A Bit of Optimism - Why We Fall for the Wrong Person | Couples Therapist Dr. Harville Hendrix

Starting point is 00:00:00 And this is healthy? It's nature. Nature's trying to finish an agenda that it didn't get to finish in the parenting period of childhood. Nature's trying to finish that. And it's simple. It's about survival. So I'm trying to think about the people in my life when I was a kid and what did they not meet? And then what am I attracted to now?

Starting point is 00:00:24 Ah, shit. It works. You're right. Ah, d-da-it. They say that it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. But you know what's even better than that? Learning how to stay in love. Now, I have my own podcast, which means I get to bring on whoever I want,

Starting point is 00:00:42 and it may or may not be a coincidence that I have had multiple relationship and love experts. And the reason is because the stuff is hard, and I have a life of failed relationships to prove it. But that might all change, thanks to. my guest, Dr. Harville Hendricks. He spent 50 years figuring out love. Working alongside his wife, fellow relationship expert, Helen Le Kelly Hunt, he's written 10 books, including the bestsellers, getting the love you want, and receiving love, the subjects of which made him a fixture on Oprah for nearly two decades. My conversation with Harville really challenged me, but then that doesn't

Starting point is 00:01:24 help me understand. I'm sorry. I didn't create nature. But I watched this for 50 years. And it really helped me reframe what's supposed to happen in a relationship. Will we learn to stop seeing each other as a resource to meet our needs, but rather that relationships become an act of service? Trust me, this will help anyone is either looking for love or is looking to stay in love. If you like this episode, please remember to subscribe. This is a bit of optimism.

Starting point is 00:01:56 So I'm always fascinated by someone's origin, like how they got into their careers, because I bumbled and fumbled into mine. You and your wife and your books, you were an Oprah million times, and you still are, you know, the go-to for anybody who's trying to understand love and relationships. You know, how did you find yourself in that place? Oh, in that place. So I could start with the fact that my first interview was when I was 15 years old. I didn't know that was the beginning of my career. And I became a pastor of a church at 17. So I've been on the stage regularly every Sunday, and I've done stuff like that ever since I was ordained at 17. I grew up on a shark roppers farm. I had no money, no status, no nothing. I just happened to speak one day at church.

Starting point is 00:02:55 people said, hey, this boy can talk. And that led to the ministry and blah, blah, blah. So I have a PhD. Then got a divorce in 75. I was a professor at Perkins School of Theology here in Dallas. It's a Methodist seminary. And at that time, it was a conservative Methodist seminary. So the dean had to fire me because his supporters in the Methodist Church could not have a divorced professor. five of his tenured faculty were divorced five years later, but I was not tenured. What you're saying is you're a pioneer and a trendsetter. I didn't know that, but I decided they, I got my degree to be able to be paid to write and read and talk. They put me on committees so that 20% of my time was on teaching, 80% of my time

Starting point is 00:03:48 was on committees. So when they fired me, I said, that was not fun. I was like, I was, a clinician. So I decided I would go full time in private practice, started psychotherapy. Then met Helen, the fifth year of my divorce, and we clicked around a bunch of things, started talking. Five years later, we got married. And then I had begun putting together this Amaga relationship therapy theory stuff. And so our conversation has continued about what causes conflict, why do people get divorced and so forth. And then when we got into it, Helen became the second most important person in the world in the women's movement after we got married. So we did parallel for a while.

Starting point is 00:04:32 She was doing the women's world, and she was number two, along with Gloria Steinem. Helen paid the bill for the women's movement. Gloria was the face. Then Helen decided she liked working with couples, and we co-wrote books. she began to join me in lecturing and doing workshops. Our life just merged together so that right now we do everything together. You had one failed marriage before this happened. And now you have a relationship that you're still together.

Starting point is 00:05:07 I believe you're 90, right? How long have you, the two of you been together? 45 years. 45 years you've been together. Almost divorced twice. Right, which we will come to. All right. I mean, I can tell you from my standpoint, like, I never imagined that I would be talking about leadership and culture. I came from the marketing world and I was talking about communication. And it sort of became that those who could communicate from this thing called why, which is what I was talking about, were actually the best leaders. And so I discovered leadership rather than pursued it. How did you discover love and that you had a point of view on it, especially after one relationship ended in divorce,

Starting point is 00:05:55 and then you found love again. When we both met at a party, neither one of us wanted to go to, and she was single, and I was single. And it turns out she was in one of my classes, at a big class, and I didn't know her at all. She sat on the back row that had a door that went out the back end of the room. I didn't know her, but she came to this party, and, I didn't recognize her, but I was leaving because I didn't want to be there anymore. I dated enough, and it was really tired of women. I thought it would be a monk or something like that, and I would leave. But on the way out the door, she stopped me and said, Dr. Hendricks, I'm Helen.

