Harville: …a very loud shirt today. I’m sorry.

JJ: Don’t be sorry. I love it. It’s very Hawaiian.

Harville: It is. That’s true. I wear Hawaiian shirts all summer in lieu of going to Hawaii, so that I have the… They say if your mind creates it, then you’re in it. I actually learned this many years ago. I went to Hawaii and I bought some shirts, and I came back, and I was in therapy at the time, many years ago, because it was therapy in Dallas. And so, I left Dallas in 1982. So, you can imagine how long that is. And so, I was talking to my therapist about my trip to Hawaii, and I got into “I’m so unhappy about being back. It was so beautiful there.” I had lived in Dallas at the time before I moved to New York, but actually before Helen and I married. And I said, “I’m kind of depressed about this, and my life here is just so hard. In Hawaii, it was so beautiful, even though it was hot.” And I just went on and on and on about how bad it was, and he interrupted me, and he said, “Look, Harville, you can live in Hawaii every minute of your life. Just go put on your Hawaiian shirt. And why don’t you put a palm tree up in your backyard? And I understand you have a pool, so you’ve got the ocean right there. And just complaining about not living in Hawaii has just got to stop. You’re wasting your time, messing with your heart, doing bad things to your immune system.” And so, I looked at him and said, “My god, so you’re telling me I’m a pathological victim.” He says, “Yes.” So, I took him seriously and realized I don’t have to be in Hawaii to have good thoughts.

JJ: Exactly. Yeah.

Harville: Yep. That was a change in my life, one of my big therapy breakthroughs.

JJ: It’s great. I love it.

Harville: Thank you.

JJ: So, thank you again for being here. I’m a huge fan of your work. And the oldest book I have, “Keeping the Love,” okay? Right? And then that original version of “Getting the Love You Want.” And of course, I’ve got here the workbook.

Harville: Oh, my goodness.

JJ: Which you could see I use. And also…

Harville: I’m impressed.

JJ: Well, I did a whole show on imago therapy with a local therapist who also uses your workbook within her therapy with couples. And it’s really the only therapy that I tell people I think they should be doing when it comes to relationship work.

Harville: Oh, thank you.

JJ: You’re welcome. I’m an avid learner and explorer, and I test things out all the time, and so I’m very particular about what I believe in terms of, like you were talking about, your Hawaiian shirt, using law of attraction, using your mind, using visualization, using what we’re given to create what we want. At the same time, different kinds of therapies like EMDR, things like hypnosis, and definitely imago therapy is my number one recommendation for anyone in relationship, even if they’re not in relationship. Because I’ll tell you, I haven’t finished the workbook, we didn’t get through the whole thing, but when I did the “Creating Your Imago,” I’m a very interested, passionate learner, and when I can be blown away and you’ve taught me something about myself that I didn’t know before, that exercise, I thought, “Oh my god. Why isn’t everyone doing this exercise?” Forget couples therapy. Why isn’t every person everywhere doing the “Creating My Imago” exercise? So, when you get to the end and you’re putting the A and the B and the C and the D together to see what it is you’re trying to heal, that’s priceless because that’s why you choose friends, that’s why you get along with certain co-workers. It explains so much in that one exercise that I just thought, “Everyone needs to be doing this.”

Harville: I’m with you. I agree with that. By the way, this is the 30th anniversary of “Getting,” and we have talked to the publisher several months ago, and they are going to reissue it this year, and they said they’d reissue if we would edit it and update it and bring it into our current thoughts. So, it had an update in 2001, because imago evolves all the time. I sometimes think, “I’ve got a period at the end of the sentence, and we’re done now. We just have to figure out how to distribute it.” But the period then turns into another paragraph. So, every 10 or 12 years, when the book comes out again, like the 10th year anniversary, 20th, and now 30th, there’s always something to do. But this one is a rather significant revision because we’ve had some rather, I wouldn’t say, radical insights. Not like radical, but reframing. I mean, the fact that people have an imago is like universal and not much you can do about that, except, as you just did, see how it works with friends and how it works in business. And when we first did that, I didn’t actually think that it would be applicable in business or with friends because I was so myopically focused on trying to figure out this thing called couples and why they’re so intensely attracted to each other, and then it’s so wonderful, and then it goes so bad. So, that was a phenomenon that just got my interest, and I said, “I’ve got to figure this out.” But we now have some larger frames within which to understand that primary psychological and unconscious dynamic. So, anyway, the book will come out, I think, January 22nd. We couldn’t get it out this year because we started the journey too late. Publishers work with a 9-month timeframe, and they can’t change that very much, even with a reissued book. So, it will come out again then. And just to let you know that if you’ve got the old one, the new one is on its way.

JJ: Well, I know there’s another one. I know that there’s a red cover that’s more updated than this one, right? The 25th anniversary or 20th anniversary?

Harville: It’s still behind. It’s 2001, I think.

JJ: I know I’m still behind. But Harville, you just send me the next one and we’ll do another show, and we’ll help promote the next one.

Harville: All right. 2008, I think that’s the one you’ve got there. And then 2018 is the 30th anniversary. That was the 20th.

