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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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IN RECENT YEARS, I’ve added another key exercise to Imago Therapy. Its purpose, as in all the exercises I’ve described in this chapter, is to help couples leave their negativity behind them and look towards a future free of emotional toxins. This final exercise is the grand finale, the ultimate expression of love and regard between couples. I call it “Positive Flooding.”
In its basic form, two people in a love relationship write down all the things they appreciate about one another. The list can include what they love about each other’s bodies and character traits, appreciation for favors or activities they’ve done in the past, and overall statements of love and adoration. Then the partners take turns “flooding” each other with these specific expressions of love.
In the second part of the exercise, each person gets out a piece of paper and makes a list of all the qualities her or she would like to have praised. “Tell me that you appreciate how hard I work to support us.” “Tell me that you like how intently I listen to you.” “Tell me that you like my long, shapely legs.” Then the partners exchange lists and take turns flooding each other with their specific requests. It’s like making a list of all the things you want for Christmas, only in this case, you get to receive them all.
Helen and I practice the flooding exercise regularly. Even though we designed the exercise and have watched it performed over and over again, we still feel moved by the intensity of the love and affirmation we receive from each other. It makes us feel deeply, thoroughly loved.
In the workshop version, all of the couples perform the exercise simultaneously. One person in each couple sits in a chair while the other partner circles around the chair. For the first minute, I ask the speakers to describe what they like about their partners’ physical features—a graceful curve to the lips, silky skin, a handsome nose, and so on. For the next minute, I ask them to speak a little louder and talk about their partners’ admirable character traits—trustworthiness, honesty, kindness, bravery, intelligence, etc. The third time around, I ask them to speak louder still and proclaim their gratitude for favors their partners have done for them—nursing them through a cold, putting chains on the tires in the middle of a snowstorm, going willingly to a family reunion, being a source of comfort when a family member had died. At the culmination of the exercise, the admiring partners proclaim their overall feelings of love and appreciation—“I can’t believe I am married to such a marvelous person.” “I love you, I love you, I love you.” “You are the woman of my dreams!” “You are my best friend and lover!” The energy is contagious. There are shouts of laughter, bear hugs, and tears of joy.
Many of us have never heard someone say to us in a strong voice, “I love you.” “You are wonderful.” Instead, we’ve heard people yell, “Be quiet!” “Go away.” “Mind your own business.” “You are crazy!” This exercise opens the flood gates and inundates people with joy.
PORTRAIT OF TWO RELATIONSHIPS
What makes a happy marriage? It is a question which all men and women ask one another … . The answer is to be found, I think, in the mutual discovery, by two who marry, of the deepest need of the other’s personality, and the satisfaction of that need.
—PEARL BUCK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I STARTED OUT life as a minister, not a therapist. I was introduced to the ministry at a tender age. As a young boy, I was a member of the First Baptist Church in Statesboro, Georgia, and was involved in a youth group called the Baptist Training Union. Once a year our church sponsored what we called “Youth Sunday,” a special day devoted to the young people in the community. The year I turned fifteen, I happened to be chosen to deliver the traditional youth address. I remember standing behind the pulpit dressed in a suit and tie, a cold sweat slicking my shirt to my back. I looked out over a church filled with young people and their parents and somehow managed to open my mouth and talk. Despite my anxiety, I must have given a reasonably good sermon, because several people came up to me afterward and said, “You should be a preacher.”
Apparently the minister of our church, George Lovell, thought so, too, because several weeks later he called me to his office. “Harville,” he said, “there’s a little Baptist church about twenty miles out of town. They just lost their minister. They called me and asked if I knew anyone who could preach for them the next couple of Sundays. Would you like to do that?” Flushed with success from my youth address, I said that I would.
For the next few days, I studied the Bible with a new sense of responsibility and pored over a book Lovell had given me called
Great Sermons,
a collection of sermons from famous religious leaders. On Sunday, my sister and brother-in-law drove me to church because I was too young to drive. If I recall, the message that I delivered that morning from the depths of my experience went something like this: “Man is a sinner. We have a loving God. In order to be saved, we have to meet God. And you do that through commitment, confession, Baptism, prayer, and trying to lead an exemplary life.” I believe I also warned about what Baptists call “backsliding,” the tendency of even devout Christians to fall away from a faithful life.
I preached at the little church for the next couple of Sundays, and word got back to George Lovell that I was doing a good job. From that point on, he began to think of me as his “preacher boy,” and for the next few years, when other small communities needed a stand-in minister he would send me.
