1
LOVE, LOST AND FOUND
IN THE THIRTY-FIVE years that we have been helping people get the love they want, we’ve witnessed many changes in the outward appearance of love relationships. For example, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the age at which people marry. When we first worked with couples, the median marriage age for first-time marriages was twenty-three years for men and twenty-one years for women. By 2017, that had risen to thirty years for men and twenty-seven for women.1 Today, people in their twenties are just as likely to be in school, working, or exploring the world as getting married and starting a family. Many marry later, if at all. And young people are suspicious of marriage and have given up on the institution, since they have seen so few marriages they would want to emulate.
Three decades ago, most of the couples we saw were spending too little time together, which redirected energy away from their relationship. Today, the digital world has shrunk that time even more. A 2016 survey2 reported that adults are now spending five hours a day on their portable devices, and that’s in addition to the time they spend watching TV, playing DVDs, and working on their laptops and personal computers. Apple’s digital devices—the iPhone and the iPad—are aptly named: they all strengthen the “I” and not the relationship we most care about.
Another twenty-first century phenomenon is the growing reliance on the Web. In the 1970s and ’80s, most couples met each other at school, work, or social events. Today, millions of people meet their matches on internet dating sites. For a monthly fee, a computer will scrutinize your personality and preferences and churn out a list of people who come closest to your ideal. With luck, you’ll find a 100 percent match! Matches are no longer made in heaven—they’re made by computer algorithms.
THE TRUTHS THAT ENDURE
AMID ALL THE changes in the way we meet and mate, two truths endure. First, people everywhere still seek lasting love. We all long to feel the deep sense of connection and joy that floods us when love is new. A man who attended a recent workshop said that “falling in love with my wife made me feel loved and accepted for who I was for the very first time. It was intoxicating.” Nineteenth-century romantic poet John Keats put it this way: “My creed is Love and you are its only tenet—You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist.” You are in love. You are no longer alone. The sensation of being fully alive and joyfully connecting is running through your nervous system. You feel at home in the universe itself. You have been captured by the power and wonder of romantic love.
The second truth is that when love flounders, people experience the same heartache that couples reported since the age of Cleopatra and Antony when suicide was the best answer. One client said as his girlfriend was leaving him, “I can’t sleep or eat. My chest feels like it’s going to explode. I cry all the time, and I don’t know what to do.” Indeed, this is the same trauma that has been described throughout recorded history. An ancient medical text from the Middle East, written more than three thousand years ago, described a condition called “lovesickness.”3 According to the text, you know a patient is lovesick when he is “habitually depressed, his throat tight, finds no pleasure in eating or drinking, and endlessly repeats, with great sighs, ‘Ah, my poor heart!’”
IT GETS PERSONAL
WE KNOW THE pain of lost love because both of us had first marriages that ended in divorce. For me (Harville), my first wife and I began having marriage difficulties when our two children were young. We were deeply committed to our relationship and went through eight years of intensive examination, working with several therapists. Nothing helped, and ultimately, we filed for divorce.
As I sat in the divorce court waiting my turn to see the judge, I felt like a double failure, a failure as a husband and as a therapist. That very afternoon, I was scheduled to teach a course on marriage and the family, and the next day, as usual, I had several couples to counsel. Despite my professional training, I felt just as confused and defeated as the other people who sat beside me, waiting for their names to be called.
In the year following my divorce, I woke up each morning with an acute sense of loss. When I went to bed at night, I stared at the ceiling, trying to find some explanation for our failed marriage. Sure, my wife and I had our ten rational reasons for divorcing, just like everyone else. I didn’t like this about her; she didn’t like that about me; we had different interests and goals; we had grown apart. But beneath our list of complaints, I could sense that there was a central disappointment, an underlying cause of our unhappiness that had eluded eight years of probing.
Time passed, and my despair turned into a compelling desire to make sense out of my dilemma; I was not going to walk away from the ruins of my marriage without gaining some insight. I met Helen two years later.
I (Helen) also had two young children, and like Harville, I was deeply sorrowful and also puzzled by the failure of my first marriage. I was aware that a distance had grown between my husband and me, and I thought his long hours at work contributed to the problem. When he was unavailable, I felt lonely and sad. But I grew to wonder if there were other, more hidden causes of our growing distance. Why hadn’t we been able to identify those deeper issues and solve the problems?
