The Hidden Reason You Fall for People Who Hurt You | Helen Hunt & Harville Hendrix | EP 76

If you go with your heart, nature is going to pick the one who's going to cause you the most problems. It pairs the people who need to be paired to repair what was wounded and injured in childhood in the relationship with caretakers.
One parent is usually engaged, but in a controlling way, and the other parent is disengaged in a kind of neglectful way. The child has only one need, to be seen and heard and valued.
So when you grow up, you still have that need. When you get to partner selection, you'll pick the person who's similar to the one who was most painful in your childhood.
The brain is still looking for survival. And it says the deepest need not met was with the controlling person.
You need to find somebody to get the need met from a controlling person,

which of course, you marry that person, you fall in love with them, and they don't meet the need.

So now they become a problem. Your partner is not your problem.
You are your problem.

If you take responsibility and you ask the question, this is a fundamental question,

am I safe for my partner? That's very different from, is Helen safe for me?

Fundamentally and simple, marriage is about survival. And if you create predictable safety, you can have a great marriage.
If you have negativity, you're not going to have a great marriage because the brain's going to keep looking for love in all the wrong places and it's not going to find it there. Welcome back to the Healing and Human Potential podcast, where today we're going to be talking about why do we attract partners who mirror the childhood wounds that we had? The creators of this theory that has revolutionized the relationships since the 80s are here on the podcast today.
They're also going to be sharing about how to turn conflict into connection and what some of the biggest destroyers are that silently ruin relationships and what you can do differently because of it. So I first discovered Harville Hendricks and Helen Hunt on Oprah.
They are the founders of Imago psychotherapy. I got trained in it.
I love this body of work and it shares practical ways that you can use the Imago dialogue to rebuild trust, to create connection, to move through any difficult relational conversations, whether it be with your kids, whether it be with your partner, your coworkers. It's a really beautiful framework that we're going to dive in today.
It is a good one. Enjoy.
Well, first off, I'm just so grateful to have you two. And I want to share some of my story about how I discovered the power of your work.
And so I became a licensed psychotherapist and I first discovered your work. I had actually found somebody that was an Amongo therapist, your approach, because it was so important to me and it was so transformative.
I first found your work when you were on Oprah. I think you guys were on Oprah for a few times.
And I was like, this is going to change the game for people relationally. I didn't have any good models.
I really wanted to learn how to do relationships in a new way. And so I could feel the power of the work that you did when I first learned about it.
And I want to recognize you guys because you have made something so common now mainstream because of your work. So this idea that we attract somebody who's going to near the childhood wounds and all of the things that we have with our partner relate back to the parent that we had harder times with growing up, not getting our needs met, that came from you guys.
And that has changed thousands of people's lives. I want to make sure you guys get credit for that because even just that concept is remarkable.
So it's not like I'm with the wrong person or this is bad. It's like, oh no, these are things that are looking to be healed inside of me.
And so I want to just acknowledge you guys for your body of work, that being one of the things that is now mainstream and has changed the game for so many people internationally. But I would just love to hear from you guys just what, like, so that I can hear from you, why do we unconsciously attract a partner that will mirror the parent or caregiver that we had our unmet needs from most? Okay, so let me start with that.
Yes. I know the answer, but I love the answer.
The first thing I want to share a thought that went through my mind while you were setting us up, which was about that connection between the caregiver and your partner. And the thought that went through my mind was kind of humorous.
Nature doesn't make any mistakes. So it pairs the people who need to be paired in order for nature to repair what was wounded and injured in childhood in the relationship with the caretakers.
It's unconscious. You don't realize you're doing it.
Oh, yeah. The second thing that comes up is that it's all about survival, that to get down to the bottom tier, the brain has only one agenda, and that's to keep us alive.
And if it can secure safety, that is that we stay alive, then the brain says, okay, now we can look around and play and enjoy the trip. But if we are not safe, then you can't enjoy the trip because the brain feels a threat.
And it really is. I've not believed this.
I've done a lot of research on the brain researcher's view of what the brain is doing. And I'm now pretty convinced that the feel probably would say that that's the fundamental agenda of the brain.
And then it will play after that. But surviving is first.
Thriving then is second, which is one of the reasons why with that being so clearly a part of nature, it's not like that's a, that's not a psychological state. That's a natural state.
That's the state of nature, which is one of the reasons why our work using the dialogue process, which we kind of began to create in the 1980s, early 1980s, the goal of that is to create safety. so that the first thing you have to do is figure out how to help couples experience safety.

