63 Perceptive Quotes from Getting The Love You Want by Harville Hendrix
Getting The Love You Want by Harville Hendrix is a must read before getting married.This book will save you from a lot of pain because it presents the marital relationship in a realistic way.Often we have unrealistic dreams and fantasies when it comes to love and relationships.Getting The Love You Want will bring you closer to reality.So, when you actually experience the reality of marital life,it won't be a shock.you will be able to handle it in an effective way and find the love you want.
Here are the quotes I like:
‘’Whether we like it or not, a woman’s youth and physical
appearance and a man’s power and social status do play a role in mate
selection.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’The basic idea of the exchange theory is that we select
mates who are more or less our equals. When we are on a search-and-find mission
for a partner, we size each other up as coolly as business executives contemplating
a merger, noting each other’s physical appeal, financial status, and social
rank, as well as various personality traits such as kindness, creativity, and a
sense of humor. With computer-like speed, we tally up each other’s scores, and
if the numbers are roughly equivalent, the trading bell rings and the bidding
begins.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’The exchange theory gives us a more comprehensive view of
mate selection than the simple biological model. It’s not just youth, beauty,
and social rank that interests us, say the social psychologists, but the whole
person. For example, the fact that a woman is past her prime or that a man has
a low-status job can be offset by the fact that he or she is a charming,
intelligent, compassionate person.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’The persona theory maintains that an important factor in
mate selection is the way a potential suitor enhances our self-esteem.Each of
us has a mask, a persona, which is the face that we show to other people. The
persona theory suggests that we select a mate who will enhance this self-image.
The operative question here is: ’What will it do to my sense of self if I am
seen with this person?’ There appears to be some validity to this theory. We
have all experienced some pride and perhaps some embarrassment because of the
way we believe our mates are perceived by others;it does indeed matter to us
what others think.’’
‘’Take a moment and think about the personality traits of the
people that you have seriously considered as mates. If you were to make a list
of their predominate personality traits, you would discover a lot of
similarities, including, surprisingly, their negative traits….It appears
that each one of us is compulsively
searching for a mate with a very particular set of positive and negative
personality traits.’’
‘’What we are doing,… is looking for someone who has the
predominant character traits of the people who raised us. Our old brain [the
part of brain that controls automatic actions]…, is trying to re-create the
environment of childhood. And the reason the old brain is trying to resurrect
the past is not a matter of habit or blind compulsion but of a compelling need
to heal old childhood wounds.The ultimate reason you fell in love with your
mate, I am suggesting, is not that your mate was young and beautiful, had an
impressive job, had a ‘point value’ equal to yours, or had a kind disposition.
You fell in love because your old brain had your partner confused with your
parents! Your old brain believed that it had finally found the ideal candidate
to make up for the psychological and emotional damage you experienced in
childhood. WHEN YOU HEAR the words ‘psychological and emotional damage of
childhood,’ you may immediately think about serious childhood traumas such as
sexual or physical abuse or the suffering that comes from having parents who
divorced or died or were alcoholics. And for many people this is the tragic
reality of childhood. However, even if you were fortunate enough to grow up in
a safe, nurturing environment, you still bear invisible scars from childhood,
because from the very moment you were born you were a complex, dependent
creature with a never-ending cycle of needs. Freud correctly labeled us
‘insatiable beings.’ And no parents, no matter how devoted, are able to respond
perfectly to all of these changing needs.’’
‘’For the first few months,…the baby…makes no distinction
between itself and the rest of the world.[She is] in some ways more entire than
she would ever be again. As adults, we seem to have a fleeting memory of this
state of original wholeness, a sensation that is as hard to recapture as a
dream. We seem to recall a distant time when we were more unified and connected
to the world…But what does this have to do with marriage? For some reason, we
enter marriage with the expectation that our partners will magically restore
this feeling of wholeness. It is as if they hold the key to a long-ago kingdom,
and all we have to do is persuade them to unlock the door. Their failure to do
so is one of the main reasons for our eventual unhappiness.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’Although you and I have no recollection of these first few
months of life, our old brains are still trapped in an infantile perspective.
