Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed. (12 page)

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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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STANDING IN THE way of the changes we need to make in order to have a more satisfying relationship is our fear of change. A fear of change is also basic to human nature. We can feel anxious even when we’re undergoing a positive change, such as getting promoted, moving into a new home, or going on vacation. Anything that breaks us out of our comfortable or not-so-comfortable routines sets off an alarm in our old brain. The old brain is alerting us to the fact that we are entering territory that has not been mapped or surveyed, and that danger may lurk around every corner.
I see a wish to cling to well-worn paths even in young children. When our daughter, Leah, was two and a half years old, her younger brother, Hunter, had outgrown the bassinet, and Helen and I decided it was time to move her into a youth bed so that the baby could have the crib. The youth bed had a six-inch rail going halfway down the bed to keep her from rolling off in the middle of the night. The bottom half had no rail. The first morning that Leah awoke in her new bed, we heard her familiar wake-up cry: “Daddy! Daddy! Mommy! Mommy!” We went into her room, and there she was, on her knees, with her hands on the little rail, saying, “Pick me up!”—just as she had done in her old crib with the two-foot sides. We were taken aback by her helplessness. She could easily have climbed over the bar or scooted down a few feet to the part of the bed that had no railing at all. “Leah,” I said with enthusiasm, “you can get out of your new bed all by yourself!”
“I can’t,” she said, sticking out her lower lip. “I’m stuck.”
“Leah, look down here,” I implored, patting the part of the bed without rails. “You can climb down right here!” She knelt frozen in place. Finally, we had to get up on the bed with her and show her how to do it. With our encouragement, she was able to follow close behind us, overcome her resistance to change, and get out of bed.
I once saw a more dramatic demonstration of paralysis in the face of change while watching the evening news. A local TV station carried a story about a little boy who had been born with severe immune deficiency, and from the moment of birth had to spend his life encased in a plastic bubble, sealed off from life-threatening germs. His devoted mother and father were by his side every day of his life, but they were separated from him by the plastic, and the only way they could touch him was by putting on long sterile gloves that were permanently inserted into the bubble.
Shortly after the boy’s fifth birthday, he was given a successful bone-marrow transplant, and after elaborate testing, the
doctors decided that his immune system was sufficiently developed to allow him to leave his sterile world. On the day he was scheduled to come out, the bubble was slit open, and his overjoyed mother and father held out their arms to him. This was the first time in their lives that they would be able to kiss and hug their son. But, to everyone’s surprise, the boy cowered in the back of the bubble. His parents called to him, but he wouldn’t budge. Finally his father had to crawl inside and carry him out. As the little boy looked around the room, he started to cry. Since he had lived all his life in an eight-by-ten-foot enclosure, the room must have looked enormous to him. His parents hugged him and kissed him to reassure him, but he wasn’t used to any physical contact, and he arched backward to escape their embraces.
The closing segment of the story, filmed a few days later, showed that the child was growing more comfortable with life outside the bubble. But on the day of his emancipation it was clear that his fear of confronting the unfamiliar was stronger than his desire to explore the world.
That little boy lived for five years inside his bubble. The couples that come to me have been living for two, ten, twenty—as many as forty years inside a restrictive, growth-inhibiting relationship. With so many years invested in habituated behaviors, it’s only natural that they should experience a great reluctance to change. After all, I am asking them not only to risk the anxiety of learning a new style of relating, but also to confront the pain and fear that have been bottled up inside them for decades—the reason for their dysfunctional behavior in the first place.
TO GIVE YOU some insight into the difficulties of creating a conscious partnership, I want to recount my highly abridged
version of the story of Moses and the Promised Land, which I view as a parable of the human psyche.
2
It goes like this:
Many centuries ago, the Israelites were a great tribe of people living in a country near the Mediterranean Sea. There came a drought to their land, and, in order to survive, the Israelites migrated south to Egypt, where the bins were full of grain. But in exchange for the grain they were forced to become slaves to the Egyptians and were subjected to cruel treatment and the dreary labor of making bricks without straw. After more than four hundred years of this meager existence, along came a man named Moses, who said to the Israelites, “Good grief. You’re going through painful, repetitive behavior that is getting you nowhere. You’ve forgotten your heritage. You’re not slaves of the house of Egypt, you are the children of the great God Yahweh! The God of all gods is your creator, and you are his special people.”
