Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed. (18 page)

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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

BOOK: Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed.
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HERE’S AN EXAMPLE from a recent couples workshop to show how the Behavior Change Request Dialogue works. To begin the demonstration, I asked a volunteer to state a significant gripe about his or her partner. Melanie, an attractive woman wearing a bright print dress, raised her hand. She shared what at first appeared to be a superficial frustration about her husband, Stewart. “Stewart has a terrible memory,” she said. “It seems to be getting worse. I’m always nagging at him about his memory. I wish he would take a memory course.”
Stewart, a mustached, scholarly looking man, was sitting next to her and, as if on cue, promptly began to defend himself in a weary tone of voice. “Melanie,” he said, “I’m a lawyer. I have to remember thousands of pages of legal briefs. I have an excellent memory.”
Before Melanie had a chance to restate her criticism, I asked her what bothered her most about Stewart’s inability to remember. When did it make her the most upset?
She thought for a moment. “I guess when he forgets to do something that I’ve asked him to do. Like last week, when he forgot that we had a date to go out to lunch. Another thing that upset me was when we were at a party a few days ago, and he forgot to introduce me to his friends. I stood there feeling like a complete idiot.”
I then prompted her by giving her the beginning of a sentence:
“And when he did that, I felt …” I was trying to help her pinpoint the deeper feelings, such as sadness, anger, or fear, that might underlie her frustrations. Basically, I was helping her identify the desire that was hidden in her criticism, a process I had described earlier in the workshop. But first, it was important that she identify her most frequent feeling, and then identify the fear behind that feeling. “Well,” she said, “when he does those things, I feel unloved. I feel he doesn’t care for me. I feel rejected.” Then I gave her another sentence stem and asked her to fill in the blank so that she could make the connection of this chronic feeling to her childhood. “And when I feel that, it reminds me of …” Melanie filled in the blank with, “It reminds me of my father who was never there for me. He was always so preoccupied with other things and he often forgot to attend my sporting events.” I gave her a third sentence stem: “And what scares me about that is …” She replied, “I am afraid he doesn’t love me. That I am not important to him.”
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I turned to Stewart and asked him to restate Melanie’s frustration and mirror everything she had said so far—to give what I call a “summary mirror.” With a little coaching, Stewart finally said, “If I got it all, your frustration is that I have a poor memory. And I forget what you ask me to do and also ignore you at parties, and this reminds you of your dad’s constant preoccupation, which made you feel unloved and you were afraid that he did not love you. Did I get it all?” With tears in her eyes and astonishment that he remembered everything so well, Melanie said, “Yes.”
I asked Stewart if he would validate Melanie’s experience and express empathy by imagining the feelings she had as a child. While this was difficult for him and he needed some prompting, he finally said, “I get it. Given the fact that your father was often preoccupied and forgot about your school events, it makes sense that when I forget things you ask me to do that it would remind you of your father’s forgetfulness, and
it also makes sense that you would be hurt and feel that you were not loved. I get that now.”
And then he showed his empathy—spontaneously: “And I can imagine that you feel angry when I forget things. Is that the feeling?” She confirmed his validation with some sobbing, saying that this was the first time ever that she had felt heard, had felt important to him.
Next I asked Melanie to state what she wanted that would remove her frustration and the fear and hurt behind it. I asked her to put it in global terms using words like “always” and “never.” In the unconscious mind, our wishes have no boundaries. We want “everything, all the time!” I have learned that it is important for people to state this global wish. Even though they realize they will not get it, it helps them focus on the childhood wish embedded in the frustration. After she came that far, I knew I would ask her to break it up into manageable, bite-sized behaviors.
 
