Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed. (19 page)

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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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TO SUMMARIZE, Melanie and Stewart reaped three important benefits from doing the Behavior Change Request Dialogue:
1.
The partner who requested the change in behavior was able to resolve some childhood needs.
2.
The partner who made the changes recovered aspects of the lost self.
3.
The partner who made the changes satisfied repressed needs that were identical to the partner’s.
The result of all this growth was a dramatic increase in positive feelings between them. Both Melanie and Stewart felt better about themselves because they had been able to satisfy each other’s fundamental needs. Meanwhile, they felt better about their partners because their partners were helping them satisfy
their
needs. This made them more willing to stretch beyond their resistance into more positive, nurturing behaviors. Through this simple process of defining their needs, understanding how they are connected with the past, and then converting them into small, positive requests, they had turned their relationship into a self-sustaining vehicle for personal growth.
THIS BENEFICIAL CHANGE always involves some resistance. One of Freud’s insights was that underneath every wish is a fear of having that wish come true. When your partner starts treating you the way you long to be treated, you experience a strange combination of pleasure and fear. You like what your partner is doing, but a part of you feels that you don’t deserve it. In fact, a part of you believes that in accepting the positive behavior you are violating a powerful taboo. I touched on this common reaction before when I talked about the taboo against pleasure, but in the case of the Behavior Change Request Dialogue your resistance will be even stronger.
An example will help clarify the nature of this resistance. Let’s suppose that you grew up with parents who were quick to point out your faults. Out of a misguided attempt to help you be more successful, they highlighted every one of your failings. They assumed that making your faults known to you would motivate you to correct them. All they managed to do, however, was erode your self-confidence. When you managed to triumph over their negative influence and act with a degree of self-assertion, you were told to “Stop being so cocky!” You
were stung by their reaction, but you were a young child and had little choice but to cooperate. Anything else was dangerous to your survival. Over time, you began to identify with their negative view of you: “I am cocky!” Outside of your awareness, these negative feelings toward yourself deepened into self-hatred. When you looked for a mate, you unwittingly chose someone who perpetuated your parents’ critical nature, and once again you were under attack—but this time from both the inside and the outside.
Let’s suppose that for some reason your partner begins to treat you more kindly. At first you thrive on this turn of events. But gradually an inner voice makes itself heard: “You can’t be respected,” says the voice. “That’s not allowed. If you continue along this path, you will not survive. Your existence is in the hands of others, and they won’t let you be whole!” To silence this voice, you find ways to undermine your partner’s behavior. Maybe you deliberately pick a fight or become suspicious of his or her motives. Ironically, you are looking for a way to deny yourself the very love and affirmation you so desperately want. Why do you do this? On an unconscious level, accepting love from your partner feels too dangerous because it contradicts a parent’s view that you are unworthy of love. Going against a parent’s edicts can trigger the fear of abandonment and death. To your old brain, it’s far safer to turn away your partner’s love than to trigger a parent’s rage.
The defense against receiving love is more common than most people would believe. The fear can range from an inability to accept compliments to an inability to form an intimate partnership. The way to overcome this fear is to keep on with the process. I urge my clients to continue using the Behavior Change Request Dialogue until their anxiety becomes more manageable. Given enough time, they learn that the taboos that have been impeding their growth are ghosts of the past and have no real power in their present-day lives.
I was working with one man who was doing an excellent job of stretching into new behaviors. In response to his wife’s requests to be more available to her and their children, he was slowly rearranging his priorities at work. He had stopped bringing work home on weekends, and he was home by six o’clock in the evening most days a week. But when his wife asked him to become a more active parent, he ran headlong into his resistance. He came into my office one day and exploded: “Harville, if I have to change one more thing, I’m going to cease to exist! I’m no longer going to be me! It’s going to be the death of my personality!”
To change in the way that his partner wanted him to change meant that the “me” that he was familiar with had to go away. The rushed, successful executive was going to have to become more of a relaxed, nurturing parent. On an unconscious level, this change was equated with death. I assured him that, if he were to continue to change his behavior, he would feel anxious from time to time, but he wasn’t going to die. He was not going to disappear, because he was not his behaviors, his values, or his beliefs. He was much bigger than all those things combined. In fact, if he were to change some of his more limiting behaviors and his beliefs, he would become more fully the person he was—the whole, loving, spiritual being he had been as a child. He would be able to develop the tender, nurturing side of his personality, which had been shoved aside in his efforts to excel in the business world. His family would benefit, and at the same time he would become a more complete human being.