Moses’ words stirred a sense of recognition in the Israelites, and they became aware of their mental imprisonment. This made them restless and unhappy—not unlike many of the couples that come to me for counseling.
Lured by a vision of the Promised Land, the Israelites followed Moses. But the Israelites were not prepared for the hardships of the journey, and they had little faith in God’s protection. When they came to the first obstacle, the Red Sea, they complained bitterly to Moses: “You got us out of our comfortable huts with a promise of a better way of life. Now our way is blocked by an enormous sea! Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What are we to do?”
Moses himself wasn’t sure what to do, but he believed that if he had faith a way would appear. While he was pondering their fate, a huge dust cloud appeared on the horizon. To the Israelites’ horror, they realized it was a cloud kicked up by thousands of rapidly approaching Egyptian soldiers coming to capture them and return them to their chains.
At this moment Moses lifted his hand and a strong east wind miraculously parted the Red Sea. Awed by this great miracle, the Israelites summoned their courage, took one last look back at Egypt—the only home they had known—and followed Moses fearfully into the watery chasm. There were walls of water to their right and to their left. When they were safely across the sea, Moses raised his hand once more, and the great sea walls collapsed, drowning all the Egyptians in a rushing torrent of water.
The Israelites had only moments to celebrate their safe passage. As they looked at the new land, they were dismayed to learn that they had arrived on the edge of a barren, trackless desert. Once again they cried out in anguish. “You disrupted our secure lives. You urged us to follow you on a long journey. We were almost captured by the Egyptians. We were nearly drowned in the Red Sea. And now we are lost in a barren land with no food or water!”
Despite their fears, the Israelites had no choice but to continue. They wandered for many months in the foreign land, guided by a pillar of cloud by day and by a pillar of fire by night. They encountered great hardships, but God was merciful and made their burden lighter by performing miracles. Finally the Israelites arrived at the end of the desert. Just over the ridge, said Moses, was the Promised Land. Scouts were sent ahead to survey the territory. But when the scouts returned, they brought more bad news: “The Promised Land really does flow with milk and honey, but it is already occupied! This is the home of the Canaanites, gigantic creatures seven feet tall!” The listening crowd cried out in terror and once again yearned for the safety and security of their life in Egypt.
At this point God spoke to them: “Because you have no faith, and because you keep remembering Egypt, you have to wander in the desert for forty years, until a new generation arises that does not remember the old ways. Only then can you go into the Promised Land.” So for forty more years the Israelites camped out in the desert. Children were born, and
old people died. Finally a new leader arose to take them into Israel to begin the hard work of wresting the land from the Canaanites.
What can we learn from this familiar story that will help us in our exploration of love relationships? One of the first truths we can learn is the fact that most of us go through our relationships as if we were asleep, engaging in routine interactions that give us little pleasure. Like the Israelites in their four hundred years of servitude to the Egyptians, we have forgotten who we are. In the words of Wordsworth, we come into the world “trailing clouds of glory,” but the fire is soon extinguished, and we lose sight of the fact that we are whole, spiritual beings. We live impoverished, repetitious, unrewarding lives and blame our partners for our unhappiness.
The story also teaches us that we are prisoners of the fear of change. When I ask couples to risk new behaviors, they become angry with me. There is a part of them that would rather divorce, break up the family, and divide up all their possessions than acquire a new style of relating. Like the Israelites, they tremble in front of the Red Sea, even though the way lies open to them. Later, when they are in a difficult stretch of the journey, their emotional difficulties seem like hordes of pursuing Egyptians and seven-foot-tall monsters. But, unlike the case of the Israelites, the enemy is within; it’s the denied and repressed parts of their being threatening to come to awareness.
The final truth in the story of Moses is that 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 self-growth that we can begin to satisfy our unconscious yearnings.