“WHAT I WANT most,” Melanie started saying, “is to know that I am important to you all the time, that you are always thinking of me, and that I am more important than your work, always.” At first, Stewart’s face softened with this request. But then he looked overwhelmed.
“Now, Melanie,” I continued, “I want you to write down a list of specific behaviors that would help you feel more cared for, important, and loved. Will you give Stewart some concrete information about how he could become a more positive force in your life?”
She said she would.
Next I gave Melanie and Stewart and the rest of the group some detailed instructions. I explained that their partners would ask for behaviors that could be difficult for them to enact, because they had not been allowed in childhood. Understandably, they would feel some resistance. Some might feel that it was impossible to respond. But, I continued, if you
stretch and give your partner what they need from you, it will activate that part of you that was shut down in childhood, and you will develop hidden parts of yourself. Your partner’s needs are an invitation and opportunity for you to grow.
I then sent the workshop participants back to their rooms, having asked them to identify a chronic complaint, isolate the desire that was at the heart of the complaint, connect it with a childhood experience, and come up with a list of concrete, doable behaviors that would help satisfy the unmet desire. They should then look at each other’s lists and rank the behaviors according to how hard they would be to act upon. I told them that sharing this information did not obligate them to meet each other’s needs, but that the purpose of the exercise was to educate each other and to develop their capacity for empathy. If their partners then made the decision to stretch into new behaviors, they would now possess some specific guidelines. Any suggestion of obligation or expectation on my part would reduce the exercise to a bargain, bringing with it the likelihood that the whole experience would end in resentment and failure.
When the group reconvened, Melanie volunteered to share her list. She had followed the SMART behaviors guideline and made her requests small, measurable, achieveable, relevant, and time-limited. Here are a few of them:
“For the next four weeks, I would like you to set aside one night a week so that we could go out for the evening. And during that evening, I want you to tell me three times that you love me.”
 
“I would like you to introduce me to your friends when I meet you at the office for lunch next Thursday; and for the next three months, each time I come to your office, I would like you to introduce me to another friend.”
 
“I would like you to give me a special present on my next birthday that you have bought and wrapped yourself, and during my
birthday, I want you to look me in the eye three times, for one minute each, and say: ‘You are the most important person in my life.’”
 
“For the next three weeks, I would like you to call me on the phone once a day just to chat.”
“For the next two months, when we go out to dinner, I would like you to remember to pull my chair out for me, and then lean over and kiss me.”
 
“For the next two months, I would like you to reduce your hours at the office so that you don’t have to work on Saturdays and Sundays.”
 
“For the next four weeks, I would like you to call me if you’re going to be more than fifteen minutes late coming home for dinner.”
 