Although we are now adults, capable of keeping ourselves fed and warm and dry,
a hidden part of us still expects the outside world to take care of us. When
our partners are hostile or merely unhelpful, a silent alarm is triggered deep
in our brains that fills us with the fear of death…. this automatic alarm
system plays a key role in intimate love relationships.’’
‘’When you were young, there were probably many times when
you,…were angry at your caretakers. More than likely, it was a sentiment that
got little support. Your angry feelings, your sexual feelings, and a host of
other ‘antisocial’ thoughts and feelings were pushed deep inside of you and
were not allowed to see the light of day. A few parents take this invalidation
process to the extreme. They deny not only their children’s feelings and
behaviors, but the entire child as well. ‘You do not exist. You are not
important in this family. Your needs, your feelings, your wishes are not
important to us.’ ‘’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’TO FILL THE void, the child creates a ‘false self,’ a
character structure that serves a double purpose: it camouflages those parts of
his being that he has repressed and protects him from further injury. A child
brought up by a sexually repressive, distant mother, for instance, may become a
‘tough guy.’ He tells himself, ‘I don’t care if my mother isn’t very
affectionate. I don’t need that mushy stuff. I can make it on my own. And
another thing—I think sex is dirty!’. Eventually he applies this patterned
response to all situations. No matter who tries to get close to him, he erects
the same barricade. In later years, when he overcomes his reluctance to getting
involved in a love relationship, it is likely that he will criticize his
partner for her desire for intimacy and her intact sexuality: ‘Why do you want
so much contact and why are you so obsessed with sex? It’s not normal!’ ‘’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’Why do negative traits have such an appeal? If people chose
mates on a logical basis, they would look for partners who compensated for
their parents’ inadequacies, rather than duplicated them. If your parents wounded
you by being unreliable, for example, the sensible course of action would be to
marry a dependable person, someone who would help you overcome your fear of abandonment….The
part of your brain that directed your search for a mate, however, was not your
logical, orderly new brain; it was your time-locked, myopic old brain. And what
your old brain was trying to do was recreate the conditions of your upbringing,
in order to correct them. Having received enough nurturing to survive but not
enough to feel satisfied, it was attempting to return to the scene of your
original frustration so that you could resolve your unfinished business.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’Look around you, and you will find ample evidence that
people choose mates with complementary traits. Dan is glib and talkative; his
wife, Gretchen, is thoughtful and introverted. Janice is an intuitive thinker;
her husband, Patrick, is very logical. Rena is a dancer; her boyfriend,
Matthew, has a stiff and rigid body. What people are doing in these yin/yang
matches is trying to reclaim their lost selves by proxy.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’Not everyone finds a mate who conforms so closely to the
imago [an unconscious image of the opposite sex that you had been forming since
birth]. Sometimes only one or two key character traits match up, and the
initial attraction is likely to be mild. Such a relationship is often less
passionate and less troubled than those characterized by a closer match. The
reason it is less passionate is that the old brain is still looking for the
ideal ‘gratifying object,’ and the reason it tends to be less troubled is that
there isn’t the repetition of so many childhood struggles. When couples with
weak imago matches terminate their relationships, it’s often because they feel
little interest in each other, not because they are in great pain. ‘ There wasn’t
all that much going on,’ they say. Or ‘I just felt restless. I knew that there
was something better out there.’ ‘’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''Our motivation for seeking an imago match is our urgent
desire to heal childhood wounds.''
''The reason we have such good feelings at the beginning of a
relationship,…is that a part of the brain believes that finally we have been
given a chance to be nurtured and to regain our original wholeness. ''
‘’To the lovers it seems as though romantic love is actually
going to heal them and make them whole….They feel as if no one, not even their
own parents, has cared so deeply about their inner world. As they share…intimacies,
they may even experience moments of true empathic communion and become absorbed
in each other’s world….With a sixth sense that is often lamentably lacking in
later stages of a relationship, lovers seem to divine exactly what their
partners are lacking. If the partner needs more nurturing, they gladly play the
role of Mommy or Daddy.If the partner wants more freedom, they grant him or her
independence. If the partner needs more security, they become protective and
reassuring. They shower each other with spontaneous acts of caring that seem to
erase their earlier, childhood deprivations. Being in love is like suddenly becoming the favored child in an
idealized family.’’
