Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed. (16 page)

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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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ONCE COUPLES HAVE become adept at mirroring each other, I encourage them to go on to the next step of the Imago Dialogue: validation. In this part of the exercise, they learn how to affirm the internal logic of each other’s remarks. In essence, they are telling each other, “What you’re saying makes sense to me. I can see how you are thinking, and why you would think that way.”
I had my first and most indelible experience with the power of validation when I was a young man. It was 1960, and I had been sent to Louisville, Kentucky, to be a chaplain in a mental hospital where I was assigned to a ward for schizophrenic patients. I was given very little training in the beginning. Basically I was told, “Go in there and relate the best you can.” As time went on, I would be given more supervision, but in the first few weeks it was sink or swim. One of the first patients I tried to get to know was a gaunt man in his fifties whom I will call Leonard. One thing I remember about Leonard is that he was a nonstop smoker. I always saw him through a veil of smoke. But the reason he has stayed in my mind all these years is that he was convinced he was Jesus.
“Hello, Leonard,” I said to him when we were first introduced. “My name is Harville.”
“I’m Jesus,” he replied calmly, drawing on his cigarette, “not Leonard.”
I was taken aback, but I covered up my reaction. “Oh,” I said, “I’m a theological student, so I have a different concept of Jesus. But I’m pleased to meet you.”
As the days went on, I found myself drawn to Leonard, primarily because I was so fascinated by his unshakable conviction that he was Jesus. I didn’t try to convince him otherwise because I could see that that would have been pointless. I just studied his internal logic. Eventually, Leonard began to feel
safe enough with me that he started to share some of the voices inside his head. When I found out exactly what the voices were saying to him and that those voices were as real to him as the words coming out of my mouth, Leonard’s view of himself as Jesus began to make complete sense to me. I hasten to add that
I
didn’t think he was Jesus, but I could see why
he
thought that he was. It made all the sense in his world.
The day came when I decided to address Leonard as Jesus. This didn’t seem blasphemous to me. Indeed, it seemed a form of respect. Why add yet more conflict to his life when his head was already a battleground? If
he
thought he was Jesus, I was going to go along with it. I walked up to him that morning and said, “Hello, Jesus.” To my surprise, he said, “I’m not Jesus. I’m Leonard.” I sputtered for a moment and said, “But you’ve been telling me for weeks that you’re Jesus!”
“Yes,” he said, “but my voices are now telling me that I don’t have to be Jesus with you.”
Validation had moved him one step closer to sanity.
WHEN I FIRST worked with couples, the communication exercise stopped with mirroring. I didn’t require them to go on and validate the internal logic of each other’s messages. As I gained more experience, I began to see that validation is a vital step in the process. I remember the first time I asked a couple to add validation to mirroring. The two people, I’ll call them Rita and Doug, were in their forties. Rita was a schoolteacher, and Doug was an insurance salesman. Their central problem was their inability to connect emotionally. When Rita tried to talk with her husband about something important, Doug would answer halfheartedly and then emotionally withdraw. Over time, I learned that one reason he withdrew was that he often
felt critical of her, and he was trying to keep from being her constant critic. In his own way, he was trying to improve the relationship. But, understandably, his unwillingness to respond to Rita infuriated her. To get the sense of connection she was longing for, she would raise her voice and exaggerate her statements until he would finally respond. As I write this, I can almost see Doug react to one of Rita’s outbursts. He would start breathing very shallowly. His face would flush. Then he would cross his arms and lean his body away from her. If Rita persisted long enough, Doug would finally react. Unfortunately, his response, once it came, was cold and accusatory and served only to throw gasoline on her fire.
