The Marriage Whisperer

The same techniques that keep marriages strong, says therapist Harville Hendrix, can end conflict between nations. It starts with trying on someone else's reality.

Falling in love is like a temporary inoculation against reality. It's about the idealized feelings between two people in which they see connections ("You like the color blue, too!") rather than distinctions. But there comes a time in most marriages when the oneness shatters. "That phenomenon is what I've been addressing for many years," says Harville Hendrix, PhD, a marital and relationship expert and the author of Getting the Love You Want. For the most couples, the romantic interlude of a new relationship leads to an inevitable truth, says Hendrix - "a slow discovery of the other as 'not the person I thought he was.' The breaking of that illusion is one of the most shocking and terrifying experiences of married life. There's an actual change in brain chemistry - levels of dopamine fall while levels of adrenaline and cortisol rise - as people go from excitement to frustration, fear, conflict, and opposition." In the power struggle, partners move from courtship into coercion, trying to get each other to surrender their "otherness." "This is the second stage of all relationships," Hendrix says. "It's not a pathology." But it's when damage can occur to a couple's children and when the couple often splits up.

Hendrix, along with his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, developed Imago Relationship Therapy to help couples push past this impasse with workshops and programs. "We take you through a structured process designed to let you feel the distinction - 'I am not you and you are not me - but we are connected through the depth of our communication and commitment to each other.' We ask you not only to listen but to mirror in a paraphrase what you're hearing, and then take it deeper - validate the other's point of view, stretch into their world to the point where you can see how much of what they're saying makes sense to them. What's true for them, given their life experience, does not have to be true for you - but you realize that your reality is as much a problem for them as theirs is for you. Then you can move on to the empathetic response: 'Not only do I see the logic of what you're saying but also what you're feeling - excited or sad or angry or scared.' You move from 'other' to connection to communion."

In his effort to help resolve conflict in the world, Hendrix supports a grassroots movement for a federal Department of Peace, first proposed to Congress in 2001 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), among others. The new department would be headed by a cabinet-level secretary who advises the president on no-combat options and would establish a U.S. Peace Academy to study cutting-edge ways to wage non-violence. The new department would also address issues such as domestic violence, child abuse, gangs, and prison rehabilitation. In September, the bill was reintroduced to Congress. (See thepeacealliance.org.) In the meantime, Hendrix suggests focusing on your own relationship. "If people resolve the personal," he says, "they will change the social."

The "And" Stance If someone is setting up a choice between what you believe and what she believes, you can reject that model and embrace both ideas, even if they oppose each other. Such a switch from "either/or" thanking to the "and" stance is the idea of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group of scholars working to improve conflict resolution (from having difficult conversations with a spouse to resolving armed border conflicts in South America). The mere act of understanding what someone ways doesn't require you to give up your own belief. Regardless of whether your opinion influences hers or vice versa, both matter.