Starting point is 00:06:32 At that time, she was called Helen Cryling. And I said, so, I'm trying to leave. She said, well, I was in your class. And it said, cry, okay, okay. So Helen, because it rang a bell. Helen Cryling, I remember. the best paper in the class. That's why I remembered the paper. These are those 32nd interfaces that if they don't happen, nothing after that happens. So, oh, you wrote that paper. I'll go to my

Starting point is 00:07:00 office tomorrow and be sure, because I saved the best papers. You wrote the best paper. Only one in the class was worth reading because I learned something from it. Everything else was a regurgitation of the lectures. So I called her and said, I do have your paper. So you want to get together and talk about it. it. So we got together and talked about it, and we started talking about we were both divorced. How come? I'm a university professor. She's one of the richest women in America, because she's the daughter of H. L. Hunt, who was at one point in 1976, the richest man in the world. And so she's a socialite, and she's educated and beautiful. I come to divorce. Why come I divorce? So we started asking that question. And so we got to, well, the couple's conflict. And what's conflict about?

Starting point is 00:07:47 So I am a theoretical mind. So I began to put together more questions and more answers and more research and interviews and all that. And after a while, I found I had a system emerging about how do people get attracted to each other. How did they pick each other? Why does romantic love turn into conflict? And we kept having all these conversations. Now we were dating and fighting. We've always fought. We would date and fight. But they were not polarizing. It was just serious disagreements. And so that eventually turned into a lectures, which I started giving in public here in Dallas, and people started showing up and wanted to be trained in what I was talking about.

Starting point is 00:08:31 And so I decided when I moved out of the university, I would move into practice. I became a psychotherapist, but then I got interested in marriage after I got my divorce. So what does this marriage think about? I blew one, and I have no idea what to do next. So it began to show up. As I began to see couples, they began to tell me what they needed because I did have a good listening ear. Like, what do you need me to help you do? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:56 And I finally learned from them. If I do certain things, it really helps. If I do other things, it doesn't help. So I finally put it together. And in 1980, I had a working system that was enough that therapists wanted to come and be trained. That's fine. And then I started writing this book. And here's another 32nd thing.

Starting point is 00:09:14 The book got dropped in Oprah's. executive producer's office. Her boyfriend came into the office that afternoon, and they got into a fight. And Debbie DeMaio, I still remember her name, said, you know, we can't even be together without fighting. And Oprah called her in the middle of their fight. She had to go.

Starting point is 00:09:35 He said, can I have this book on the top of the stack? And she said, you can have all 40. He said, no, I just want this one. He picked up my book, getting love you want, guide for couples, went home and read it, came back the next afternoon and said, you should read this book. She said, I'm not going to do workshops. I'm not going to do any shows on relationships. They don't work. He said, no, no, no, not for the show, for us. This will help us. And she said, I nearly fell on my face. If you think

Starting point is 00:10:07 in, he says, this guy was a lawyer. So he was really smart, fast reader. She took it home and read it, and went in the next day and put her on Oprah's desk and said, I changed my mind. I do want to do a show on this book. 20 years later, I'm still on the Oprah show. Except during that time, Helen and I get into trouble. And I say to Oprah, I can't be on the show and be going through a divorce. And she said, well, when you fix it, call me. She had no belief that we were going to get a divorce.

Starting point is 00:10:39 But when you fix it, call me. This is important. The two of you are now, you know, in part due to Oprah. Yeah, we're visible. You are world famous for relationships and functional relationships, and you are a case study yourselves of a beautiful, loving marriage. But here you carve it the secret where you came very, very, very close to actually ending the relationship. Yes. How close did you actually get to the – because people, I think, think, think it, you know, when they're angry.

Starting point is 00:11:08 Sometimes they talk about it when they're angry. But how close did you actually come to getting the divorce? First time was like, well, we backed off. the second time, we actually file the papers. Wow. And then we went to therapy, and the therapist fired us. Wait, wait, wait. Why did the therapist fire you?

Starting point is 00:11:25 Y'all, a couple from hell. She said, you're untreatable. You're a couple from hell, and I don't want to see you anymore. So Helen said, look, you've been teaching dialogue now all over the world. Why don't we practice that ourselves? Not a idea. Okay, so why don't we do that? So we said, okay, we're going to practice what I preach, the dialogue process.

Starting point is 00:11:53 She was now still in the women's world, so she hadn't been teaching it very much then. So we did that nine months of dialogue on a weekly basis and finally got to the point where we moved through our polarization and went through this revision in which we moved out of seeing each other as a resource because that always generates frustration and see each other as a gift. That generates gratitude. And that is what transforms marriages. One of the things I'm astonished by is you've filed the paperwork for divorce, which means you sort of gone through the trials and tribulations. You've even tried therapy to help save the marriage. I mean, you've done it and you've given up that there's nothing else that we can do. And yet you then commit nine months, which is, let's be honest, if you're filed for divorce, that's quite the commitment to stick around for nine more

Starting point is 00:12:50 months. What kept you in it? A commitment? Because this therapist was a catalyst for that because she was so cruel in her diagnosis that we said, we'll show her. So you both shared a spite for the therapist, which is what motivated you to fix your marriage. Right. And there was no therapy that would help us. So we needed to use our own therapy. And it worked. And in fact, that transformed my own understanding of my own intellectual system. There's many things that I know anybody who's listening now wants to know. Okay. For people who are struggling in relationships, who may be considering divorce or breaking up and maybe in the process, what was the transformation that took place? Okay. So this is a technical thing. So

Starting point is 00:13:38 say it right now. When you're a baby, you're orienting. You're oriental. to the world is that my needs are outside of me. So I got to find that nipple, that I got to find that home in that high contact. I call it now the child consciousness follows you all the way into adulthood. And I think nature sort of sets it up that way. In adulthood, however, you become a parent and you can't now live in child consciousness with your children. You have to move to adult consciousness and you become a resource for your children. But somehow nature didn't figure out how to shift the adult consciousness to your relationship. So one side of your brain says, Ellen, you're my resource. The other side of my brain says, my children, I'm a resource for my children.