IMAGO THERAPY
FROM THE DAY we (Harville and Helen) met, we discovered that we shared the same intense interest in the psychology of relationships. Harville was a clinical pastoral counselor, and Helen was working on her master’s in counseling degree at Southern Methodist University. During our courtship, we spent much of our time gathering insights from wide-ranging fields, including philosophy, religion, feminism, and physics. We spent our “dates” sharing what we were discovering.
Imago (i-MAH-go) Therapy, the ideas and techniques you will be reading about in this book, was born out of our decades-long collaboration and refined in the crucible of our own marriage. In the past thirty-five years, we have used our insights to counsel thousands of couples, some in private practice and some in the group workshops that we now colead.
Working with so many people has deepened our understanding of how marriages work, why they break down, and how couples can learn to reconnect and experience the joy and wonder that was there when they first fell in love. Drawing on these insights, we have been able to make Imago Therapy more and more effective. Today, we can help couples get the love they want more quickly than we had in the past, and with even better results.
CORE IDEA
ONE OF THE core ideas of Imago Therapy is that the underlying cause of most couples’ discontent lies buried beneath the surface. Superficially, partners argue about household chores, money, parenting styles, their next vacation, or who is spending too much time on their cell phones. Outside of their awareness, however, each one is being compelled by an unwritten agenda that was formed early in life: to recover the sensations of being fully alive and joyfully connecting with which we came into the world. Although the specifics of each person’s agenda are unique, the overriding goal is the same: to experience with the partner the same sensations they experienced with their caretakers. And they assign their partner the task of making it happen! “Partner, I expect you to satisfy the unmet emotional needs that I brought from childhood.”
Most of us vastly underestimate the scope of the unconscious mind. There is an analogy that might give a better appreciation for its pervasive influence. In the daytime, we can’t see the stars. We talk as if they “come out” at night, even though they are there all the time. We also underestimate the sheer number of stars. We look up at the sky, see a smattering of dim stars, and assume that’s all there is. When we travel far away from city lights, we see a sky strewn with stars and are overwhelmed by the brilliance of the heavens. But it is only when we study astronomy that we learn the whole truth: the hundreds of thousands of stars that we see on a clear, moonless night in the country are only a fraction of the stars in the universe, and many of the points of light that we assume to be stars are in fact entire galaxies. So it is with the unconscious mind: the orderly, logical thoughts of our conscious mind are but a thin veil over the unconscious, which is active and functioning at all times. When we fall in love, this unconscious, trapped in the eternal now and having only a dim awareness of the outside world, is trying to re-create the environment of childhood. And the reason the unconscious 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.
Few people are aware of this agenda, and many would deny it. “What does my childhood have to do with my partner’s drinking problem? I want to deal with the here and now.” They do not know that their being unavailable to their partner may be the source of their partner’s drinking problem, which in turn feeds their unavailability to connect in the here and now. Nor do they know that the mutual experience of ruptured connecting is a replay of each partner’s childhood. While each partner contributes to the complaint of the other, on an unconscious level, we expect our partners to intuit our unmet needs and satisfy them without asking for anything in return. Additionally, we picked that partner to reexperience these old feelings so that we could then heal the sadness and pain from the past.
YOUR WONDROUS BRAIN
HOW CAN YOU satisfy your needs from the past if you are not aware of them? Learning a few facts about your brain will give you a better understanding of the potential we all have to recover our original joy.
Let’s take a brief look at the physical structure of the brain, that mysterious and complex organ with many different subdivisions. For simplicity’s sake, we divide the brain into three concentric layers.4
The brain stem, which is the inner and most primitive layer, oversees the flow of messages between the brain and the rest of the body. It also controls such basic functions as breathing, swallowing, heart rate, blood pressure, and other vital body functions. Located at the base of the skull, it is sometimes referred to as the “reptilian brain,” because all vertebrates from reptiles to mammals share this portion of the anatomy.
Flaring like a wishbone around the top of the brain stem is the layer of the brain called the limbic system, which stores long-term memory and can generate strong emotions. Scientists can surgically stimulate the limbic system of lab animals and create spontaneous bursts of fear and aggression. In your partnership, you may have been the sender or the recipient of similar impulsive eruptions!
