Getting the Love You Want - Harville Hendrix 
Jackson Snyder, November 30, 1993

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BOOK REVIEW

Hendrix, Harville. Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1988. $12.00 U.S.

Harville Hendrix, who has earned his Ph.D. in psychology and religion from the University of Chicago, is a lecturer on marriage and marital therapy at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He is a diplomate in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, a clinical member of the International Transactional Analysis Association, and a full member of the American Group Therapy Association. He has practiced marital therapy since 1965.

Through personal experience of divorce, and several years of counseling troubled married couples, he developed "Imago Relationship Therapy," a process designed to develop what he has termed a "conscious marriage." From this method of therapy is derived this book, which is a guide for couples to do self-therapy. In addition, Hendrix founded the Institute for Relationship Therapy to help train counseling professionals.

Hendrix, his wife, Helen, and their six children live in New York City.

Getting the Love You Want uses an updated version of Freudian psychology augmented with brain physiological theory and practical exercises.

The basic concept behind "Imago Relationship Therapy" is that one's reptilian brain ("old brain") becomes programmed in infancy to the behavior of one's earliest care-giver(s). That programming will of necessity include any childhood trauma, rejection, hurts and wounds. When the physical relationship between the child and custodian(s) is finally severed, the once child now adult will inherently and automatically seek a mate with the same "style," behavior patterns, and aura as the former care-giver(s).

After subconsciously directing the selection of a mate, the old brain will, being in a state of identity confusion, attempt to resolve and heal childhood traumas with the newly found mate rather than the former caregiver(s). The thesis statement of the book is found on page 14:

The ultimate reason you fell in love with your mate...is not that your mate was young and beautiful, had an impressive job, had a 'point value' equal to yours, or had a kind disposition. You fell in love because your old brain had your partner confused with your parents! Your old brain believed that it had finally found the ideal candidate to make up for the psychological and emotional damage you experienced in childhood.

Hendrix describes in detail the many ways in which one might suffer "psychological and emotional damage" in childhood including negative suggestions, such as "you are not smart enough, pretty enough, etc.," body taboos (publicly touching "private parts"), and repression. Such criticism and perceived lack of care leads to a "loss of self" - those essential parts repressed from socialization's demands.

As a defense mechanism, a child might create a "false self" in order to camouflage his/her repression and protect from further damage. In turn, this "false self" can lead the child's caretaker(s) to further criticize the child for the manifestations of the defense mechanism - "you are fat, distant, inferior." In time, the child must disown these negative attributes of the false self in whatever way he/she can, since they have become "too painful to acknowledge." One's ultimate personality is formed from such conflicts, defense mechanisms, and self-ablutions as these.

Based on such an understanding of the inner workings of the psyche, Hendrix proposes the concept of imago (L. image). One's imago

is a composite picture of the people who influenced you most strongly at an early age. This may have been your mother and father, one or more siblings, or maybe a baby-sitter or close relative. But whoever they were, a part of your brain recorded everything about them - the sound of their voices, the amount of time they took to answer your cries, the color of their skin when they got angry, they way they smiled when they were happy.... Along with these impressions, your brain recorded all your significant interactions with them. Your brain didn't interpret the data; it simply etched it all onto a template.

When one physically matures to the point of searching for a mate, it is unavoidable that one has a belief that somehow, somewhere there is that perfect mate that will make one complete, happy, and totally whole. Involved in this "imago matching process" of mate selection is continual competition between the old brain (the seat of the imago) and the new brain of logic and intellect. Nevertheless (and often, unfortunately), the old brain usually wins out, and a partner is found who has the positive and negative traits of the former caregiver(s). Hendrix posits that the negative traits are the more influential.

For example, one might say to one's self, "Self, I'll never marry a drunk like my father and a tyrant like my mother." Although one might search for a mate radically different from such negative traits, one finds him/herself strongly attracted to the drunken tyrant type. Having finally succumbed to the directives of the old brain, and having married the pseudo-caregiver, the old brain is content with its accomplishment, and now constantly and vigorously engages itself in resolving the unfinished business of childhood.

Double the trouble by considering that the new mate is going through the same struggle for resolution, as well. This relationship is termed "the unconscious marriage."

Hendrix proposes to make the marriage "conscious" by facilitating the process of imago-awareness between partners: this is the mainstay of Imago Awareness Therapy. It consists of personal interview and a number of subtle yet revealing exercises, designed to be executed in ten sessions with or without a therapist (the book is designed to be used in lieu of the therapist). Exercises include sharing a written "relationship vision," discovering each other's childhood wounds, working up each other's imago, mapping childhood frustrations, and making a "no-exit decision."

One interesting concept that Hendrix elucidates is that of "Reromanticizing;" that is, recalling the romantic behaviors of courtship and reintroducing them gradually back into the failing marriage. Another is the exercise entitled "Visualization of Love," in which a habit is made of visualizing one's partner as being made whole through the healing power of love.

Getting the Love You Want is really an entirely self-contained approach to marital counseling. Imago Awareness Therapy is easy enough to understand for even the novice pastoral counselor to be effective, if Hendrix's directions are followed. The book is written in the style of popular psychology books, almost completely eliminating jargon and deep conceptualization. I am looking forward to making use of these concepts and exercises in my own practice of marital counseling.

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