One Sunday he sent me out to a little church in Guyton, Georgia, called the Pine Street Baptist Church. I preached for four consecutive weeks. After the fourth sermon, the church leaders held a meeting and decided to ask me to be their permanent preacher. I was only seventeen at the time—a gangly young man with a cracking voice—but they wanted me anyway. (In the Baptist church, you don’t have to have extensive theological training to be ordained; you just need to be called by God and by a congregation. If your home church honors
the request of the petitioning congregation, then you can become a minister.)
As I look back on that period of my life, I realize that being called to preach at the Pine Street Baptist Church was one of the real gifts of my life. The Pine Street congregation was a very loving congregation, and they ministered to my hidden depression and loneliness. Their love for me enhanced my self-confidence, and in a few years I managed to increase the active church community from thirty to a little over two hundred people. I preached there every Sunday for two and a half years. Between the ages of seventeen and nineteen and a half, I baptized over fifty people and buried eighteen.
In the summers I began to be called upon by various churches to lead youth revivals, and as a result of all this experience, my sermonic style got better and better. During one revival I looked around me and realized that there were over a thousand people straining to hear my every word. At the end of the session, sixty young people came down the aisle and gave their lives to Christ. Twelve of them decided to join the ministry. My reputation as a youth evangelist began to grow outside Georgia.
I wanted to continue as a minister, but to do that I felt the need for a college education. Eventually I saved enough of my weekly fifty-dollar paycheck from the Pine Street Church to buy a car and pay my tuition at Mercer University, a Baptist college about a hundred miles away. I studied hard during the week and drove back to the Pine Street Church each weekend to deliver the sermon.
In my third year of college, I took an excellent course in philosophy, and a whole new world of logical thinking opened up to me. As I became absorbed in the realm of abstract ideas, nothing seemed simple any more, and when I went out to preach, my sermons were filled with probing questions.
I soon discovered that you don’t win souls to Jesus by engaging in a linguistic analysis of the Bible. The summer after
completing that fateful philosophy class, I was invited to lead a revival at a church in a fairly good-sized town, a church where I had worked wonders the year before. The first night, all the seats in the arena were filled with people eager to hear the new preacher boy. To their surprise, my opening speech was about the concept of “eternal life” and whether the word “eternal” referred to the quality of life or its duration. When I got up to speak the second night, I looked up and noticed that there were some empty seats in the balcony. By the third night, there were empty seats riddling the main floor. At the end of the weeklong revival, only a faithful few had stayed to listen. When it was all over, the minister took me aside to have a heart-to-heart talk. He brought up the fact that the previous year I had convinced 120 people to devote their lives to Christ; this year only eight people had ventured down the aisle. “You’ve started college, Harville, haven’t you?” he said, the disappointment evident in his voice. I nodded. “Well, college has ruined you,” he concluded.
My brief career as an evangelist rapidly drew to a close, but my intellectual curiosity about philosophy and religion flourished. In my remaining year of college, I added a third interest—psychology. To me, theology, philosophy, and psychology were three portholes into one central reality, the reality of man’s existence, and each one offered a slightly different perspective. If I looked through all three portholes at once, I believed that I saw more of the total picture. When I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Chicago, it was in the new interdisciplinary field of psychology and religion.
From that point on, the events of my life led me deeper and deeper into the study of just one of these disciplines, psychology. When I finally arrived at my destination, I looked up and discovered that I had landed in the rather specialized field of couples therapy. From my beginnings as a preacher boy in South Georgia, I had wound up as a marital therapist in upper
Manhattan. But the formative years that I spent preaching and baptizing and bringing souls to Christ were not left behind me. To this day they continue to be very much a part of the way I view the world. To me, man’s spiritual wholeness is inextricably linked with his psychological wholeness, and the work that I am now doing as a therapist feels just as much a part of God’s work as my summer revivals. When I help a man and a woman heal the rift between them and become passionate friends, I believe that I am bringing them closer to God.