‘’After all, if you don’t appear to have many needs of your
own, your partner is free to assume that your goal in life is to nurture, not
to be nurtured, and this makes you very desirable indeed.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’IF WE WERE to translate John’s love for Cheryl into dry
psychological terms, it could be described as a mixture of denial,
transference, and projection. John was ‘in love with Cheryl’ because:
1. He
had transferred his feelings about his mother onto her.
2. He
had projected his hidden rage onto her visible rage.
3. He
was able to deny the pain that she caused him.
He thought he was in love with a person, when in fact he was
in love with an image projected upon that person. Cheryl was not a real person
with needs and desires of her own; she was a resource for the satisfaction of
his unconscious childhood longings. He was in love with the idea of wish
fulfillment and—like Narcissus—with a reflected part of himself.’’
''Romantic love does
indeed thrive on ignorance and fantasy. As long as lovers maintain an
idealized, incomplete view of each other, they live in a Garden of Eden….When you and I lit our lamps and took
our first objective look at our lovers, we discovered that they weren’t gods at
all ꟷthey were imperfect humans, full of warts and blemishes, all
those negative traits that we had steadfastly refused to see.''
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’WHEN DOES ROMANTIC love end and the power struggle begin?
As in all attempts to map human behavior, it’s impossible to define precisely
when the stages occur. But for most couples there is a noticeable change in the
relationship about the time they make a definite commitment to each other. Once
they say, ‘Let’s get married’ or ‘Let’s get engaged’ or ‘Let’s be primary
lovers, even though we still see other people,’ the pleasing, inviting dance of
courtship draws to a close, and lovers begin to want not only the expectation
of need fulfillmentꟷthe illusion that was responsible for
the euphoria of romantic loveꟷbut the reality as well. Suddenly it
isn’t enough that their partners be affectionate, clever, attractive, and
fun-loving. They now have to satisfy a whole hierarchy of expectations, some
conscious, but most hidden from their awareness.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’There probably came a time in your relationship when you began
to wish that your partner was less sexy or less fun-loving or less inventiveꟷsomehow less wholeꟷbecause these qualities called forth
repressed qualities in you, and your hidden self was threatening to make an
unscheduled reappearance….Your growing discomfort with your partner’s
complementary traits was only part of the rapidly brewing storm. Your partner’s
negative traits, the ones that you had resolutely denied during the romantic
phase of your relationship, were also beginning to come into sharp focus.
Suddenly your partner’s chronic depression or drinking problem or stinginess or
lack of responsibility became evident. This gave you the sickening realization
that not only were you not going to get your needs met, but your partner was
destined to wound you in the very same way you were wounded in childhood! ‘’
‘’At some point in their love relationships, most people
discover that something about their partners awakens strong memories of
childhood pain. Sometimes the parallels are obvious. A young woman with abusive
parents, for example, may discover a violent streak in her boyfriend.’’
‘’Two factors that fuel the power struggle:
1. Our
partners make us feel anxious by stirring up forbidden parts of ourselves.
2. Our
partners have or appear to have the same negative traits as our parents, adding
further injury to old wounds and thereby awakening our unconscious fear of death.’’
''As the illusion of
romantic love slowly erodes, the two partners begin to:
1. Stir up each other’s repressed
behaviors and feelings.
2. Reinjure each other’s childhood
wounds.
3. Project their own negative traits
onto each other.
All of these interactions
are unconscious. All people know is that they feel confused, angry, anxious,
depressed, and unloved. And it is only natural that they blame all this
unhappiness on their partners. They haven’t changedꟷthey’re the same people they used to be! It’s their partners who have
changed!''