And fundamentally, this is almost a full version of the whole system. Fundamentally, you have to get rid of negativity because all negative statements trigger the brain survival directive.
If a person is negative, they could be dangerous. And if they're dangerous, they could kill you.
And the brain doesn't sit around waiting, it's going to go into a defense immediately. I want to pause because that is so important, what you just shared.
So it's like the negativity triggers the brain's survival. It doesn't feel safe in that environment.
And so negativity can be the first killer of real connection and intimacy and safety is what I'm hearing. Now, you don't deny or pretend like you don't feel negative.
What we teach people to do is make an appointment with your partner about something you felt very, very negative about. I'd like to talk with you about something that happened, and I'd like to request that you do it another way.
And you want me to do something different from what I did. Yes, and could we have a dialogue? If not exactly what I'm asking for, could you, let's compromise so we're both happy? Because I want you to be happy.
We want to compromise so we'll both be happy. So convert the frustration into a convert the frustration and the request is a behavior not something abstract like be nice the brain is not interested in being nice it wants to see you how your eyes look how your face looks what your energy is and so you can't fool the brain.
It knows when you're faking. It wants only

authenticity and meaning. So now let me back up and say, why is this so connected to childhood?

That's the piece that it took years to tease that out of listening to couples, because you can't

find it in the research literature, because it's hard's hard to research this so i teased it out over the years and and listening ellen and i listening to couples and talking about our own relationship i want to say our relationship has been a laboratory so um let's let's let's talk about what that is and then, that makes sense now for Mary and George and the therapy.

Then go and check out with them and say, oh, what I'm learning here makes sense for Helen and me.

When we were dating, we felt like we were the perfect ones.

I was attracted to him because he was teaching people stage one, stage two, stage three.

And so we started dating. I said, I'm getting funding from a family-owned business.
I'd like to fund your work. And so we had our first two dates.
We had a big bite on them. We're going to that later.
Let me just get this foundation because you ask a foundational question that I haven't gotten to yet. So here most kids have two parents.
But even if you have only one parent, you still get the same thing. And the two parents, you get one parent is usually engaged but in a controlling way.
And the other parent is disengaged in a kind of neglectful way. And so if you grow up with a single parent, they will be controlling on the one hand, and then they'll switch and be neglectful on the other.
By controlling, they go, listen, you should be doing this. You need to wash your dishes.
You need to do this. They don't control your time.
You don't have any time to do what you want to do.

Like Harville wants to read.

And he grew up with parents or siblings that were always overmanaging him.

Yeah.

You've got this caretaker.

Now, so there's the controller and the neglectful one, either in two people or in one, because there's so many single parents nowadays because of so many divorces, that one wonders what happens to the other polarity. Well, the partner with the kid adopts it.
So the question then is, which one of those behaviors, neglectful or controlling, is most painful? And the one that's the most painful is the one that triggers the brain's survival directive. Because the most painful one means they're not meeting the need.
The child has only one need, to be seen and heard and valued.

And if you're engaged with controlling, you're not seeing or hearing or valuing. You're telling them what to do.
And if you're neglectful, you're not seeing, hearing, and valuing. You're ignoring them.
So is it more painful to be controlled or painful to be neglected? and I think that what I don't know and I haven't seen

