131: Terry Real - Redefining Masculinity: Men’s Hidden Depression & Relational Healing
The Sacred SpeaksShow Notes
In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, host Dr. John W. Price sits down with pioneering therapist and author Terry Real, whose decades of work have redefined how we understand men, relationships, and emotional life. Nearly thirty years after the release of his groundbreaking book I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, Terry reflects on the evolution of men’s inner worlds, the cultural forces that still shape them, and the courageous work required to heal. This conversation moves between the personal and the collective—between the suffering of individual men and the systems that taught them to suffer silently. Together, John and Terry explore how patriarchy has halved both men and women, severing men from their emotional lives, and how healing requires a return to connection, empathy, and embodied relational practice. Through heartfelt stories, clinical insight, and grounded wisdom, Terry calls us toward a new model of masculinity—one rooted not in dominance or disconnection but in courage, accountability, and love. This episode is an invitation to anyone longing to understand the hidden pain of men and the pathways toward relational wholeness.
Key Themes -Male depression as a covert epidemic—often masked by addiction, anger, or withdrawal rather than sadness. -How patriarchy teaches men to fear vulnerability and equate worth with production, control, and performance. -The intergenerational inheritance of silence and shame between fathers and sons. -Why true intimacy depends on empathy, humility, and repair—not dominance or emotional avoidance. -The call for a new relational culture that honors interdependence and shared healing.
Time Stamps 00:00 – Introduction & framing the conversation 03:00 – Revisiting I Don’t Want to Talk About It nearly 30 years later 06:30 – How patriarchy harms men and the women who love them 10:45 – Understanding covert male depression 16:20 – The producer model: when net worth becomes self-worth 22:10 – Loneliness and the erosion of male friendship 29:40 – Family systems, shame, and the father wound 37:15 – Relational Life Therapy: a model for repair 44:00 – Vulnerability as strength 50:30 – Healing through accountability and compassion 58:00 – The future of masculinity and relational wholeness Connect with Terry Real Explore Terry’s courses and trainings in Relational Life Therapy (RLT) for both professionals and general audiences: 🌐 terryreal.com 🌐 relationallife.com
Connect with Dr. John W. Price Website: https://drjohnwprice.com Podcast: https://thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjohnwprice/
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In this In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Dr. Susan Schwartz, Jungian analyst and author, for a searching conversation about one of the most underaddressed wounds in contemporary psychology: the absent father. Susan is the author of The Absent Father Effect on Daughters and the forthcoming Absent Fathers, Yearning Sons. Her clinical work draws on decades of practice and deep immersion in Jungian theory, and what she brings to this conversation is not just scholarly precision but the kind of knowledge that only comes from sitting with this material in the consulting room across a lifetime. Father absence, she argues, is routinely minimized in both psychoanalytic literature and popular culture. John and Susan move through the specific ways absence shapes identity, relatedness, sexuality, and the gaze. They explore what it means when a father's eyes are never there to confirm a daughter's body, her mind, her worth, and how fathers model partnering, love, and respect for soul. Susan brings two clinical dreams into the conversation: one involving Vladimir Putin as a figure for the negative father complex, and one about cleaning a closet that opens into something unexpected and alive. These are not illustrations. They are the unconscious at work, showing what the personal father could not provide and what the psyche has done with that absence in the meantime. The conversation moves into territory that will matter to men as much as women: the relationship between absent fathers and male brutality, the failure of initiation when the father is not present to initiate, the ancestral and communal dimensions of the wound, and whether fathers can actually change. Susan's answer to that last question is honest and worth hearing slowly. The episode closes with the questions she believes everyone should be asking, and almost no one does.