‘’IN DESPAIR, PEOPLE begin to use negative tactics to force
their partners to be more loving. They withhold their affection and become
emotionally distant. They become irritable and critical. They attack and blame….They
believe that, if they give their partners enough pain, the partners will return
to their former loving ways. What makes people believe that hurting their
partners will make them behave more pleasantly? Why don’t people simply tell
each other in plain English that they want more affection or attention or
lovemaking or freedom or whatever it is that they are craving?...Once again our
old brains were to blame. When we were babies, we didn’t smile sweetly at our
mothers to get them to take care of us. We didn’t pinpoint our discomfort by
putting it into words. We simply opened our mouths and screamed. And it didn’t
take us long to learn that, the louder we screamed,the quicker they came. The
success of this tactic was turned into an ‘imprint,’ a part of our stored
memory about how to get the world to respond to our needs: ’When you are
frustrated, provoke the people around you. Be as unpleasant as possible until
someone comes to your rescue.’ ‘’
‘’When partners don’t
tell each other what they want and constantly criticize each other for missing
the boat, it’s no wonder that the spirit of love and cooperation disappears. In
its place comes the grim determination of the power struggle, in which each
partner tries to force the other to meet his or her needs. Even though
their partners react to these maneuvers with renewed hostility, they persevere.
Why? Because in their unconscious minds they fear that, if their needs are not
met, they will die. This is a classic example of what Freud called the ‘repetition
compulsion,’ the tendency of human beings to repeat ineffective behaviors over
and over again. Some couples stay in this angry, hostile state forever. They
hone their ability to pierce each other’s defenses and damage each other’s
psyches. With alarming frequency, the anger erupts into violence.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’The old brain is the cause of most of our relationship
problems. It’s the old brain that prompts us to choose partners who resemble
our caretakers. It’s the old brain that is the source of all our elaborate defensesꟷthe projections, transferences, and introjectionsꟷthat obscure the reality of ourselves and our partners. And
it’s the old brain that is responsible for our infantile response to frustration,
the ‘cry-or-criticize’ response that causes further alienation. But the old
brain also plays a positive role in love relationships. Although some of the
tactics of the old brain may be self-defeating, its fundamental drives are
essential to our well-being. Our unconscious drive to repair the emotional
damage of childhood is what allows us to realize our spiritual potential as
human beings, to become complete and loving people capable of nurturing others.
And even though our projections and transferences may temporarily blind us to
our partners’ reality, they’re also what binds us to them, setting up the
preconditions for future growth.’’
''Ten Characteristics of a Conscious Partnership
- You realize that your love
relationship has a hidden purpose—the healing of childhood wounds.
- You create a more accurate image
of your partner.
You see your partner not as your savior but as another wounded human
being, struggling to be healed.
- You take responsibility for
communicating your needs and desires to your partner. In an unconscious partnership,
you cling to the childhood belief that your partner automatically intuits
your needs. In a conscious partnership, you accept the fact that, in order
to understand each other, you have to develop clear channels of
communication.
- You become more intentional in your interactions. In an unconscious partnership,
you tend to react without thinking…. In a conscious partnership, you train
yourself to behave in a more constructive manner.
- You learn to value your partner’s needs and wishes as
highly as you value your own. In an unconscious partnership, you assume that your
partner’s role in life is to take care of your needs magically. In a
conscious partnership, you let go of this narcissistic view and divert
more and more of your energy to meeting your partner’s needs.
- You embrace the dark side of your personality. In a conscious partnership, you
openly acknowledge the fact that
you, like everyone else, have negative traits. As you accept
responsibility for this dark side of your nature, you lessen your tendency
to project your negative traits onto your mate, which creates a less
hostile environment.
- You learn new techniques to satisfy your basic needs and
desires. During
the power struggle, you cajole, harangue, and blame in an attempt to
coerce your partner to meet your needs. When you move beyond this stage,
you realize that your partner can indeed be a resource for you—once you
abandon your self-defeating tactics.
- You search within yourself for the strengths and
abilities you are lacking.One reason you were attracted to your partner is that
he or she had strengths and abilities that you lacked. Therefore, being
with your partner gave you an illusory sense of wholeness. In a conscious
partnership, you learn that the only way you can truly recapture a sense
of oneness is to develop the hidden traits within yourself.