What leads me to believe that couple’s therapy is a spiritual path? How can talking to people about mundane things such as “behavior changes” and “caring behaviors” and “childhood wounding” have anything to with helping them experience the divine? I had better define my terms. When I use the word “spiritual” I’m not giving the word its most common usage. I’m not talking about going to church or following the doctrines of a particular religion or attaining a rarefied state of mind through meditation, fasting, or prayer. What I’m talking about is a native spirituality, a spirituality that is as much a part of our being as our sexuality, a spirituality that is a gift to us the moment we are conceived, a spirituality that we lose sight of in childhood but that can be experienced once again in adulthood if we learn how to heal old wounds. When we regain awareness of our essential inner unity, we make an amazing discovery: we are no longer cut off from the rest of the world. Because we are in touch with the miracle of our own being, we are free to experience the beauty and complexity of the world. The universe has meaning and purpose, and we experience ourselves as part of a larger whole.
It is my conviction that one of the surest routes to this exalted state of being is the humble path of becoming committed partners. When we gather the courage to search for the truth of our being and the truth of our partners’ being, we begin a journey of psychological and spiritual healing.
THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS detail various ways in which this healing process takes place. Now let’s stand back and get an overview of the entire process. The first step is to become more conscious of our old wounds. We look into the past for evidence of how we were denied adequate nurturing and how we repressed essential parts of our being. We do this through therapy, prayer, and reflection, and by becoming more astute observers of everyday events. As we gather new insights, we share them with our partners, because we no longer assume they can read our minds. When our partners share their thoughts and feelings with us, we listen with understanding and compassion, knowing that this sharing is a sacred trust. Gradually we start to “reimage” our partners, to see them as they really are—wounded children seeking salvation.
Once we have this more accurate image, we begin to redesign our relationships to heal our wounds. To do this, we first build an atmosphere of safety and trust. By closing our exits, renewing our commitment to each other, and deliberately pleasuring each other, we create a safe and nurturing environment. We add to this feeling of safety and validation by learning to communicate openly and effectively. As we overcome our resistance to this new way of relating, we begin to see our partners with even more clarity. We learn that they have fears and weaknesses and desires that they have never shared with us. We listen to their criticisms of us and realize that these illuminate our own darkness. We tell ourselves: “My partner has something to say about me. There is probably a measure of truth in this comment.” Gradually we come to accept the fullness, the dark and the light of our own being.
The next step in the healing process is perhaps the most difficult: we make a decision to act on the information we are acquiring about ourselves and our partners and become our
partners’ healers. We go against our instinct to focus on our own needs and make a conscious choice to focus on theirs. To do this, we must conquer our fear of change. As we respond to our partners’ needs, we are surprised to discover that, in healing our partners, we are slowly reclaiming parts of our own lost selves. We are integrating parts of our being that were cut off in childhood. We find ourselves regaining our capacity to think and to feel, to be sexually and spiritually alive, and to express ourselves in creative ways.
As we reflect on all that we are learning, we see that the painful moments in life are in reality opportunities for growth. Instead of blocking the pain, we ask ourselves: “What truth is trying to emerge at this moment? What primal feelings are hiding beneath these feelings of sadness, anxiety, and frustration?” We learn that the underlying feelings are pain and rage and the fear of death, and that these feelings are common to us all. Finally, we find a safe and growth-producing way to express these powerful emotions and no longer allow them to jeopardize our relationships.
One by one, the elements of our partnership that were once unconscious—the fears, the anger, the childhood needs, the archaic pain—are brought to the surface, first to find acceptance, then, ultimately, to be resolved. As our wounds heal and as more hidden parts of ourselves come into our awareness, we have a new sense of our inherent unity and wholeness.
1
 
CREATING AN INTIMATE love relationship is a spiritual path, but it is not necessarily an exalted path. For the most part, it is a very practical, day-by-day sort of struggle. To give this process greater reality, I want to share with you the story of two couples.
There are obvious differences between these two couples. The first couple, Anne and Greg Martin, are in their forties. They have been married for only five years. Both of them have been married before and have children from their previous
relationships. Both of them have full-time careers. The Martins learned about Imago Relationship Therapy early in their relationship and managed to resolve their major conflicts in just three years. Kenneth and Grace Brentano are in their mid-sixties and have been married for thirty-five years. They have four grown children. Kenneth provides most of their income, and Grace is primarily a homemaker. Kenneth and Grace struggled for thirty years before achieving a satisfying relationship. Much of this they did on their own before becoming acquainted with my ideas.
What these couples have in common, however, is more significant than their differences. Both the Martins and the Brentanos have managed to create an intimate love relationship that satisfies each individual’s need for healing and wholeness—a relationship that makes each individual feel safe and vital and loved.
BOOK: Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed.
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