JJ: Okay. Well, I’ll be more than happy to help spread the word when that comes out. And maybe you can come back on, the both of you, and we can do another little promo for the book.

Harville: Now, do you go by JJ?

JJ: Yes.

Harville: Okay, JJ. We have a daughter who just changed her name from Kimberly to KJ. Her middle name is June, so she wants to be called… I said, “How can I, after 30 years of calling you Kim, start calling you KJ?” And she said, “Just do it.” No empathy whatsoever on the challenge to an old mind that she just put me through.

JJ: Well, I have the list of talking points that you and I can talk about that was sent to me by your team. And I want to go through some of those, but I want to get a little bit deeper with some of the things, because the people that have been following my show and me have heard about imago therapy. Some of them may have done some of the exercises from the workbook. So, I want to be able to skim the surface for the people that are listening right now or watching this right now that are new and have never heard of this before. I’m going to do a little intro before I publish all this, and I’m going to read your bios. It’s on the back of one of these books. So, I’ll do a proper introduction. And yeah, let’s start at the beginning about imago therapy. And you can correct me. This is what I say about imago therapy: that my understanding from years ago, when I first got introduced to your work, was the idea that we choose our partners to heal the wounds of our past. Yes?

Harville: Yes.

JJ: Okay. That alone is all I needed to hear to say, “Okay, there’s an unconscious/subconscious reason why I’m attracted to you, because you represent the combination of things that I want and want to heal, and that will be brought out in my relationship.” Okay. So, now, obviously, everyone in the world is not conscious of that, right? There are people who live either repressed and depressed in relationship or unsatisfied in relationship, and there are people that are conscious about that. I think that majority of people are actually unconscious about that and not conscious about that. So, your first question, your first talking point here says, “Why do we fall in love?” So, why do we fall in love?

Harville: Well, the primary reason we fall in love is very unromantic, although when we fall in love, we call it romantic. And it’s romantic, meaning it has intense emotional feelings to it, like you feel more alive than you’ve ever felt before, and you can’t stop dancing or thinking or ruminating and dreaming. And all of that is very romantic, but what is actually going on underneath that is that in your unconscious mind, or at the level out of your awareness, you have met somebody who is a facsimile of… Not identical, but a facsimile, a close enough picture, sort of like an impressionistic painting, of the major traits of your caretakers, whoever they were: mom and dad, so parents. But sometimes we use caretakers because sometimes children were reared by a sibling, or they were foster kids. But whoever was there. So, we call them caretakers, especially in the first three years of life. And also now, as some research has been done on this, they pushed back the primary memories to probably the first year of life. So, it’s really important what happens in the first year of life.

But what actually happens psychologically is the baby is now interacting with caretakers, and the baby’s brain is interested in only one thing, which is to survive. And if it can survive, then it’s interested in playing and in laughing and giggling and running around. But if it’s scared… And so, it goes back and forth between being scared and being fully alive. And those two things depend on how the caretakers interact with the baby. Now, the brain is recording everything. It’s like a movie camera. It records everything. And it records all those behaviors that parents did or did not do that contributed to the baby’s certainty of survival, like picking it up on time, feeding it when it’s hungry, covering it when it’s cold. And we thought for a long time, it was pretty much those physical things. But what we’ve learned in the past, I think it’s probably 15 years, especially by some research done in child psychiatry at Harvard by a man named Dr. Ed Trawning, that the primary thing the baby is interested in (and this is so revealing) is how the face of the caretaker looks: whether the eyes are open and engaged rather than glaring, whether the cheeks are dropped rather than tight, whether the lips are smiling rather than still. And he did research on if the mother doesn’t show any expression, and he calls it a still face, the baby goes into panic. It wants the mother to respond. Even though the mother is looking at the baby, if the mother doesn’t respond to the baby, the face looks like a mass, the baby will go into panic. And as soon as the mother drops that and goes back into resonating, smiling, the baby comes out of panic. So, we’ve learned that it’s the quality of the presence of the caretaker.

So, in the research we’ve done, and this also is amazingly complemented in relationships, when you’re engaged emotionally, everything is great. If you turn away, then that triggers the survival response. If you turn back or if you’re looking without engagement, that triggers the survival response. The baby is filming all of this. So, the primary thing that the baby gives energy to are the things the parent does that injures survival, or doesn’t do, which is needed for survival. And that’s the most emotionally charged memory. So, now you’re grown up and you’ve got these memories from childhood, and you’re in your search and find mission in adult life. That actually starts with adolescence, those first adolescent love affairs, our attempts to find a person with whom what didn’t happen in childhood, that injured survival, can happen. So, you look for that. So, when you, in adulthood, fall in love, decide to engage, and you don’t have to get married, but you could. That’s why I think monogamy arose because monogamy is sort of a promise that “I’m going to be there.” It’s less about sex than it is about reliability and predictability and dependability. The argument is about sex and multiple sexual partners, but it has hardly anything to do with the reasons for monogamy. Monogamy is “Can I count on you?”

