Imago Relationship Therapy was co-created by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D. Their books on Imago Relationship Therapy, Getting The Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, Keeping The Love You Find: A Personal Guide, Giving The Love That Heals: A Guide for Parents, and three companion books on meditation and exercises, have sold more that two million copies and have been translated into more than fifty languages.

Guy Spiro: Harville, how did all this begin for you? I know this is quite a sweeping question but what was the evolution of your work?

Harville Hendrix: It wasn’t my life plan to wind up where I am. The journey to developing the Imago Relationship Therapy began at the end of my first marriage when I was in Dallas and teaching at Southern Methodist University. I was teaching at the Perkins School of Theology on counseling and marital therapy and got a divorce. It took about a minute and a half for the judge to grant the divorce because it was one of those amicable divorces not contested by either side. But I left court to come to a classroom where I was going to meet with twelve graduate students in a seminar on marital therapy, so you can image the cognitive dissonance of that.

GS: There may have been a bit of irony at play

HH: A little irony, yes. [laughter]

     I was anxious about what was going to happen in the class because my divorce became public knowledge in the school, and these were all clergy. As you may know, clergy persons can have a judgmental side.

GS: I’ve heard that. [laughter]

HH: You are supposed to wait for your professor for ten minutes, and if he is not there in ten minutes, then you can leave the class legitimately without it being missing the class. So I deliberately slowed myself down, hoping they’d all be gone. But they all stayed. I was about twenty minutes late to the class and I said to them, “What are y’all doing here? You’re supposed to be gone.” And they said, “We were waiting for you.” So my anxiety went up because I thought this is going to be horrible (laughing). But they said, “We know where you have come from and we want to express to you our care and appreciation and prayers.”

GS: That was really nice.

HH: It was. They said, “What we want to do instead of having the regular class today is have a discussion on why men and women have such a hard time being together. We want you to talk about that.” And I said, “I don’t have the foggiest idea. If I knew, I wouldn’t have a divorce paper in my hands right now.” And they laughed and said, “We were talking about our relationships while we were waiting.”

GS: These were seminary students?

HH: These were seminary students and there were twelve in the class. “Four of us are divorced and have not been able to sustain a marriage. Four of us are married. Four of us are single, and we all have difficulties in our relationships,” they said. And I had a little epiphany during the class. After I said, “I don’t have the foggiest idea,” I said, “You know, that question is really provocative and I think that I will spend the rest of my life searching for and answering it.”

     I had a small practice on the side. Within a few months, I decided that I would only see couples and I would look at them from the perspective of that question, because the marital therapies that I had been trained to do were basically problem solving—you help people with communication skills, problem solving skills, negotiation skills, compromise skills, conflict resolution skills—and it didn’t work very well.

     Marriage therapy had a success rate of about thirty percent. So I knew that the marital therapy I was doing was not very helpful. I also had a psychoanalytic background and had had a lot of training in Gestalt, a lot of training in Transactional Analysis, and I also had a philosophical education in which I had learned Eugene Gendlin who founded Focusing. I studied with him in Chicago, and one of the ideas that he introduced me to came from Maurice Merleau-Ponte, a French philosopher from whom I learned, for the first time, how to come to a subject without prejudice. Although you can’t really do that, Merleau-Ponte said that you can come knowing you have a prejudice. With that you can, in a sense, set it aside to allow the phenomenon to appear more in its essence, without interpretation.

     So I started listening to couples in a new way. That was the beginning of Imago. I discovered that in listening to them in a new way, and trying to set aside Freud and everybody else, I heard why couples get along badly and why they have such a hard time. I began to hear patterns in the couples that there was some relation between their childhood and their marriage; statements like, “You remind me of my father,” and, “I never felt valued by you, George, nor by my parents.” I also heard a level of complaint which sounded like children complaining about bad parenting, and so I began to probe. I finally came to the conclusion that everybody’s marriage that was in trouble, was in trouble because of the presence in the present of unresolved issues in the past in relation to their caretakers. That began the research that led to Imago Relationship Therapy as a schematic theory and a practice. Today, I think, we have 2000 therapists in Imago Therapy practicing in thirty countries.

GS: Imago is not an acronym.

HH: No, it’s not an acronym. In 1979, I had developed enough of what later became Imago Theory to develop a couples workshop. Therapists began to come to this workshop and a group of them decided that they wanted me to teach them what I was learning. That helped me formulate the system; because they kept asking questions, that put me into the frame of mind and I began to put the pieces together. One day, somebody said, “You know, this is becoming solid enough to be called a theory. You better name it, because people are going to steal these ideas unless you do.

