ERP 138: The Most Critical Ingredient For Relationship Success, With Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt

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Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.

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Dr. Jessica Higgins: Hi! Thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 138 –  “The most critical ingredient for relationship success, with Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt”. First off, I just wanna say, I have missed you! It has been a little while since I’ve posted an episode, and if you’ve been a consistent listener you’ve heard me mention the enormous amount of technical issues that I have been enduring over the last several months, and there’s still yet to be a final resolution unfortunately, and I’m hoping I’m on the tail end of all of this. It has had a pretty big impact on me, so I appreciate your patience.

In a nutshell, most of the technical issues that I have been facing have been related to a migration process from one hosting account to another hosting account. Unfortunately, it seems as though everything that could go wrong, went wrong – there’s been like 12, 13,14, 15 errors at different points over the last several months and each one of those points take several days and hours to resolve and address, unfortunately, and as of late it’s been related to the security features I have set up on both of my sites. So again, like I said, I hope that I am in the end phase of this, and again, I appreciate your patience in sticking with me.

If you will join me in centering in the intention of today’s conversation and the larger conversations that happen on the Empowered Relationship Podcast — and that is that we are growing ourselves as we show up in relationship; as we show up in relationship, we are fostering, co-creating relationship with our partner. And the intention here is that we are doing that in a proactive, positive way, so that we are increasing the harmony, the love, the intimacy within the bond. That ultimately sets us up on a trajectory of long-lasting intimacy.

My intention for you, is that you feel through these conversations more prepared, better equipped to negotiate dynamics in relationship, so that you can cultivate the type of relationship you desire, whether or not that’s more harmony, connection, intimacy, safety in love, all of the above, and lastly, that you feel confident as you build the skills to do relationship well, and that you see the positive influence on applying this skills, and that your relationship is on the path to success.

To assist you with the goal of becoming more skillful, I provide principles, here on the Empowered Relationship Podcast. I also deliver relationship coaching to individuals and couples who are ready to transform their dynamics from conflict, great disconnect and turmoil into connection, harmony and greater intimacy. If you’re interested in learning more visit drjessicahiggins.com. Click on Contact and find all the ways to reach me there.

Let’s get started with today’s episode. Today’s episode, again, is 138 – The most critical ingredient for relationship success, with Harville Hendrix & Helen Hunt. I am so pleased to be sharing this interview with you, as these are two major contributors to the field of relationship and couples work.

Harville Hendrix Ph.D. and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D. co-initiated and co-created Imago Relationship Theory and Therapy. They make it available in workshops, training programs, lectures, seminars and books. Their professional partnership has produced 10 books, including 3 New York Times best-sellers (Getting the Love You Want, Keeping the Love You Find, and Giving the Love That Heals).

Dr. Hendrix is a couple’s therapist with over 40 years of experience as an educator, clinical trainer and lecturer, whose work has been on Oprah eighteen times. In addition to Dr. Hunt’s partnership with her husband in the co-creation of Imago, she is sole author of Faith and Feminism. She was installed in the Women’s Hall of Fame for her leadership in the global women’s movement. Helen and Harville have been married for over 30 years, have six children, and reside in Dallas, Texas.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Okay, thank you so much for joining the show. I know you guys are A-listers and involved in many, many projects and have been contributing in the field of couples work for a number of years, and I just feel so grateful to have this time to share you with my listeners.

Dr. Harville Hendrix: Well, we are glad to be here. Thank you for unwinding us and inviting us.

Dr. Helen Hunt: Right. We greatly respect what you’re interested in and the research you’ve done on it, so it’s a great joy to be here.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Lovely. Okay, so for us to just get an orientation of kind of what we’re looking at when we are talking about couplehood and you know, Helen, in our talking just a moment ago, you were saying these principles are extremely valuable for couples who are just entering into a relationship and even maybe couples who are in that place where they are feeling some struggle or power struggle. Can you talk a little bit about your understanding of just why we fall in love, what’s that play unconsciously and whatnot?

Dr. Helen Hunt: Well, yeah… To respond to the first part of what you’ve said, what Harv and I believe is that helping people with their relationships, with their marriages, used to be pretty murky. We are both the product of divorce, we both had first marriages, we went to marriage counseling and didn’t work, and that’s the experience of many people until the 1990’s. And in the 1990’s with the breakthrough in the science, the relationship sciences had now become a lot more efficient and accurate and successful, when they try to work with the couple. Some therapists may not be aware of some of the new relationship sciences, but there are therapists now that really know now how to help that couple shift from conflict to connection… And it’s very teachable now, especially — I really give Harville a lot of credit, I have an intuitive feel for relational harmony and how people can get there, but he is the one that makes it very teachable, and with that said, this stuff ought to get out of the clinic and into schools.