So, you find this person and they’re across a crowded room, and you feel them. You go across the crowded room, or you find your way to them, or you send somebody over there. You do something to get this person into your life because your unconscious mind says, “This person is like my caretakers, including what my caretakers did not do for my survival. And they’re most important to me because they’re like a part of them that did not meet my needs. Now that I’m connected to them again, I’m going to get those needs met. Yipee! I got to go over there and get connected to you because now you’re going to give me the hugs you didn’t give me, the presence you didn’t give me, the warmth. You’re going to be responsible and reliable and all the things that I didn’t get, which I complain about all my partners. They don’t do all that stuff. But now you’re going to do all that stuff.” So, you fall in love because you’ve met somebody whom your unconscious says will give you all the needs you didn’t get in childhood, and now you’re going to survive. And the feeling of full aliveness you get is our nature. That’s what we really are: creatures of aliveness. And when that’s dimmed down by anxiety, we want it back, so this person is going to give that back. So, it’s an amazing experience to fall in love because it has to do (a) with survival, primarily, and then (b) with the experience of who we really are, which we feel before the light goes out again and [23:32]. So, that’s sort of a long answer to the question, but…

JJ: Oh, no, I love your long answers. Keep going. Because I’ve talked about this. It’s in your books, but it’s coming from you, and that’s what I want to share with people, because you’ve written the books, you’ve started a movement, you’ve created imago. Now, let’s say people get into these relationships and they get married, or they don’t get married, but somewhere along the line, as you say. So, let’s talk about the next stage. You said it goes bad. So, why does it go bad?

Harville: Well, it goes bad, and this is the almost tragicomedic part of falling in love. It goes bad because the person you fell in love with can, no way in hell, meet those needs, because when they were little, their caretakers trained them in such a way that the parts of themselves you need were sort of not developed in that person because of their relation with their caretakers. So, you fell in love with them because they’re similar to the people who didn’t meet your needs, and therefore, they have the same deficit that the caretakers had. Consciously, you do not know what’s going on in the unconscious. So, “Now I’m in love with you and we’re together, and now what about that thing that I didn’t get in childhood? When are you going to hug me, or when are you going to take initiative, or when are you going to call me back on the phone, or nowadays, answer my texts as soon as I send it?” We have a daughter that’s not married, and she writes me every time her new boyfriend… She says, “I wrote him a text, and he didn’t text back for two hours.” I said, “Maybe he was busy. Because he wrote back in two hours. He was so excited to get your text.” “Yeah, but he waited two hours to respond.” So, apparently, in her childhood, she didn’t get immediate response from… I keep telling her, “Every time you tell me about this, I remember how bad my parenting was.” Anyway, so we got into that.

So, these people, the person you fall in love with, can’t meet your needs as they are. So, here’s where the magic of a committed partnership, usually called marriage, but it can be in a committed partnership in which you’re not married, if certain things like marriage or part of that. Like, “I’m going to hang up and we’re going to work this through.” So, I have a need for, say, physical contact. I didn’t get enough. Or emotional intensity. I didn’t get enough. So, I’m going to say, “When you tell me you love me, would you say it with a warm and kind and energetic voice so I know that you’re feeling the love you’re telling me you feel? Or when you hug me, would you really hug me and don’t just make it mechanical?” Well, I’m probably touch-phobic, and that’s why I don’t hug you tight. Probably my feelings are regulated and suppressed because in childhood, that’s how I had to survive. So, I’m just not a hugger, and I just don’t do strong feelings. I gave you a card, and I took you to dinner, and we went to Paris. But these intense hugs and emotional expressiveness, I just don’t do that. I’m a more logical, contained person. I go into all my rationale with my roots in childhood, which was “Don’t be expressive” and “Don’t touch,” because touching was painful apparently for you as a baby.

So, here’s the magic now. Let’s say my partner wants emotional intensity when I talk to her, especially about her. If I will just practice doing that, and I’ll say… I usually don’t push up,” but I’m going to say, “I really love you, and I really think you’re beautiful, and I’m so glad we’re out this evening to do that.” If I were pushing through a defense against that which I developed in childhood, eventually, and not too long if I’ll do it regularly, I’ll start feeling the intensity. It won’t just be intensity. It would trigger a neurochemical in my brain called endorphins and, occasionally, maybe a little dopamine, and I’ll start feeling my words. They won’t come from the left brain. They’ll be coming through the right brain. They’ll be supported by the neurochemistry that’s produced by the words themselves. So, guess what. By responding to my partner’s need for emotional intensity, I get my feelings back that I had to shut down in childhood. So, my partner’s need calls me in. It gives me an opportunity to evolve a part of me that I’ve shut down. We call it “I recover my wholeness.” And here’s the thing that makes many people say that sucks: “My partner’s deepest need is my greatest opportunity for growth and healing myself.” So, I have to thank you that you need emotional intensity, otherwise I would have kept reins on my feelings all my life. So, you call me into the undeveloped parts of myself, whether that’s hugging, so I have to hug you, and I have to get over my skin phobia, and realize I can hug without being hurt. I can hug without being rejected, or whatever it was the caretakers did that made me not want to be touched. And a lot of people are like that.