in any literature to help me this, which one is most painful? So I just say that's a subjective experience. I know I grew up because of my parents dying both before I was five.
I grew up with three sisters at different times. And the sister that was most painful for me was the one who was most controlling.
The ones who were neglectful, that wasn't very painful because I had a lot of private time. And so I developed that private side of myself because nobody was controlling me or telling me what to do.
I could go hide somewhere and read. And so it was less painful for me to be ignored or neglected or just left alone than this other thing, which was, did you do your chores? When are you going to get them done? You got to go milk a cow and all that sort of stuff.
So in any case, your psyche picks one of those as the most dangerous. And then that means the need was not met to be seen, heard, and valued.
So when you grow up, you still have that need. And if that doesn't change, then when you get to adult partner selection, you'll pick the person who's similar to the one who was most painful in your childhood because that's where the most of the need wasn't met.
So, for instance, in Helen's case, Helen's caretakers were pretty neglectful as she grew up. Because he was a businessman and his and his wife h.l hunt and then his wife was doing volunteer work all over dallas and neither of them ever had time and i came home from school to go helen welcome back home how was your day at school any are you reading into any interesting books? Do you have any friends? In my whole junior high and high school years, nothing.
And I wanted someone to see me, make me feel seen. So Harvard gives me three appreciations every day.
Well, that's now. But when we got together, I was the neglectful one because I'm the isolator.
I don't initiate. I respond.
And so if Helen doesn't ask for something, I don't think of anything. So it took years for us to work out that dynamic is that I have to come out of my privacy and my shell, and Helen has to sort of back off from going after me because I'll go back in my shell.
Then she gets more of what she doesn't want, which is me being gone and so forth. So anyway, so that's the dynamic.
You grow up, the brain is still looking for survival. And it says the deepest need not met was with the controlling person.
You need to find somebody to get the need met from a controlling person, which of course, you marry that person, you fall in love with them, and they don't meet the need. So now they become a problem.
But you didn't have this conversation, you know, while you were dating or on the way to the wedding. Your unconscious is having the problem, having the conversation.
So then that need will show up in the relationship with, you know, we didn't talk about this, but where are you or why are you so interactive? Helen is what we call a maximizer. I'm a minimizer.
So I put out very little energy. She puts out a whole lot of energy.
And it's like, you know, back off. And she says, where are you? And so that was fun.
And it's that fundamental. Where are you? And how come you're in my face, you know, controlling me? Why don't you show up so that I know I'm living with somebody? But it's all, this is the thing that was so almost sad to figure this out.
It's that simple. It's about survival.
So all these behaviors make sense when you're trying to get a need met so that you won't die. And so since the need is connected to early childhood memories,

when. when you're trying to get a need met so that you won't die.
And so since the need is connected to early childhood memories, when it was the fact the baby had no options, except if I don't find that parent, I'm not going to make it. But the baby doesn't have that conversation.
It just goes, ah, where are you? Or if you cry and nobody comes, then you stop crying and then somebody will come because the baby who's crying and stops crying, the parents ignore their crying. It's that amazing.
The baby stops crying. What's wrong with the baby? Now the baby's got parents' attention.
So the baby now knows it has to make noise to get needs. And all that is marriage is about survival.

And if you create predictable safety, you can have a great marriage.

If you have negativity, you're not going to have a great marriage.

Because the brain is going to keep looking for love in all the wrong places.

And it's not going to find it there.