We believe that there should be 4 R’s thought at school: reading, writing, rithmatic, relationship. I mean, you go to college, you learn all this stuff – how much of it is really relevant for your life? After, you know, trigonometry, geometry, Egyptian history or whatever… You can dissect and interpret the hieroglyphics, okay, but throughout your life,  what you need to know is how to be in a relationship, so we really think that when a couple is dating, they should learn this in their schools, in college and all, but when applying to a marriage license, it should be like a driver’s license – that at this point is now so simple, there could be a little manual that people read, like the driver’s manual before you get your driver’s license, and you have to take a test to get your marriage license. And, so we really are excited to get this wisdom out into the world, and maybe Harville can best speak to what happens when we fall in love.

Dr. Harville Hendrix: Oh, okay.

Dr. Helen Hunt: That part of her question.

Dr. Harville Hendrix: Yeah, well… Why do we fall in love and what the process was the on-ramp of our work that started in 1977 in a conversation when we first met, and was the basis where the research that led to the development of Imago Relationship Therapy, and the question was “Why do couples fight?” and then, the preceding question was “How do the couples who fight get together anyway and is there any relationship between the selection process and the conflict that happens later?” And what we’ve discovered is that there is, so here is our working model of why people fall in love and how they fall in love, and the story behind both of them is the fact that childhood memory, childhood experiences with caretakers, leave memories, and the memories are of interaction with the caretakers, in which needs were not met that was essential in the child’s emotional economy to be met, for their survival.

Now, the baby, the infant, didn’t have language to talk about that, but their brains are set up on survival mode; primary, the brain is about not dying and the survival mode, and after you don’t die, you do other things like play, create, work and so forth. But primarily, it’s a survival mechanism, and a need not met that seems necessary for survival becomes housed in memory, and the need, the deficit is also connected to the caretakers, which means it’s connected to a living human being that is also recorded in memory, and there are hundreds and hundreds of interactions between infants and young children.

We think that the operation is up to about – the primary, the basic stuff is up to about the age of three, and then some second level stuff happens all the way up to about six, and can continue to be reinforced through childhood and adolescence.

But what happens is this memory, and all these memories become a template, the brain organizes them into something like an impression of the caretakers, and since caretakers don’t change very much in their parenting styles – caretakers are very consistent with the deprivation that they provide, and also with the nurturing that they provide, but the deprivation is what interests the brain. It goes, “The nurturing is great, because that means I’m gonna survive”, but the deprivations mean to the brain, “I might not survive.”

So in adulthood those unmet needs from childhood are still active in the hippocampal memory, and they form sort of a surge committee for a person who will meet those needs. And in the search and find mission in adulthood for intimate partner you see somebody across the crowded room and you have this [unintelligible 00:13:41.15] response to them; what happens for you consciously is that you fall in love, because you have a rush of endorphins, you have a rush of dopamine, you have a rush of all kinds of bonding chemicals, so you are experiencing falling in love.

What your unconscious mind is experiencing is connecting with a person in adulthood who is similar to the caretakers you had in childhood, and that activates the hope, the possibility (unconsciously) that you will now get your needs met, but consciously you simply experience that as “This is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. Look how tall, dark and handsome he is and how beautiful she is!”

So you move towards each other, and underneath this movement towards each other, there’s this expectation – if it’s mutual – that you are the resource that’s going to meet the unmet need in childhood, and therefore I’m feeling very strongly attracted to you and you become essential to my life, and so you move on from that initial romantic attraction to bonding and commitment, and then ultimately, this dream fades and becomes a nightmare of the power struggle.

But why we fall in love is to get needs met in adulthood that were not met in childhood, and why we fall in love with particular kind of people is because they share in significant ways traits that allow them to trigger those memories, and attach the expectation of each satisfaction to that person. So, that’s what we call romantic love.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Lovely. I’m just listening to you, Harville, and I’m in the field and I’ve known about your work for so long, and the way that you are able to distill… You know, Helen was mentioning how these principles can be distilled to very accessible, efficient techniques and processes, but that’s the gift that we have with you both – it’s how you’re experiencing your training, the ability to distill what feels very complex into very concrete language, so I’m just grateful to hear you speak even.

