Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples: Third Edition

Preface

WELCOME TO THE fully revised and updated edition of Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. By purchasing this book, you are continuing to circulate a classic with a thirty-year history of transforming relationships all across the globe! We’re glad you’re a part of a new consciousness, that of couples everywhere committing to strengthening their relationships at home.

Here is something about the book you may not know. A few weeks after its publication in 1988, Oprah Winfrey featured it on her show, winning her an Emmy. For the next twenty-three years, she created over a dozen shows featuring the book, which helped to put it on the New York Times bestseller list eleven times. This massive visibility attracted around four million readers globally. Approximately 2,500 therapists have become Imago Trained and practice Imago Couples Therapy in over fifty countries, making it among the largest and most popular mainstream couples’ therapy in the world.

But that is the old news. Here is the new. On the cover, you will notice that this edition has two authors. In all preceding editions, I (Harville) am the only author. In the 2008 edition, Helen, my partner in life and work, appeared on the cover as cowriter of the new preface. That started something that this edition completes, which I feel most passionate about: the public recognition of Helen as cocreator of Imago Relationship Therapy.

Why now, why not then? you might ask. Well, it was discussed as an option in 1988, but I (Helen) firmly declined. It was a chance to make Harville distinctly visible in important ways he deserved, so Harville was willing to agree with me. Supporting the book as it was being written was a tremendous honor. Not only was this a chance for Harville’s distinct visibility, but I needed to spend time with issues around my Dallas family business, with our own new blended family, and I was very happy to be a behind-the-scenes support. It was Harville’s talent that went into the writing and executing of this beautiful vision. Contributing to the content was different from writing it down, and in that regard, Harville was clearly the author. This continued with the second book, Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide, but with the third book on parenting, I became a visible partner, Harville fully including me as coauthor, which set the pattern for the future. But Harville and I were conflicted around how to talk about my role in and my original contribution to Imago.

Now let’s regress to see how this story began. We met in 1977. We both were divorced, and we began dating. After several months, as we discovered so many interests in common, I asked Harville what his dream future might look like. Since he was leaving his teaching job at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology, and had no specific plans going forward, he shared with me a few options he was considering. One was to write a book. I asked him what the focus of the book would be. And he said, I’m curious: Why do couples fight? Why does the dream become the nightmare? I began to ask him what he thought was the answer, and a conversation grew out of that evening with each of us helping to finish each other’s sentences. This continued throughout our dating years, and six years after we married, the manuscript Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples was finished and then published in 1988. Harville and I have continued to talk about couples’ theory most days in our lives, the forty-plus years we’ve known each other!

As we have reflected upon how we co-created Imago theory and therapy, I (Harville) discovered a basic and productive complementary: Helen is right-brain dominant, which means she accesses information through her feelings and senses, intuits subtle qualities, and sees the connections. I am left-brain dominant, which means I access information through observation and logical thinking and construct wholes out of parts. Helen is the creative source, and I the architect and contractor. Between us, raw content derived through these different mental operations has been transformed into the publication of ten books on intimate relationships, a global organization of Imago therapists, Imago Educators, plus relational social activists who are zealously committed to healing couples and creating a relational culture.

Even though we were cocreators of Imago theory for over forty years in all its forms, my name was the only one on the book, so I was considered its sole author. And since I was the solo Imago professional trainer and couples’ workshops presenter for the first ten years after publication, I was seen by the public as sole creator of Imago Relationship Therapy. When a brand is established with high-profile status, it gets quite solidified in public opinion.

Although Helen was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame for her work in the women’s movement, her motivation was helping women have equal voices in society but to also have equal relationships at home, too. While I (Harville) was a marriage therapist in the office, we both saw Helen as being a marriage therapist in the culture. Couples had been her soul calling a decade before we met. After we became partners, creating, developing, and teaching Imago ideas was clearly a part of her DNA. And while we won’t go into too many details here, we will summarize by saying people logically saw me as the creator of Imago and Helen in the shadows as my supportive partner. Over the years, as our children were leaving home and our marriage became more connected, Helen turned fully to what she really loves to do professionally and began to regularly colead couples’ workshops, copresent at national and international conferences, and coauthor books and articles on Imago Relationship Therapy.

Then a series of serendipitous things began to happen that led to a profound awareness: our issue was an instance of a world historical problem, the historical second-class status of women, and the unconscious bias against women’s equality. And both Helen and I were unconsciously complicit in it.

Here’s one way we moved to consciousness. I (Helen), published a book called And the Spirit Moved Them through the Feminist Press. It is about a group of women whose contributions to the origins of the women’s movement in the United States were omitted. My book restored them to their rightful place in early feminist history. At the same time these women came out of the shadows of history into the light, the Hidden Figures movie appeared. This movie valorized the African American women whose contributions to the success of the space program had never been imagined or acknowledged. At the same time, we became aware of other books about women in politics and in the medical professions, a sort of zeitgeist of bringing other women out of the shadows of the men around them.

Helen’s place in Imago was a women’s issue, and thus a man’s issue and a human issue. It dawned on me (Harville) that we were unconsciously participating in a cultural dynamic of which we consciously disapproved—the second-class status of women. Helen’s living in the shadow of recognition for her contributions to Imago was an instance of this world historical situation that is just now beginning to right itself. This awareness was shocking on the one hand and liberating on the other.

