ABOUT HARVILLE & HELEN
Harville Hendrix Ph.D. and Helen LaKelly Hunt Ph.D. are co-creators of Imago Relationship Therapy and a social movement called Safe Conversations. Internationally-respected as couple's therapists, educators, speakers, activists, and New York Times bestselling authors, their 10 books, including the timeless classic, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, have sold more than 4 million copies. Harville appeared on the Oprah Winfrey television program 17 times! Helen was installed in the Women’s Hall of Fame and the Smithsonian Institute.
LISTEN
WATCH
READ
What flipped Helen’s lid?
1- Helen was watching Harville explain the stages of a relationship: romance, power struggle, and real love and it flipped her lid! And she wondered if he could be a good mate— and he is!
2- Later on, her blended family with Harville wasn’t doing well and counseling wasn’t helping. They had announced their planned divorce when a few new details were added to their relationship theory and she became determined to never give up hope.
What flipped Harville’s lid?
1- Discovering that Helen wanted to divorce and later celebrating their re-commitment. Owning their destiny together meant learning to suffer well together.
2- As a six-year-old, Harville came out of his room and saw that his mother was being dragged down a hallway and into her room, being told she had had a stroke. This memory wiped out all other memories of her apart from her death. He had to go and view her and touch her before she was taken from the family. This was a primal lid flip that made him vulnerable to any other threat of someone going away.
Harville now knows that his response to Helen wanting a divorce was connected to his mother’s death.
3- A positive flip was being invited to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He was asked to return after his first interview to conduct a couples’ workshop that became a two-episode series and resulted in being invited back a total of 17 times!
Harville and Helen have what they call partner minds. Harville comes up with good ideas and creates systems. Helen knows what to do with a good idea when she sees one-- like Harville! To Helen, Harville was a good idea she married him. And when Harville began finding success and increased visibility, she found an agent and helped him reach even greater heights in his career.
Relationships are not just two people who have known each other a while.
They define relationships as two people and the space between them. There is energy in that space and when there is safety, the two people connect. If there is anxiety, connection is ruptured.
“THE SEXIEST THING IN THE WORLD IS SAFETY.”
When you can count on safety as predictable, you can relax into your true nature, which is joyful aliveness. Nothing can be done in therapy until safety is established.
Safety is fostered in four ways:
1. Dialogue- A structured conversion with predictable phrasing and regulated tone will calm the amygdala and activate the prefrontal cortex where there are no feelings. This builds the expectation of safety for the next conversation.
Kim shared a concept from Deb Dana, an expert in polyvagal theory:
INTONATION PRIOR TO INFORMATION
Putting the emphasis on tone helps someone actually hear when they are in trauma. Helen added how important it is to shift from a glare to a gaze as well. Listen without judgment and speak without criticism.
2. Identifying childhood wounds- The prologue to all of this is partner selection. There is a type of person you are drawn to and they will often resemble your caretakers and their limits. They will be like the caretakers who did not meet your needs. We might wonder why we don’t look for partners who meet the needs your caretakers failed to meet. That is where memory comes in and doesn’t allow you to choose a partner who actually meets your needs. Our subconscious choice resembles the person or a prototype of the person who should have met our needs. And that is who we fall in love with.
This will require that we reframe certain behaviors from our spouses to remove the reactivity from our psycho-neural system. We can’t recreate the unfinished trauma from our childhood in marriage and try to make it come out okay. We are partners in the project of co-creating the marriage of our dreams in which the trauma of our childhood won’t be repeated. We have to start behaving in ways that don’t trigger those memories.
3. Zero negativity- Behavior or comments that cause a fracture or disconnection. What you say is not as important as how you say it. You can say what you think without making it their problem. Convert frustration into a wish and a request.
4. Affirmation- Giving mutual emotional support or encouragement.
CONNECT WITH DR. HENDRIX & DR. HUNT
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/harvilleandhelen
INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/harvilleandhelen
While you’re here, why not check out Kim’s book?
But Your Mother Loves You is the witty and candid tale of how a renowned psychotherapist moved from “not good enough” to “the right person” despite childhood neglect and a toxic relationship with her mother.
Everyone knows at least one person who demonstrates toxic love, someone who consistently jabs a straw in others and sucks the life right out of them. Without an in-depth understanding of how to navigate these relationships, most people continue to emotionally regress and remain paralyzed in familiar, pain-soaked patterns. But Your Mother Loves You helps readers overcome this cycle of toxicity.
Kim Honeycutt shares the real-life experience of how a shame-based, self-destructive little girl grew up to be a recovered alcoholic, entered the world of psychology as a professional, and created her own strategies to address and conquer toxicity.
This story, both witty and practical, is told through the lens of personal life experience and expert psychological strategies combined with Godly intervention. Readers learn how to either walk away from or walk with a toxic loved one without losing themselves. Covered in both vulnerability and clinical information, But Your Mother Loves You provides a step-by-step approach on how to stop toxic love and the subsequent self-abuse.