So, when people are in this power struggle and they’re really perplexed, they don’t know if their partners are willing to work with them… Helen you were saying it’s often this deep dive internally, which can have some value but it doesn’t necessarily change the interpersonal dynamics, so what would you guys be suggesting to help people become aware of how to shift and what they are working with?

Dr. Helen Hunt: So we just had this insight one day, that a lot of people think about relationships and they define them in a certain way… We have a definition of a relationship that is unique to us, no one else says this. We call a relationship — it’s not just two people interacting, or two people with a history… We say the definition of a relationship is two people and the space between them. And the quality of the relationship does not depend on one person or the other person, and their mental health or their relational skills or anything like that; it’s not about the two people, it’s about how the two people steward the space between them and learn to take care of the space between. Because if the space between is safe, two people can connect, but if there’s anxiety in the space between, anxiety surfaces and the two people distance, because they don’t like that anxiety. So it sort of depathologizes everything, because it’s a simple science to keeping safety in the between… And Harville might summarize that simple science.

Dr. Harville Hendrix: Well, let me pick up on the question of — so people are in a power struggle, how do you get them to become interested in the resolution of that? I think our clues (again, I’m trying to make it communicable) is that you know that you are engaged in a relationship in which unconscious childhood needs are presenting themselves in the relationship for satisfaction. If you have the same frustration with each other three times, and secondly, if it’s repetitive, and after a while, you know, couples say “Well, we have it all of the time” and if the issue is charged with emotion, usually with negative emotion… So you can say to anybody, say “Has this thing come up before?”, “Yup.” “Has it come up twice?” “Well, yeah…” “What about three times?” “Yeah…”. So if it’s three, we just sort of make it arbitrarily. If it’s three, it’s repetitive; if it’s repetitive, it’s old, and if it’s old the past is presenting itself in the present; and if it’s got emotion attached to it, we know it’s old.

So that helps people know that the issue that they have, which is ruining their current relationship, is rooted in their childhood, and that they need to identify what that issue is, and this is our major internal excavation or exploration, because they need to identify what that is. And so we try to get them curious about what possibly could have happened in your childhood that you’re trying to get met in the adulthood, and so one of the easiest ways to translate that is … So you’ve got a frustration, and you state that, and the person might say “Well, my biggest frustration is that you are always late.” So we translate that immediately into they had caretakers who were unreliable and unpredictable in childhood, they couldn’t count on them.

Or the person might say “Well, you know, when I’m hugging you, you move away or you won’t hug me”, so we know that that person had caretakers whose propensity to have physical contact and do physical nurturing, physical touch, was probably broken; it didn’t happen, so they have this fear of being touched. Or the parent touched them too much, hugged them too much and smothered them, so you wanna get into what was it that happened in the past that is present in present, and presenting itself for need satisfaction.

So what we turned that into is a formula – embedded in your frustration with your partner is a wish in disguise, is an unexpressed desire, so can you convert the negative into a wish? So the negative is: “You’re always late”, the positive is ” I wish that when we have an appointment to go to dinner or to be home for dinner (or whatever), that you would keep the appointment, and if you can’t get there for whatever reason, that you would give me a phone call so that I know what is going on, and then I will know what to do with my time, or I will know not to be anxious because you’re okay”, and so forth.

So to change a frustration into a wish, express that wish as a behavior, begins to operationalize the negative and extract from the negative a potential for people moving toward each other, to meet those unmet, unconscious childhood needs.

So, that’s sort of the operation of that, and the way that we institutionalize is that we invite couples – we’re assuming that they are in an office, and they are both there, and the question of how you get both of them in an office is another one… But when we are there, we guide them and we facilitate them through what we call a dialog process – it’s called Imago Dialog – and that enables one person, who is the sender, to say what they are experiencing, and the receiver mirrors them back accurately, without judging, changing it or whatever, as an accurate mirror. And we take them through that listening, sending and mirroring process, through validation about their point of view, and empathy about their point of view.