“For the next three months, I would like you to give up your separate bedroom so that we can sleep together every night.”
According to my instructions, Stewart had reviewed Melanie’s requests, ranked them according to difficulty, and chosen a request that he could honor with relative ease. In fact, he announced to the group that he would begin the exercise that very evening by remembering to pull Melanie’s chair out at dinner. There was a marked contrast between his earlier, antagonistic response to Melanie’s complaint about his poor memory and his cheerful response to these specific requests. Because he understood that these behaviors addressed one of Melanie’s unmet childhood needs, because he was allowed to rank them according to difficulty, and because he was free to choose whether to do any of them or not, he found it relatively easy to comply.
A sign that Melanie’s list contained some growth potential for Stewart, however, was the fact that there were some requests that he found very difficult to do. For example, he thought it would be very hard for him to give up his own bedroom.
“I really cherish my time alone,” he said. “It would be difficult for me to give that up. I’m not willing to do that now.” It came as no surprise to me that that was the thing Melanie wanted most:
one partner’s greatest desire is often matched by the other partner’s greatest resistance.
“I don’t feel like we’re really married unless we sleep in the same bed,” she said. “I cried myself to sleep for a week after you moved into your own room. I really hate it!” I reminded Melanie that letting her husband know how much she wanted him to share a bedroom with her was an important piece of information for him, but he was not obligated to cooperate. The only legitimate power she had in the relationship was to inform Stewart of her needs and to change her own behavior to meet Stewart’s needs.
WHEN WE WERE through working with Melanie’s list, Stewart volunteered to share his list. He, too, had identified a chronic complaint, isolated his desire, connected it with a childhood need, and composed a list of target activities. His main criticism of Melanie was that she was too judgmental. It seemed to him that she was always criticizing him. This was painful to him, he acknowledged, because he had judgmental parents. “Which,” he added with a smile and a sideways glance at me, “given all the information I’ve gotten at this workshop, is probably one of the reasons I was attracted to her.”
One of Stewart’s specific requests was that Melanie praise him once a day for the next two months. Melanie acknowledged that some days it would be hard for her to do that. “I don’t think I’m being hypercritical,” she said with sincerity, “I think the problem is that Stewart does a lot of irresponsible things. The basic problem is not my attitude—it’s his behavior!” The main reason it was going to be difficult for her to praise Stewart, I realized, was that she was denying the
validity of her husband’s complaint. She saw herself as a realistic judge of his character, not as a perpetual critic. Stewart had homed in on a disowned negative trait.
One of the benefits of the Behavior Change Request Dialogue however, is that Melanie didn’t have to agree with Stewart’s assessment of her in order for the healing process to work. All she had to do was comply with his simple request for one compliment a day. When she did this, she would become more aware of her husband’s positive qualities, and eventually she would learn how immersed she had been in the role of judge and critic. Ultimately, both Stewart and Melanie would gain from the exercise. Stewart would be able to bask in some of the approval that he deserved, and Melanie would be able to accept and transform a denied negative trait. In the process of healing her husband, she would be becoming a more whole and loving person herself.
When couples faithfully perform this exercise for several months, they discover another hidden benefit of the exercise:
the love that they are sending out to each other is touching and healing their own wounds
—wounds they didn’t even know they had. Stewart and Melanie continued to work with me in private therapy sessions for over a year. About six months after the workshop, Stewart was finally able to overcome his resistance to sharing a bedroom with Melanie. He didn’t like the idea, but he saw how important it was to her and decided to give it a one-month trial.
The first week, he had trouble sleeping and resented that he had agreed to the change. In his own bedroom he had been free to open the window and get more fresh air whenever he wanted to, and turn on the light and read when he couldn’t sleep. Now he felt trapped.
By the second week, he was able to sleep, but he still felt as though he were compromising himself. By the third week, he found that there was some compensation to sharing a bed. First of all, Melanie was a lot happier. And, second, they were having
sex more often: it was much easier to make love when they didn’t have to make appointments. By the last week of the experiment, he decided that he could live with the new arrangement. “I’ve gotten used to having her sleep beside me now,” he admitted. “I guess I’m not the hermit I thought I was.”
Melanie and Stewart’s relationship continued to improve, and during a session several months later, Melanie said that things had gotten so good between them that she no longer needed the reassurance of having Stewart sleep with her. “I know you love your own room,” she said. “I’d rather have you stay with me, but I don’t think I need it any more.” Through the Behavior Change Request Dialogue, he had been able to give her enough reassurance that he cared about her and valued her so that she was able to let go of that particular request. But, to her surprise, Stewart would have no part of it. “I’d be lonely in my own room,” he said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”
What was going on here? Somehow, in the act of responding to Melanie’s need for more intimacy, Stewart was discovering a hidden need of his own. In the conversations I had with Stewart, I learned that his mother and father had not been comfortable with physical or verbal expressions of love. Stewart maintained that this didn’t bother him. “I knew that they loved me,” he said. “They just showed it in other ways.” In other words, his way of adapting to their lack of affection was to decide that he didn’t need any. “I remember visiting other kids’ homes,” he told me, “and their parents were more affectionate to me than my own. One woman would even hug and kiss me. I was really uncomfortable around her. I was much more used to my parents’ style of parenting.”
When he and Melanie were first married, he was drawn to her because of her affectionate nature, but eventually her need for intimacy seemed excessive to him, and he began to withdraw, just as he had pulled away from the adults who had been physically demonstrative to him when he was a child. But now,
with more insight into the nature of his problems and with a desire to be more intentional in his relationship, he had been able to overcome his resistance and respond to Melanie’s needs. In the process he had discovered his own repressed need for affection and was able to satisfy a hidden need of his own.
I have witnessed this phenomenon of two-way healing so many times in my work with couples that I can now say with confidence that most husbands and wives have identical needs, but what is openly acknowledged in one is denied in the other. When the partners with the denied need are able to overcome their resistance and satisfy the other partners’ overt need, a part of the unconscious mind interprets the caring behavior as self-directed. Love of the self is achieved through the love of the other.
To understand why the psyche works in this peculiar way, we need to recall our earlier discussion about the brain. The old brain doesn’t know that the outside world exists. Instead, it responds to the symbols generated by the cerebral cortex. Lacking a direct connection to the external world, the old brain assumes that all behavior is inner-directed. When you are able to become more generous and loving to your spouse, therefore, your old brain assumes that this activity is intended for you.

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