Starting point is 00:14:34 So I would be fine with the kids, be a good parent, and then fight with Helen because she wasn't meeting my needs. So what you have to come to understand is that when you become a parent, nature has set it up that you also become an adult so that your needs are not outside of you. You are a resource. Not looking for resources. You are a resource. And you have to become a resource for your relationship. I assume that for the relationship to succeed, both parties need to come to this realization. Yes. Otherwise, one will martyr themselves in the attempt to save the relationship, but the other just milks it, no pun intended.

Starting point is 00:15:20 Right. So in working with a couple, that's exactly what has to happen. Nobody ever gets to this place on their own. And I hate to say this because it sounds so arrogant. This particular insight into the transformation relationship does not yet exist generally in human consciousness. Yeah. Because we do three things. Romantic love is all about you meet my needs. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:47 Power struggle is all about you didn't meet my needs. The third stage, which is built into relationship, is we have to move to another place where we meet each other's needs. Yeah. That helps the power struggle work better, but it doesn't end the frustration. Yeah. Because somebody is always going to blow it. So you really have to make a cognitive decision that I need to reframe my view of you as a blessing instead of a resource.

Starting point is 00:16:20 And when I see you as a blessing, that generates a gratitude. And now it's amazing what gratitude does to the brain. Braddicud cuts off that deep yearning that never got mad in childhood cuts it off. It actually goes away. I don't no longer have that yearning. And so then we live supporting each other's full potential. When you hear couples in trouble or you hear couples breaking up and you say to them, what happened, I've done it myself, I've given this list, I point out all the other person's failings. It can be done with no anger, but rather this person is incapable of meeting my needs.

Starting point is 00:17:02 Yep. And these are the things I need. And we even call them, these are my deal breakers, my, my non-negotiables, right, that they haven't met. So what you're proposing is that that mentality is rather to look at oneself and say, did I put the work in to meet their needs? If both individuals can come to the conclusion that I did not and both still wish to that the relationship is savable and you may actually be a good couple for each other. Absolutely. And this is where the dialogue process is the engine of that conversation. So the therapist holds a couple looking at each other and essentially gives them words to say to get them started because the brain, I don't think

Starting point is 00:17:52 we human beings have evolved to this point yet. But it's obviously on the way or it wouldn't have shown up in my mind. So you hold this couple in this conversation and they're going to wiggle, but you don't wiggle. You hold them in the conversation. And at some point, they relax enough to drop their defenses. And here you say, now we, I want to shift you out of what I have already told them is a child consciousness into adult consciousness. You remember when your children were born, how you shifted to be their resource? How do people do this if they don't have kids? Well, then we talk about it as a theoretical possibility.

Starting point is 00:18:37 And do you have to have a therapist to do this? Or can couples do this themselves? I have not met a couple yet that can do it by themselves. I assume that if one of the members of the couple, if one of the individuals cannot make that shift into how do I help take care of you rather than you just taking care of me, that if one of the individuals cannot do that, then the relationship should move on, that you should go find someone who. No, definitely not. So if one of you can do it, and that's usually it, there's one more willing and capable than the other. So we support then the one who can to hold the one who's reacting without reacting to them, without judging them and criticizing them. And that person then will experience something in their lower memory cell, the hippocampus, that they didn't have since childhood. Okay. So the person who holds them becomes safe enough for them to drop their defenses and then move into the work.

Starting point is 00:19:39 Okay. So now let's move on to pre-relationship, finding. Pre-relationship. Finding love. I think that from what I've read and you're the experts, you know, you can tell me if this is right or wrong, you know, that younger couples these days are taking more time. They're having sex later. They're waiting longer when they're in relationships very often. they're actually not in relationships as frequently. And it raises questions, which is, what's not happening? What are they missing? Like, how do we find love?

Starting point is 00:20:11 How do we start a relationship that we meet somebody who wants to provide for our needs and that we want to provide for theirs? How are we supposed to date, I guess, is where I'm getting to. Like, what are we supposed to do to find love? I mean, we're all looking for it. You know, it's a basic human need to want to feel it. Yes. The search for the partner is regulated by what's happening in the culture at the time. And so that is going to influence, you know, even the fact of having a dating site is a cultural, technological innovation. But no matter how many people that may increase their contact with, or they may be working through some stuff from their childhood, and so they're just not ready to do that. But at some point, the selection process will be, you'll meet somebody who will attract your interest. We call it falling in love. You'll have an attraction.