It’s just amazing how important it is that caretakers know something about what the human brain needs, which is, it needs emotional presence and it needs physical contact. Touch is very important to the baby’s sense of survival. So, that’s why it goes bad because the partner I married is the one who’s least capable of giving me what I need, and I’m the same for that person. So, it’s always two ways. And some people say, “Well, they don’t meet my needs.” Well, you’re probably not meeting theirs, and so that led to the impasse that both people have been defended in childhood, and their defenses now are colliding in adulthood. So, what each has to do is stretch beyond the comfort zone into behaviors that they say, “No way in hell. I don’t do windows.” They have to do windows. And when they do them, they learn to be window cleaners.

JJ: Yeah.

Harville: And it’s a wonderful experience because now you can see the world. All the mud is gone and so forth. So, I think that’s why I keep in this work: because that incompatibility… So, what Helen and I now call it, and I wish she was here because she has many wonderful stories to this. We call it incompatibility is the grounds for a great relationship. And in fact, compatibility is the grounds for boredom. And if people married the person that they had fallen in love with, they will always marry an incompatible partner. And that’s in the service of the mutual growth of both. So, compatibility doesn’t grow you because you have nothing to stretch into. There’s not enough tension in the relationship. You need incompatibility for the tension, for growth to happen.

JJ: So, what about compatibility in terms of commonality? So, I have sort of two situations. So, let’s say we have the husband and the wife who are incompatible, but I see here on the notes, there’s a question that “Can relationships work if only one person is willing to work on it?” Before getting into imago a little bit deeper, I took on the idea that you choose your partners to heal the wounds of your past, and I started working on my own wounds. And I believed and took responsibility for every possible thing I could do, from the way that I thought, from what I projected, from what I visualized, from how I reacted. And I went on a deep dive to kind of heal anything that would come up for me in my relationship. But that became an imbalance of I was doing a lot of sort of self-growth, and getting uncomfortable, and 

Harville: Well, if they’re not willing to stay and work, what do you do? Well, that’s a very consistent question because everybody marries somebody. One of them is an approach person, and the other one is an avoidant person. And that’s a part of their incompatibility: that a person with more emotional expressiveness… Like Helen, she’s a networker, she reaches out, and so she’s always coming up with stuff. I’m an introvert, I shut my feelings down, I’m left-brained, and so forth. So, that will happen in most relationships. And back when we were having trouble in our own marriage, now back about 18 years ago, we were on the verge of divorce. Well, actually, it’s been about 20 years now. On the verge of divorce because of the same pattern and a few other things thrown in that both of us had because of the complexities of our childhood. So, that’s going to be there.

And let me just go off side a minute. When it’s important and makes it work best is when both people say, “We’ve got to be partners in the project. And I hate it, but I’m going to be a partner in this.” So, then you make a covenant that “When I’m most uncomfortable with what you want, that’s when I’m going to be there and produce. But if I don’t have a covenant, then when I get uncomfortable, I’m going to go to my childhood defenses.” So, this is when we work to create conscious partnerships: that you’re partners, damn it, not competitors, in the relationship. But if one person won’t show up, then what the other person can do, who is aware of the dynamics of the relationship, is that they can be different in the relationship. Like the initiator, who is always showing up with the introvert, can really understand that the introvert is not avoiding them. They are protecting themselves from the intensity of engagement because they unconsciously need that to survive. So, you regulate how you show up. And one of the ways the initiators show up that messes it up is to say, “Let’s go to a therapist,” and “Why don’t we plan more time together?” and “When are you going to stop watching TV or start writing your book or stop working so late?” They guilt them, thinking that that person is now going to say, “Oh, well, thank you for wanting to be with me. I’m going to shut down my computer and come home early, and we’re going to have a wonderful time.” They’re not going to do that because they’re not aware of what is going on in themselves when somebody invades their space, or what they experience as invasion. So, the more aware person has to know what the dynamics of relationships are. And if you don’t follow them, you’re going to just make matters worse. That’s why we say to a partner who comes to a workshop without their partner, “We’re sorry that your partner is not here. You cannot go home and teach your partner this workshop. You must go home and be with your partner, what this workshop says you should be.” And everybody is a minimizer and a maximizer. And if you’re a maximizer, you’re going to have to kind of contain your energy. And if you’re a minimizer, on the other side, you’re going to have to rev up your energy. Like if you’re a very active networking person and they’re getting their needs met somewhere else because you’re not showing up, you’re going to have to go and show up. So, one person who’s conscious of the dynamics can change the dynamics, but they can’t change it by getting the partner to change.