- You become more aware of your drive to be loving and
whole and united with the universe. As a part of your God-given nature, you have the
ability to love unconditionally and to experience unity with the world
around you. Social conditioning and imperfect parenting made you lose
touch with these qualities. In a conscious partnership, you begin to
rediscover your original nature.
- You accept the difficulty of creating a lasting love
relationship.
In an unconscious partnership, you believe that the way to have a good
relationship is to pick the right partner. In a conscious partnership you
realize you have to be the right partner. As you gain a more realistic
view,you realize that a good relationship requires commitment, discipline,
and the courage to grow and change; creating a fulfilling love
relationship is hard work.
We live impoverished,
repetitious, unrewarding lives and blame our partners for our unhappiness.
''We are prisoners of the fear of change…Couples…would rather
divorce, break up the family, and divide up all their possessions than acquire
a new style of relating.''
''We expect life’s
rewards to come to us easily and without sacrifice. Just as the Israelites
wanted the Promised Land to be the Garden of Eden, God’s ready-made gift to
Adam and Eve, we want the simple act of falling in love to cure all our ills.
We want to live in a fairy tale where the beautiful princess meets the handsome
prince and they live happily ever after. But it was only when the Israelites
saw the Promised Land as an opportunity, as a chance to create a new reality,
that they were allowed to enter.And it is only when we see love relationships
as a vehicle for change and selfgrowth that we can begin to satisfy our unconscious
yearnings.''
''As the couples began shifting their focus away from demanding
that their existing relationship meet all of their needs to focusing on what
their relationship needed from them, they began to make remarkable
progress….My second order of business with couples is to help them define their
relationship vision. Before I hear all the things they don’t like about their relationship,
I want to know how they would prefer it to be. What would it be like if they
lived in the relationship of their dreams? Defining the vision turns their
energy away from past and present disappointments toward a more hopeful future.
Achieving their vision is the goal of therapy.''
''It is very difficult to identify what is wrong in a
relationship if the participants keep themselves distant and distracted. Even
more important, two intimate partners cannot reconnect with each other until
they are physically and emotionally available.''
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''ONCE A COUPLE has made a commitment to stay together and work
on their relationship, the next logical step is to help them become allies, not
enemies….In order to make the surest and fastest progress toward their
relationship vision, they need to become friends and helpmates.''
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''Insight into childhood wounds is a critical element in therapy,
but it isn’t enough. People also need to learn how to let go of
counterproductive behaviors and replace them with more effective ones.''
''Most people tend to choose fairly passive activities as their
caring behaviors; they have forgotten how to have fun together. As soon as I
noted this trend, I surveyed all my clients and found that they spent, on
average, about ten minutes a week playing and laughing together. Improving this
bleak statistic became a priority for me. I knew that when couples have fun
together they identify each other as a source of pleasure and safety, which
intensifies their emotional bond. When the old brain registers a positive flow
of energy, it knows that the person associated with the energy is connected to
life and safety, and the two people begin to connect with each other on a
deeper unconscious level.''
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''The pain of hearing a
criticism is largely due to its accuracy.''
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''Most of your partner’s criticisms
of you have some basis in reality.''
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''Many of your repetitious,
emotional criticisms of your partner are disguised statements of your own unmet
needs.''
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''Some of your repetitive, emotional
criticisms of your partner may be an accurate description of a disowned part of
yourself.''
''Examining your
criticisms of your partner turns out to be an excellent way to gather
information about yourself. How can you increase your knowledge of your partner’s inner
world? The answer is through improved channels of communication. Throughout the
course of your relationship, your partner has given you thousands of hours of
testimony about his or her thoughts and feelings and wishes, but you have in
turn registered only a fraction of this information. In order to deepen your
understanding of your partner’s subjective reality, you need to train yourself
to listen and communicate more effectively.''