In this book, we will use the term old brain to refer to both the brain stem and the limbic system. Think of your old brain as being hardwired and determining most of your automatic reactions.
The third area of the brain on top of and surrounding the two other inner layers is the cerebral cortex, a much larger, convoluted mass of brain tissue. This portion of the brain, which is most highly developed in Homo sapiens, is the site of most of your cognitive functions. We will refer to the cerebral cortex as the new brain because it appeared most recently in evolutionary history.
Your prefrontal cortex of the new brain is the part of you that is conscious, alert, and in contact with your daily surroundings. It’s the part of you that makes decisions, thinks, observes, plans, anticipates, responds, organizes information, and creates ideas. The new brain is inherently logical and tries to find a cause for every effect and an effect for every cause. By and large, this analytical, probing, questioning part of your mind is the part that you think of as being “you.” When you and your partner are operating out of your new brain, you can help manage and quell some of the emotional responses coming from your old brain.
OLD-BRAIN LOGIC
IN CONTRAST TO your new brain, you are unaware of most of the functions of your old brain. They operate unconsciously. Scientists who study the brain tell us that its main concern is self-preservation. Ever on the alert, the old brain asks the primeval question: “Is it safe or dangerous?”
As it goes about its job of ensuring your safety, your old brain operates in a fundamentally different manner from your new brain. One of the crucial differences is that the old brain has only a hazy awareness of the external world. Unlike the new brain, which relies on direct perception of the outside world, your old brain gets its incoming data from the images, symbols, and thoughts produced by the new brain.
This data is sorted into very broad categories. For example, while your new brain easily distinguishes John from Suzy from Roberto, your old brain segregates all people into six categories. Is this someone to: (1) nurture, (2) be nurtured by, (3) have sex with, (4) run away from, (5) submit to, or (6) attack.5 Subtleties such as “this is my neighbor,” “my cousin,” “my mother,” or “my husband” slide right on by.
The old brain and the new brain, different in so many ways, are constantly exchanging and interpreting information. Understanding this fact about the nature of your brain helps explain why you can have feelings about your partner that seem out of proportion to the events that triggered them.
Let’s suppose that you are a middle-aged man, a middle manager in a medium-size company. After a hectic day at work, where you manage to placate an important client and put the finishing touches on a multimillion-dollar budget, you leave for home, eager to share your successes with your wife. Just before you get to the house, she sends you a text saying that she is still at work and won’t be home for several hours. You had counted on her being there! You park in the garage and walk into an empty house. Do you recover from your disappointment and relish the time to yourself? Do you use the time to do a final check on the budget? Yes. But not before you head straight for the freezer and dish out a bowl of vanilla ice cream, your go-to comfort food, to help subdue your anger and disappointment.
When your wife finally gets home, you feel cool and distant toward her. You continue to be reserved the following day. You bring your work to the dinner table and barely glance up at her. You spend the evening watching sports on TV.
Days later, you might become puzzled by your reaction. You know that your wife has a demanding job just like you do. She, too, has to work overtime. Why were you so upset at her? Why did you feel betrayed? Outside your awareness, her absence triggered feelings you had decades ago when you were being raised by working parents. When you were in grade school, you stayed after school in a day care program and were picked up by your mother just before dinner. You envied friends who went straight home at the end of the school day. As a young teen, you walked home from school to an empty house and spent hours watching TV, waiting for your parents to come home. When they did come home, they were often too stressed from work to spend relaxed time with you.
Decades later, your past would worm its way into your present, making you overreact to your wife’s late homecoming. To your old brain, you were experiencing the same sense of abandonment you had felt growing up.
CREATING NEW PATHWAYS
IF YOU COULD become conscious of and begin to regulate these unwelcome, unconscious intrusions from your past, you and your partner would be less reactive and have fewer arguments. You would be able to stay in your new brain and interact more rationally. Your stress level would go down, and you would be more open to spending enjoyable time with each other once again.
But how can you accomplish this feat? How can you diminish these subterranean intrusions if you’re unaware of many of the painful episodes from your own past and even less familiar with your partner’s emotional childhood wounds?
