Harville Hendrix - Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

There are periods in the life of a marriage when things are fragile. You scrutinize every little gesture and action to see whether the signs point toward your staying together or splitting up. For us that time came right after we decided to give our marriage one more year before we either renewed our vows or divorced.

During those early weeks we felt we had entered a world of signs and portents. In addition to using our rational skills to improve our relationship, we found ourselves searching for personal meaning among the detritus of everyday life. Everything said either stay or leave.

One evening we found ourselves in a bookstore picking up a large book on relationships and astrology. We looked up the horoscope for our marriage. Given our birth signs, it cautioned us to achieve freedom from negativity, and stop the unrelenting scrutiny of each other. We were shocked. It was as if the authors had followed us around taking notes. The simple and direct advice was helpful, and we followed it. We decided to establish the ritual of flooding each other with positive words daily. We became super-aware of keeping our Between safe. Both of these resolutions meant getting the negativity out of our relationship. This leap into the positive turned out to be transforming.

We arent saying you should put this book down and take up astrology. The point is that it can be life-changing to read a book so on the mark that it seems written just for you. We hope you have found something in this book that strikes you that way. We want you to know that relationships follow certain courses that can be known and understood. Once you identify where you are in the pattern, you can follow the reliable path toward healing.

Our message, too, is simple and direct: Learn to receive the gifts that are everywhere around you. Life itself is a gift! We have learned this on a deep, personal, connected-knowing level. Every breath we take, every color we see, every sound we hear, every taste we experience comes to us without our asking. Learn to accept praise and appreciation from others, see the serendipities of life as moments of grace, and love all aspects of yourself as wonderful. When you can do that, emptiness will disappear, longing will be assuaged, and you will become a true giver. This is the best way to heal your deepest wounds and your intimate relationships.

On a professional level, the concept of receiving love has been a linchpin in our understanding of many things outside the complexities of partnership. What weve learned about intimate relationships can be applied to the hurting society in which we live. We see applications of the personal to the public everywhere. We cant read a newspaper, attend a meeting, or discuss world events without wanting to use Imago Relationship Therapy tools and concepts to clarify the underlying dynamic or improve communication.

We admit to a certain amount of bias. There is no doubt that our work has shaped the way we see things. When youre a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when youre involved in Imago Relationship Therapy, everything looks as though it can be understood in terms of relationship. Here are some of the conclusions weve reached that we would like to continue to explore:

Every couple who creates a conscious marriage is making a significant contribution toward the common social good. For a long time, weve observed that couples who complete the Imago Relationship Therapy process tend to become social activists. They dont necessarily march in parades or join social organizations (although some do!), but they become involved in improving the world in lots of simple ways. They coach Little League, recycle their trash, become better parents, and take better care of their neighborhoods. One couple began to pick up garbage along their various local highways. Another planted trees in an empty lot. Still another couple began to care for abandoned cats and dogs.

They knew what it was like to feel connected to each other, to experience empathy, and as a consequence, they felt more connected to all of life. When they were no longer split inside, they did not experience cracks and fissures in their relationship to things outside themselves. They felt more at home in the wider world. Charity really does being at home. Happy couples make better citizens and call for a better world. Conscious marriages turn partners into conscious parents. The brains of new babies and children are shaped by the quality of their parents relationship. Children who are the products of conscious parenting are healthier, more creative, and more productive. They will want to live in a better world and will be willing to work to create it.

What would happen if every couple became conscious and replaced negativity with kindness and care? What would happen if they parented their children with attunement, neither invading nor neglecting them?

Here is what would not happen.

• We would not have a 50 percent divorce rate each yearaffecting one million marriages.
• Over one million children each year would not lose their homes and one of their parents.
• 63 percent of youth suicides would not occur.
• 90 percent of children who run away and become homeless would not run away.
• 85 percent of children with behavior problems would not have behavior problems.
• 71 percent of high school students who currently drop out would not drop out.
• 85 percent of youths in prison would not act out their anger in society.
• 50 percent of single, teen motherhood would not occur.
• Nearly $3 billion annually would not need to be spent on alcohol and drug abuse recovery programs.
• Nearly $1.2 billion annually would not need to be spent on obesity.
• 30 million people would not be raised in poverty.
• Over $9 billion would not have to be spent on the foster care of children.
• $25 billion annually would not have to be spent on the criminal justice system.
• $150 billion would not be spent on mental health services.

This does not include the cost to the environment of people living on the earth without empathy for nature in all its forms, nor does it include the savings possible from improved physical health worldwide. Many of our most lethal diseases are related to stress, and happy relationships provide a defense against stress-related illnesses.

Instead of trying to fix the social ills of poverty, violence, addiction, and abuse after theyve occurred, we could focus on improving the relationships that are the most determinative for every individual from the beginning. We could put more emphasis on upriver prevention, so that we dont have to keep losing the battle of downriver cleanup.

We believe the only way to clean up the river of life is to go upriver and transform all intimate partnerships, and then parenting. Heal the splits in the individual, the couple, and the family, and then our social fabric will not be so split and torn. Social programs and government projects will not succeed in creating a just and peaceful society when all they can do is try to react to the ruptured connections of family life. This is why our mission and the mission of the Imago Relationship Therapy community is to transform the world, one couple at a time.