‘’Even though you and your partner speak the same language,
each of you dwells in an idiosyncratic world of private meanings. Growing up in
different families with different life experiences has given you separate
lexicons. As a trivial example, let’s explore what the simple words ‘Let’s play
tennis’ might mean in two different families. In family A, the full,unspoken
definition of this phrase is: ‘Let’s grab any old racket that happens to be
lying around, walk to the local park, and lob the ball back and forth across
the net until someone wants to quit. Rules are secondary; it’s the exercise
that counts.’ In family B, however, ‘Let’s
play tennis’ has quite a different meaning. It means: ‘Let’s reserve an indoor
court at the private club, get out our two hundred-dollar rackets, and then
play tough, competitive tennis until one player is clearly the winner.’ Mark,
raised in family A, is going to be taken aback by the aggressiveness and
determination that his wife, Susan, raised in family B, brings to the game.’’
‘’BESIDES THE PROBLEM
of idiosyncratic language, there are other roadblocks to communication. Perhaps
the most common mechanism is denial: you simply refuse to believe what your
partner has to say….When
our partners behave in ways that deviate from our idealized view of them, we
have an arsenal of weapons to help us maintain our illusions. We can condemn
them: ’You are a bad (ungrateful, insensitive, boorish, stupid, spiteful,
uninformed, crass, unenlightened, etc.) person for feeling that way.’ We can ‘educate’
them: ‘You don’t really feel that way. What you really feel is …’ We can
threaten them: ‘ Unless you change your mind, I’m going to …’ We can ignore them: ’Uh-huh. Very interesting.
As I was saying …’ And we can analyze them: ‘The reason you have such
unacceptable thoughts and feelings is that years ago your mother …’ In all of
these responses, we are trying to diminish our partners’ sense of self and
replace it with our own, self-serving illusion.’’
''When you assume that
your partner is identical to you, you are negating your partner’s existence. In
a healthy relationship, you realize that you live with another person who is
not an extension of you. Your parner is a unique individual who has an equally
valid point of view. Failure to recognize each other’s separate existence is
the major source of conflict between partners.''
‘’LET’S TAKE A closer look at the three steps of the Imago
Dialogue. The first is called ‘Mirroring.’ When one of you has something
important to say, you begin by stating that thought or feeling in a short
sentence beginning with ‘I.’ For example,
‘I don’t enjoy cooking dinner for you when you don’t seem to appreciate all the
effort involved.’ Your partner restates the sentence in his or her own words
and then asks if the message was received correctly: ‘Let me see if I got it.
You find it hard to put the effort into cooking dinner every night when I don’t
show my appreciation for all that you’ve done. Did I get you?’ You repeat this process until your partner
clearly understands what you mean to say….Once the receiving partner had
understood what the sending partner had said, I coached the receiver to add
these words: ‘Is there more?’ This gave the sender a chance to expand on the
topic. ‘It takes me at least an hour to cook dinner, and I do my best to make
it attractive and delicious. I feel sad when you eat without comment.’ The
sender continues adding more information until he or she has no more to say.’’
‘’ONCE COUPLES HAVE become adept at mirroring each other, I
encourage them to go on to the next step of the Imago Dialogue: validation. In
this part of the exercise, they learn how to affirm the internal logic of each
other’s remarks. In essence, they are telling each other, ‘What you’re saying
makes sense to me. I can see how you are thinking, and why you would think that
way.’ ‘’
‘’THE THIRD STEP in Imago Dialogue is empathy. It makes sense
that empathy would follow on the heels of validation. If you listen carefully
to your partner, understand the totality of what he or she is saying, and then
affirm the logic behind your partner’s words, you are ready to acknowledge and
respond to the feelings behind those thoughts. Your first task is to try to
imagine what those feelings might be. If your partner’s feelings are conveyed
beyond his or her words, by facial expression or tone of voice, you will have
little trouble intuiting them. If your partner’s feelings are not so obvious,
you will have to imagine what they might be. In either case, you need to check
with your partner to see if you perceived their feelings accurately. ‘Given the
fact that you said I neglected you, I’m wondering if you feel hurt by my
neglect. Is that how you feel?’ Checking to confirm the accuracy respects your
partner’s reality and enhances your emotional ‘presence,’ an essential
ingredient of healing. Asking for confirmation also deepens your partner’s
experience of empathy; he will think: ’My partner is being very respectful of
my feelings. She cares how I really feel.’ ‘’
‘’ ‘sender responsibility’ [means]…that the person sending
the message had to follow certain rules that were designed to make the message
easier for the receiver to ‘hear.’ The first rule was to use ‘I’ language when
expressing a frustration. Instead of blurting out, ‘You made me feel so ashamed
when you treated our neighbor that way,’ you say, ‘I felt ashamed when you treated our
neighbor that way.’ The second rule is that you should avoid making critical
remarks about your partner’s character and focus instead on your partner’s
behavior. Instead of saying, ‘You are always late. You have no sense of
responsibility,’ you say, ‘When you are
late, I feel frustrated and scared.’ In addition, you moderate the intensity of
your emotions so that your partner feels safe enough to relax and listen. After
all, your goal is not to wound your partner but to deepen the connection
between you.’’