I think a message is for two people who have married. Take time to get to know what it was like for your partner to grow up and take time.
And I remember the big, the one that was just horrifying for me about how Harville wanted to read books and his older sister, you know, because his mother died when he was about five. And when she died, his father had already died.
So he never met his father. And so then the older sisters had him.
And what Rosalie would say, who was the hardest sister to live with, if it weren't for me, you would be in an orphanage. You have to work.
You have to work. And they would not let Harville read books.
He's an academic. I had to go hide in the barn and read.
But, you know, she helped me become an academic because I ran from her a lot and read to take my time. And finally, I became an intellectual.
So at any rate, we're talking too much. You have a question.
No, no, it's beautiful. And I really hear it comes back to safety and survival.
And the unconscious thinks is familiar. It thinks it's safe, even if it's not.
And so part of this, I'm hearing you say, get to know yourself and get to know your partner. And I'm just curious about the one that feels controlled and the one that feels neglected.
Do you find that those pairs go together? Like as in partnership, you wouldn't really attract to neglected, right? It would typically, it'll be a partnership of one of the opposite. Cause I'm seeing that with my husband and I.
Right. You attract the polarity to maximizers who are controlling that they kill each other.
And the neglectful ones, I mean, they would never get together. And I think occasionally some people seem to have seen some in my 40 years of practice, I've seen them get together like that.
And it's kind of a little bit off of the theory, but they really are two maximizer. People married are really toxic for each other.
So we have to do a little different kind of twist there that they have to sort of develop that. But I would say 95, 99% of the people married their polarity.
That makes sense. And you guys are opening up so many conversations I want to get into, and this is already so rich and valuable.
And there's a conversation online right now that I'm hearing, which is like, the most important decision you will make is who you marry. And then it stresses people out because they feel worried about choosing the wrong partner or making sure to choose the right partner.
What is your perspective on this? If you go with your heart, i.e. you fall in love, your nature is going to pick the one who's going to cause you the most problems.
And that's the one you should go with. Go with the one because that's where the growth is, growth for you and the growth for that person.
For instance, with Helen and me, my growth edge is to move, is to push myself out of my isolation into connection with Helen. If she weren't asking for that and causing me problems because I kind of avoid her, I wouldn't grow because you've got to have somebody say, where are you in order to do that? So nature will lead you to the person who is just right for you.
Don't worry about that. The selection process, that's already set up.
Just don't try to manage it and don't try to make it logical. Like, you know, if I date somebody and it looks like we would be, you know, difficult, I'm not going to do that person.
I'm going to get somebody with whom things always go well. Well, there'll be no growth there, which means there'll be no passion there.
The passion is in the tension of the opposites. And that passion becomes sexual passion, can become creative passion, but you've got to have the tension.
Nature seems to have set it up that way. So often this question comes up that you just said, which is just don't worry about that.
What you need to worry about is what are you going to do once you say, I do?

That's when you have to say, how do I make that work?

And that's where Helen was just talking about dialogue.

You have to learn how to talk so you don't worry.

And let's talk about that.

And I love what you're saying because people get so tripped up about making the wrong decision

picking.

And I think that gets us up into our head. And then we have a fight between our head and our heart versus trust life's intelligence.
Obviously don't be with somebody that's physically abusive. Like there's toxicity in that, but you can be with somebody because your heart, it's almost like nature's way of bait and switch, get you all drunk on cocktails of oxytocin and like getting in love so that then you're committed to do the work to get free, whether you end up staying with them or however that feels true for you, but do the work to grow, to find peace inside of yourself.
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I love the Imago dialogue. So I found an Imago therapist to be my supervisor when I was a marriage and family therapist intern, because I wanted to go deeper into your guys's work.
And I wanted to get feedback and really immerse myself in a new way of relating. And I know the dialogue is powerful.
It's extremely valuable. And so for people that don't know the structure, and obviously the Imago process goes much deeper than just the dialogue, but just for people that want to have a conversation, that structure creates so much safety.
Can you break down what the Amago dialogue is? And then how do you use it to avoid a fight so you can have a difficult conversation, but really still stay connected with each other emotionally? So let's just for the sake of the big, I'd like, as you can tell, like to start with a 90,000 view. The bottom line is how couples talk to each other is way more important than what they talk about.
And I know I spent before we developed dialogue in the early 80s. Prior to that, I had about a 10-year venue as a couples therapist that we worked on helping couples solve their problems.
So what is the problem? Well, they come in, well, we're not having sex. Or we can't decide whether to go on vacations.
Or we don't know who's got to control this money stuff. So I'm a logical and analytical person.
So I would help them create a solution to this problem. And so we decide, well, you can have two bank accounts or, you know, decide how many times you want sex.
If you want it four times a week and you want it one time a week, maybe three or two or something like that, make compromises. None of that ever worked.
But it was the content of the discipline. I was teaching it at the graduate level in a university, and I did not know that it was pointless.
There was like a 35% success rate, and that was with people who didn't have difficult marriages. They did need to kind of, you know, think a little bit better and communicate a little better and they would do better, but they didn't have a big, deep wound.
And they weren't dealing with what, you know, about 95% of couples deal with. So we had to move out of that into, it occurred to me one day while listening to them, couples, is, you know,

the problem here is that whenever George talks to Mary, he's got this authoritarian tone and like he knows everything. And then she kind of, she adapted in childhood to this over-controlling father.
So she kind of