So that he could triumph over his fear of death, I advised him to keep on with the activities that stimulated his fear. “At first you’ll think you’re really going to die,” I told him. “A voice from deep inside you is going to say, ‘Stop! This is too much! I’m going to die! I’m going to die!’ But if you continue to change, eventually your old brain will recycle, and the voice will quiet down. ‘I’m going to die. I’m going to die … . I’m going to
die? But I’m not dying!’ Ultimately the fear of death will no longer be an inhibiting factor in your campaign for self-growth.”
WHEN THE BEHAVIOR Change Request Dialogue (which is explained in detail in Part III) is integrated into your relationship, the healing power of love relationships is not just an unconscious expectation, it is a daily fact of life. A love relationship can fulfill your hidden drive to be healed and whole and to be deeply connected with another human being. But it can’t happen the way you want it to happen—easily, automatically, without defining what it is that you want, without asking, and without reciprocating. You have to moderate your old-brain reactivity with a more intentional, conscious style of interaction. You have to stop expecting the outside world to take care of you and begin to accept responsibility for your own healing. And the way you do this, paradoxically, is by focusing your energy on healing your partner. It is when you direct your energy away from yourself and toward your partner that deep-level psychological and spiritual healing begins to take place.
When making a request, rather than reacting, becomes your standard method for dealing with criticism and conflict, you will have reached a new stage in your journey toward a conscious partnership. You will have moved beyond the power struggle and the stage of awakening to the stage of transformation. Your relationship will now be based on mutual caring and love, the kind of love that can best be described by the Greek word “agape.”
2
Agape is a self-transcending love that redirects eros, the life force, away from yourself and toward your partner. As one transaction follows another, the pain of the past is slowly erased, and both of you will experience the reality of your essential wholeness.
CREATING A SACRED SPACE
Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it necessary?
Is it true? Does it improve on the silence?
—SHIRDI SAI BABA
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, I have been talking about the vital role that safety plays in creating lasting love. Two people cannot be passionate friends unless they feel safe in each other’s company. Couples need to feel physically safe, to be sure, but they also need to feel emotionally safe. Without safety, they cannot say what’s on their minds, express their full range of feelings, or be who they really are. They cannot lay down their armor and connect, even if they truly want to. We are all built that way. Danger activates our defenses.
During my early work, I designed four exercises, discussed in earlier chapters, to help couples create a climate of safety. To refresh your memory, the exercises are: 1) closing down the exits that prevent intimacy, 2) returning to the caring behaviors of romantic love, 3) using the Imago Dialogue to deepen understanding and compassion, and 4) defusing anger and frustration
by transforming criticisms into respectful requests. These exercises help couples develop trust and goodwill and experience more joy in their daily lives.
In addition to developing these basic exercises, Helen and I have also spent many years searching for ways to help couples manage their intense feelings of anger and rage, those outbursts that are typically fueled by childhood pain and disappointment. When people spew this archaic anger at their partners, the relationship can become a war zone. But, on the other hand, when they repress their anger, they can also jeopardize the relationship. When people deny this critical part of their being, they dampen their enthusiasm for life and their capacity to love. To make the relationship a safe haven, couples need to find a way to
manage
their anger that brings them closer together and sustains a feeling of connection.
I KNOW, FIRST HAND, the destructive power of repressed feelings. I endured subclinical depression for the first thirty-three years of my life, and my emotional numbness was one of the main reasons for the failure of my first marriage. I was depressed because I was not in touch with my sorrow and anger over the death of my parents. When I look back, it is astonishing to me that I could lose both of my parents by the age of six and not experience any emotional pain. My father died when I was eighteen months old, and I have no memory of that event. My mother died from a sudden stroke five years later. I am told that I showed little reaction. I didn’t even cry. In fact, I remember my adult siblings taking me aside and praising me for being such a “brave boy.” Operating on naive childhood logic, I converted their compliment into a blanket assumption: “I am loved when I deny my pain.”