‘’The love we are seeking has to come not just from another
person within the context of a safe, intimate relationship, but from an imago
matchꟷsomeone so similar to our parents that our unconscious mind
has them fused. This appears to be the only way to erase the pains of
childhood. We may enjoy the hugs and attentions of other people,but the effects
are transitory. It’s like the difference between sugar and Nutrasweet. Our
taste buds may be deceived by the taste of artificial sweeteners, but our
bodies derive no nourishment from them. In just such a way, we hunger for love
from our original caretakers or from people who are so similar to them that
on an unconscious level we have them merged.’’
''while it was often true that what one partner needed the most
was what the other partner was least able to give, it also happened to be the
precise area where that partner needed to grow! For example, if Mary grew up
with caretakers who were sparing in their physical affection, she most likely
has chosen a husband, George, who is uncomfortable with bodily contact; the
unmet childhood need in Mary is invariably matched by George’s inability to meet
that need. But if George were to overcome his resistance to being affectionate
in an effort to satisfy Mary’s needs, not only would Mary get the physical
reassurance she craved, but George would slowly regain contact with his own
sensuality. In other words, in his efforts to heal his partner he would be
recovering an essential part of himself! The unconscious selection process
has brought together two people who can either hurt each other or heal each
other, depending upon their willingness to grow and change.''
One partner’s greatest desire is often matched by the other partner’s
greatest resistance.
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''[For Behavior Change Request
Dialogue] I gave Melanie and Stewart and the rest of the group some detailed instructions.
I explained that their partners would ask for behaviors that could be difficult
for them to enact, because they had not been allowed in childhood. But, I
continued, if you stretch and give your
partner what they need from you, it will activate that part of you that was
shut down in childhood, and you will develop hidden parts of yourself. Your
partner’s needs are an invitation and opportunity for you to grow.I then
sent the workshop participants back to their rooms, having asked them to identify
a chronic complaint, isolate the desire that was at the heart of the complaint,
connect it with a childhood experience, and come up with a list of concrete,
doable behaviors that would help satisfy the unmet desire. They should then
look at each other’s lists and rank the behaviors according to how hard they would
be to act upon. I told them that sharing this information did not obligate them
to meet each other’s needs, but that the purpose of the exercise was to educate
each other and to develop their capacity for empathy. If their partners then
made the decision to stretch into new behaviors, they would now possess some
specific guidelines. Any suggestion of obligation or expectation… would reduce
the exercise to a bargain, bringing with it the likelihood that the whole
experience would end in resentment and failure.''
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
‘’We discovered that couples had an even more joyful
relationship when they abolished all forms of negativity. This involved getting
rid of blatant forms such as anger, shame, and criticism, but also eliminating
more subtle forms as well, including such well-known ploys as ‘helpful’
criticism, inattention, condescension, ‘the silent treatment,’ and using a
bored or weary tone of voice.’’
― Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
''when one person yells
at another, the person being yelled at produces more of the stress hormone
cortisol. That’s to be expected. But, perhaps more interestingly, the same
increase in cortisol is seen in the angry person as well.One could say that any
negativity that we direct toward others is a form of selfabuse.''
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