Gay Hendricks - Learning to Love Yourself

LEARNING
TO LOVE YOURSELF

The Steps To Self-Acceptance, The Path To Creative Fulfillment

Gay Hendricks, Ph.D.

2011 The Hendricks Institute, Inc.

Copyright 2010 Gay Hendricks Ph.D.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1439274290

ISBN-13: 9781439274293

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introducing The New Edition

I am thrilled and delighted to offer to you the new edition of Learning To Love Yourself. Revisiting and rewriting the book has been a pleasure from beginning to end. With its new elements, the book comes alive in a whole new way.

Looking back over more than three decades to the moment of its conception, I can now see how writing this book changed my life in every way. I first wrote it as an act of love, to share an experience that still even now feels as if its still transforming me in my very cells. It was my hope that telling about the experience could inspire the same profound life-changes in others. The many thousands of letters, emails and spoken appreciations Ive received since then let me know that my hope came true.

The experience described in the book revealed the living mystery of love to me, allowing me to feel its sweet power for the first time. Because I suddenly knew what real love felt like, I was able to break free of my pattern of painful relationships with women. Ultimately it helped me find my way to Kathlyn, the love of my life and my wife for the past quarter-century.

Of all my books, this is the one people ask the most detailed technical questions about. Did I write it on a typewriter? How long did the writing take? To answer these sorts of questions once and for all, I recall that the book was written on an improvised desk made from a wooden door supported by a stack of concrete blocks at either end. I was staying in David Josephsons house in Palo Alto that summer, so I could be close to Kathlyn, who had her movement studio in the living room of the house. Davids spare bedroom had nothing in it but a bed and a chair, so I had to improvise. I found a wooden door in the garage, borrowed a few concrete blocks from a neighbor, and poof: instant desk!

It was the first summer of my relationship with Kathlyn. I worked on the book every morning, then spent as much time as possible with her in the afternoons and evenings. Those were the pre-computer days, of course, and I never liked writing my books on a typewriter. Every word of Learning To Love Yourself was written on yellow legal pads with my beloved 19-cent Bic pens, the clear plastic kind they dont make anymore.

Although I had published several books before Learning To Love Yourself, this was the first one I felt passionate about writing. I poured my heart and soul into every sentence of the book. Instead of writing with thoughtful distance and careful analysis, the style so revered in my Stanford Ph.D. training, I hurled myself into the maelstrom of my own confusion, anxieties and joys. I described as intimately as I could the ecstasies and agonies that gripped me. My only criterion was truth. At the end of a sentence I would pause and ask myself, Is that absolutely, unarguably true? If I got a clear yes, I went on to write the next sentence. When I finished the book I felt for the first time in my career that I had fulfilled my creative potential.

The book changed my life in many other ways, some of which took me by surprise and turned my life in unfamiliar directions. When first published in 1982, it was subjected to a scathing review in a then-popular magazine, Psychology Today. Through the sweetest of ironies, this awful review produced an unimaginably wonderful outcome for me. To understand what happened, I should tell you that self-help books were rare in those early days, and to my knowledge there had never been one in which the author revealed his or her own feelings to the extent that I did in this book. It was this deeply personal aspect that so outraged the reviewer in Psychology Today, one R. D. Rosen.

I remember it was a Sunday afternoon when a friend, Ed Graham, called me to ask if I had seen the latest Psychology Today. I told him I hadnt. Do yourself a favor, Ed said. Dont read it. He went on to tell me that the review of my new book wasnt exactly flattering and that I was probably better off not burdening myself with the details. Psychology Today wasnt a magazine I read regularly, but based on my friends tantalizing warning I rushed down to the nearest newsstand to get it. I didnt even wait to purchase the magazine, so eager was I to devour the forbidden fruit. Standing by the magazine rack, I flipped through the pages until I came to the review, which I read at first eagerly, then with morbid fascination. It was then that I first learned of the pain and suffering I had inflicted upon R. D. Rosen.

Rosen not only hated the book (and the emerging self-help genre in general), he intimated that I had lost my mind and sacrificed my academic reputation by sharing my own feelings of anger, anxiety and longing. In one particularly vivid passage, he even shared some feelings of his own, saying that parts of my book were so personal that they made him sick to his stomach! (I heard later that he was a part-time restaurant critic. For him to say it made him sick to his stomach was harsh criticism indeed.)

By the time I finished reading the review I wasnt feeling in the best of moods, either. I slunk back to my house feeling that a hit-and-run driver had run over my career. I was a tenured professor at a major university. I had written a textbook in my field of counseling/clinical psychology, as well as many articles in scientific journals. After the breakthrough experience I described in Learning To Love Yourself, I felt that I had the key to bringing a much-needed wave of authenticity and emotional expression to the academic world. I loved the university world. My role in it, teaching graduate students in a counseling psychology program, was something I loved to do. The harsh reality, however, was that the Psychology Today review would likely be read by more people than had read all my scientific articles and textbook combined. Was I going to become a laughing-stock?

Now for the sweet irony: After the Psychology Today review came out, the book took off like a rocket in the marketplace. Sales doubled the next month, then tripled. I discovered the truth of the Bob Dylan quote, Theres no such thing as bad publicity. Apparently the reading public liked the very things that had turned the reviewers stomach. I began to get tear-drenched letters of appreciation from people who thanked me for baring my soul, saying that the book had healed them by giving them permission to bare theirs. I received letters from other professors saying that Id restored their faith in the academic world and given them a reason to go on teaching. The book became a steady bestseller, going through more than twenty printings over the next two decades.

R.D. Rosen, if you are still out there somewhere, I owe you a deep bow of gratitude and a long-overdue gift bottle of Pepto-Bismol. I also have a heartfelt request: Please review more of my books!

The best was yet to come: After the book became a bestseller I was inundated with requests to do talks and seminars. I fell into a pattern of teaching all week at the university, then flying off somewhere to do a talk or seminar on the weekend. One winter a few years after the book came out, I went to Hawaii to teach a seminar. I got off the plane and stood on the tarmac luxuriating in the 80-degree warmth of Kauai. Moments later my hosts handed me a message from my secretary back in Colorado. Someone named Oprah Winfrey had called. I should mention that there was a long stretch of my life when I didnt own a TV set, so I was far out of touch with goings-on in the popular media. According to my secretary, who devoured