Starting point is 00:21:05 You can't control that. You can't make it happen. And when it happens, you can't stop it from happening. Because your brain has now seen a person, opposite sex or same sex, doesn't matter, whose personality is similar to a caretaker in childhood from whom you did not get your needs met. So there's a yearning left over from infancy and childhood, and the brain is committed to survival. So the brain has to find a replica of that caretaker who didn't meet your needs to put you in relationship with so that you can still try to get those needs met. But they can't be met because the person you fall in love with is similar to the caretaker who, didn't meet them. You're going to properly fall in love with somebody who replicates somebody who didn't take care of your needs? Exactly. Exactly. But then how do you find attraction if they didn't

Starting point is 00:22:04 take care of your needs? So your unconscious will look at this woman or man. Your unconscious will say mommy, mommy, the mommy who is not available. So the brain has an agenda that has to finish that agenda to get the unavailable mommy available. Unfortunately, I know it doesn't make any sense. It sounds like trying to convince someone to love you. Like I'm trying and it sounds like sort of like my mom wasn't there for me as a kid, so I'm going to convince the next person I meet to replace my mother. Yes. That's what you do. And this is healthy? It's nature. Nature's trying to finish an agenda that it didn't get to finish in the parenting period of childhood. Nature's trying to finish that. And it's simple. It's about survival. Yeah. So the baby doesn't get the needs met. So the brain is

Starting point is 00:22:59 left with, I could die until I get this need met. So I have to get the need met with this person. I'm so confused, Harville, because finding love is finding somebody to complete the stuff I didn't get as a kid, to have somebody meet my needs. But what makes the relationship last and survive is that I have to go from a child brain, which is what this sounds like, to the adult brain, which now I have to convert myself to meeting their needs. So I'm now meeting the needs of the mother who didn't meet my needs. Now meeting the needs of the mother who didn't meet your needs. Yes, that's the way nature sets it up. So that puts the power strong. Okay. I'm sorry. I didn't, I didn't create nature, but I I know, I know. I'm trying to understand. I'm tracking. But then that doesn't help me understand

Starting point is 00:23:55 why one relationship succeeds and one relationship fails. It's not the nature that I'm pushing against. I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to understand. You had me, which is I fully get showing up in the relationship and expecting somebody else to meet your needs. And that's why the relationship fails because that doesn't work. And that what rescues the relationship is making the conversion of instead of showing up in the relationship, expecting the other person to meet all your needs, we make this beautiful, beautiful, we mature and make this beautiful conversion of dedication and devotion to helping the other person meet their needs. And if both individuals are able to do that, the relationship thrives. And I'm thinking of my favorite couples, you know, that I watch the way

Starting point is 00:24:35 they interact. And that seems to be the way in which they're organized, which is how do I help my partner succeed and thrive, find joy and happiness and all the rest of it. As opposed to how can they help me find joy, happiness, and thrive. You know, I get that. The struggle is over. Where you lost me and where I need help to understand is, and because I asked about finding it, that's in the relationship, which I get wholeheartedly. But if I'm trying to set myself up for success in a relationship, wouldn't it be that I meet somebody who wants to meet my needs? I don't understand where I'm attracted to people who don't meet my needs. And I'm trying to put my own,

Starting point is 00:25:14 I'm trying to run it through my own filter rather than intellectualize it, right? So I'm trying to think about the people in my life when I was a kid and what did they not meet? And then what am I attracted to now? Ah, shit, it works. You're right. Ah, damn it.

Starting point is 00:25:36 This is really interesting. So I'm thinking like what I was unable to get from the people who were tasked with looking after me when I was a kid and what the most attractive thing that I find in a partner is their ability to give me that. Yeah. Okay. So wow. Okay. Tracking. Got that part of it. But now I'm still left in the dynamic.

Starting point is 00:26:02 I found the person who meets my needs fulfilling the void that was left when I was a kid. got it, but I'm still in the mindset now of that person meeting my needs and having that child mentality because it fills this childhood void. So now then that's what makes me attracted to the person. That's what makes me fall for the person, but that's not what makes the relationship succeed. What we have to add here is the whole concept of the unconscious. You are not in charge of the selecting process. You're just in charge of the- Well, I did swipe right. I was in charge of swiping right. But what you have to bring in to this, and once you get this, this is easy to understand,

Starting point is 00:26:46 that your unconscious mind outside of your awareness is going to pick the person that you're going to fall for. Because your unconscious mind has inside an image, I call it an imago. It's the core word in my intellectual system, an imago an image of this caretaker. Right. And when somebody crosses your path that matches that picture, your brain is going to go, wow, look at that. But what it's looking at is, I'm going to get my need met now. Right. Because there's mommy or daddy, whichever one was the most active in my frustration.

Starting point is 00:27:27 So the expectation is you are going to meet my needs, but you never make that conscious. Right. You just say, wow, how wonderful, how beautiful. Let's go date and, you know, blah, blah. blah, blah, blah. And you'll both go through the romantic stage with all kinds of things that are wonderful until some difference shows up in which you had an expectation. And this can come anywhere from the end of the honeymoon to 18 months later, which is about the range. It'll show up that the expectation now 18 months later still not being met.

Starting point is 00:28:08 Now you know you're with the right person. And this may sound paradoxical. What? So you're with the right person because you're attracted to them because they meet the need, but then 18 months later, they don't meet your need and that makes them right? The first 18 months is all fantasy. Right. That I've definitely lived that.

Starting point is 00:28:26 It took me a lot less than 18 months. There's a kind of collusion. Yeah, yeah. I projected. I've projected on somebody. I handpicked the things about their personality that reinforce. my narrative of what I wanted them to be. And then I projected that they were the perfect person for me because they met all these needs that I have only to discover that they didn't. Like,

Starting point is 00:28:48 I set them up to fail. It's not fair. And I think we do this to each other generally. Absolutely. It's pretty universal. That you do pick it up. You create this person in your mind. And then you attach an expectation to them. And when they show up, they don't meet the expectation. And then of course, that's when we break up. You're like, you didn't meet any of my needs that I projected on you that you would meet all of them. The person you projected onto and the real person are very different. But you're going to live with the fantasy. But this real person cannot live in your fantasy.

Starting point is 00:29:19 I think this is the distinction between lust and love, right? Like, we fall in lust with, you know, and I make the distinction that one is more superficial, one is more the falling in love with the projection. and the other is actually more grounded. And I think very often we fall in lust. We fall in less quite easily. But to fall in love, I think, actually, is a little deeper and a little more complex, I hope.

Starting point is 00:29:46 Well, I think probably we all fall into lust and then move into something more serious. Hopefully, hopefully. We really need to get this need met. Yeah. But the sexual attraction is one of nature's ways of getting you in bed together. There's one of the nature's ways to getting you in a relationship to get the need met.

Starting point is 00:30:03 You see, you have to have the tension of the polarity of the difference in order to activate the undeveloped part of yourself. So nature set this up, but it didn't give you a handbook when you got married. I guess that's why therapists were created or why books are written about nature's trying to get it out. So how does this reconcile with the fact that dating as a concept is a relatively new experience invented in America in the Industrial Revolution where most relationships, if not all relationships and marriages, were arranged by the family either for convenience or for wealth or for wealth exchange or power exchange when the Industrial Revolution happened and people were leaving the home to go live by themselves in the urban centers. And when dating first started showing up, it took about 30 years for being to normalize because it was, if you were walking down the street with a member of the

Starting point is 00:30:55 opposite sex and you weren't married, it was considered disgusting in the accusations of prostitution. And so it took 30 years for that concept of choosing my own mate and walking down the street with somebody I'm not married to to be acculturated. So how does this, because everything we're talking about here is a very modern conception of choice and unfulfilled needs. And yet, and yet arranged marriages have much lower divorce rates than marriages of choice. Yeah. I'm not an expert in your question, but I have thought about it, read about it, and have conclusions about it. One of the things that if you look at arranged marriages,

Starting point is 00:31:38 while they look stable that are stable and they last longer, they have compensatory sidebar behaviors. Oh. That the affair. So the king had mistresses is what you're saying. The king had mistresses, the queen had mistresses. In other words, this dynamic of romantic love of being attracted to somebody has been around.

Starting point is 00:32:02 forever. Got it, got it. So the romantic love was sometimes found outside the relationship. I understand. On outside the relationship. It's like Romeo and Juliet, you know, they found love outside and it was the forbidden love. Yeah. The natural dynamic that finally got cultureized and cultureated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't come until about 150 years ago. But prior to that, nature dealt with the same thing. It just didn't have a cultural container for it. So it had to happen outside. If we think this through, and again, these are two people with a lot of opinions who have done very little research on the subject, which is my favorite kind of conversation, which is when there's an arranged marriage, it sort of meets your standard, which is, okay, I'm going to make this work. And that means I have to invest in meeting the other person's needs, otherwise this is going to fail? Because I can't sit around going, you know, is this person going to meet my needs? Because the interviews that I've seen have arranged. marriages, there's a commitment to the relationship, which means there's a commitment to the other person, and it meets your standard to a T, which is, I enter the relationship with a commitment to meet

Starting point is 00:33:11 the other person's needs, because that's my job in this arranged marriage. Because the interviews that I've seen with the arranged marriage is very, very happy, and that love came later, but the work started immediately, where I think for us, in our choice of relationships, the love may come sooner, or the lust may come sooner, but the work starts later, usually when problems occur. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So we've made it more difficult for ourselves. And what an amazing concept, which is you can still have a relationship by choice, but to enter the relationship with the mindset of I'm going to commit to seeing my partner's needs. And by the way, if they won't let me meet their needs

Starting point is 00:33:48 or they won't take the same commitment to me, then this is not a relationship that should survive. And we should both move on. It's a re-understander. of the word commitment, right? It's not commitment like a blind loyalty, which is often how we think about commitment. You know, you have commitment issues. You know, we usually mean that you don't have the intense loyalty that you're supposed to have to the relationship, regardless of what's happening. I think that's sometimes how we use the term commitment. But here, the way we're using it, is commitment to the work that needs to be done to see the other person's needs are met. And now when you say somebody has commitment issues, they are unwilling to do the work

Starting point is 00:34:27 that needs to be done to see the other person's needs met and once met, I think is a very nice construction. Yeah, I would agree with that if you have commitment issues, which is why when we do work with couples, one of the first things we say, we call it a no-exit decision. And the reason I do the no-exit decision is I can tell you in advance that when we start working, you will start making progress, you will get more and more anxious about the progress you're making because it's violating your survival directive. Yeah. Because your brain has been fine with survival without the needs being met.

Starting point is 00:35:09 When the needs start getting met, it changes the survival directive. So you get more and more anxious and you'll want to stop therapy. And when you want to stop therapy is when I'm going to invite you to make a non-negotiable recommitment to the therapy process. Because in about three to five weeks, the anxiety will go away because your brain will discover it's not dangerous to receive stuff that you really want and need and are getting. But if you leave when you get anxious, that simply means your brain says, hey, I can't. I don't know how to operate and be safe with this system of stuff, good stuff coming in. I can't count on that. I can count on the bad stuff because that gives me security. So the brain's

Starting point is 00:35:54 kind of crazy about that. I'm tracking this conversation. I like it. The one part where I disagree is I do it without a therapist. It makes sense that you've never met a couple that couldn't do it without a therapist because you were their therapist. That's the only. Those are couples that meet. So that makes perfect sense to me. Helen and I did without a therapist. There you go. You see, you and your own wife did it without a therapist. So you have empirical data to show that it can't be done without a therapist. You just both have to be self-aware and willing. Here's one thing that I think happens. in a relationship, and I've definitely done this in mine, which is the person is meeting my needs. And I'm so afraid of losing that that I shy away from total transparency for fear that I will

Starting point is 00:36:39 somehow push them away or upset them or they won't like all of me. And then I'm going to lose this person who's meeting my needs. But in so doing, they are now either forming a relationship with somebody they don't fully know or worse, they always feel a little bit distant and like they can't get close. And that ultimately will be the undoing of the relationship. And the accusation is it's like, I don't know you. You know, it's like your walls are up, whatever the terminology and euphemisms are. Because I think to your point about this childhood getting our needs met, it's so seductive when you find it, or at least it's even seductive when you project it, that I think very often we become afraid, so afraid of losing it, that we choose not to be our full selves, which,

Starting point is 00:37:28 if we take the commitment to see the other person's needs met, one of the needs they have is to know who they're dating. And so there's sort of the requirement to be honest and transparent. That doesn't mean necessarily on day one. You don't need to tell everybody everything on day one. But to go through the process of gently opening up and taking risks and discovering that the person still likes you, I think a lot of relationships fail because they're never true, they're more open with their friends sometimes than they are with the person they're supposedly getting married to.

Starting point is 00:38:02 Yeah, right. And so let me just add on to what you just said, that part of it is that if I really become vulnerable and let it in, that it might lose it. Yeah. The other side of that is that if I take it, I will violate a directive in my mind. So I have to reject what I get, which is what I want, in order to honor a directive in my mind, usually coming from some message from your caretakers early in child. Are you talking about sabotage? Yeah. I'll sabotage what I want in order to maintain the status quo.

Starting point is 00:38:41 In other words, I like being in the state of seeking it because in some twisted way that makes me feel like I don't know what that makes me feel. Not quite. Let me give you an example. We wrote a book called Receiving Love. I had to learn that. This couple, they were not even a neurotic couple. They were, you know, like they had really deep childhood needs to work through before they could even get to their relational needs. They owned a store.

Starting point is 00:39:09 It was a, I don't know what there was a store where they sold paper and pencils and all that sort of stuff. And it wasn't a big store. so they were the primary people in it. I think she would come to work, like 9 o'clock, would leave at 3 to go home and make dinner. He would have one or two other staff people managing that. Then he would come home at 6 o'clock to eat dinner.

Starting point is 00:39:33 And so their pattern was, I go to work with you at 9, I leave at 3, you stay until 6. I go home at 3 to cook dinner, you come home, and then we have dinner. And so now then the office with me, and what is the complaint? and she said, well, you never thanked me for fixing dinner.

Starting point is 00:39:51 Well, this is not a pathological complaint. This is, I work with you all day. I go home and do another job, and you come home. And he said to her, well, I don't think people should get compliments for what their job is. That's what your job is in our relationship. My job is to stay there from nine to six. Your job is to come home at three in fixed dinner. And then I come home.

Starting point is 00:40:14 You get three hours from three to six. Six. It's like, you know, some parents say to their kids, you know, don't complain about having to take out the trash. That's what you're supposed to do. You just do that without being complimented. That's your job in the family. So he had that. And he said, you know, I'm not going to thank you for what you're supposed to do.

Starting point is 00:40:32 Right, right. So that made sense. So I said to him, Peter, would you just stop and let Mary tell you what she wants? and so she said, well, what I would like is when you come into the door, that you would come find me, I'll be in the kitchen, and you spend me around and hug me and tell me how grateful you are that I came home and fixed dinner. I said, do you think you could do that? She just said that, that he said, well, sure, I can do that.

Starting point is 00:41:07 So I said, let's enact it then. So you move up from thinking to enacting. So he did. First time you did it sort of clumsily. So we did it about the third time. He got it down. And he was having fun doing it and was appreciated it. And she said, no, no, don't, don't hug me anymore.

