Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - How to Heal Your Heart with Katie and Gay Hendricks

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

On today’s episode of “The Language of Love,” Dr. Laura Berman sits down with Katie and Gay Hendricks. This husband-and-wife duo have transformed the lives of thousands of people with their iconic self-help books, including their New York Times bestseller “Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment.” In this episode you will learn: • How to identify and break negative thought patterns that are keeping you from finding love • How to find healing and purpose even when the world feels chaotic and dangerous • How to communicate with your partner in a way that resolves fights rather than amplifies them • How you can influence your partner’s behavior with nothing more than your own energy Listen now to hear this inspiring interview with self-help gurus Katie and Gay Hendricks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's what we're doing here on The Language of Love, where I get to answer calls and emails from people just like you. My goal with The Language of Love is to help you discover more meaningful emotional and physical intimacy and to help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexuality really is. Be sure to email me or reach out with your very own love sex relationship

questions and I might just answer them live on the air. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. I am so excited to introduce you to Gay and Kitty Hendricks. They have been living together as partners in work and in life for 40 years they've written 40 books they've trained thousands they've appeared on oprah welcome guys i'm so excited to talk to you and we're also celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary oh happy anniversary just in just in october yeah and we uh went to maori and celebrated for 10 days and then we had so much fun. We booked another 10 days in May to go back and continue our 40th wedding anniversary. Yeah. It's like I say about my birthday. I celebrate it the whole month.

You should celebrate your 40th wedding anniversary the whole year. Yeah, that's a great idea. We should do that. Now I know, you know, basically for those of you who don't know Gay and Kitty Hendricks, they are amazing teachers. And to me, you all are kind of the teacher's teachers, because so many, I've never had the pleasure. I'm so excited to talk to you. I've never had the pleasure of meeting you in person, but I feel like I know you because I've read all your books, but also all of my favorite teachers have been trained by you. And that's such a gift because you have such a beautiful ripple effect, helping people break through the limited beliefs that are holding them back and really you know for me personally in my work in the world

it's always about fundamentally helping people learn to love and be loved better and you know that's what you're doing you're expanding people's ability to give and receive love and remove yes in fact that's our that's really one of our highest purposes is to expand our capacity every day to give and receive more love and also to reveal essence that relationship can be a discovery of more and more of who you are. And I know I keep discovering more of your essence. And I think that's one thing we can support in each other is who are you and who are you becoming?

And that's such a, you're such an amazing model because so many of us, first of all, get into relationships, not our authentic selves. Some of us spend our whole lives, not our authentic selves. But but it's very hard for so many people. And I know that's a huge part of your work. And we're going to be talking about some of the specific teachings that have really resonated for me. I mean, there are millions of them. But this idea of showing up in your true authenticity with each other and full acceptance so that there is safety in revealing yourself, I think, is the key to continuing to discover each other. right? To discover who you are through your relationship with each other. Totally. I was just thinking, as you were saying that, that Chris Rock said something really wonderful about people meeting each other. He said, when you meet somebody new, you're not

really meeting them, you're meeting their representative. That's right. Yeah, you know, we call that persona around here where you're playing out some role. And, you know, the month before I met Katie, 40 some years ago now, I had a realization actually that really helped me get ready to meet her because I realized that I messed up a lot of my relationships by not being authentic by not telling the truth by not revealing simple things like I'm angry or I'm scared or I feel hurt or you know the things that for some reason I didn't think I was supposed to reveal those kind of things the way I grew up anyway because I come from the John Wayne era back in the 50s you know you don't hear John Wayne sitting with a sidekick saying something like

you know we're out here kind of alone and I'm feeling kind of attracted to you that would have made a great movie I guess that was Brokeback Mountain but it would have been great to see John Wayne do that so I had this realization that well actually that I messed up relationships, all of my relationships by two things. One is I would fail to tell the truth about something, feelings or something I'd done. And then I distanced myself from the person because I had that withhold truth between us. The other thing I would do, and I hated to admit this about myself, but in relationship conflicts, I would always run for the victim position and blame it on the other person and then she would never go along with that idea you know that it

was all her fault she would often turn it on me and say it was all my fault and then we'd spend about three weeks in that kind of victim blame game until we finally decide to call off the truths and go out to call the truth and go get something to eat that's put 20 pounds on me during the course of that relationship, solving all my problems with wine and food, eating them. Eventually, I woke up one day and realized that and I made this vow that if I ever got in another relationship, I was not going to hide anything. I would just set it like it was and try to listen to it like it was. And I would never again run for the victim position. I'd take responsibility, even if it was, even if the Supreme Court could agree that it was the other person's fault,

i'd go ahead and take responsibility for it too because there's two people in a relationship and if both of them are taking responsibility that's great if one of them won't and the other one will that's a drama if neither one of them will well that's a real then you run for president there's so many pearls in what you just said i want to take a minute to unpack it and i'll start by saying that this has been one of the gifts, biggest gifts I've received from you, not only my work, but just, you know, in my relationship with my husband, what you're describing. And I know you talk about this at least in the book I'm thinking of is conscious loving, which I give to everyone when they get married or into a relationship. Oh, thank you. But you talk about

the drama triangle. And I was just with a client earlier today talking about, I was like, and I'm gonna talk to gay and kitty hendrix later today but i was talking about the drama triangle which i think is what you're referring to that we spend so much time on this triangle where one point is victim one point is villain and one point is hero and it's like a game in which we stay stuck with each other because the the villain can't exist without someone playing the hero and or uh the victim and vice versa. And so when one of you refuses to play, then the other really can't stay on the triangle. That's right. And yes, and people will go round and round that triangle sometimes for decades. I mean, I can remember as we're speaking here, one couple that had been

basically having the same argument for the 29 years of their relationship and over and over and over again and it's addictive yeah living on the drama triangle is an adrenaline addiction you're trading in adrenaline for intimacy and the only way out of that is for both people to claim 100 responsibility so you're not duking it out over whose fault it is yes forget fault you never get happy by assessing blame and fault boy do we like to do that oh we get so much seeming juiciness out of that. And taking responsibility doesn't mean blaming yourself. It really means getting curious about how I'm co-creating what's going on between us. And if both people can learn how to move from blame into wonder, that's really the heart of responsibility. It's not going,

you did it. No, you did it. No, I have evidence and my friends think and let's write needing to be right. Right. And the need to be right is so powerful because what you get from that is that big burst of adrenaline. You get that momentary, ha ha ha, you know, I'm right. But then it fades off really quickly and then people kind of get sort of low energy. And so what often happens is that the argument then accelerates and there's more blaming and you sort of get that hit of adrenaline. And that really keeps people running around on the triangle. But that move of, how am I creating this? And what could I do differently that would create a different result? That's using your creativity rather than your blame muscles.

Those muscles are very well developed. And I can tell you that when my husband and I really committed to doing this, I would get so pissed at him because my favorite place was victim and I would be have a foot in villain, but I loved victim. And he would say, what's your hundred percent? And I'd be like, you know, you have a hundred percent. And I think it's true. It was the adrenaline, but it was also a sense of safety because if I was right when he had his, I'm just taking my 100 percent responsibility here, not talking about him. But if I was right, then I was safe. And that was certainly, you know, if I could convince my father that he was wrong, then

he wouldn't emotionally or sometimes physically abuse me. And I literally could. I was a grade A gas lighter in the reverse to keep myself safe. I could win any argument by turning it around and you'd end up apologizing at the end. And I think the reason, one of the reasons I fell in love with my husband is, and I've told him this, I realized it pretty quickly, is that I could not do that. Like, I couldn't, he would not let me do that. Period. That's a wonderful gift.

And it's also a great tribute to you for doing the kind of work on yourself that you would invite a man like that into your life, a mirror like that. You know, because a lot of people use the mirror that's given to them in relationship, you know, by saying, no, that's not what I'm saying. No, that's not what I'm saying. But you have willingly brought in a person into your life who's savvy enough to transcend that whole pattern. Yeah. I was also thinking about how you are creating safety in a way that we recommend creating safety, which is to be real. And one of the great joys of my relationship with you is that I can reveal all of me. There's the safety of being able to be real with you.

And boy, that is just such an amazing experience. The sense of, ah, of kind of deep relaxation and openness to discovery rather than protecting and trying to find the safe thing and also anticipating that you're going to be attacked because on the triangle, there's always the danger of escalating the drama in order to get that juice. and so it's a different kind of flow that works on harmony and creativity rather than on blame and being right yeah and i think also one of the things i've learned from you is that it's not just because you're right we do get addicted to the adrenaline of the tension even if we don't realize we are and then it can feel like the softness and the flow and the creativity that you're talking about, which really helped me, is the best antidote to the adrenaline you get from the drama triangle is playing together and being silly. And we stop playing and playing, especially when you have the safety that you guys are describing. And I want to ask you about how

the hell you create that, because I think I've managed to create that with my husband and I help people create it. But I would love your take on what cultivates that safety where you can fully express yourself and go back to playing again because we lose the play which is such a huge part of creativity yeah and you touched on something really important because a lot of people fuel their connection with adrenaline and actually require repeated arguments to get sexually turned on yes we call that the wargasm pattern and where you have to jazz up your sex life with some kind of adrenaline-based drama. But what really helps people is learning how to make a genuine whole body commitment, because it takes commitment to create play in your

relationship, because oftentimes the default position of especially married couples or couples who have been together for a while is a kind of deadness that a lacking of a spark and I grew up in a family I think and I think Katie did too from the ones I saw where they they were it's like nobody wanted to be where they were no and that's like the norm for so many people yeah yeah and most of them didn't even the ones that were married didn't even want to be married to each other and and in case of my grandmother she said the most amazing thing that just made my head explode my brother once asked my grandmother and they were married for 63 years according to my mother they fought for 59 and a half years they were together a long time and

My brother once asked my grandmother, what was the source of the problem between you and granddaddy? Why were you always just sniping at each other? And she said, I think it's because I hated him from the moment I laid eyes on him. Oh, my gosh. My brother's eyes sort of popped out. And he said, then why? and he said can you imagine what it was like to be the only unmarried female in saint claire county alabama yeah just after the civil war can you imagine what my life was like

oh man i felt so much compassion in that moment for the women of her time and everywhere who have to make huge concessions to fit into whatever society they're trying to be. I saw that with my mother too. Yeah, me too. Yeah, it's heartbreaking in a way. So that's why we are so committed to never doing anything we don't want to do or never doing anything that I don't want to do that Katie wants to do. She's welcome to do whatever she wants to do by my book I feel the same freedom to her, but she is under no obligation to come over and sit on a golf cart with me for three hours. Oh my God. I'm so glad you brought that up. There's so many pearls here, guys. That has been one of the hugest gifts too, because I am a recovering codependent

and my parents were not only had, they had a loving, in many ways, a beautiful relationship, but in many ways, a toxic relationship because my dad was a severe narcissist and my mom was a severe codependent but they were extremely enmeshed and they did everything together and my husband has been an ain't like he has been my greatest teacher in this in part because he subscribes so deeply to what you all teach which is the win-win kind of like okay i don't want and when the kids were small he's not very social he doesn't like big he doesn't like small talk he doesn't like big social events he's an empath even though he doesn't admit it and he you know so all the kids and the parents would come over for one of the kids birthday parties and he would go

upstairs and disappear and the other mods would be like oh where's Sam and at first I would be mortified and I would like try to make up an excuse or I would be angry at him like why can't you just suck it up and like you know be there we're supposed to be and eventually once I really got this, I was like, oh, okay. And so it's not my responsibility. And it's also, he's not a reflection on me. It's not my place to explain his behavior. So when they would say, where's Sam? I'd be like, I don't know. I guess he's upstairs. Like, and me being totally okay with it. Everyone else was okay with it, but we've done that. We are very different. We like doing really different things. I'm really social and like to like be, you know, we'll go to a party and he leaves

a couple of hours before I do, but it works because neither one of us make the other do things to hero one another, right. To suck it up. You're describing a couple, I think of really, really important things. One is that so many people get trained that their relationship is a license to improve the other yeah to make them more like ourselves and boy that was one of the things that we we did our best to stop right away because taking your partner on as an appreciation project rather than an improvement project say that again say that again say that again taking your partner on as an appreciation project rather than an improvement project a little fixer proper is one of the most important shifts that you can make. And the other one that you're

pointing to that's been so important is that healthy relationships have a dance between the urge to merge and the urge to individuate. The urge to let go into another person and experience that deliciousness of of union with another but what often gets neglected is what's my own creative fulfillment what really turns me on and what we often help couples to find out is what's the rhythm of your wanting to get close and you're wanting to get separate and how can you do that without creating an argument because people think if I if I criticize you or you have an argument and then we get separate, then I'm getting space, but you're really not because it's your space. And that's how they'll get space is by picking an argument.