slumbers down

and then becomes fussy

and or quiet. So the way he's talking to her is impacting her at the body level.
So I began to change that as a result of discovering that that was true with Ellen and me. In 1979, Ellen and I had started dating.
No, it was in 77 we started dating and ran into this, that we had fights. I mean, we were really at polarity, that we had fights on the first date.
Yeah, Harville, our first date, he took me to this real expensive restaurant. Well, I left and I said, Harville, I like barbecue chicken, Dickies, and next time you don't have to take me to an expensive restaurant.
I like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dickies barbecue, 7-Eleven hot dogs. And Harville started yelling at me.
How dare you say that? And then took him on a date well come on come on she is a wealthy dallas socialite and and i grew up on a subsistence farm in south georgia and i'm dating this person who is out of my social and economic class am i going to take her to a cafe but i never met anyone that was interested in like no no matter it was me trying to i had heard his lecture three stages in a lecture he gave a lecture in a unitarian church the uh garages filled with cars on Sunday and on Saturday they have speakers come.

And there were 20 of us a friend of mine said hey a guy's going to talk about apparently something about marriage and you want to come with me and i went and there was horrible stage one stage two stage three and so um so we started dating but i was trying to impress you and i didn't think i could impress you by taking you to kentucky fried chicken i know oh that was that would um it just don't work i mean i couldn't even get i couldn't even imagine but you had already impressed me no but for another i was impressed i was not impressed with what you were impressed with. No, that was just my intellectual work.
You're the only person in the world throughout all of history that created a marriage history stages. So I'm the only person in the world who's created these marriages stages.
And no one has talked about dialogues in Socrates. 330 BC in Greece, Socrates wanted to have the young people think for themselves, Socratic dialogue.
The Greek authority said, stop it. He said, I like doing this.
And they said, we're going to arrest you and put you in jail if you don't stop it. They arrested him and put him in jail and said, okay, one more chance, Socrates, say you will not keep teaching our teenagers Socratic dialogue and you'll be released tomorrow.
If you don't say that, we're going to kill you. But that night he drank poison.

Yeah. No one has done dialogue since 330 BC.
Right. And what they have done

Thank you. That night he drank poison.
No one has done dialogue since 330 BC. Right.
And what they have done since 333 and for the 10,000 years of human civilization is talk in monologues. It is, I talk, then you talk, then I talk, then you talk.
And you agree with me I'll, well, I'll try to get you to agree with me. No.
Or I'll talk about what you said. So what got clear in mine and Helen's work together, we had this huge fight early in our relationship in which Helen Helen yelled out in the fight,

well, stop.

One of us talked, and then the other one talked,

because we were talking over each other.

So we stopped and did that.

And I noticed that when we took turns,

this is where the taking turns suddenly started,

that I calmed down and Ellen calmed down.