Harville: They can only change it by changing their relationship to the partner. What that does is produce two possible outcomes. One, we’ve discovered, is that it will produce a negative outcome. The partner is experiencing a change and it triggers their anxiety, they don’t know what the hell is going on, so they get the hell out of there. And the second thing it can produce is curiosity, like “What are you taking? What are you on? Did you go to a seminar?” “Gosh, you’ve been so kind and warm for the past week, and I’ve experienced just you kind of letting me have my space and not criticizing me. In fact, the other night, you told me, ‘Why don’t you go watch some TV and take some time to yourself?’” And this introvert is saying, “Wow, I can do this without guilt?” and so forth. Or you can reverse it. It takes too long to go through this scenario on both sides, but the bottom line is one person can make a dramatic difference, but you can’t predict the outcome. Most of the time, the outcome will be positive because becoming a safe person for your partner makes them curious. But sometimes it triggers something deep in them, and they then have to get distance, even though you have not invaded their space. They just wonder what’s going on with you. “Are you having an affair?” or something like that, “Because you’re treating me so nice.” “Well, what are you trying to make up for?” They go into all of that.

JJ: Yeah.

Harville: But the other person just says, “Tell me what’s going on,” or “Thank you very much. I’m glad we had this dinner and that we didn’t talk about our relationship for once. We just talked about going to Paris” or something like that. Because usually the initiating person wants to talk about the relationship. “Why aren’t we doing so and so? Why don’t we do more and more?” And the other person doesn’t want to talk about it at all because they don’t feel so engaged about that. So, it’s a good thing. But I’m spending a lot of time on this. I just want the listener to hear that you can make the difference, but you cannot do it by continuing to expect your partner to change and respond to your pleas. You have to be different, so that that breaks the dynamic of the impasse.

JJ: So, I definitely had experienced that with some of the work that I had done to be different, and saw an energetic change of like I’m calmer, therefore you’re calmer. I’m not in your face telling you or educating you or wanting to pull you. There was that. So, I definitely also teach and tell people and show people that there is so much power that you still have within a dynamic that you can work on, and most people don’t work on. They just want to blame the other person for not being different.

Harville: Right.

JJ: But if you take responsibility, even from just the way you think about them, or the way that you feel about yourself, or how you react to things. I noticed when I was defensive that I thought, “Oh, well, that’s something in me I have to… What’s the ideal response here?” The ideal response is that I don’t get triggered, and then I feel safe, and then I feel calm, and I feel centered, and I feel love, and I don’t need to defend myself, so let me go work on that. So, for this whole time, though, I’ve done a lot of, like, “I’ll take the lessons and I’ll go work on it myself.” But what I didn’t understand until I actually started doing the work with the therapist doing the imago work and reading the book… Because I hadn’t read the book at that point. I held on to your books because I’m like, “Okay, I can’t wait to do this work. I’m a student.”

I’m like, “Let’s do this work. I want to learn. I want to grow.” But I also thought I had to do it with a partner. And so, when I was starting to read it and I realized, even just the first 20 pages of your book, talking about why imago… I get the concept that you can’t heal some of this stuff without being in relationship. Relationship becomes the place where you actually really do the deeper work. It’s not about the separate. It’s about what happens in that dynamic.

Harville: Right.

JJ: Because you are trying to heal, possibly, abandonment and not feeling safe, and feeling secure and loved and good enough. So, when someone decides to leave a relationship because that person doesn’t want to do any more work or isn’t interested or the divide is too big, and you move on to the next… Because people get married multiple times. And I’m a big fan of you haven’t probably done enough work. I want people to take more responsibility and not just necessarily do the knee jerk of “You’re not making me happy,” because that’s not the world I live in. Just like your therapist with your Hawaiian shirt, you can have Hawaii wherever you go. You can also be happy wherever you go. You can create in your mind, you can create in your energy field what it is you want to see and vibrate at that level. So, for that reason, I’ve also encouraged people to…don’t blame other people, don’t be the victim of what that person is doing, to assess your own feelings and needs, and figure out how you can get your own needs met, and see what that’s really about and what you’re contributing to that situation. So, now we have someone decides to go off from a relationship and attracts another relationship that might be more compatible, but is there still another imago later of, again, that unconscious/subconscious, “There’s still something I want from you that I’m not getting”? Because you mentioned that incompatibility was almost like the grounds for a better relationship. So, what about the people that are still in love but more compatible? Isn’t there still some kind of lesson that we’re going to go through there?

Harville: If you’re in love and incompatible, well, actually, you won’t be compatible if you’re in love.

JJ: Okay. All right. That’s great. Good to know.

Harville: Because the dynamic of the selection process, and not just dynamic, pairs you with a complementary person rather than a similar person. There’s always enough similarity and compatibility. Like we can have a political conversation. I mean, there has to be a range of… I think value systems turn out to be one of the things that people can’t… “Even though I’m in love with you, I can’t marry you if our value systems…” Like if you want to kill people and I want to save them, that’s pretty hard.

JJ: Yeah.