I learned the lesson well. In young adulthood, I was able to look back on my early life and tell myself I was fortunate that both my parents had died: it gave me the opportunity to leave the farm and live in town with my sisters, where I got a better education. This myth had its uses. I went through my childhood numb to the pain of abandonment. I pictured myself as a “lucky” person, not a poor orphan boy, and I wasted little time bemoaning my fate. I took on challenges well beyond my years and succeeded at most of them. I was on my way.
But, decades later, my repressed sorrow wreaked havoc in my first marriage. Cut off from my pain, I was not fully alive. To survive, I had anesthetized an essential part of my being. Unconsciously, I looked to my wife for what I was missing. I hungered for emotional and physical contact, but she was unable to give me enough—partly because of deficiencies in her own childhood and partly because she experienced me as withholding, cold, demanding, and needy. It was a vicious cycle. The more I wanted, the more she withheld.
One of the most telling moments in our relationship took place the day after her father died. We were alone in our bedroom, and her grief over his death was just hitting her. She cried and cried. I circled my arms around her, but my body was stiff and unyielding. There was no warmth in my embrace. Inside, I felt deeply conflicted. Intellectually, I knew that it was reasonable for her to cry over her father’s death, and I wanted to comfort her. But a larger part of me was cold and unsympathetic. That part was thinking, “What’s the problem? I lost both of my parents when I was a little boy, and
I
didn’t cry. Why is she so emotional?” Lessons learned early in life persist.
A few years later, when I was thirty-three, I saw a therapist for the first time—not because I thought I needed any help but because personal therapy was a recommended part of my training. In one of the first sessions, the therapist asked me to tell him about my parents. I told him that they had both died when
I was very young, but that a lot of good luck had come my way as a result. Because they both died, I got to live with my sisters, get out of South Georgia, get a better education, and so on.
“Tell me about your mother’s death,” he said to me, cutting short my highly edited autobiography.
I started to tell him how she died, but for some reason my throat felt constricted.
“Tell me about her funeral,” he said.
Once again I tried to talk. Once again, my throat seized up. Then, to my great astonishment, I burst into tears. I began to sob. There was no stopping me. I was an adult man, and there I was sobbing like a six-year-old boy. After a few minutes, my therapist looked at me kindly and said, “Harville, you are just beginning to grieve over your mother’s death.”
After that momentous day, I began to feel my own pain and anger—not just from the past, but from the present as well. I became less anxious. I had more compassion for other people. If my needs or wishes were disregarded, I experienced the normal feelings of sadness or anger—but not rage or depression. Because I was being reunited with my full range of feelings, I was beginning to feel fully alive. I was more in touch with who I was and where I had been, and I became open to the rhythm of my own heart.
IN THE ORIGINAL edition of this book, published in 1988, I included an exercise to help couples release their repressed sorrow and anger. I called it “The Full Container Exercise.” It was based on the psychodynamic model of psychology that views the self as a container that is filled with pent-up emotions. According to this school of thought, purging those emotions helps people relieve their anxiety and depression and go on to live more satisfying lives.
I agreed with this theory, so I adapted a new technique for couples. First, I would ask them to sit down in chairs that faced each other. I designated one partner the “sender,” and the other the “receiver.” Then I would ask the sender to identify a chronic frustration that was interfering with their relationship: “You’re always late.” “You don’t really listen to me.” “You don’t help with the housework.” “You’re on my case all the time.” “You don’t value what I have to say.” Next, I asked the sender to think about how that frustration might be linked with painful childhood experiences. Once the connection was made, I encouraged the sender to express that frustration, amplifying the annoyance until it turned into outright anger. To protect the psyche of the receiver, I would ask him or her to create an imaginary shield to deflect the anger and to keep from feeling under attack. “The anger is not just about you,” I would advise the receiver. “Its roots are deep in your partner’s childhood.” Once the catharsis was complete, I would help the couple deal with the original frustration by using the Stretching exercise described in chapter 10.
Years ago, I viewed the Full Container exercise as one of the flagship techniques in Imago Therapy. But as time went on, I saw that it produced mixed results. The final portion of the exercise, the Stretching exercise, always worked. But, sometimes, the first part, the emotional catharsis, had the
opposite
effect of the one I intended. Couples would become more conflicted than they were before. Eventually, I discovered literature from other therapists that confirmed my experience. I stopped using the Full Container exercise in workshops and private sessions, and I have removed it from this revised edition of
Getting the Love You Want.