So we still did monologue, but it was parallel monologue, not combative monologue. I noticed as a clinician that that changed us, just that little shift.
So I took it to the clinic and started and put couples, that turned from talking to me, like they would do psychotherapy to talk to each other, which was, I think the invention of couples therapy. Couples therapy is not when you talk to the therapist, it's when you talk to each other with the therapist's help.
And you let the couple solve the problem or help figure out the problem not not the therapist. So I went to that and I started that with couples and I found that it calmed them down.
So I said, well, I have no more problem solving here. We're going to talk to each other.
And then I asked them and they taught me, couples taught me the dialogue process. What do you want you want next and to a couple i'd like to hear back if if my partner heard what i said oh so listening we've never done that in therapy i would listen to the couple uh but but listening was not a part of the therapeutic process.
So we added listening to that. And listening meant you have to mirror up.
You have to say back, word to word. And what I noticed as I learned each of those steps from asking couples, what do you want next? Well, I'd like to know whether or not I got my mirror, whether it was accurate.
Did I get it? So I said, oh, so you got to do a checkout of accuracy. And then somewhere along the way, somebody came up with this radical idea.
I like the person, I like my partner to ask me, am I done? Do I have anything else to say? Is there more about that? Is there more about that? That became, is there more about that, which is adding curiosity to the process. So instead of just listening and mirroring, you say, let me see if I got it.
Did I get it? Is there more? And what happened with that emergence over, it was probably five to seven years. As I look back, it was a long time.
Because when Getting came out in 1988, and we started playing around with this in 1979, I'd only developed the mirroring process. It was the second edition, 10 years later, that we had finally figured out mirroring, validating, and empathizing the three stages there.
So dialogue means that you move from a vertical talking. I'm talking to you.
And usually means I'm talking down to you because I am the one who knows what the truth is. And you'll talk back and say, well, I'm the one who knows what the truth is.
And that produces the conflict. And then we just raise our voices or come up with better arguments or whatever there is.
But there's no listening. So we added listening to the parallel monologue formula.
So if you're doing this and one person starts mirroring back, then you've changed the dynamic. This person now is not in a defensive mode anymore.
They're saying, oh, well, yeah, you're listening to me. You're getting that.
Thank you very much for, yeah, I'm feeling heard. I'm feeling seen.
And then, of course, if you're in the therapy session, we say, okay, so now would you be willing to do that for your partner? And so they began to do that. So I monitored this in minute detail and wrote about it for about seven years.
Each of those pieces finally came in that couples wanted to be heard. They wanted to know if they were getting it right.
They wanted to be asked, is there more? And most of them would like to have a summary to see if they got it all. And then we finally evolved something that was very complex, which was validation.
They want to know. And I remember the couple.
I'll never forget this couple because of the poignancy of this thing. I want to know, she said to him, do I make sense? And he said, no, you don't make sense.
And she said, well, I think, let me see if I can make that clearer. Do you see how I'm thinking about this? That's what I'd like to know.
And he said, well, yeah, I see how you could arrive at that conclusion given your premise. But I don't agree with you, but I see how you see it.
Yeah. It makes sense.
So that phrase, it makes sense. It makes sense.
It means, oh, well, that makes sense to you. Yeah, that makes sense to you.
You have a logical brain. I have a logical brain.
There are different logics. So I can make sense about something that makes no sense to you, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
It just means you see it differently. You can imagine the tectonic shift that was, is that we don't have to agree to have a happy marriage.
We have to see each other without judgment. And those words were very dynamic.
And then so I can, you make sense? I can see how you would see that. And then they wanted empathy.
And can you imagine how I might feel with that? And so the couple would then move to, well, and I can imagine that really scares you or makes you happy or you feel anxious or whatever. So then move into a feeling.
So that's the how couple. And what I found after that was they had very few problems.

Those problems kind of dissolved because they were now feeling safe enough that they didn't need to protect themselves from each other.

And you probably remember this in your own work, is that things change.

What would take 18 months to help a couple with would take maybe three because they learned this. It's a skill.
It's basically a skill. Nothing profound at all about it.
However, it's new in the history of the world. You know, Martin Buber is a Jewish mystical theologian who wrote the book, The I Vowel, came up with the concept of dialogue in 1925.
Prior to that, except for Socrates, which was not dialectical dialogue, except for Socrates, the word dialogue was something characters did in plays ever since Socrates. So dialogue came into that, and not quite knowing about that.
When we developed in the 80s, we developed what we call sentence stems. It was really clear that you have to learn to say, did I get it? Is there more? You make sense.
And it has to be a short and not full of a bunch of words. Like if I'm listening to you accurately, I think I'm getting, that doesn't work.
If I got it and so forth, that we had to do that. Once we got that down, the whole, to me, that became the engine then of therapy.
It's interesting to explore your childhood,

interesting to look at your patterns.

But then I began to learn something fascinating.

Every time we went back and looked at your past conflicts,

those conflicts materialized again in the relationship.

So it's like you can't bring something from the past into the present without it affecting the present. So it became less and less interesting and helpful for couples to have thriving relationships to explore in depth their unresolved childhood issues.
What really became important was they, in the the present would relate to each other in such a way that those childhood needs were met in the relationship. Then those memories lost their activation power.
And just so we don't run out of time. You want to talk about the race.
This is not in the book, Getting the Love You Want. but once we were using our dialogue skills,

a lot of different places, and I decided someone suggested that I take the dialogue skills to Mayo Clinic and let them look at how they feel. I mean, how does the Mayo Clinic believe our dialogue skills can be helpful? Well, we got a medical, I got a medical report about the brain.
So basically, now I've studied a lot about the brain because of the Mayo Clinic, the 2.4 pound organ in everyone's skull is considered to be the most complicated organ in the universe. But,