All our goal about that (and here is the paradox) is that they engage in this process of having a conversation that is safe, that allows them to hear each other fully, and to hear each other into speech, and to do that without reacting, being critical, and negatives put down, and so forth. And what happens is that the room and the relationship becomes safer and safer, and the safer that it becomes, and when it does become really safe, what happens is that the partners begin to experience connecting; the safety allows connecting to occur, and paradoxically, the attunement and connecting is in fact the healing of all childhood wounds.  That’s what happened in childhood – there was an unattuned caretaker, and primary wounding for children is that parents are not available for their children in a variety of ways. But if you’re not available then you have all kind of needs; if you are available, you don’t have any needs because you’ve got your caretakers and everything will work.

So when couples begin to experience connecting and they are feeling safe and relaxed and begin to flow with each other, they actually are in the relationship of their dreams, and we have to help them understand that, and most of them actually do understand that and they say “Hey, if we can stay like this all the time, I wouldn’t have any complaints. But my complaints are when we are not like this.” So we finally learned about that; that’s what we learned about the space between, that what’s really important is that the quality of your interactions with each other in the outside world, what we call the interactive rather than [unintelligible 00:24:25.18] Your memories are added to by positive memories, new memories, that build new neural networks change the brain, and eventually you have a different brain, because you constructed a different relationship, which reorganized your brain.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: That’s so powerful. It’s so powerful, and I think it’s giving people the vantage point and reprioritizing a little, that the space between is so critical for this healing process. I’ve heard so many clients come and try to facilitate this attunement, and some of them, you know, back years and years ago, they might have come across the “I statements”, where it’s so formulaic, and it’s really sometimes “I feel that you…” — they think essentially it didn’t work. So I feel like what you are speaking to is really helping people get a different paradigm, but I’m also wondering at the same time, Harville, that when people are really triggered, how did they start building…? I just imagine that the work you are doing or the other therapist that are doing this type of work and coaches are like the training wheels and holding the container to help guide people so they can have some experience of this safe space, but when people are so triggered, how do you give them some anchor points to hold on to that it does work, and you know, to trust the process and how to engage when they are feeling so triggered or activated?

Dr. Harville Hendrix: Well, if you are feeling triggered, then —  it’s very hard if you are feeling triggered to get out of the trigger. What we help couples say is that is that if your partner gets triggered by behavior, then you need to do the mirror. Say “I get it that you’re really feeling triggered right now, you really wanna kill me and you just can’t believe that I did that, and that really makes sense, I validate that.” In other words, don’t join the negative activation of energy. As soon as someone is triggered, that you say ” Gosh, tell me more about that”, instead of “I didn’t do anything. What the hell are you talking about?”

We encourage people to develop what we call “curiosity”. So if you see your partner acting out in some way, you go to curiosity instead of judgment or instead of joining them. So one person then regulates, while the other person is deregulated. If one person regulates, the other person will regulate, so it will bring it out. But if one person is dysregulated and you join them, then of course you have the typical nightmare, so that’s one of the pieces that we do.

The second thing is that we work with couples and we are very serious with them about the fact that negativity is a toxin, that the worst thing that you can do is to be negative in your relationship. Any putdown, any criticism, any contempt, any eye rolls… Anything that says “You’re not okay as you are” communicates to your partner the message that triggers their anxiety, and they will then go into their defensives. So what we have worked with is the creation — this comes out of our own relationship, where many, many years ago, when we were really in trouble, Helen came up with a process by which we worked, called “the zero negativity process” in which we learned that if one of us — if Helen does something that triggers me, what I do instead of telling her she is triggering me… I have a clue, I call it a marshmallow. So I say “Marshmallow!” Helen knows when I say marshmallow that she just did or said something that triggered anxiety in me.

So she doesn’t say I didn’t do it, she then goes to curiosity and says “What did I do?” And so we’ve already regulated, because now we are in the prefrontal cortex regulating the amygdala, and then we go into what was done, and then we do a quick repair process. “What is it that you need from me so that you will feel connected again?” And it may be just an apology, it may be a hug, it may be we need to sit down and have a long conversation about that… But whatever it is, the primary commitment is to reconnect as quickly as possible, so that our brains don’t become habituated to a disconnected state, because if we become habituated, then it’s very hard to break the habituation.

But what we’ve learned and what couples have learned is that if you repair it quickly and stay in the connected space most consistently, when you get out of it, it will be so painful that you will be motivated to go and repair it.