     The basic idea developed that everybody has an image in their mind created by their caretakers and their interactions with their caretakers. That image from all the caretakers is a filter through which people look when they are on their search and find mission for an adult intimate partner. The person who gets through the filter needs to be similar in specific ways to the caretakers. Particularly, they have to have the negative traits of the caretakers that were responsible for them being somehow neglected or wounded in some way.

     So we got the word “image” going and thought, well, we can call it image therapy, but nobody thought that was very sexy. I went to the English dictionary and looked up the word image and it said it was from the Latin word imago. Half the group liked it and half of them didn’t. Some of them said, well gosh, nobody knows what it means. My response has become sort of anecdotal, “Well that means you will be able to tell them what it means.” And then I said facetiously, “Someday it will become a household word and everybody will know.” We all laughed and said, “Yeah, sure.”

     Getting The Love You Want came out, I think, in August of 1988, and Oprah called three weeks later while I was on vacation. I went on the show with a couple of couples who she wanted to be illustrations of the theory in the book. We had a great show and Oprah then said, “Can you come back to the show? But before you come, we want to film one of these couples workshops that you do and we want to show the workshop. We’ll get all the couples and get permission and so forth. You just do the workshop here in our studio and we’ll film it.” They decided that it would take two shows to show it adequately, so it was on two shows on two subsequent weeks. Oprah became enamored with Imago and promoted me and the book in a very direct light. “You have to read this book. Whatever you’re doing, sit down and watch this show or record it and then make sure your partner sees it.” She just gave me a huge endorsement. So the book went on the bestseller book list.

GS: It is well known that Oprah can sell books.

HH: Oprah puts you into the stratosphere and the New York Times bestseller list sort of supports it. So that is how the first visibility came.

     What amazed me was how many therapists watch Oprah. I began to get calls from all across the country and around the world about training programs. I had a little training program going in New York. We had moved to New York from Dallas in 1982, so I had sort of started over and had a little training program of three people one year and seven the next year. I figured that it would be slow, but all of a sudden, I had sixty applicants for training. So I, like a fool (laughing), took them all and then realized, I can’t train sixty people at a time. So I broke the groups down to smaller sizes and finally picked out the really smart clinicians and gave them an extra course which would enable them to be trainers themselves.

     We have twenty faculty people now whom I’ve developed out of the clinicians who now teach Imago. I don’t do any training anymore. They wanted to do the workshops, so I trained them to do the workshops and we now have about 300 centers doing the couples workshops. It just continued to evolve and grow and expand. Some of them had contacts abroad so they did workshops abroad and now we are in thirty countries.

GS: That is a great ride you have been on, and thank you, Oprah.

HH: Yes, thank you, Oprah. I’ve been on her show sixteen times.                          

GS: Talk a little more about what the essence of the process is.

HH: The basic theory is that romantic attraction is based upon similarity between traits in your caretakers that were connected to not having all your childhood needs met: unavailable parents, or anger, or depression, or whatever the parent did that resulted in them not be able to provide a safe emotional environment for you. That has become part of the template that we call Imago. The Imago then, the image in your mind filters out everybody who doesn’t match this template. So whenever somebody mirrors the template in their own traits and behaviors, you are then attracted to that person. At a conscious level, they have certain similarities of tastes and values and so forth. But there is also an unconscious level of attraction in which there is a match between the unconscious images and the traits.

GS: This is how people end up with people that they didn’t think they would normally be attracted to.

HH: With people they would not be attracted to. And if you knew what was going on, you would run like hell. If you had a depressed mother, you don’t want a depressed wife. Or an angry father, you wouldn’t want an angry husband. Somehow the depression and anger is connected to an unmet need, and the need to be attached to the caretakers. So with the people you meet and fall in love with, those needs get transferred to those people, all unconsciously. The most fundamental characteristic of romantic love is expectation, an unconscious expectation, that you are going to get all those needs met through this person. So in a few weeks, or months, or years they become the person of our worst nightmares.

GS: It’s almost like some kind of cruel cosmic joke.

HH: Well, you know, I have this plan. If there is a being called God that you get to talk to after death, I have a question.

GS: I want a word with this guy, too. [laughter]

HH: The question is, “Since you had infinite choice, why couldn’t you create the unconscious to be attracted to the ideal person?”

GS: Why do we seem to have to learn from pain?

HH: That question was really poignant for me for many years, because I knew it was true, but I couldn’t come up with why it would be true. One morning I was taking a shower and I was in a really down mood because I was realizing that marriages can’t really be happy. That it’s just an illusion. Because you only marry people you are attracted to and anybody you are attracted to will have negative traits that reactivate childhood wounds, and since they are like your parents, you are not going to get what you need from them. So it is a cruel cosmic joke. I was standing under the shower and suddenly I realized something: Marriage needs warmth and caring. Mary is married to George who is detached, distant and often cold. That is their fight.