Harville: And if you want to sacrifice yourself but I would like to make a million dollars. Those are some… But certain compatibilities, like we both want children and we both have a sense of care about the world. Or we don’t. We both just want to make money, and then we give our money away, or whatever. So, a range of compatibilities so that you could actually live together. But the incompatibilities are usually those emotional things that have to do with need satisfaction, which are always connected to the brain’s interest in survival. But there’s also a complementarity that seems built into nature itself. And I’ve been really curious about that now for about five years. I don’t know. Everything about brain, I get interested in. “Well, why is that? What is this complementarity about?” So, I began to read quantum mechanics and discovered that in the quantum mechanical world, complementarity is our nature: that a particle is a wave, which is a particle. That complementarity. The wave and the particle are two sides of the same thing. So, nature is made up of polarities and tension. And one polarity is different from the other pole. A particle is different from a wave, but they are two ends of a continuum called a wavicle.

When I got that clear in my mind, I don’t understand 90% of what I’m reading, but one day it dawned on me, “Oh, complementarity is in human beings what the wavicle is at the quantum level.” So, this complementarity is not a psychological structure that just happens to be that opposites attract. They do attract, but that’s not a romantic or poetic or sentimental thing. That’s the way nature is built, and couples inhabit nature. So, there are two sides of an individual. Sometimes I’m focused like a particle, and sometimes I’m being creative and flowing like a wave. But I’m more particle-like in my relationship with Helen because I’m left-brained. I focus on things and details and structure, and she’s intuitive, creative, and focuses on flowing things and networking and stuff like that. So, it got really clear to me that all the things that we have thought were psychological, that were kind of everywhere, are actually cosmological. They are a local manifestation of a cosmic process that’s happening everywhere. So, partnership, relationships, couples are quantum phenomena. So, therefore, that pull and push, the polarities, is not there for conflict, which is what human beings use it for. It’s there for the tension of growth. So, there are two things in tension that growing produces a third reality which is another level of themselves.

So, in that sense, you can always grow, because the thing that produces polarization is difference. And when you discover the difference… Like the other day, Helen came up with something. It’s like, “Where did that come from? We’ve been married for 37 years and you want to do what?” So, I could stay with that and get mad about that or criticize her or just not participate in it, or I could say, “Well, I’m curious about that.” Because the principle of managing a complementarity is mutual curiosity versus judgment. So, instead of going into judgment, I go into curiosity. And now I discover what is going on with Helen about that, and what would happen with that. So, that interests me. So now, I decide to use my own experimentation, because I do have that. I think that’s how I developed imago: through experiment. So, I go and try that and do that, and you find it’s not like you made it up. The experience is not like the concept. And my concept was I would never want to do that. My experience was “This is kind of fun. It’s more fun than I thought. So, why don’t we do more of that?” And now I’m beginning to flow with Helen in a co-creating process instead of polarizing with Helen that produces a splitting process.

But you have to know that the principle of curiosity should be what you bring to difference rather than the principle of judgment and criticism. And if you don’t know the difference between those two things, your brain always does not like novelty. Actually, most of the brain doesn’t like novelty because the brain has only a static state. And when it’s surviving, even if it’s not all that wonderful, it’s surviving. And you bring novelty to it, and it says, “If you did this, it would be better.” The brain says, “Prove it to me.” And so, you have to use that thinking part, that observing part of your mind, noticing yourself, and say, “Well, I learned that curiosity can open a new experience, and so I’m going to go and do that.” So, we’re going to hug longer, or we’re going to go ballroom dancing, or something that’s relational. And usually, that’s where the main growth part is: if it’s something relational. I’m going to do that in order to experience something. This is not a childhood wound here. This is just human. The brain is basically paranoid, because the brain, for millions of years, wandered through the jungles, and if it was curious, it got eaten for lunch. So, it had to be defensive and paranoid until it discovered it really wasn’t a tiger. It was another human being wanting to connect with them. So, that has millions of years of evolutionary programming. So, we’re not going to just be excited about a new thing at the beginning, because it could threaten the survival mechanism. But if you consciously can go curious, then you actually discover you can survive better with this new thing, and so forth. But that’s intentionality. You really have to become intentional about that. And I remember that for the last 20 years, Helen and I have trained ourselves out of negativity into curiosity. It’s a much better way to live.

JJ: And thank God that’s my natural state, because I know a lot of people who it isn’t.

Harville: Yes.

JJ: And that’s seemingly an insurmountable hump to come over when there’s people who are not naturally inclined to do that. They have no model for that other than possibly you. But their default mechanisms are going to be survival and protection all the time. And they’re not at that place where, on a conscious level, they can say, “Oh, I see how that could be better. Let me try that. Let me fight through that impulse to protect and resist” and just do what you said in terms of, at the beginning of this interview, we were talking about “Hug me more” or “Be more expressionistic with my words, and more intention with my love and expression to you.” Like someone who can see the difference, and that is “I have resistance, but I’m going to do that because I committed to doing that.” There are too many people, I think, that just go, “Well, I don’t feel that. I’m not doing that. And I’m not going to do it until I feel it.”

Harville: Right. Oh, yes. I mean, that’s really a defense. “I don’t feel it. I’m not going to do it.” So, what we have to say back is, and here’s a piece that we’ve finally gotten clear, “If you want to change, you have to do something other than what you think you normally would have to do to change.” And one is understand your resistance. You can do that. And you can understand it, analyze it, know where it came from, and all that. But self-knowledge is not change. Self-knowledge changes your knowledge about yourself, but change is when you behave differently.

JJ: Yes.

Harville: So, we spend, as you know… Are you a therapist by background?

JJ: No.

Harville: No. But you’re so psychologically oriented that you know that psychology, starting in the 18th century, when it split off from philosophy, split off to studying the self. And then Freud came along and developed psychotherapy because he got interested in the healing of the self, where Freud went with inside the self. He constructed the first model of the interiority of human beings. It’s really interesting that for thousands of years, nobody explored the inner world. They would read the poetry and the novels and the stories that were produced by creativity, but Saint Augustine in the 4th century was the first autobiography of human beings, so there were no other autobiographies that were of significance until Freud started going inside and again just studied dreams. And it was really important because dreams are about the farthest into the interior you can get. It’s what happens in your brain while you’re sleeping. You’re not defended, and therefore, all kinds of things show up. So, psychotherapy, and all therapy, was built on the model that we have to go inside to subjectivity, and we have to explore it, understand it, get insight into it, and so forth, and then we will change. But what those therapists discovered was you can have all the insights you want and you will remain an educated neurotic.

JJ: Yes.

Harville: You’ll be neurotic, but now you know why.

JJ: Yep.

Harville: Before, you were neurotic, but you didn’t know why.

JJ: Yep.

Harville: So, what we learned was something behaviorism taught. They went to the end of the line and said there is no such thing as subjectivity. You just have to do your behavior. But they were wrong about that because you do have an inner world. I mean, it’s self-evident. I stop and think, and I’m thinking. That’s an inner world. But they were right about the fact that you have to do something. But this was all behavioral, and reinforcement of positive things, or positive reinforcement, and all of that. You’d have to pay attention to insight. And actually, the best thing you have to do is both. You have to understand. But you do have to go to your partner and actually hug them, and hug them until your anxiety is triggered, and keep hugging them until your anxiety relaxes. Because the brain is worried that if I touch you, I will be hurt. So, I have to touch you long enough for me to not experience hurt, for my brain to say, “I could hug without feeling guilt. I could be touched without being hurt.” In fact, it feels better. So, the brain takes in new data, but it never takes in an argument or a recommendation. You can’t market to the brain.

JJ: Right.

Harville: You have to do something. Then the brain, while doing it, develops a new neuron. And this is a thing that’s been discussed since 2000. The brain actually changes with experience because it was actually created by experience. But up until 2000, everybody thought the brain was a fixed entity. Somehow it grew inside your skull, and it lived there in a black box, and you couldn’t do anything about it. You just had to adapt to things, but you couldn’t actually change the brain. Now we know you can. So, when you do a new behavior long enough to go through the anxiety barrier, then the brain creates a new neuron that says hugging is better than not hugging. And so, now you can hug without resistance. Am I making sense?

Harville: You’ve got to do it.

JJ: And without knowing… I study psychology and human behavior and astrology and everything law of attraction and quantum physics, but before that, I remember a time with my grandmother where my grandfather had passed away and we were at the house, and their relationship was more dictatorship and sort of servant at that time. And I wanted a piece of paper and a pen to write something down, and I went to put my hand on a drawer to pull the drawer open, and she slapped my hand because the drawer was messy, so she wouldn’t let me open the drawer. And I didn’t do it in the moment, but afterwards, I thought what I really wanted to do was to pull the drawer out and dump it on the floor, to have her freak out and then calm down and realize it’s just stuff, like it’s not a big deal. I didn’t do that, and she would have had a heart attack, but that was my impulse to want to go through that sort of emergent therapy of, like, “Okay, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s messy. What am I going to do? I’m going to make it messier. What’s going to happen? You’re not going to die, and everything is going to be fine, and we’ll put it back together again.”

So, that was sort of one of my impulses, to do that, but also the understanding the new neural pathways. And for me, I harp on healing, like what is healing. Because while I’m not a big proponent of therapy, I’m not a proponent of all kinds of therapies and all kinds of therapists, because what I find is, like you said, people get very educated about their issues but they’re not actually different. So, to me, healing means you are different in the same situation. So, you do what you need to do to stand in the same exact situation. You don’t avoid situations. You don’t try to avoid that person or that stimulus or that trigger or that trauma. You face it. And when you can face it and you are different, you are healed. And that is the goal, not to necessarily be running away from people that upset you. It’s to deal with what goes on. What is that about? Let’s get to the place where it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to try to control circumstances so that you feel comfortable.

Harville: Right. Yeah. So, let me just add to this that our exploration and where things keep cropping up is what is healing and how does that happen. And we serendipitously discovered the primary healing process in 1977, the year Helen and I met. And Helen, in fact, initiated it. We had always had a tense relationship. It’s either been intensely horrible or intensely wonderful. And only in the past 15 or 18 years has that polarity changed to it’s great most of the time, and then when it’s bad, it’s not very bad. But in 1977, we were in her living room, and I don’t think we’d even reached dating status, but it was more like we liked each other, we’re curious, she was interested in what I was interested in cognitively, and I was interested in her and what she was doing. But we were polarized and we’re having this huge argument. In fact, sometimes we say, “I don’t know how we ever got married.” We had knocked-down, dragged-out battles. Even the night before the wedding, we had one. I even considered not showing up at the wedding because that was so bad and so forth. So, it’s a very intense story.