I used to tolerate disconnects for 2-3 weeks, and now it’s hard to tolerate it for 2-3 minutes, because it’s so much more painful. It’s sort of like, I’m done with drinking a long time, and you take one and you’re immediately drunk, because your body has no resistance to the alcohol. So that’s what we basically do – the principle of curiosity and zero negativity process. That invites couples into a conscious partnership in which they are collaborators and co-creators of their relationship by committing to and engaging in these processes on a regular basis. So you stop having lone ranger reactions… You know, just living side by side, and somebody suddenly implodes, what do you do?  Well, what you do so that that doesn’t happen, is you have a system of behaviors that you will engage in on a regular basis that regulates your brain, so that when you do get an emotional trigger, you can go to the prefrontal cortex.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yes. And you guys just wrote a book about the space between and where you really describe this in more detail… Would you like to talk a little bit about the book?

Dr. Helen Hunt: Well, one thing people can do is buy the book, because it’s simple, and one of the things I said to Harville, I’m so happy about  “Getting the love you want” But you sort of have to be a reader, to read “Getting the love you want.” So we’ve written two books that are for the non-readers; the first is “Making marriage simple” – it’s got cartoons, it’s a funny book… You know, it’s light-hearted. Someone said “Well, you need to write one of those really small books” Someone said “It’s simple, but profound” It’s sort of funky. [laughs] But basically, we also are doing workshops, like 5-hour workshops, that is the essence of what a couple can do to shift from conflict to connection. Information about that is on the RelationshipsFirst.org website.

Dr. Harville Hendrix: Yeah, and those workshops are low-cost. The long, two and a half day workshops are also on the website, which are done at [unintelligible 00:32:07.10] So if people wanna have a weekend spa, they can come to either of those retreats centers, and the schedule is on harvilleandhelen.com We would be happy to have them.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Wonderful. I will make sure those links are readily accessible on the show notes. Is there  anything that you want to underscore, anything you wanna leave us with?

Dr. Helen Hunt: Yeah. My last comment is that all marriages are hard, and if you think that you are struggling in your marriage or in your relationship and maybe it’s because you’re with the wrong person, that is not healthy thinking. No marriage is easy, and what people don’t know — it’s like at one point people went to the dentist once their teeth were falling out; they were aching, their teeth were just a mess… And then they went to the dentist, but a consciousness emerged that to keep your teeth healthy, you should go to the dentist twice a year, so you don’t have teeth problems emerge. That’s true about relationships. Everyone should go to a workshop or some sort of weekend getaway once or twice a year, to keep your relationship healthy. There are all sorts of wonderful workshops in the country, and they ought to listen to your program every week, every day. [laughter]

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Thank you.

Dr. Harville Hendrix: I think my closeout would be that relationships that are high-quality are ones in which couples can spontaneously play, and that means that they feel safe. And we’ve learned and now amplified by Stephen Porges’ work on the vagal system… That if it’s not safe, you will not thrive. You can only be defended if you are not safe. So safety is the necessary, non-negotiable quality of the space between, and a way to make it safe is that you learn to talk without judgment and criticism, and to listen without judgment and criticism; therefore you remove negativity from your relationship, but you have to add some spice… Because we thought for a long time if you could get negativity out, that would be fine, but we’ve discovered it isn’t.

You have to add positive connecting behaviors, and that might be anything from an appreciation to a caring behavior, to having fun together, to surprising each other, doing something that triggers the endorphin chemistry, the neurochemicals of endorphin and dopamine, so that the brain associates your partner with pleasure, rather than with cortisol, which is pain. And you want to have as many memories — so you have to decide the quality of your relationship will be determined by the kinds of memories you give your partner about who you are with them. And when your partner’s memories of you are “Wow! I can’t wait to see her!” then you are on easy street and you’re into joyful aliveness.

If your partner doesn’t want to come home or comes home late or has all kinds of excuses or whatever, or picks fights and so forth, then they are anxious, and they’re having to stay distant because they are afraid. So safety is non-negotiable; take out the negativity, add the affirmations, and you’ll move into a relationship that will be filled with joy and full of liveness, and can get better than that.

Dr. Jessica Higgins: Yay! Very, very grateful, and that’s so beautifully said… And again, thank you both so much for your time.

Dr. Harville Hendrix: You are welcome. Thank you for having us on.

Dr. Helen Hunt: Yes. Many blessings.

I hope you have enjoyed today’s interview. If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to visit today’s show notes on my website, which is drjessicahiggins.com, click on Podcast and you can find the most recent episodes there at the top. Again, this is 138 – The most critical ingredient for relationships success, with Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt. Until next time, I hope you take great care.

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