Right. Right. But that's not really a chance to enjoy your own. What is it that I want to do right now? It's really, then you have to recover from the argument and kind of repair that. But if you really see that your relationship is an ongoing dance of knowing what are the signals that let me know I want to get close and what are my signals or your signals that let us know it's time for me to have a little time on my own that really is one of the best ways to juice up your relationship in an authentic way I think also we have to remember too that there's this thing called polarities where oftentimes one person will come into a relationship who's super heady and I'm describing how I came into our relationship and one of us came into our

relationship very in touch with her emotions and very emotive and you know sounds familiar and we also come in polarities one's called a glommer and one's called a splitter the splitter kind of likes to be on his own must have my space don't fence me in and the glommer just and interestingly enough a glommer and a splitter will often get into a relationship with each other and then try to make the other one into the way they are. And take it personally when the other splits or somebody or feel put upon when the other gloms. The underpinning of a lot of the beautiful gifts

you're offering that I think is a rate limiting factor here is the blame game, right? In terms of safety, in terms of acceptance of the other's desire to merge or to individuate or to express themselves or even to not withhold, right? The blame. And I know you have so many beautiful teachings and truisms that I still use all the time that around when someone is denied,

like for instance, when someone is denying something that you haven't even accused them of, you know, that's a sign that maybe me thinks thou doth protest too much. But also that finger of blame. And I try to explain this to people, but it comes from you. So I want you to explain the way in which when we're pointing the finger of blame at our partner, we're really pointing it at ourself. Can you talk about that for a minute? Yes. Well, relationship, one of the ways relationships should work is the closeness

between you should invite to the surface old glitches and patterns and emotional things that are in the way of you feeling that love and circulating that love 24 hours a day. To me, the ultimate pinnacle of life on earth is to feel the continuous flow of love between you and your partner, if you have one, or between whoever you're close to, whether it's family or Or what? It's to feel that flow of love back and forth all the time. And it's blocked oftentimes by old glitchy patterns from the past, like the need for approval or the one that often comes along with it, the need for controlling another person. The fear of criticism, that was a major pattern in our relationship when we first got together. And it was invisible because it was just the water that I swam in, that I just expected criticism. And the closeness of love brings up those old patterns so that you have a chance to really love them.

and maybe find out where they came from and make a new commitment to let your relationship be free of blame and criticism i'd say that was probably the most powerful single move that we made early in our relationship how do you do that because people can't turkey through the power of commitment yeah you know we looked each other in the eye and said things like, okay, I vow to tell you the truth about things that I'm feeling to the best of my ability. And I commit to you to take responsibility for things that come up, especially the ones where I think I'm the total victim. We make commitments to each other. And I vow not to criticize or to Yes. So we we and we recommend this for people also is that in instead of criticizing, shifting into appreciation, because the research is really clear that thriving relationships have at least a five to one ratio of appreciations to criticisms.

And that includes the nonverbal things to the looks and the eye rolls and all that. You know, I love that. And I just make that shift because what doesn't work is catching yourself criticizing and then criticizing yourself for criticizing. It's kind of this endless loop. And really, ultimately, relationship brings those things to the surface that are essentially unloved parts of yourself. and that's where it gets really tricky because some of us have gotten into relationship to get the other person to feel and love the things that we haven't even loved in ourselves and so it's an unrealistic demand that's a setup for them to fail in that so what needs to happen

there is i think all of us in a relationship need to make a deep commitment to learning to love ourselves at deeper and deeper levels because those very old crystallized things in yourself that you haven't opened up and loved and forgiven and accepted yourself for become things that get projected into the relationship or expectations or demands onto the other person. Yeah. I play this game as a couples therapist inside myself. It's always fascinating to me. And this is what you're talking about that couples come in with an issue, whatever, or issues and whatever those things are that drive them crazy, or they see as the point of conflict in the other person is actually the reason they chose them both because of how those, because of how those