neurosciences, four pound organ in everyone's skull is considered to be the most complicated organ in the universe. But neuroscientists have simplified it so the average person can read about the brain and learn to create a healthier brain.
And then the Mayo Clinic said, now let me tell you about your dialogue skills. First, the lower brain controls vital functions.
Its job is to keep you alive. When you're hungry, you eat.
Then you do different things and throughout the day, eating whenever you're hungry. And then soon it's time to go to sleep, and you're tired.
Your body tells you, get in bed and close your eyes. So you get in bed and close your eyes, and eight hours later, you get up automatically.
And this keeps the body healthy, but it reacts real automatically. Like if you wake up and you go into the stove, into the kitchen, and you think someone has turned off the stove last night, and another family member walks in and you put your hands on the stove, but they left it on, it's hot.
Well, you don't do a strategic plan before you

lift the hand. And so monologue keeps you alive.
So that's a very valuable thing to keep your body alive. Now, if you want healthy relationships, the sentence steps of dialogue, you have to go to the neocortex.
There's a left brain center, which is logical, accurate, and a right brain center, which is more musicians or right brain. If you're an innovator, you know, left brain hemisphere, right brain hemisphere.
And when you mirror someone, the mirroring is a left brain process. So the sentence stems of dialogue, you use the left brain, the right brain, and then when you say, is there more about that? Or you ask questions.
But one of the sentence stems of mirroring is when you've mirrored someone, left brain, and then the other person says, yes, you've got that right. When you say, is there more about that? Dan Siegel, the best, the most famous brain scientist in the world, said, this is between left brain, right brain hemisphere, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, where you wonder, you move beyond predication.
And then the lower brain releases cortisol, adrenaline, and toxic neurochemicals. You don't sleep well at night, and you sick more but if you are in use the upper brain a lot um like going to bed um well i actually throughout the whole day a dopamine acetylcholine norepinephrine serotonin flows through your out of out of the brain throughout the body.
That's what happens with the brain. It affects how the blood functions.
So it's very important to know that in using dialogue, he's a happier person, the relationship is a better person, and you are a healthier person. And you have a better brain if you don't know the space between becomes the content that goes inside here's where we focus our attention then it's beautiful because like you were speaking of just now helen it's like we go in if we're in a fight usually we're going into our reptilian brain we're not functioning from our higher cortex and frontal prefrontal cortex we're're not rationally thinking clearly.
And so having the dialogue creates that safety. So we feel seen and heard and we calm down.
We both feel we've got this template. So we don't have to think about it.
What do I say? It's literally plug and play with any conflict or any misunderstanding to really regulate your nervous system. And one of the things I remembered is that my kid's school took your guys' Imago dialogue and they called it the peace path.
And so you have, and most of us didn't learn this in childhood, but my kid's school have where you take one step up the ladder and you say, the thing I did to contribute problems in this dynamic was, and you take personal responsibility and you keep taking one step up. So you learn conflict resolution and personal responsibility.
And you really join making that ladder, that physicalizing it, which is so helpful and beautiful. Yeah, exactly.
And I know that nowadays, you know, you guys have worked with hundreds of couples, a lot on the brink of separation. And in 2024, just last year, the divorce rate for first time marriages is 40 to 50%.
And so I'm just wondering if there's something that couples, either a myth you want to debunk that's in the mainstream now, or if there's a misunderstanding or something that they're doing that's quietly killing the relationship, what would you say that is? Well, I think that the only thing that kills a relationship is negativity. Well, and monologue.
And well, and negativity is monologue is the way you deliver negativity. Yeah, often.
And the reason negativity means is negation. So when I said that didn't make any sense, where did you get that? I am negating Helen and her brain is going to go into a defense.
She may not say anything, but her brain has now said danger, dangerous person. So if people don't have a structured way to talk so that they can deal with their differences, you got differences.
They're not going to go away. You deal with them.
They enrich the relationship because every difference is a resource for the relationship. And by couples see differences as a problem, that misses it.
So see your differences as a resource to enrich your relationship. And just a brief comment to make sense out of that, Ellen and I had for years the problem of vacations.
I'm a wanderer, so I like to go places. Ellen is a nester.
She likes to stay home. And watch TV or YouTube videos about other places in the world.
Yeah, she's fine with documentary on Italy or on the Alps. Or Alaska.
I want to rent a motorhome and go to Alaska or go to Italy. So I'm a wanderer.
So we talked about this for a long time, in fact, and finally came up with, well, why don't we, we started off with rent a motorhome. Then I'll be be a wanderer i'll drive and you can sit in the back of the motorhome and watch uh documentaries once we're on the highway and then once we get to the campground we'll cook dinner together and i'll share my day and you share your day you went to italy and i went up the road so but but we had a relationship like So that's just a sort of superficial way that if you bring difference together, you create something new that neither one would ever come up with by yourself.
And usually, so it's kind of a collaborative process in which you collaborate on your differences. And then you begin to co-create something that would satisfy those differences for both of you, but it would be different from what you started with.
Oh, and we also, we were told by our staff today to say to you that we have now made a documentary of our life, and at the end of it is an avatar, so that on our website, now harvillandhelen.com, if you go there, the documentary will be put up in March, I think, and they'll have an avatar so that you can go there for the rest of whatever and talk to us, and we will talk back to you. And this company is called Eternus.
They're creating, making people eternal. So this avatar will answer questions about Imago and about marriage and about relationships after we're long gone.
We study in DE, so that's where we plan to be one day. Well, I love it.
I love that you guys have used your relationship as a laboratory, that you have really listened to your clients to hear what is the framework that's going to create that safety so people can find and use conflict to grow closer together, that it's not bad, but it really can be a way to understand ourselves and help each other heal at the root. Whatever the missed childhood experience that we didn't get, of course, we're going to be attracted to the very person that doesn't give it so that we can stretch ourselves to develop more of our full spectrum and offer ourselves and our partners healing, which is so beautiful.
And just in closing, for those that may have lost faith in love, maybe they're single and they don't know if they're going to find the right person or they're in relationship, but they're feeling disconnected. What would you guys want to say to them? Well, I think I love your model about the kids climbing the stairs and taking responsibility for what they brought to the relationship.

