Hellobee

For the last few years I’ve been working hard to improve my marriage and mental health. Along with a lot of self-care and work in therapy, I’ve also been doing a ton of bibliotherapy. One of my most treasured reads is Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt’s Getting the Love You Want. Although the book was first published in 1988, it was still very relevant, fresh, and illuminating to me.

The premise of Getting the Love You Want is that we choose our partner in order to heal old wounds from our childhood. Our attachment style is formed by our experiences with our parents as a young child. As children we create an idea of “mother,” “father,” “husband,” “wife,” “partner” or “spouse” from the relationships we see around us (in the book, this mental image of this parent/spouse figure is called an “imago”). We choose partners who mirror the personality of our parents, as well as the attachment style that we have with our parents. This means that our partners are likely to disappoint us in the same way that our parents do.

No parent is perfect; although they love us, they also shape our perception of relationships in ways that are both valuable and damaging. For example, a woman who had an emotionally distant father might create an imago of “husband” and “father” that is emotionally unavailable. Later in life, this woman will select a partner who conforms to this image. She may find her partner’s reserved nature to be attractive at first, but as the newness wears off she will find him aloof and unresponsive. As a result she may resort to the same tactics to get attention from her husband that she used as a child: acting out, clinginess, guilt trips, and aggression. Similarly, her husband will have selected his wife because he was attracted to her emotional expressiveness. Later he will come to find her emotional nature intrusive and needy, as if she were his third parent. The more she pursues, the more he moves away.

Hendrix and Hunt believe that in order to be an emotionally whole adult, we must heal the wounds inflicted by parents in childhood. This healing process will naturally widen our self-concept, as well as the concept we have of our partner. They write:

We cover our wounds with healing ointment and gauze in an attempt to heal ourselves, but despite our efforts an emptiness wells up inside us. We try to fill this emptiness with food and drugs and activities, but what we yearn for is our original wholeness, our full range of emotions, the inquisitive mind that was our birthright, and the Buddha-like joy that we experienced as very young children.

This quote resonated with me because my son is 3 and at the moment seemingly has access to his full range of emotions. He vacillates from joyful to heartbroken, and is wonderfully expressive. He is verbally and physically affectionate, and extremely silly and playful. As I read this book I could not help but mourn my own progression from curious and emotionally open child, to closed-off and defensive adult.
Critically, Hendrix and Hunt believe that it is through relationship– not outside of it– that we have the opportunity to practice self-work and healing. If we are able to work through our struggles in key relationships, we can experience a richer interior life.

Hendrix and Hunt outline ten characteristics of what they call “Conscious Marriage.” Most important is to realize that your partner is, like yourself, a wounded individual who is acting out of self-preservation. Recognizing that your partner is wounded helps you to feel more empathy for him or her, and motivates you to make new inroads toward connection. Once you recognize that you are also wounded, you can work to minimize the negative parts of your personality that you developed as a defense against pain and shame.

It is important to note that this book is not religious in any specific sense, but that the writers do briefly allude to general humanistic spirituality, including both eastern and western spirituality. However, the psychology behind the text is fairly basic and fundamentally secular. As an agnostic I was not concerned with the amount of spiritual language in the book.

My only word of caution with the book is that it is directed toward the couple and not the individual. However, in talking with friends, it has been my experience that usually one partner is interested in repairing the relationship. Meanwhile the other partner is in denial, or is already on their way out of the relationship. Relationships are a dance, and each member of the relationship reinforces the other. It isn’t possible to change another person, but it is inevitable that one will change a relationship by changing oneself. Although the book is written for couples, an individual who wants to improve their relationship will do an enormous amount of good by reading the book and going through the exercises solo.

This book helped me to feel more empathy for my partner. In terms of communication, my husband distances and I pursue. For a long time I thought this was a deficiency in his personality, or was even something he did on purpose in order to shame me in heated moments. Now I understand that his distancing is a natural way of avoiding tension, and is a result of his childhood, just as my emotionally neediness is my way of managing tension, and is an outgrowth of my own upbringing. The shame and upset that I heaped upon this cycle is tension that has its roots in childhood, and the shame I felt when I was punished for emoting.

Finally, this book has helped shape my parenting perspective. Studies show that Hendrix and Hunt are correct that people pick partners who mirror their parents. This really motivates me to do the self-work necessary to model healthy self-concept and healthy marriage to my sons.