Several of the exercises in Imago Therapy are designed to help you fill in these gaps. In a surprisingly short amount of time, you will be able to identify key issues that are interfering with your efforts to have a safe, loving partnership. (You’ll find these exercises in part 3 of this book. We recommend that you read all of parts 1 and 2 before you begin working on the exercises.) This new awareness will enhance your sensitivity to each other’s unmet needs and motivate you to be more willing to satisfy them.
If the core idea of our work is about understanding how the unconscious purpose of marriage is to finish childhood, the core practice is learning a new skill. Imago Dialogue introduces a radically new way of talking that makes all conversations safe. As you practice this essential exercise, you will create a safe environment in which you can begin to understand each other on a deeper level than ever before. The important thing to remember is that safety is the key. When you and your partner learn to create safety in your relationship, you will also be able to talk about sensitive issues without slipping into an argument or feeling frustrated or hopeless. Another fundamental exercise, Behavior Change Request, shows you how to convert a frustration into a request and turn the request into a simple, doable behavior. Removing the criticism embedded in a frustration keeps the space between you safe.
As you work your way step by step through Imago Therapy, you will be creating a zone of safety between you—a sacred space we call the Space Between—that is essential for getting the love you want. You might liken this zone to a river that runs between you. You both drink from the river and bathe in it, so it’s important that it be free from garbage and toxins. Your interactions in the Space Between determines what you experience inside. To keep the water running clean and pure, you must stop filling it with criticisms and hurtful comments and replace them with respectful, safe interactions. You must move from self-care to caring for this Space Between.
NEW FINDINGS ABOUT THE BRAIN
AS THE NEUROSCIENCES advanced in the 1990s, I (Helen) became fascinated by the concept of neuroplasticity, which states that our brains are impacted and changed by the experiences we have with others and the outside world. We have “social brains” that are influenced by our relationships. Prior to this discovery, brain scientists assumed the brain was unchanged by its interaction with other people and the outside world. This discovery helps explain why the exercises in Imago Therapy can be so transformative. Your brain is changed every time you interact with others.
Through animal experiments and sophisticated brain imaging techniques, neurologists have discovered that experiences from your childhood are recorded in your brain as chemical pathways linking individual nerve cells. Painful experiences from your past are recorded in extra-strong pathways, their strength caused by a stronger flow of chemical messengers. Each time you have a similar painful experience, the pathway becomes stronger still. Later in life, when you have a conflict with your partner, the intensity of your response can be amplified by this hidden pathway. We call this PFSD (post-family stress disorder), the mental condition that can develop during highly stressful relationship situations. Few people recognize that relational stress is similar to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that results from military combat, a natural disaster, or living in a war zone, among other situations. Long after the stressful interaction, people with PFSD find that interactions in their present life can trigger episodes of intense anxiety, especially events that are reminiscent of the original relational trauma. This phenomenon is much less intense when it is caused by the relatively mild interpersonal distress that most people experience during childhood, but if “emotional baggage” from your past amplifies a conflict you are having with your partner, it can rupture the connection between you and trigger anxiety similar to the original rupture in childhood.
Imago Therapy can short-circuit this unwanted turbulence from your past by helping you create and strengthen new neural pathways. When you have a positive experience with your partner, your old brain encodes it by creating new connections between brain cells. When you have more and more positive interactions, the pathway intensifies. Meanwhile, the old and disruptive pathway that was created in your childhood loses its strength (fewer chemical messengers flow between the cells). It no longer has the same capacity to intrude into your relationship.6
We liken this process to building a new freeway beside an old highway—once people travel on the freeway, they spend less time on the old, narrow road. And when they do wander over to the old road, they recognize it immediately and know they have the option of a new response to an old stimulus. Over time, the old road is no longer maintained and becomes cracked and overgrown with weeds. Meanwhile, the freeway has become the road more traveled.
We have witnessed this transformation in the many couples who have taken part in Imago Therapy and Education. As negative experiences from the past become less intrusive in a couple’s day-to-day life, there are fewer misunderstandings between them. They respond to what’s happening between them in more appropriate ways. They have fewer flare-ups in temper and begin to spend more relaxed time together. This safer, more connecting relationship begins to be a source of joy and rejuvenation.
Copyright © 1988, 2008, 2019 by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt
