Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved (A Guide to Love and Relationships) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., a clinical pastoral counselor and co-creator of Imago Relationship Therapy, has more than thirty-five years' experience as an educator, public lecturer, and couples' therapist.

Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D. used her education in psychology to help develop the Imago process, as well as to support gender equity, for which she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Nothing's Ever Good Enough

You're never happy with anything I do. I feel like giving up.

When it comes to love relationships, things are often not what they seem. The common wisdom is that romantic relationships would stay happy if people did a better job ofgiving to each other. But that's not what we've discovered. We've found that many people need to do a better job ofreceiving the gifts their partners are already offering. It's surprising how often the compliments, appreciations, and encouragements of a well-intentioned partner make no dent in the armor of an unhappy partner. The compliments are brushed off, the votes of confidence are discounted, and the words of encouragement fall on deaf ears. Why does this happen? And why does this universal but unexplored quirk of human nature carry with it implications for the health of marriage as an institution and the quality of our lives in community with others?

Let's begin with the couple who first inspired our odyssey into the hidden complications of receiving love. After we had been working with George and Mary for several months, George finally understood that Mary wanted more affection. He learned to listen to how she wanted it expressed: gentle tone of voice, looking into her eyes, light kisses on the lips, and a hug twice a day. He worked on it until he got it just right, and then he started giving her these expressions of affection every day as a gift.

What was Mary's reaction? She rejected him. As a separate knower, she had taken in the information that George loved her, but she didn't feel it.

"It's perfect, but you're only doing it because Harville is guiding you." Or, "You never did it before, so I don't believe that you mean it when you do it now." To some degree these objections make sense. Yes, the therapistdid help, so maybe it doesn't feel completely genuine. The behavior is new so there may be some distrust.

But after weeks of this we confessed that her continuing resistance puzzled us. Wasn't George doing exactly what Mary said she wanted? She answered, "Yes, but it doesn't feel right."

We asked Mary to pause and go inside her body for a moment and pay attention to her sensations and feelings: "Take your time and re-create what happens when George shows you affection just the way you want it."

She closed her eyes and waited. Then she said, "I get anxious."

Although there's nothing very startling about this scenario, it was our entrée into a whole new way of understanding why some relationships are stubbornly resistant to healing. At first we didn't realize we were seeing the tip of a problem that had deep roots in the ground of personal identity and relationships. After working with several more couples in crisis, however, we began to wonder whether praise-resistant behaviors in partnerships might be both more common and more significant than we thought.

A Broken "Receiver"

Inside very different relationships we began to notice that the same puzzling barrier to receiving love was leading to frustration and in some cases toward divorce. What is happening when a willing partner is able (sometimes after much coaching) to express caring and admiration, and it isn't received? When one partner is finally able to say and do the right things, why doesn't the relationshipalways get better and the other partner always get stronger? Answering these questions will take us deep into the heart of the power that close relationships have to shape and reshape those traits and characteristics that make us distinctly who we are.

In each of the three marriages discussed below, one partner learned how to give appreciation and encouragement to the other, but still ran into resistance. Apparently there was some sort of invisible wall surrounding the intended recipient that made it difficult for gestures of love to penetrate.

Stan and Suzanne

Stan and Suzanne live in the same neighborhood they both grew up in, surrounded by old houses that are occupied by friends, in-laws, and cousins. Stan's quietness and his wiry physique give him an air of competence. It's easy to imagine him managing details and solving problems in his job as a building and grounds supervisor. His capacity to hold facts and figures in his head and coolly analyze problems is matched by Suzanne's capacity to feel the emotions of every single person involved with the problem. When they work together on an issue, they balance each other out. But when they're at odds, Stan's need to stay with the facts and Suzanne's need to stay with the emotions add up to a lot of miscommunication.

Suzanne is short and slight, but her personality is outgoing. She was a stay-at-home mom until their twin sons entered first grade, and then she became an insurance clerk. With all the creative housekeeping she put into it, Suzanne loved staying home. Cooking from scratch, sewing curtains, canning her own vegetables -- even though these tasks didn't reallyneed to be done the way she did them, she felt good maintaining the domestic standards she'd been raised with.

After twelve years of marriage, Stan and Suzanne entered therapy because she was sure that he was having an affair. Infidelity was the only way she could explain her husband's gradual but steady retreat from their marriage. Despite Stan's heartfelt denials that he was not involved with anyone else, Suzanne could not be convinced. After a difficult year and what Suzanne described as "a mini-breakdown in the supermarket," they decided to get some help.

Suzanne told the therapist: "When we were first dating, Stan followed me around like a puppy....But the truth is that we've had problems ever since we married. We're so different. And we don't know how to talk about what's bothering us. Now, we either fight or avoid each other as much as possible. Stan comes home late during the week, and on the weekend he goes fishing with his brother and his buddies whenever he can. Recently, one of our sons asked me if I was a single mother."

Stan winced when he heard Suzanne say this. It was painful for him to hear how absent he was from his sons' lives. He loved his family. He said he was willing to put in the effort to make things better, but surprisingly, he also said he wasn't sure anything would help. His wife was hard to please. In fact, he confessed that he secretly thought of her as "not good enough" Suzanne. He didn't like...