical psychologist, she translates research and clinical wisdom to help people expand their Relational Self-Awareness. She is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, the face of MasterClass In Practice, the host of Reimagining Love, and the award-winning author of three bestselling books including Love Every Day. Her work is frequently featured in outlets like NPR and The New York Times. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.alexandra.solomon/ Website: https://www.dralexandrasolomon.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marianne Williamson – What Blocks Love? | Real Love Ready Ep 16
2026/08/18
What would change if love was not just something we believed in, but the principle we used to make our decisions? Marianne Williamson has spent more than four decades exploring that question. A bestselling author, spiritual teacher, and longtime student of A Course in Miracles, her book A Return to Love introduced millions of people, including Robin as a teenager, to a different way of thinking about love, fear, forgiveness, and inner peace. In this episode, Robin and Marianne explore how we can train our minds away from judgement, blame, and fear, recognize the everyday thoughts that block our capacity to love, and practise forgiveness without abandoning boundaries or the ability to say no. They talk about what we bring to our relationships, why love requires us to take responsibility for our own part, and how even small moments of judgement can shape the way we move through the world. Marianne also reflects on what running for president taught her about power, speaking up, forgiveness, and owning her mistakes without becoming consumed by resentment or self-blame. This is a conversation about choosing love as a practice, from the way we think about a stranger in a café to the way we treat the people closest to us and the world we create together. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:05:49) What A Course in Miracles Teaches About Love (00:08:36) Training Your Mind to Choose Love (00:13:31) Making Love Our Bottom Line (00:17:45) The Blind Spots That Block Love (00:20:36) Mercy, Forgiveness & Intimate Relationships (00:24:54) Ego, Fear & the Illusion of Separation (00:28:01) Radical Accountability & Spiritual Detox (00:35:30) Forgiveness, Repair & Atonement (00:36:29) What Running for President Taught Marianne (00:44:55) Owning Your Part & Choosing Again QUOTES “Every moment you are making a decision. Will your heart be open to accept, to be your best, to hold another person in a space where they can be their best?” – Marianne Williamson “How very important it is for us to take radical accountability for our part. As human beings, that’s hard to do, but that’s what’s required.” – Robin Ducharme “When someone treats you without love, the only appropriate response is to see that as a call for love.” – Marianne Williamson “How can we be more loving in our individual lives, so that we are contributing to a more loving world?” – Robin Ducharme “The miracle is the new beginning. Get up, choose again.” – Marianne Williamson ABOUT THE GUEST For more than four decades, Marianne Williamson has been a leader of spiritual and progressive circles. She is the author of 17 books, four of which became #1 New York Times bestsellers, including A Return to Love, A Woman's Worth, The Law of Divine Compensation, and The Mystic Jesus: The Mind of Love. She founded Project Angel Food, which has delivered more than 20 million meals to homebound patients with life-threatening illnesses across Los Angeles since 1989, and co-founded The Peace Alliance in 2004 to support the creation of a U.S. Department of Peace. Williamson has run for U.S. president twice. Instagram: www.instagram.com/mariannewilliamson/ Website: Marianne.com Substack: MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarianneWilliamsonCommunity GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Janna Meyrowitz Turner – Love Is a Form of Leadership | Real Love Ready Ep 15
2026/08/11
What does love have to do with leadership? For Janna Meyrowitz Turner, everything.  After twenty years building power for women, shaping cultural narratives for brands like Estée Lauder and the WNBA, and organizing 150 venture capital firms behind reproductive justice, Janna had a revelation: the powerful women she'd spent her career building up were going home to men who weren't growing alongside them.  That observation became Antenna Up, a platform of summits and community infrastructure built to send new signals about the health and wellbeing of American boys and men. Recorded in New York as part of the East Coast Tour, Janna and Robin trace her pivot from the women's space to the men's space, and why she calls love a leadership skill. More than a conversation about men and women, this episode offers a framework for reimagining leadership itself, what changes when we build institutions, relationships, and culture around love instead of greed. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:02:50) Meet Janna (00:03:52) From Building Women Up to Seeing the Gap (00:12:41) Founding Antenna Up (00:18:39) Love as a Form of Leadership (00:23:12) What Is Buoys Club? (00:27:26) The Antenna Up Fund (00:31:34) The Business Case for Healthier Men at Work (00:37:40) The Vulnerability Gap (00:47:08) Time, Money & Relationships (01:02:17) Myths of Love & Janna's Definition QUOTES “I believe that love is a form of leadership.” – Janna Meyrowitz Turner “We need to build organizations and institutions that are both financially rich and emotionally rich.” – Janna Meyrowitz Turner “None of us are free until all of us are free. That applies to men and boys too.” – Janna Meyrowitz Turner ABOUT THE GUEST Janna Meyrowitz Turner is the CEO of Antenna Up, a company platforming events and conversations alongside brands, media, and corporate sponsors to send new signals about the health and wellbeing of American boys and men. A career strategist and entrepreneur, she spent 20+ years building values-aligned coalitions in the women's space — shaping cultural narratives for brands like Estée Lauder and the WNBA, and coaching Fortune 500 leaders — before having a reckoning that the men adjacent to the powerful women she was building up weren't growing alongside them, and the women in their lives were paying the price. Antenna Up and Buoys Club, Antenna Up’s 700-member ecosystem of men's wellbeing leaders across North America, operates with the core thesis that healthier men = healthier societies, workplaces, families and communities. Antenna Up: https://www.antennaup.com Buoys Club: https://www.antennaup.com/buoys-club LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jannameyrowitz/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashley & Lair Torrent – Can a Relationship Help You Heal? | Real Love Ready Ep 14
2026/07/28
Sometimes the parts of us that helped us survive are the very parts that make love harder to receive. Ashley and Lair Torrent both learned early to become what the people around them needed. Ashley learned to read every room, care for everyone else, and disconnect from herself when life became unsafe. Lair learned to be the good boy, the caretaker, and the hero, while making his own needs and feelings as small as possible. Today, Ashley is a psycho-spiritual counsellor, intuitive medium, and spiritual guide. Lair is a licensed therapist and the author of The Practice of Love. Together, they co-host The Practice of Love podcast and have spent more than 25 years learning what it means to love each other well. In this episode, Robin, Ashley, and Lair explore how childhood wounds become adult relationship patterns, why conflict is rarely about what it appears to be, and what it takes to stop fighting to win and start listening for what is underneath the reaction. They talk about protective parts, the “not enough” wound carried by so many men, and why some of our deepest healing can only happen in relationship. Ashley and Lair do not present love as perfect or easy. They share what it has taken to become mirrors and safe containers for each other, to receive difficult truths without turning away, and to recognize when the parts of themselves built for protection are taking over. This is a conversation about what it takes to keep choosing connection and why love is not just something we feel, but something we practise again and again. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:03:49) How Ashley & Lair Learned to Love (00:09:09) The Good Boy, the Caretaker & the Hero (00:16:22) When Survival Patterns Enter the Relationship (00:20:09) Becoming Mirrors for Each Other (00:23:21) The Moment Healing Begins (00:32:47) What Are You Really Fighting For? (00:38:03) The “Not Enough” Wound in Men (00:48:01) Healing Happens in Relationship (00:54:05) What Love Teaches Us QUOTES “Sometimes the thing that helped us survive becomes the very thing that keeps us from the love we want.” – Robin Ducharme “There’s a part of me here that is not designed for connection. There’s a part of me here that is designed for protection.” – Lair Torrent “Anytime I’m fighting to win, that means she loses. If she loses, that means we lose.” – Lair Torrent “You’re fighting about something, but really, you’re fighting for something.” – Ashley Torrent “Love requires work. It takes responsibility. It requires a lot of courage.” – Robin Ducharme “It’s a myth that you’re going to do all the healing on your own. I think it’s in relationship that we heal the most.” – Ashley Torrent “Love asks more of us. It’s asking you to dig into yourself and find the wounds that are there, the things that need healing, the parts of you that nobody claps for.” – Lair Torrent ABOUT THE GUESTS Ashley and Lair Torrent bring a rare mix of psychology and spirituality to conversations about love. Ashley is a psycho-spiritual therapist and intuitive medium who works with individuals and couples and co-hosts The Blue Butterfly Effect Podcast; Lair is a marriage and family therapist and author of The Practice of Love, with work featured by NPR, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. Together, the longtime couple co-hosts The Practice of Love Podcast, exploring what it means to love with intentionality, curiosity, and care. Instagram: @ashleytorrent29 @lairtorrentholistictherapist Website: ashleytorrent.com , lairtorrent.com GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lori Gottlieb – The Stories We Tell About Love | Real Love Ready Ep 13
2026/07/21
We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. The story we tell ourselves about why a relationship ended, why we have not met the right person, or why someone else needs to change before things can get better may feel completely true. But it is still only one side of the story. Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, New York Times advice columnist, and host of the podcasts Dear Therapists and Since You Asked. She has spent years listening to the stories people tell about their lives, while also being honest about her own experience on the other side of the couch. In this special episode of Real Love Ready, recorded live at the Global Love Conference in New York City, Robin and Lori explore what changes when we become willing to question our own version of events. Together, they talk about why the most dangerous story in a relationship is that everything was the other person’s fault, what flexibility can tell us about someone’s capacity for partnership, and how to know whether someone is genuinely ready for love. They discuss ghosting, rejection, chemistry, and the conversations we are often afraid to have early on in a relationship. They also look at how AI and texting are changing intimacy, what many of us have been taught about vulnerability, and what it takes to make room for someone new after divorce, loss, or a whole life lived before them. This is a conversation about becoming a more honest narrator of your own life, not by taking responsibility for everything, but by getting curious about the part that belongs to you. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:06:52) The Stories We Tell Ourselves (00:10:20) Unfinished Business & Flexibility (00:14:38) Are You Actually Ready for a Relationship? (00:17:19) Ghosting, Rejection & Taking It Personally (00:22:37) The Cement Is Still Wet: Speak Up Early (00:25:51) The Conversations Couples Need to Have (00:29:28) AI, Texting & Real Connection (00:38:02) Starting Over & Making Room for Someone New (00:45:34) Situationships, Infidelity & Audience Questions QUOTES “It’s not that people aren’t telling the truth; it’s that they’re telling the truth as they see it.” – Lori Gottlieb “The stories we tell ourselves often shape the way we love.” – Robin Ducharme “Relationships are like cement. In the beginning of a relationship, the cement is still wet.” – Lori Gottlieb “It’s so much about communication. It’s so much about just being honest. It’s scary to have those hard conversations, but you have to have them.” – Robin Ducharme “The easy part of a relationship is: we are both really interested in each other. The harder part is, how do we deal with difficulties that come up?” – Lori Gottlieb ABOUT THE GUEST Lori Gottlieb is a licensed psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which has sold more than three million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. She writes The New York Times' "Ask the Therapist" advice column, co-hosts the podcasts Dear Therapists and Since You Asked, and spent six years writing The Atlantic's "Dear Therapist" column. Her highly acclaimed 2019 TED Talk, "How Changing Your Story Can Change Your Life," has been viewed more than 7 million times and was named one of the year's 10 Most-Watched TED Talks. Lori is a frequent guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, CBS Mornings, CNN, and NPR's Fresh Air. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lorigottlieb_author/ Website: https://lorigottlieb.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready  @robinducharmeofficial  @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Terry Real – Is It Too Late To Break The Cycle? | Real Love Ready Ep 12
2026/07/14
There is a version of love most of us were never shown. Not because it doesn't exist, but because the people who raised us hadn't found it yet either. Terry Real has spent his life showing us what that love looks like. He is a family therapist, the creator of Relational Life Therapy, the founder of the Relational Life Institute, and the bestselling author of four books including Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. His first book, I Don't Want to Talk About It, published in 1997, was the first book ever written on male depression. Esther Perel has said, ‘When I need advice, I call Terry Real.’ He is also Robin's former therapist. He sat with her through one of the hardest chapters of her life. And this conversation is unlike any other in this series, because today Robin gets to flip the dynamic and ask Terry questions.  In this episode, recorded in Boston, they explore what it actually takes to break the cycle of generational trauma and love better than we were taught. They talk about the Adaptive Child and the Wise Adult, why grandiosity feels good and what it costs you, and what it means to be the one person in a generation who turns and faces the flames.  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready. IN THIS EPISODE (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:23) Meet Terry Real (00:02:42) The Work That Saved Robin (00:06:38) Terry's Origin Story (00:12:52) Breaking the Cycle (00:16:14) Something Better Than This (00:26:15) Is It Too Late? The Wounded vs. Adaptive Child (00:33:41) Never Too Late (00:37:42) Men & Masculinity (00:49:10) Grandiosity, Contempt & Empowerment (01:01:33) Myths of Love & Defining It QUOTES “If you treat someone as they are, they will be as they are. If you treat someone as they ought to be, they may become who they ought to be." – Terry Real “The only thing that counts is love, and everything else is just BS” – Terry Real "Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow." – Terry Real "The relational answer to the question who's right and who's wrong is 'who cares?'" – Terry Real ABOUT THE GUEST Terry Real is a nationally recognized family therapist and the creator of Relational Life Therapy (RLT). He's the author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship and I Don't Want to Talk About It, the first book ever written about male depression. A former senior faculty member at the Family Institute of Cambridge and Clinical Fellow at the Meadows Institute in Arizona, Terry now trains therapists in his RLT method and leads workshops for couples and individuals through the Relational Life Institute. Instagram: www.instagram.com/realterryreal/ Website: https://terryreal.com/ GET THE REAL LOVE READY BOOK Real Love Ready: A Guide to Relational Literacy is a clear, compassionate guide to the knowledge, skills, and daily practices that help us love with greater intention, truth, and heart. https://geni.us/RealLoveReadyBook Follow Us: @realloveready @robinducharmeofficial @soulprintmediaco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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