Starting point is 00:41:28 I don't want it anymore. You don't mean it. You just don't mean it. I was watching him. He did it perfectly. Yeah. His tone of voice was warm and loving. And he was apologetic for not having done it before.

Starting point is 00:41:41 He saw this could really be fun. He would really like to make that a part of their life. And the more he said, the more she said, no, no, no, I'm not going to do it. So I had this gut thing, and I said to her, Mary, would you tell me what would happen if you accepted his appreciation now? Yeah. And she said, oh, my God, my mother would tell me that you don't deserve that. And if you get that, you should be ashamed of yourself. for asking.

Starting point is 00:42:12 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a voice from her hippocampus showed up. Yeah. And she said, my God, I didn't even know that was back there. And she just broke down and cried. Yeah. I didn't know. I can't even receive what I want.

Starting point is 00:42:29 Because if I do, I'll disappoint my mother. And my mother's dead. How crazy is this? Well, it's not crazy. It's normal human stuff that gets triggered. Yeah. Around the critical issues. Then I said, okay, well, now that you got this clear, would you be willing now to let,

Starting point is 00:42:49 you know, Peter come over and really hug you? And she said, please do. That's delightful. So the breakthrough, see, she could not receive what she wanted. Yeah. Now, the reason I wrote a book on that was I had 20 couples in the same impasse. And I didn't know how to get them through it because I didn't know that they had an unconscious. rejection of their wishes. Yeah. So my experience was I dated an amazing woman who her love

Starting point is 00:43:18 language was acts of service and she loved to make me dinner, right? And which was very nice and she's a better cook than me and it was a wonderful thing. But she wouldn't let me do the dishes. I always wanted to do the dishes. If she cooked me dinner, which I was super grateful for, I wanted to contribute and I wanted to do the dishes. So it was egalitarian in the construction. And she always refused. She goes, no, no, no, I'm making you dinner and I'm doing the dishes. That's part of dinner. And it was very uncomfortable for me. And where I had to learn to receive love is I had to learn to put my own sort of desire aside and be like, well, this is how this person wants to express her love for me. I have to learn to receive it. And I did. I always was uncomfortable with it,

Starting point is 00:43:58 but I learned to accept the love rather than being secure about that I wasn't contributing. The relationship didn't survive. And we took a long break where we didn't talk for a long time. And then when we got together again, we sort of reconnected. And she said to me, I owe you an apology. And I said, what happened? She goes, in this time that I've had to think about our relationship, she said, I was so hell-bent on taking care of you and giving you my love that I didn't give you the space to show me love back because you wanted to do the dishes as your expression of love,

Starting point is 00:44:36 your act of service, and I denied you that opportunity. Yeah. And it goes to the original theory of helping the other person have their needs met. It was such a beautiful, genuine place of wanting to love me. And I'm sure it's fulfilling some unmet need as, you know, whatever it was going back to your point. I was so struck by it. It was so meaningful for her to recognize that she was allowed to receive love as well. And she was somehow denying herself, like maybe that she felt unworthy of receiving love.

Starting point is 00:45:09 and recognize that it bummed me out, you know? And it was this beautiful, beautiful reconciliation. And it's to your point of wanting to do the thing that made the other person have their needs met, which is to give love, to give service. No, no, that's beautiful. That's the perfect example of something in her unconscious prevented her from receiving.

Starting point is 00:45:30 So she had to, in a sense, then deprive you of what you wanted to do, which was to give so that the reciprocity, which is beautiful in a relationship, couldn't happen. It raises a nice, interesting point. You know, successful relationships are not equal. They're egalitarian. And I think people sort of, it's really important to make the distinction because equal is, I cook, you cook, I clean, you clean, I take out the garbage, you take out the garbage.

Starting point is 00:45:59 That's equal. Egalitarian is, I'll cook, you do the dishes. Egalitarian is, I'll put the kids to bed, you take the garbage out. where both parties, they both feel whole because they feel like the other person is contributing even though the act of contribution aren't exactly the same, which is nice because you get to do the things

Starting point is 00:46:16 that sometimes you want to do that you actually prefer doing, and the other person feels that you're doing the thing I don't want to do, boy, this is a great relationship. But healthy relationships are egalitarian, they're not equal. I like that distinction. I hadn't thought about that.

Starting point is 00:46:30 I used the word equality a lot, but I can see how egalitarian makes it a kind of teamship rather than a transaction. You've been doing this for a long time. Only about 50 years. Only about 50 years. You said something early in our conversation, which really, I think, was so accurate and so right. I can't remember the exact words, but that dating is constructed around the norms of the day or the culture of the day. And so it does change, and it changes from city to city, country to country. It changes with time because it is a construction of its time.