issues trigger their own wounds. And because of the fact that those issues are the shadow side of their partner's gifts. So like, for instance, my husband, it used to drive me crazy that he was so controlling over the safety of our children because I wanted them to be able to jump on a trampoline or go horseback riding or do the things that he was afraid to let them do because they might break something or that. And he was super protective and it would drive me crazy. And what I eventually realized is that one of his gifts is like he's the craziest chess player of life. You know, he can see 10 moves ahead, you know, and he's got that amazing brain. But also his dedication to protect our children, even if it was a little overkill, sometimes allowed me to have so much

fun with them. Like I never worried about their safety when we were together. I was body surfing with them while Sam watched to make sure nobody drowned because that was where he was comfortable. So there were gifts in that, but there were also wounds. And this is what you were talking about. Wounds in me that I really needed to get clear on and heal so that I didn't need him. And this was the balance for me. Not only did I not need him to change, but I also needed to figure out, especially with regard to co-parenting, which I know is a huge issue for lots of couples, I needed to figure out, which I still sometimes struggle to figure out, how to hold that line. Like it's one thing with me, I can find the win-win, right? But when it's with our kids,

things feel a lot more loaded, at least for me. And so to find that line between standing for what I feel is the truth. And what he feels is, or what I feel is in our children's best interest, right? But I'm convinced that's true. And what he feels is in our children's best interest. And we're both really committed to that belief, how you meet in the middle. I'm curious. It sounds a little bit like underneath that you were both invested in being right. Yes. About your position. And one of the things we do with people being right is have them play with it. Do what I imagine you've done some work with Diana Chapman on what we call persona play. One of the things that's really fun is to just

exaggerate what you're doing rather than trying to hide it. So actually letting yourself express your and your playfulness and having your relationship really be a place where you can share different sides of yourself and explore those without this sense of we have to be always in control. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we did. I remember when the kids were in elementary school and first getting really serious homework and I just started doing to them what was done to me, like overlord of the homework. And they were kids and AD deers. And it was like herding cats. And I would get curious and, and Sam then would get triggered that I was, you know, creating all this tension. And so I decided, and we did some persona play and I became the homework Nazi.

And when that one wanted to come out, I would start goose stepping around the living room and speaking in a German accent and yelling at them and telling them that they were going to go to prison if they didn't. And it was it was funny and it really did help. Although there was a part of me that was like, yeah, and do your frickin homework. But it at least broke the tension and it allowed us to address what wanted to be happening without getting so caught up. So I think that's a good example. Right. When you talk just so people understand what personas are. There are these parts of ourselves that typically come from our wounds or our stories that kind of, at least the way Diana Chapman has explained it to me, it's like we have all these

coats in the closet, our personas that, you know, and the goal is to choose to put them on versus them putting us on. Like when I have a persona, when I talk to a group of a thousand doctors, I have a persona of that I kind of get into as the authority and combating standing up to their ego stories as the Ph.D. in the MD room. And and that serves me and I'm intentionally putting on that persona. But that's different than unconsciously doing it. That can actually make a bridge between you and other people because we have so many different groups, So many different ways that people gather together and they're kind of rituals with each other. So it can help us.

Personas, we really can't get along in society without personas. But I really like to encourage people to let their essence, who they really are, shine through their personas. And back in the old days when Alien had come out, I would say that you want to be wearing your personas. You don't want your persona to be, you know, gripping you. Yeah, because we've all got personas and we have personas that get us positive attention, you know, like, you know, being a cheerleader or being, you know, a hard worker. And we also have troublesome personas. Rebel. The rebel, the loner.