To help them break out of this destructive pattern, I taught them the mirroring exercise. It helped a great deal because Rita had to slow down her torrent of words, and Doug had to stay in contact. But the exercise did not produce the kind of results I was used to seeing. Their communication improved dramatically, but there was little enhanced sense of connection. At a loss, I remember turning to Rita one day and asking her, “What do you want from Doug that you’re not getting?” Her response was immediate. “I want him to tell me that I make sense. That I’m not crazy!” A light went on in my head. Rita wanted more than to be heard. She wanted her thought processes to be validated. She wanted her husband to tell her that her worldview made sense. I turned to Doug and asked him if he would be willing to add another step to the mirroring exercise. As soon as he had paraphrased Rita correctly, would he tell her that what she was saying made sense to him? Doug thought for a long moment and then said, “But what if she doesn’t make sense to me?” I told him that he didn’t have to agree with Rita or give up his own point of view in order to validate hers, he just needed to suspend his view of the world for a moment and make an honest effort to see hers. Doug thought it over and said he would try.
Rita made a statement—I no longer remember what it was—and Doug paraphrased it back to her. Instead of waiting for me to structure the next part of the exercise, however, Rita blurted out, “Well, do you agree, Doug?”
For once, Doug was equally quick on the draw. “No,” he said belligerently, “I do
not
agree.”
Rita persisted, “But do I make
sense
to you? Does what I say make sense? Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, I don’t think you are crazy,” Doug said, “but I certainly don’t agree with you.”
Rita got out of her chair and grabbed Doug’s forearms. “So, what I say makes
sense
to you?”
“Yes,” Doug acknowledged, “when I see it from your point of view, yes, you do make sense. I just see things differently.”
I’ll never forget how Rita responded. She sunk to her knees in front of Doug and began crying. “That’s all that I wanted to hear!” she said. “I haven’t heard that before, from you or from anybody! I’m not crazy! I make sense!”
Finally, someone was affirming her truth.
Even today, I am impressed by how aggressively each of us defends our separate reality. It must be connected to our fear of the loss of self. If I see it your way, I will have to surrender my way. If I feel your experience, I will have to invalidate mine. If what you say is true, then what I say
must
be false. There can be only one center of the universe and that center is me! But if I muster the courage to suspend my own point of view for a moment and then manage to see a fraction of your reality, something miraculous happens. First of all, you feel safer around me. Because I am no longer challenging your worldview, you can start to lower your defenses. As you do this, you become more willing to acknowledge a portion of my reality. Because I have abandoned my centrist position, you are more willing to let go of yours. To our mutual surprise, a drawbridge begins to descend on its rusty hinges, and you and I connect.
THE THIRD STEP in Imago Dialogue is empathy. It makes sense that empathy would follow on the heels of validation. If you listen carefully to your partner, understand the totality of what he or she is saying, and then affirm the logic behind your partner’s words, you are ready to acknowledge and respond to the feelings behind those thoughts. Your first task is to try to imagine what those feeings might be. If your partner’s feelings are conveyed beyond his or her words, by facial expression or tone of voice, you will have little trouble intuiting them. If your partner’s feelings are not so obvious, you will have to imagine what they might be. In either case, you need to check with your partner to see if you perceived their feelings accurately. “Given the fact that you said I neglected you, I’m wondering if you feel hurt by my neglect. Is that how you feel?” Checking to confirm the accuracy respects your partner’s reality and enhances your emotional “presence,” an essential ingredient of healing. Asking for confirmation also deepens your partner’s experience of empathy; he will think: “My partner is being very respectful of my feelings. She cares how I really feel.”
For some people, validation of their thought processes is more important to them than validation of their feelings. But for others, empathy is the key to their healing. Once someone affirms their raw emotions, they begin to feel loved and whole. I hate to say it because it perpetuates our gender stereotypes, but, in my experience, women tend to value empathy more than men. At least at first. If you stop and think about it, this makes sense. In our culture, indeed in most cultures, women are allowed to express their feelings more freely than men. Although this is beginning to change, many men still believe it is unmanly to disclose their emotions, especially their tender feelings or feelings of fear and weakness. So if we men feel
uncomfortable showing our feelings to others in the first place, you can hardly expect us to want our partners to empathize with us should we happen to let a feeling slip out. We’d just as soon that they overlook the momentary lapse and focus on our steely logic instead.