At the moment of that insight, all barriers to sharing authorship melted. Receiving rightful and unrestrained recognition brought tears to Helen’s eyes and joy to my heart. The timing of the publication of the revised version of Getting and Helen’s pivotal contributions to its inception and publication thirty years ago made it a vehicle to correct the issue of her visibility and, simultaneously, to contribute to the project of women’s equality across the world. So, this fully revised and updated edition, with us as coauthors, is not only a celebration of a durable book; it is participation in a world historical process of bringing social justice and equality to women, and thus to everyone. While its processes have created relational equality for women in the couples who have used it, they are now creating equality for its coauthors. It’s about time!

And there’s more! The theory keeps evolving. In the years of our struggle with professional equality in our relationship and personal equality at home, we were also observing relational inequality as a chronic dynamic for couples. But this was not surprising, since women’s social, economic, and political equality has been an issue since the dawn of civilization.

Our new awareness was that couples are doubly challenged. First, the source of the most obvious challenge comes from childhood wounding that leaves most of us so self-absorbed that we are unaware of the inner world of others. Therefore, we think we are alike in significant ways, and when that does not check out, we object to our partners, or the world, being different from how we see it. That leads to conflict and polarization, the ingredients of misery.

The second challenge comes from the fact that couples are soaking in a cultural value system that rewards competition, being the best, and winning at all cost. When this value system interfaces with the need for control that comes from our childhood history, the relationship becomes toxic and often unsustainable—hence, a 50 percent divorce rate and 75 percent unhappiness rate for couples who do not divorce. This complex issue makes it hard for couples, because the way they understand their emotional needs and try to get them met is dictated by the competitive value system in which they live. The outside shapes the inside.

The traditional therapy process has been to explore the inner world of each partner: their feelings, thoughts, and memories, with the goal of helping them deepen their understanding of their inner world. The guiding assumption was that insight would free them to relate in a healthier way. But they did not. The success rate of that method was about 25 percent.

So, we (Harville and Helen) shifted the focus of Imago from exploring what was going on inside couples to what was going on outside and between them—another contribution by Helen, bequeathed from Martin Buber. We discovered that when we help couples change their interactive behaviors—rather than how they feel, think, or remember—they feel connected and begin to have new thoughts and create new memories. The primary interactive behavior is how couples talk to each other, not what they talk about, which we came to call Imago Dialogue. This shift, which gave birth to the Imago Dialogue process, was initiated by Helen in 1977, who one day, early in our relationship, when we were in a deep conflict, shouted, Stop! Let’s one of us talk and the other listen. We did. To our surprise, we calmed down and began to talk without shouting. This was one of the first times, followed by many, that I (Harville) incorporated one of Helen’s contributions into a therapeutic process. In this case, it became the primary therapeutic tool and is used by every Imago therapist in the world. The target of therapy became the interactions of partners between each other, essentially their outside world rather than their inside world. It became apparent that not only is how partners talk to each other more important than what they talk about, it is also more important than what they remember from childhood or understand about the whys of their behavior.

That’s not all. The rest is amazing. Therapy becomes simple, precise, and effective, but not easy. When partners use Imago Dialogue, a three-step structured process, to talk to each other, they experience safety in the relationship. Safety is nonnegotiable, and it is created by structure. Safety makes it possible for couples to be vulnerable with each other, drop their guards, open up, and become what we call present to each other. Effectively, when one really listens while the other is talking and removes all forms of negativity about what they are hearing, they create an environment in which the wounds of childhood are healed in their current intimate relationship, and they do not have to do the exploration of their memories, feelings, and thoughts as has been thought in the past one hundred years since therapy was founded. Not only is the inside changed when changes occur on the outside, the past is also healed in the present. And being present to each other without judgment creates emotional equality that contributes to changing the competitive culture in which they were wounded. The personal becomes social and political. Everything is connecting to everything, all the time.

Finally, all this helped us refine the answer to the questions we asked at the beginning of our relationship: Why do couples fight? Why the nightmare? And what to do about it? It turns out not to be complicated. We believe that couples fight because they object to difference. And they put each other down emotionally, and sometimes physically, because they are unconsciously competitive. This comes from the cultural value system that directs them to compete for the emotional resources in the relationship and to be the one that is right. Their fight also turns into competition for equality, and that becomes the problem. Fighting for equality is an indication of inequality, and that creates anxiety, and anxiety strengthens their defenses. When partners are anxious and defensive, they either withdraw from the scene and disappear emotionally or compete with each other, until the death of their relationship or themselves.

So, we insist that safety is nonnegotiable. It is the necessary first step to the Imago Dialogue template for all conversations. The three-step process enables partners to talk with each other about anything without polarizing and to connect with each other about anything beyond their differences. Such talking integrates the brain and reduces the tendency to overreact when triggered. The second step is a pledge to remove all negativity so that safety can become predictable. This is also nonnegotiable. The third step is partners flooding each other with all sorts of affirmations on a daily basis, to increase positive connecting.

When safety in the relationship is achieved and maintained, the inner world changes. Anxiety goes down. Defenses relax. Perceptions of the other change from negative to positive. Interactive pleasure increases! Spontaneous play appears with its daily laugh. The sensation of being fully alive returns, and we feel at home in a connecting universe. That is what we humans felt when we started out in our vibrant universe. Everyone and everything pulsated, feeling connected, curious and joyful. It was the time before our caregivers put out the lights and everything turned to shades of gray with patches of black. When connecting is restored, the colored lights turn on again, and the partner and the world are bathed in wonder. We have returned to where we started—fully alive and joyfully connecting—a state of being only available in a relationship with a significant person where the Space Between is reliably and predictably safe.

We hope to meet you again on the inside and guide you to your promised land. And we wish you happy reading and a wondrous relationship.

Harville and Helen

May 2018

part I

THE UNCONSCIOUS PARTNERSHIP

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