The person who gets sick a lot. The control freak. Control freak. yeah we've all got a stack of them though because that's what you learn to kind of get along with in life and it serves when we're younger yeah yeah and when the the problem is when you're in the middle of your one of your positive personas like good boy or mom's helper or whatever and suddenly mom's in a bad mood that day and it doesn't work very well then you have to go to kind of one of those negative personas yeah yeah and that's when you end up on the triangle

yeah or the drama triangle you can also get on the triangle from your positive persona so the hero is a positive persona run amok that you know the tendency to help people without being asked and uh one of i was just doing a little presentation on the drama triangle the other night and how you can tell how i first got on to the hero was when i was working as a therapist and I have a group of of clients and one of them would be crying and while she had her eyes closed four people were offering her Kleenex without her having asked at all and I started wondering hmm what's going on here and so I think that the we think of the triangle or those kinds of positions as purely negative yeah but we can also get over committed to helping others to the

neglect of our own selves and our own well-being. Yeah. And also to unconsciously create more. I mean, that's what I was doing to create more safety for myself. If I saved everyone else and they all needed me, they wouldn't leave me, you know, because who would leave me if they need me, which was a crack of shit. Of course, they could leave me. But I sort of adopted that story. The last book I wrote was Quantum Love, and it was about how you can kind of master and harness your body's frequency through understanding and working with your emotions, which is what sets our energetic frequency to work with and co-create the reality you want in your love life and in your life in general. And one of the things I talk about, and I cite you guys and Diana, is around

the drama triangle. Because I remember reading or listening to you once, the way I kind of describe it, I'm simplifying here, is that there is home frequency, which is our natural, as you would say, essence, our natural flow state, the place from which we're kind of from an openness and curiosity all the way up to bliss and love, right? That's when we're really co-creating more of what we want, most desire in the universe, right? That's when we're really co-creating with spirit, God, quantum field, whatever you want to call it. And then there's ego frequency, which is when we kind of anywhere from shame and guilt, anger, frustration. When you're in those lower frequency places of anger, resentment, frustration, self-blame, you are not in flow. You are in those

lower frequencies. It's going to create less of what you want. And I remember reading, and you kind of, your way of talking about that is about being in flow, being in your essence. It's the same thing as when I'm talking about home frequency. And I remember reading that you said most couples or most people don't spend more than four seconds at a time off the drama triangle. Is that true? I mean, we hop on and off, but. Yeah. Well, I remember when I was first learning all of this way back in the 60s. One of my heroes at the time was Dr. Eric Byrne, who had a famous book called Games People Play. And one of the things he said repeatedly is that most couples don't experience 15 minutes of genuine intimacy in their entire lives. And I remember thinking,

bummer. What kind of relationship do you have? But the more I, you know, Katie and I have seen thousands of couples now. And even in my own life, I had a four-year relationship in my 20s where I really don't think we ever had even close to 15 minutes of genuine intimacy because it was all persona to persona. I didn't know enough about myself to even know a moment of intimacy with myself. What would you suggest? Because there's so many people that listen to this that are, I mean, everyone here is looking to love and be loved better, right? That's the purpose of this show. And so if you're listening to this and you are realizing I am in this lackluster relationship, I do want more intimacy. I do want more aliveness. What would be the first

step? I mean, obviously you've written so many books and you can go and we'll give you the website. And I know that Gate has a new book coming out in addition to The Big Leap. We'll talk about that too, but what would you say the first step is for someone really wanting to make some changes? I would say the very first step is to something that Gay mentioned earlier, which is to commit to creating what you want in your life and committing and recommitting are the major keys because when you commit, like I commit to learning how to love myself, then what's going to happen is all of the things that you don't love about yourself are going to come to your attention.

So the recommitting, I can remember when I was learning how to reveal rather than conceal. I recommitted to that probably 500 times before I really became, I really owned it. And what I noticed was that it didn't help if I would find myself concealing and then I would beat up on myself,

that would just take a lot more time for me to come back to, okay, now I recommit. I can feel all of the feelings that are going on, but I'm more interested in moving toward what I really want. So letting yourself have the experience of falling off the horse

and getting back on again is really, really important. And you can create a space for the people you care about to learn that they don't have to be perfect in order to keep uh moving toward more and more flow and more and more harmony and each of us can take responsibility for letting our lives be about learning and discovering uh and not perfection joy in that then uh then in being right there's only limited joy in being right and also there's

limited, there's a kind of a, oh, poor me. And you can get some kind of juice from that, but you know, it's really not very satisfying. So I would say focus on committing and recommitting. A lot of people, and even I was worried that my partner wouldn't come along for the ride. And I think one of the things that was most powerful that you alluded to early on and in our conversation. And just now is this idea of like you committing and taking your a hundred percent. Like I remember years ago, I had been on a flight coming home and my husband was home with the kids and the flight was super delayed. And I was sitting next to this gorgeous man who was flirting with me the whole time. And I was really enjoying it. And at the end of the night, the