Having two people in a love relationship vent their anger at each other—even within the confines of a structured exercise and under the watchful eye of a therapist—could cause more harm than good. This was a clear example of reality not supporting the theory.
WHAT WAS WRONG with the exercise? First of all, some partners on the receiving end of the anger still felt threatened by the outburst, no matter how much they tried to deflect the torrent. Their old brains couldn’t comprehend that their partner’s anger was part of a clinical exercise. When the receiving partners felt threatened, they had a hard time feeling empathic. They might mirror their partner’s experience and mouth the right words—“I’m sorry you’re in so much pain,” but their primal instinct was to batten down the hatches or abandon ship.
There was another, more puzzling problem with the exercise. After the exercise, the partner who had vented the anger could feel angrier than usual in coming days. The exercise that had been designed to
release
stored up anger seemed equally capable of
generating
it.
I began to understand why when Helen had started reading books about neuroscience. She was fascinated by this field, partly because it shed new light on relationship dynamics. She learned that the adult brain is far more adaptable than we first thought. I was intrigued and began reading the literature myself. I discovered that scientists have known for decades that a young person’s brain is greatly influenced by experience. If nerve connections are not stimulated, they are “pruned” away. When a child has new experiences, however, new pathways are formed. This plasticity gives the child a highly efficient, adaptable brain, ready for all that life has to offer.
Once upon a time, scientists believed that the adult brain was hardwired, thus immune to experience. The only way the brain changed beyond adolescence, according to early thinking, was to lose neurons with advancing age. This bleak view of the adult brain has now been revised, thanks to sophisticated imaging devices that can show physical changes in brain activity. These images have made it very clear that what adults
do, think, and even feel alters the physical structure of their brains. Although the adult brain is not as adaptable as a child’s brain, it remains a highly responsive organ.
A number of studies have shown that the more time adults engage in a particular activity, the more nerve cells are marshaled to the task. The brain acts like a military commander summoning new troops as they are needed. In one such study, Harvard medical researchers instructed a group of volunteers to practice a simple piano exercise for two hours a day for a week. After each practice session, the neuroscientists took images of the volunteers’ brains so they could measure the size of the area devoted to finger activity. By the fifth day, they observed a significant increase in the size and activity of that area. Apparently, one of the reasons that “practice makes perfect” is that repeating an activity commandeers more neurons to the job.
Remarkably, researchers discovered that the same brain expansion takes place when people merely
imagine
doing a specific activity. As an extension of the piano experiment, the Harvard team asked another group of volunteers to imagine that they were playing a simple piece of music. They had no pianos in front of them. In fact, they were asked to keep their hands and fingers perfectly still. When the volunteers’ brains were scanned at the end of a week, the scientists were amazed to see that the virtual piano players had the same expanded neural pathways as the people who actually played the piano. They had discovered that mental training and imagery can literally rewire the brain.
For the purposes of my work with couples, I was keenly interested in the fact that changing your thoughts can change your brain. In a type of therapy called Behavior Change Therapy, or BCT, people are trained in how to use their rational minds to challenge the thoughts and beliefs that can trigger depression. As an example, a person might generate this irrational train of thought: “I’ve made a number of calls to family
and friends, and only one person has called back. Nobody loves me anymore.” Taken to its illogical extreme, it becomes “Because no one loves me, I’m going to be abandoned and die.” The emotional part of the brain reacts to this depressing thought as though it were real, and the person feels rejected, lonely, and scared.
When people see the absurdity of this type of catastrophic thinking, they can begin to think more rationally: “So, people are not returning my calls. That doesn’t mean they don’t love me. They may be busy or out of town.” Avoiding the doomsday thinking can prevent the depressive feelings.
Research now shows that BCT can relieve depression just as well as antidepressant medications. Brain scans help explain why. When people use their rational minds to defeat depression, the part of the brain that is linked with rumination and obsessive thinking calms down. On a computerized image, that area appears darker, indicating that less oxygen is being consumed. This calm state extends beyond the mental exercise. People trained in BCT can go through life with a less reactive brain, no longer triggering depressive or anxious thoughts. Once again, thinking alone has been shown to alter the physiology of the brain. Mind over gray matter.

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