     I’ve learned enough about the Georges to know that George was distant and cold and reserved because he had been wounded in childhood and had not developed. He had put his emotions on the back burner. What Mary wanted was from a part of himself that he hadn’t developed. If George could understand that if he gave Mary warmth, kindness, and availability, he would grow and develop the parts of his self that atrophied in childhood and got put away, and Mary would get what she needed and that would heal her childhood wounds. He would grow and vice versa. Mary has been so demanding and in his face because Mary didn’t get to develop boundaries. What George needs is somebody who boundaries. What if George asked Mary if she could contain her emotions? If she would be more affirming and warm, he would then get what he didn’t get in childhood, which is what made him put his warmth and caring on the ground. I came out of the shower naked and wet and I couldn’t wait. I had figured it out. All we have to do is get couples to grow and develop a part of themselves that was undeveloped and they will become more whole and meet their partner’s needs.

     So I went back to the clinic and began to work with couples. They began to understand that there is a mutual wound and a mutual defense, and that the defense they have injures their partner. The wounding is done by the continual defense. They could then start moving.

     So I got couples to go through a process which is now called the Behavior Change Request Process. Mary, ask for what you want. George, let’s figure out a way for you to give her some of that. We know you can’t give all she wants, but give her some of that. We found that just the movement toward being more kind by George to Mary, and Mary being more affirming, began to transform the relationship. My couples began to move very rapidly and get well fast. I realized then that I not only had a diagnostic theory about why couples fight, but I also had an intervention. So I developed a communication process. At the time, I called it communication, but it has become much more complex and been called dialog. I realized that most people talk to each other in parallel monologue. Most people talk and nobody is listening.

     Another thing that happens that wounds all children is the absence of the presence of the parents, a human need. We need there to be somebody there, listening. I learned that everybody has residual mirror hunger. If, when I am talking to you, you mirror me back, you actually do something for me that my parent should have done, and if they would have done it, I would have developed without getting wounded. The mirror will help me organize myself, because as you mirror me back, you confirm my sense of who I am and I become more integrated and cohesive. So the mirror part of dialog is validating and empathizing. The mirroring part creates a good exchange of information, because if you mirror, you can’t distort, interpret, and so forth. There is a certain universal human need to be mirrored.

     But a few clients taught me that you need a little more than mirroring. I remember one woman saying, “Okay, George, you got it. Now I want to know, do you see what I am saying? Does it make sense?”

     “Well,” he said, “if it makes sense, it’s got to make sense to you.”

     “Well I don’t care if it makes sense to you, do you see that it makes sense to me?”

     So I said, “You want him to see your truth. You don’t care if he buys it as his truth, but just that he sees your truth; he can still keep his. Is that what you are saying Mary?”           And she said, “Absolutely.”

     So out of that, I realized that people need not only to be mirrored but to be validated. They want to know, do they make sense? Most couples actually tell each other on a regular basis that they are crazy. “That doesn’t make sense. I don’t know how you could think that. When and where would you get an idea like that?” which would mean you are crazy. This really means that your world and my world are different, which is not where partners live, and that, since you have a different world, you have the wrong world.

     And then these same couples that I began to work with in a deep way began to say, “Now that you’ve got it, can you imagine how I feel with this experience?” This meant that they wanted an empathic response. So over two or three years, I put together an approach that I call mirroring, validating, and empathizing. That became the primary and only therapeutic intervention. I found that if you get couples into dialog, and hold them in dialog, and in true dialog they listen deeply and they validate each other and they become empathic with each other, they then experience what we call connection.

     That is what was lost in childhood, what was ruptured in childhood by the unavailable parent, the ruptured connection. When you rupture in a personal connection, you can’t integrate parts of yourself. So you feel separated, isolated and alone. But if you experience connection, which you can do through dialog when your partner mirrors and validates, you begin to feel connected to them. The mirroring helps you, then, to connect to unintegrated parts of yourself. The dialog moves from being a communication process to an integrative or healing process. We finally arrived at a short theory that everybody’s problem is ruptured connection in childhood. Every marriage that comes to our office has repeated that rupture in their marriage. Everybody wants the restoration of connection, and the dialog process is the most effective process we have found so far that enables the connection to occur interpersonally, which then restores connection interpsychically.