flight ended up getting canceled. And he said, Oh, why don't we go to dinner? And for a split second, I thought, yeah, I can go to dinner with him. Nothing's going to happen. But then I was like, no, I am not even, this is like dangerous territory. So I said, no, honestly, I'm going to go back to my friend's house, blah, blah, blah. So the next day I couldn't get it out of my head. I felt so guilty. And I thought it was a sign that something was horribly wrong in my relationship. And I finally went to him and I remember he had just gotten out of the shower and I was like, I have a withhold, which is, I have a withhold. And I said, I am noticing, I didn't tell him the whole story, but I took my a hundred percent. And I said, I am noticing that I am being attracted

to other men and wanting to flirt with them and enjoying flirting. But first I had to get clear that what was really turning me on about this guy was not the guy. I didn't know anything about him. It was the flirting. I was loving the feeling. Yes. And I was loving the feeling of being attractive to someone. Not that I'm not attracted to my husband, but that flirtatious energy. Yeah. So I said, I am realizing that I really miss flirting and I'm going to take my hundred percent here and say that I probably haven't been flirting with you and I haven't maybe been open to you flirting with me, but I'm going to commit, I'll again, Kitty Hendrix, I'm going to commit to flirting with you more and inviting you to flirt with me. And I was like clenching my toes

waiting for him to flip out and he was like okay and totally fine with it not that he didn't like you know I'm sure he didn't like that I was flirting with someone else but he loved the way I presented it to him and I didn't point the finger of blame at him and say you suck and don't flirt with me anymore so I was turned on by this guy on the plane and he rose to the occasion and he always does this is what I just I'm always amazed that he right because I always expect him halfway to be like, screw you and the horse you rode in on. I'm not up for this, but he always rises to the occasion, which is really beautiful. That's really beautiful also that you have done the necessary things in your life to allow you to manifest that kind of a husband. So take a moment

of love and appreciation for yourself at the same time. Yes, that's right. I appreciate myself for having a good litmus test, a good compass to choose from. Yeah, you got your picker fixed. Yes, yeah. Even the things that drive me crazy are good fodder. Well, especially because they can open up more wildness because, you know, relationships need a balance between stability and safety, but also wildness and variety. And one of the ways that we recommend that people get their variety is by continuing to reveal more aspects of themselves and, you know, continuing to find out what is it that I want and what fulfills me.

And if you bring back then that fulfillment to your relationship, that creates juiciness and the kind of wildness rather than doing the routines in the same old every day. Including sexually, right? Yes. You got to explore there too and be honest. Go out and rent yourself a big pair of leather Western chaps for the weekend. Listen, you and John Wayne have a history together. I'm convinced. I like it.

This has been such a beautiful, beautiful conversation. I'm so grateful to you for spending time with me, but also most importantly for your beautiful work in the world. And I want to make sure that I talk about some of the newest things you're up to. so if you want to learn more first of all should they go to your website hendrix institute right yeah hendrix.com h-e-n-d-r-i-c-k-s.com and the new book also has its own website which is geniuszonebook.com and that's a good place to go because there's all sorts of cool guided meditations there and everything that go along with the book is that about finding your

genius it's all about finding out what you most love to do and what makes your biggest contribution in life and also how to fix the things that are keeping you from doing that every day and from making that big leap which is also i recommend you guys read the big leap and conscious loving to let you know we have another website the foundation for conscious living.org which is from our foundation, which has dozens of free videos about how to explore more deeply the things we've been talking about. And the latest one that I've, the latest class I've taught on the drama triangle is going to be up there next week. So you can always find kind of the latest things that we're discovering both on Hendrix.com and on the foundation for conscious living.org.

thank you thank you thank you i'm going to keep stalking you guys now that i've met you because i adore you and all you are in the world oh thank you so much and thank you for rippling love out into the world in such a delightful way oh thank you much love to you both thank you thank you bye I went to the doctor, said I'm crazy for your love. Wrote me a prescription, but there's no cure for a crush.