Harville Hendrix - Getting the Love You Want Workbook: The New Couples Study Guide

ALSO BY HARVILLE HENDRIX AND HELEN LAKELLY HUNT:

Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide

Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples

Giving the Love that Heals: A Guide for Parents

The Couples Companion: Meditations and Exercises for Getting the Love You Want

The Parenting Companion: Meditations and Exercises for Giving the Love that Heals

The Personal Companion: Meditations and Exercises for Keeping the Love You Find

Making Marriage Simple: Ten Relationship-Saving Truths

The Space Between: The Point of Connection

Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

DISCLAIMER: This study guide is an educational process. While it is based on the theory and procedures of Imago Relationship Therapy, it is not therapy, and no therapeutic benefits are offered or implied. Therapy is a process that can occur only between a therapist and a couple. In this study guide, Imago Relationship Theory and Therapy procedures are modified to be educational.

If you and your partner experience difficulty with the exercises in this study guide, we encourage you to immediately consult an Imago therapist or attend a Getting the Love You Want Couples Workshop. You will find a list of therapists and workshops on the website imagorelationships.org.

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ISBN 978-0-7434-8367-4

ISBN 978-1-4391-0033-2 (ebook)

We dedicate this study guide to the faculty of the Imago International Training Institute to honor them for their commitment to teaching Imago theory and practice worldwide. We especially thank them for their commitment to the highest teaching standards, their professionalism, and the joy of their colleagueship.

The person who desires to see the living God face-to-face should not seek God in the empty firmament of the mind, but in human love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Getting the Love You Want introduced you to the conscious partnership, a radically new understanding of intimate relationships that fosters maximum psychological and spiritual growth. Such a partnership is created by becoming aware of and cooperating with the fundamental drives of the unconscious mind: to be safe, to be healed, to restore the original experience of connecting. Getting the Love You Want also introduced you to Imago Relationship Therapy, the process designed to help you create a conscious partnership.

The New Couples Study Guide is a unique twelve-week course designed to help you and your partner work through the exercises in Part III of Getting the Love You Want. This guide provides you with complete step-by-step instructions for transforming your relationship into a lasting source of love and companionship. It simulates the process you would participate in if you were to come to a Couples Workshop or work with a Certified Imago Therapist. Its purpose is to help you and your partner become aware of your unconscious agendas and show you how to intentionally cooperate with your unconscious to create a relationship that will satisfy your deepest needs.

Before beginning this study guide, please read all of Getting the Love You Want (2019 edition) by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D. The New Couples Study Guide is meant to be used in conjunction with Getting the Love You Want as a companion to the exercises in Part III. It has been designed to build on the insights you gained about relationship and marriage from reading the book and contains only brief reviews of the books content. Your successful participation in the process contained in this study guide will be greatly facilitated by having a complete understanding of Imago Relationship Theory and of the entire Imago Process presented in Getting the Love You Want.

When couples show up in our office for counseling, they are often in a stew of anger, shock, despair, and sadness. Some are relative newlyweds, and they cant understand how they have plummeted from the heights of love and glory into a swamp of hopelessness and conflict. Others have been together for many years, and though they have been slogging alongin calm or in stormand their days of wine and roses are a dim memory, they are no less devastated by the shambles of their relationship and the consequent lack of fulfillment in their lives. Even if life at home is relatively peaceful, couples lament that they have nothing in common. So they coexist in anger and disappointment, each partner with his or her own friends and interests, in a marriage of convenience, or an arrangement they endure for the sake of the children.

They wonder if they will ever again feel love for their mates. Can they ever breach the chasm of silence or anger that has grown between them? Perhaps they should just cut their losses, they muse, and find someone who loves and understands them, someone who offers one more chance at the love and security they long for.

Whatever forms they take, shattered dreams are painful. If you are considering using The New Couples Study Guide, it is likely that you are also struggling to find love and meaning in your committed relationship. We assure you that there is hope. In fact, the pain and conflict arise not out of lack of love for our partners, but from a misunderstanding of what relationship is about. Moreover, your conflict can be the fuel for the fulfillment you seek.

Before you begin Session 1 of this study guide, we want to talk a little about what happens when we fall inand out oflove. To make sense of whats really going on when you and your partner fight, to gain insight into the hidden agenda of your relationship, we need to look at the complex process of human growth and development, and at how we human beings fit into the larger scheme of things.

We are creatures of nature, with the evolutionary program of our species encoded in our genes. We all begin life in a state of relaxed and joyful bliss, with the sensation of connecting to everything and everyone. Our overwhelming impulse at birth is to sustain this sensation of connecting,