Starting point is 00:47:07 It is not some deep biological normal thing, this thing called dating. I'm very curious over the course of 50 years, how have you seen dating change for better and how have you seen dating change for worse? So I don't think I have a terribly sophisticated answer to that. So let me just qualify what I'm going to say with it. I think dating paradoxically was better

Starting point is 00:47:33 when people met physically face-to-face long ago, sort of like I did. You can't meet on the telephone, but you can meet on a Zoom or you can meet on a dating site. There were no dating sites as I grew up. We all are noticing of the separation of the personal as the rise of technology has increasingly contributed to more and more indirect attempts to meet people through some technological encounter rather than through a personal experience. Right. I think that's a fair statement.

Starting point is 00:48:14 And I think it'd be great to have dating sites in which after you scour the field, but to move once there is a connection of some kind, to move into the personal immediately, rather than, you know, spend some time getting acquainted with or even going to Zoom. or doing all that sort of. So the more impersonal, the fewer cues you have, I know the technology is really not the problem. It's our use of technology. That's the problem.

Starting point is 00:48:44 There are things you can't pick up. Yeah. Except face to face. You're just advocating IRL in real life. Advocating what? In real life. Telephones, you know, FaceTime, they're perfectly valid ways of meeting somebody. They're perfectly valid ways of fostering relationships.

Starting point is 00:49:02 you're already in, but what you're saying is nothing can ever replace the magic of face-to-face when in courtship and getting to know someone because so much is revealed that is subconscious when we are with someone that eventually will show up if we find ourselves in relationship. You're in an energy field. Right now, you're in an energy field. If you and I were in the same room, our energy fields would be entertaining and we would be feeling each other in different ways from the way we are now. We're still feeling each other, but it's mediated through this distance of the screen.

Starting point is 00:49:38 So it's not as informative. It's not as rich. It's not as rich. Yeah. But it's okay. I mean, it's just different ways. But the realm of intimacy is a realm of intimacy. And that requires seeing, touching, holding, feeling,

Starting point is 00:49:54 and that I'm fine for people to scour the world to find the right person. But then go see them, get together. and smell them and touch them and all the kinds of things. You heard it here first the next time you go on a date, make sure to smell the person you're with. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:50:10 Smell them. My favorite guests are people who teach me something. And I love to have people on here who know stuff that I don't know and help me think through things. I so appreciate you letting me go through it with you. I have definitely smarter and richer

Starting point is 00:50:24 about relationships now. And you're giving me so many good thoughts about even how I want to approach my own relationship moving forward, and the construction that my commitment to the relationship, assuming that I think someone is worth it and they think I'm worth it, because it is a lot of work to commit yourself to see that the other person's wants, needs, and desires are met is a beautiful, beautiful thought. And I hope that I and everybody else finds the person that they want to make that

Starting point is 00:50:49 commitment to. Yeah, that would be wonderful. And you clearly did. Clearly did. It took me a while to work through the anxiety. And mine was working through the anxiety of vulnerability. And my biggest need was visibility. But my biggest defense was vulnerability, which made visibility impossible. So I was a saboteur to my own journey.

Starting point is 00:51:14 And we had to talk long enough until we felt safe enough in the conversation for the defenses to drop. And I think that is non-negotiable, that you have to be safe enough with the other person. Yeah. To be the real you. And now, Helen and I, we don't have any struggle. We walk around playing and kidding. I don't have a sense of a need. She doesn't have a sense of a need.

Starting point is 00:51:37 We may have a want, like I'd like to go for a walk, or I'd like to go out to dinner, or I'd like to have pizza for dinner. But we don't have needs. Yeah. The needs were cut off with the gratitude. And so all that's left is just our diversity and our difference, which becomes negotiable. We can say, oh, so you want to.

Starting point is 00:51:56 on X, like the bedroom at the temperature every night is a conversation. But it's a fun conversation. I like that. If this heater would just work for us better. I love this, I love this. I love, I love this. And I'm thinking my, I've done the same thing where I desperately seek being seen, but don't give people insight enough to see the thing I want seen. So I'm clearly sabotaging. I'm clearly not going to get the thing that I want because I won't show them the thing that I want to be seen. It's such a beautiful, magical paradox. I love, love, love the idea that you have no needs left and it's only just once. And how wonderful is that we should all aspire to have a relationship where our needs are completely met and all we have left is once. Beautiful. Harville, I'm so glad you said yes.

Starting point is 00:52:42 I really think you're the best. Well, thank you. I'm so glad that you asked me. I never have an idea of being interviewed by you. But just so I met you at TED and is like, I met. I met. Simon Sennig, the guy that I admire so much. Oh, you're too kind. I got to spend a whole hour with you. All my needs are met. All your needs. I hope to see you soon.

Starting point is 00:53:07 And maybe we can do this one day in person. Oh, I would love that. I would love that. And I'm available anytime. And I'll get to smell each other. This is the most fun conversation I can remember having. Oh, thank you so much. As always, thanks for listening.

Starting point is 00:53:27 And if you liked this episode, please do remember to subscribe to A Bit of Optimism wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. And remember, new episodes drop every Tuesday. A Bit of Optimism is a production of the Optimism Company, lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford, and Devin Johnson. And if you want more cool stuff or just to find out what I'm up to, visit simic.com. Until next time, take care of yourself.

Starting point is 00:53:53 take care of each other.

A Bit of Optimism - Why We Fall for the Wrong Person | Couples Therapist Dr. Harville Hendrix

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