Many women, on the other hand, have had the opposite experience. The culture has allowed them to keep more of their emotional wholeness, but they’ve had to live with men who are relatively devoid of feeling. Their partners not only fail to empathize with them, they’d just as soon ignore the fact that they have feelings altogether. “Why can’t you be more rational? Why can’t you be more like me?”
When couples master the three-step process of mirroring, validation, and empathy, these gender differences begin to diminish. A man who is emotionally repressed starts to value empathy as much as his female partner. The reason this occurs is that seeing and acknowledging his partner’s feelings makes him more comfortable with his own. Meanwhile, a woman who is emotionally volatile can become less so. Because she no longer needs to amplify her feelings in order to have her stoic partner acknowledge them, she can express them with less force. This is especially true for anger. It is always surprising to me to see how quickly anger will dissipate once it’s been received and fully acknowledged.
As you might imagine, the ease with which you can empathize with your partner depends a great deal on the situation. It’s very easy to be sympathetic when the two of you share the same experience and react similarly to that event. Let’s suppose you and I have just been through a major earthquake. We survived the quake without any injuries, and we are relieved to see that the house still stands on its foundation. But there were several frightening minutes when we both thought we were going to die. “I was so terrified!” your partner exclaims. You respond immediately, “I can see that you were! I
was, too!” Because you’ve had the same response to the same situation, there is no stretching involved. What you feel, I feel. We had the same reaction.
Empathy is a more challenging response. It is the ability to understand what another person is experiencing even though you have not had that identical experience. Let’s assume that your partner was in the earthquake but you were gone on business 500 miles away. Your partner reaches you on the phone, describes the horrific event, and then cries out to you, “I was so terrified!” Although you didn’t experience the earthquake yourself, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that you might have been terrified as well. “I can imagine you were,” you reply with only a moment’s hesitation.
Problems tend to arise when two people react quite differently to similar events. For example, your partner might be terrified of flying but you can fall asleep during takeoff or landing. You’re going to have a harder time empathizing with your partner’s fear because you’ve never experienced it in this situation. “Just breathe deeply,” you tell your partner. “Think about something else, and the feelings will go away.” And, quite frankly, you wish that they
would
disappear. They seem so irrational. You want to
deflect
your partner’s feelings, not empathize with them.
The most difficult situation of all, however, may be those times when your partner has strong, negative emotions, and you, poor soul, seem to have triggered them: “I am so angry at you that you told Janice she could go to the movies when you know I already told her she has to stay home and clean her room! You always do this!” Or “I felt so humiliated when I saw you flirting with Paul in front of all of our friends. You know how jealous that makes me!” Your instinctual response is to defend yourself and then counterattack. Being empathetic is the farthest thing from your mind. To do so requires tremendous discipline, practice, and emotional maturity.
WHEN I FIRST developed the Imago Dialogue and began to teach it to couples, I did not focus much on the responsibilities of the person sending the message. I thought that the sender should have full license to express their thoughts and feelings without inhibition, and I encouraged the receiver to mirror back whatever they heard, without reacting. Over time, as I trained more Imago therapists and workshop presenters, I learned that most of their couples found it difficult not to overreact.
My colleagues began experimenting with coaching the sender as well as the receiver. They developed a concept called “sender responsibility.” This meant that the person sending the message had to follow certain rules that were designed to make the message easier for the receiver to “hear.” The first rule was to use “I” language when expressing a frustration. Instead of blurting out, “You made me feel so ashamed when you treated our neighbor that way,” you say, “I felt ashamed when you treated our neighbor that way.” The second rule is that you should avoid making critical remarks about your partner’s character and focus instead on your partner’s behavior. Instead of saying, “You are always late. You have no sense of responsibility,” you say, “When you are late, I feel frustrated and scared.” In addition, you moderate the intensity of your emotions so that your partner feels safe enough to relax and listen. After all, your goal is not to wound your partner but to deepen the connection between you.
We learned that being a responsible sender is just as important as being a good listener. When you manage both ends of the transaction so that you can talk to each other without rupturing your sense of connection, you will have mastered one of the most effective tools for creating a safe and lasting union.

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