So this is the major step that we help couples understand,

is your partner is not your problem.

You are your problem.

So if you take responsibility and you ask the question,

this is a fundamental question,

am I safe for Helen? Am I safe for my partner?

And I ask that sincerely, then that's very different from is Helen safe for me?

Because if I ask that question, I've already answered it. She's not.
But so the question I

have to ask is, am I safe for her? And I have to check it out. How am I doing with your safety? And I can do some things on a regular basis.
One is when she talks, I need to say, hey, Helen, let me see if I got that. And also during the day, I need to walk in, and especially at night when we're together, but also during the day and say,

hey, beautiful, I can't believe I'm married to you. And you do that and walk out of the room.
Her brain is going to have a memory of me coming in and doing that. So this is the other thing that's sort of obvious, but nobody says it.
I didn't say it. We didn't say it for decades.
You created all the memories your partner has in their brain about you. So some of the memories that your partner has about you, your partner doesn't feel comfortable with.
So you created all they have. If you want your partner to see you differently, create new memories.
Well, and I was just going to say, anybody can go to our website and get trained in dialogue. Yeah.
And so they know how to use dialogue. And when they're dating someone, you go, you know, I love using dialogue.
Would you be willing to be trained in dialogue?

And it's a different way to talk.

Yeah, and probably that's the real answer is if you want a great relationship,

become dialogical.

Learn the process.

Do it all the time, not just when you have troubles.

Yeah.

Do it all the time.

Yeah, it really is a way of life. It really is.
I mean, you're a healthier person. Yeah.
Thank you guys for your body of work. Thank you for helping more couples become conscious and have peace and connection by understanding themselves and normalizing some of these things, growing closer together, more intimate and connected.
I am deeply grateful for your work and we will make sure to add the links below. Thank you for your love and thank you for being so authentic in your willingness to find true love in the misunderstandings and the fear-based states that we all go through.
And what a gift you two are yeah Yeah. Thank you.
You're a wonderful person and I've loved being with you. Thank you.
Same. Thank you.
You make me look good. Thank you so much for doing this work that changes the world, starting with yourself.
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