THIS CHAPTER MARKS a turning point in the book. Up until now, I’ve been describing the unconscious partnership, a relationship characterized by old-brain reactivity. In the rest of the book, I will explain how to transform your partnership into a more conscious, growth-producing relationship. Here’s an overview of what lies ahead. Chapter 7 explores an old-fashioned idea, commitment, and explains why it is a necessary precondition for emotional growth. Chapter 8 shows you how to turn your relationship into a zone of safety—a safe and secure environment that rekindles the intimacy of romantic love. Chapter 9 gives you some techniques for gathering more information about you and your partner. Chapter 10 explores the paradoxical idea that the only way to satisfy your childhood needs is to commit yourself wholeheartedly to the satisfaction of your partner’s needs. Chapter 11 talks about creating a deep sense of connection by eliminating negativity from your relationship. Chapter 12 is an interview with two couples who are well on the way to creating a conscious partnership. Part III contains a series of exercises that will help you translate all the insights you have gained in Parts I and II into practical, growth-producing behaviors. (It is important that you finish Parts I and II before you do the exercises. They will be more meaningful to you once you understand the theories behind them.)
COMMITMENT
A life allied with mine, for the rest of our lives—that is the miracle of marriage.
—DENIS DE ROUGEMONT
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
WHEN A COUPLE walks into my office for their first counseling session, I know little or nothing about them. All I know with any certainty is that they have lost the vital connection between them and are mired somewhere in the power struggle. They might be anywhere along that tortuous path. They might be newlyweds reeling from the shock of discovering that they have married the wrong person. They might be a middle-aged couple trying to cope with the stress of having two careers, teenage children, and a relationship that has degenerated into a series of ongoing battles. They might be an older couple who have lost all feeling for each other and are contemplating a “friendly” divorce. But, whatever their circumstances, I can rightly assume that they have journeyed past the romantic stage of relationship and become embroiled in conflict. They have
lost something; they want it back; and they don’t know how to get it.
Years ago my approach, and the approach of many of my colleagues, was to wade into the details of their power struggle. In the first few sessions I would determine whether a couple’s main problems centered on communication, sex, money, parenting, role expectations, alcohol or drug dependency, and so on. Over the course of the next few months, I would help them gain insight into these problems. An important part of the therapeutic process was teaching them to communicate their feelings more directly: “Tell Mary how you felt when she said that.” Or “Turn to George and explain why you hung up the phone on him.” At the end of each session, I would help them negotiate a contract that would specify a course of action. George, for example, would agree to give Mary one compliment a day, and Mary would agree to express her anger in words instead of withdrawing in silence. This was standard problem-oriented, conflict-resolving, contractual relationship counseling. Many therapists still employ these techniques.
The couples learned a lot about each other in the time that we spent together, and they became more skilled at communication. But, to my dismay, few of them were able to transcend the power struggle. Instead of arguing about the issues that brought them into therapy, they were now arguing about who had violated which contract first. At times it seemed as though my function as a therapist was merely to quantify and formalize their conflicts.
My work was being supervised in those early days, and I would share my frustration with my adviser. What was I doing wrong? Why were my couples making such slow progress? All I seemed to be doing was giving people something new to fight over. My adviser would smile knowingly and then chide me for having a vested interest in whether or not my clients were able to change. If they wanted to change, he assured me,
they would. Perhaps I was confusing my agenda with theirs. My role, he reminded me, was to teach people communication skills, help them gain insight into their problems, and let them go on their way.
It was several years before I discovered that relationship therapy cannot dwell on surface issues like money and roles and sexual incompatibility. Underneath these superficial problems is a much larger issue. As one woman told me, “My husband and I had a bigger fight going on than other therapists could help us with. We couldn’t put the problem into words, and they couldn’t see it. But it was the fuel that ignited all our smaller conflicts.”
This “larger problem” my client was referring to is common to most couples who seek relationship therapy. Many people experience a ruptured connection in childhood. By this I mean that their caregivers failed to satisfy their primal needs, especially their needs for safety and for a secure parent-child bond. Years later, when they have an intimate partner, a similar rupture can begin to split apart their present-day love relationship. They no longer feel a sense of connection with their partner, and oftentimes the partner has experienced the same ruptured connection, causing both parties to spend their time criticizing each other rather than being helpmates and friends. Better communication skills and behavioral contracts are not going to provide the longed-for bridge to connection.