     Then we found that once people begin to feel connected to their context, i.e., other people, they begin to talk about being more connected to nature, and then being connected to God, more connected to a divine reality, more connected to the universe. So we said, this is better than therapy. It heals the marriage, people live in the relationship of their dreams, which they thought they were going to have in their relationship of romantic love, and they become reintegrated into the universe itself in whatever language they want to use, spiritual or philosophical. They are connected to a larger whole.

     The other piece that evolved is equally fascinating, that when people experience that level of connection, of course they are not experiencing conflict in their relations. They have created tension, but it is not conflict. You don’t give up difference. Difference simply produced tension, but if you don’t honor difference, then you have conflict. So these people became the Imago couple, and the ones who have gotten to a kind of spiritual consciousness become social activists. They then want a better world and they’ve said, “this has to be out in the community.” And we’ve said, “Take it.” And then they go out and they do things that become a social good.

GS: This process can be used in any sort of relationship, not just a romantic relationship or marriage.

HH: Yes. But I think the most powerful healing occurs in a partnership, because that is the peculiar constellation of the attraction process where you are attracted to the person who is going to reactivate all of your childhood issues.

GS: Does it happen at times that people go through the healing process and really get it, and find they are incompatible anyway?

HH: I don’t find that. What happens is that incompatibility appears to be an unwillingness to recognize difference. There is a desire for sameness. At a certain level of development, you want sameness. You want the person to be like you and to see the world your way. As people move through that into an understanding of what we call the two realities, into difference, they discover that what they saw as incompatibilities were, in fact, factors that facilitate their own evolution and growth, both psychologically and spiritually. We have discovered that if you fall in love, an unconscious dynamic goes on. When you work it all through, you become more bonded and more appreciative of difference. You become more honoring and accepting and even advocate difference. “I want you to be you.” When we are different, we will creatively collaborate and create something new, instead of negotiating and compromising, where we each get half or little. We will creatively collaborate, so that we together form an outcome around that difference that is bigger than or better than any kind of deal we could cut.

GS: Have you worked with people who come out of cultures where marriages are still arranged, or where couples would come together not out of a romantic love, but out of mutual need?

HH: We actually have. I was at a couples workshop one weekend long ago and I noticed that there were two Indian couples at the workshop and they came up to afterwards to talk. They said, “You know, Harville, we did not fall in love.” And I said, “Yes, and so I’m wondering how this workshop is going to help you, because it has the assumption that you have to fall in love in order for all these dynamics to be going on, in order for what I’m saying to be an intervention that enables you to actualize what the universe is trying to do through you.” They said, “But, we experienced the same conflicts as you.” One of them is a psychologist and he said, “Why we are here is because we have heard how transformative this workshop is and we wanted to see if we could get something. We find this is just as useful for us as the other couples because while we weren’t paired with people we were in love with, we found that over time and not very much time, we began to project onto them.” So it seems like if you don’t pick them, that you project onto them.

     “Also,” one guy said, “I’m aware as I’m sitting here that I provoke responses in my partner so that I can get her to act like my parents, which recreates the childhood issue.” Well, I thought, that’s really interesting, you either pick them or you provoke them or you project onto them, but you have to create that dynamic that is created spontaneously by falling in love. So some of these Indian couples said that, “We want you to know, having gotten it clear and having done what you have asked other couples to do, we are now in love.” But, they said, it is not romantic love. It is a love that is beyond romance. And what I said was, “Well, that sounds like what couples who were in love get to when they become loving. What you describe as your relationship is what other couples describe after the power struggle.” These people were very informative and I said, “The unconscious is apparently going to get its work done, one way or the other.” In other words, the needs are going to be there in everybody and the unconscious is going to give you factors that constellate factors that are similar to romantic.

GS: People really do believe the myth of romantic love lasting forever.

HH: People really do believe the myth of romantic love lasting forever. We have discovered that you can return to that state. The return is more delicious than the original itself because it has durability. It lasts if you go through the three stages, romantic love, the power struggle, and the conscious partnership. In the conscious partnership, couples report that it is a different kind of love, even better. I remember one couple saying, “You know, the better we get, the less driven we are to have sex.” Sex is not the only point of exotic or erotic contact. We finally began to put together that the generalization of pleasure decreases the need for localization, so genitalia become simply, on a continuum, maybe a little better than a hug, but not even better, sometimes, than a belly laugh.

GS: This is great work Harville. Congratulations.

HH: Thank you. We have had a ball and this has been quite a ride.

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Harville Hendrix, plus authors Les Brown, Marianne Williamson, Sonia Choquette, Neale Donald Walsch and many others, will be featured at the Celebrate Your Life! Conference in Chicago, June 22-24. See the advertisement in this issue for additional information.

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