I began to realize that I had to look at relationship therapy in a different way. While mulling it over, I recalled the words of Harry Stack Sullivan, a psychiatrist who wrote
The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry
in the 1950s. Sullivan said, “It does not matter so much what happens inside an individual. What matters is what happens between them.” I discussed this idea with Helen, and she reminded me that Martin Buber, a Jewish mystical theologian, has a similar philosophy. In his famous book,
I-Thou,
written in the same decade as Stack’s
Theory,
Buber made it clear that his interest was not so much on the “I”
and the “Thou” as on the hyphen between the two words, which he called the “sacred between.” According to Buber, “All life is meeting.”
As I reflected on Sullivan and Buber, a light bulb went on in my head. When I worked with couples, I was going to need to shift my attention away from the nature of the conflict between the two individuals to the
quality of the relationship
between them. Only then could I help them create a safe and stable connection. Once they became secure in this new relationship, they could begin to heal the ruptured connection they had experienced decades ago with their caregivers.
Armed with this knowledge, I began to work with couples more intensively, spending less time with the surface phenomena and more time focusing on the ruptured connection between the two parties. 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.
VIEWING COUPLES FROM this new relationship paradigm, I quickly learned that one of the necessary first steps was to ask both partners to commit to the therapy process. One of the first rules was that they had to agree to come to me for at least twelve consecutive sessions. Barring genuine emergencies, they were to orchestrate their lives so that they came to each and every appointment. The reason I asked for a twelve-session commitment was that I knew from my own experience and from statistical surveys that a majority of couples quit therapy before their fifth appointment. Interestingly, this is about the time it takes for unconscious issues to begin to emerge, which often triggers anxiety. As we know, a tried and true method for reducing anxiety is avoidance. Some couples react to their
anxiety by claiming that therapy is making matters worse, and they fire the therapist. Others claim that they “can’t find time” to keep their appointments. A twelve-session commitment helps nip this avoidance behavior in the bud. However, this does not mean that twelve sessions are enough for all couples. Those who are the most deeply conflicted might have to work with me for a year or longer. But, at the very least, I had the assurance that the two partners would stay with me long enough to work through their initial resistance, weather their anxiety, and become fully involved in the therapy process.
When you are working on the exercise section of this book, you may also experience a reluctance to complete the process. Some exercises will be easy for you—even fun. But others will give you new information about yourself and challenge you to grow and change. As you do the more demanding exercises, the temptation will be to put the book aside or alter the instructions. It is precisely at these moments that you need to commit yourself wholeheartedly to the process. You will discover that if, before you begin, you make a strong commitment to finish all of the exercises and do them exactly as prescribed, it will be easier to overcome your resistance.
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 surprisingly easy for couples to create this vision—even those who are in a great deal of turmoil. To get them started, I ask them to list a series of positive statements beginning with the word “we” that describe the kind of relationship they would like to have. They are to frame these statements in the present tense, as if the future were already here. Here are some examples: “We enjoy each other’s company,” “We are financially
secure,” “We spend time together doing things we both enjoy.” In just one work session, they are able to define their separate visions, isolate the common elements, and combine these elements into a shared goal. Once the vision is defined, I ask them to read it daily as a form of meditation. Gradually, through the process of repetition, the vision becomes imbedded in their subconscious.
AS SOON AS the work on the vision is completed, which is usually about the second or third session, I ask couples to make a second commitment, and that is to stay together for the initial twelve weeks of therapy. The reason for this is obvious: relationship therapy isn’t possible if there is no relationship to work on. For three months they are not to separate, nor to end the relationship in a more catastrophic way, such as by suicide, murder, or insanity. (Although separation and divorce are by far the most common ways my clients contemplate terminating their relationships, a significant minority have had a feeling that they might go crazy, and there have been several couples who fantasized about more violent options.) I call the decision to close all four of these escape routes the “Commitment” agreement. When you turn to Part III, you will see that this decision is one of the first exercises you will be asked to perform.
1
THE TWO MEMBERS of a love relationship often react to the commitment to stay together in opposite ways. Typically, one partner feels relieved; the other feels threatened. The one who feels relieved is usually the “fuser” in the relationship, the one who grew up with an unsatisfied need for attachment. The one
who feels threatened is the “isolater,” the one who has an unsatisfied need for autonomy. The reason the fuser is relieved by the commitment is that the guarantee of a stable relationship—if only for three months—reduces the conscious or unconscious fear of abandonment. (For the fuser this fear is always there, but it is more acute in a troubled relationship.) The reason the decision to stay together makes the isolater feel apprehensive is that it closes an important escape hatch, triggering the isolater’s archaic fear of absorption. Thus the Commitment Agreement tends to alleviate fear in one partner and exacerbate it in the other.
During the period of this agreement, I try to ease the anxiety of the clients who feel trapped. I remind them that the commitment is only for three months, and at the end of that time they are free to make other decisions. Because we are dealing with a finite amount of time, most people find they can cope. Furthermore, I explain that agreeing to stay together tends to make their partners less clingy or invasive. “One of the reasons your partner is so needy of your attention,” I explain to the isolater, “is that you are not emotionally available. When you stay together and work on your relationship, your partner’s fear of abandoment will begin to go away and your partner won’t feel the same need to chase after you.” Ironically, by making an agreement to stay within the relationship for three months, the isolater can end up with more psychic space than before.
A couple’s response to the decision to stay together is a fascinating glimpse of more complex fuser-isolater dynamics. Most of the time, two partners in a love relationship push against an invisible boundary in an attempt to satisfy their dual needs for autonomy and attachment. Typically, each individual fixates on one of those needs: one person habitually advances in an effort to satisfy unmet needs for attachment; the other habitually retreats in an effort to satisfy unmet needs for autonomy. Some couples stay locked in this particular dance step for the duration of their relationship.
Others experience a startling reversal. For a variety of reasons, the person who typically advances begins to retreat. The partner who habitually retreats turns around in amazement: where’s the pursuer? To everyone’s surprise, the isolater suddenly discovers an unmet need for closeness. The pattern is reversed, like the flip-flop of magnetic poles, and now the isolater does the pursuing. It’s as if all couples collude to maintain a set distance between them. If one person starts encroaching on the other’s territory, the other has to back away. If one person starts vacating the territory, the other has to pursue. As with a pair of magnets with like charges facing each other, there’s an invisible force field keeping couples a critical distance apart. There is not enough safety in their relationship for them to feel comfortable being more closely connected.
ONE COUPLE I worked with had mastered this game of push and pull. Sylvia and Ricardo had so many exits of the type that I refer to as “non-catastrophic” that they were rarely together—an indication of their success at staying apart was that they hadn’t made love in over three years. Non-catastrophic exits are often difficult to detect; nonetheless, they can drain a great deal of energy—and intimacy—from a relationship.
As an assignment, I asked Sylvia and Ricardo to spend just one day together doing something they both enjoyed. The very next day, which happened to be a Saturday, they agreed to go for a hike in the country and then go out to dinner.
That morning, just as they were about to leave the house, Sylvia suggested that they invite a mutual friend along on the hike. It had been a long time since they had seen this friend, she reasoned, and, besides, the friend always liked to get out of the city. Ricardo said that sounded like a bad idea. The whole purpose of the day was to spend time together. Why did she always
want to louse things up? They argued heatedly for a good hour; then Ricardo gave in. Sylvia called the friend, who was happy to come along. As they waited for him to show up, Sylvia read the paper and straightened the house, while Ricardo disappeared into the den to work his way through a stack of bills.
The friend arrived and the three of them got in the car and drove out to the country. On the drive, the two men sat in the front seat of the car—ostensibly because they had longer legs and needed the legroom—while Sylvia sat in the backseat, reading a book. During the hike, either Sylvia or Ricardo talked with the friend, while the other partner tagged along behind.
When they got back to the city, the friend went home and the couple made plans to go out to dinner. They decided to go to a restaurant that featured live entertainment. At the restaurant, Ricardo suggested they choose a table right in front of the musicians so they could pay more attention to the music. They had dinner and tried to carry on a conversation, but gave up because the music was so loud they couldn’t hear each other. They left the restaurant at precisely a quarter to nine so they could be home in time for a favorite TV show. As soon as they entered the house, they automatically poured themselves a couple of drinks and stationed themselves in front of the television. Sylvia went to bed at eleven o’clock (after ritually urging Ricardo not to drink too much), and Ricardo stayed up until one in the morning, happily nursing his Scotch and watching TV. With consummate skill, they had managed to spend the whole day together without a moment of intimacy. Although they didn’t realize it, they were living an invisible divorce.

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