But she said in the middle of our fight, “Let’s stop. Now, one of us talk, and the other one listen, and then take turns.” And I thought, “Well, I’m in kindergarten.” I’ve just been given a kindergarten instruction. But we did stop. It stopped me, and she stopped. And then we just sat there quietly. And I’m aware that my intensity went down, and then we took turns, and I listened to her. This was actually before I got mirroring down, but just listening without interruption, and she listened without interruption. And then I’m working with couples in the clinic. I think when working with couples, we’ve been engaged in these conversations about their problems and how they can solve them, but this talking like this, I don’t do in the clinic. So, I went to the clinic and said to George, “Now you listen while Mary talks, and don’t interrupt her. Then Mary, when she finishes, and vice-versa.” So, Helen was actually the inventor of what we now call imago dialogue, because I started experimenting with that with couples, and then what I learned there, I would bring back to our relationship. And we would try it out and refine it a bit, and I would take it back to the clinic and do more with it.

And one couple was amazing. One couple crystallized all three steps of the dialogue process. And I’ll get to my point in a minute. And that was, I got them to talk and not interrupt. And then I said to Mary, “So, what else do you need now that you talk without being interrupted?” And she says, “I need him to tell me back what I said.” And I said, “Well, George, would you do that?” And he said, “Well, I wasn’t listening too well. Could you say it again?” So, she said, “Well, yes, I can say it again.” Then I encouraged her not to get offended by that, just to say it again, and asked George if he would kind of turn off whatever was in his mind. And so, the process was that she wanted to be mirrored. And so, he was a smart guy and got it, and he mirrored her, and she broke into tears. She said, “That’s the first time in my life I’ve ever felt like anybody ever listened to me, ever.” So, this was her childhood wound: she couldn’t get attention. So, we kept working, both of them. It turns out he had never had it either, and he liked mirroring. And then I would ask, “What else now do you want? You got mirrored.” And she said, “Well, I’d like him to tell me if I make sense.” She wanted validation. And he said, “Well, I can’t say that because you don’t make sense.” That’s our problem. She says, “Well, you’re telling me that I’m crazy.” So, what got clear to her was she said, “Well, I don’t want you to agree with me,” because he thought if he said, “You make sense…” And she said, “I just want you to see the sense I’m making to myself.” And he said, “Oh, okay. Well, I can see that you think that, and it makes sense that you would think that, given x, y, and z.” And she broke into tears again. Then we did it with him. I could see he was softening up and breaking into tears. And then finally, we got to empathy, and she said, “Now I’d like you to tell me, how do you think I’m feeling in my world inside?” And he said, “Well, I don’t know.” And she said, “Well, just make a guess.” And he said, “Well, given what she said that I validated, I imagine you’re feeling sad.” And she said, “Exactly.”

So, here’s what we learned from this. When George and Mary learned to dialogue and taught me how to facilitate that with them, my brain is a constructive brain. I was aware I was learning something absolutely valuable because I saw a change was going on in 15 or 20 minutes I had never seen before with a couple. And it had to do with the way they were talking. And so, years and years of looking at that, it finally dawned on me. When people dialogue, their problems go away. Most of their problems have to do with the way they talk to each other. And the way they talk to each other is using negative energy, and blaming, and shaming, and “You don’t. You never have. I was this, and you didn’t. I cooked dinner and you didn’t come home,” and all of that. And it finally got clear as I started reading the brain sciences. You criticize somebody, you trigger the cortisol in their brain. They then associate you with danger. And it’s like now there’s no way in hell you’re going to connect. So, you have to change the neurochemistry of the brain. So, couples have to learn how to say connecting things, like “Thank you for fixing dinner. And I’m really glad to be home on time. Glad I could get home.” That will produce endorphin. Now I have a sense of wellbeing that is triggered by the behavior. But the endorphin doesn’t come inside the brain as a result of a thought. The endorphin comes because outside, which is where life is lived, I experienced a safe transaction called a connecting behavior.

So, what we’ve learned is that if you come down to theory, what happens with the dialogue process is it’s structured so the brain knows what’s going to come next. “I’m going to talk, you’re going to mirror” instead of “I’m going to talk and then you’re going to criticize me, and I don’t know what you’re going to say.” So, you have the structure of predictability. And then you do validation. “I’m going to be seen and validated instead of negated.” And empathy, which means “I’m going to be connected to my emotions.” You’re going to be related to without saying “Why are you so emotional?” You’re just going to say, “I can imagine you feel sad about that.” What happens is, the term we put to it is presence. When I’m fully present to you, then everything inside me goes into a safe mode. My autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic sides go into balance. I don’t have to escalate or de-escalate anymore because I’m not in a defensive mode.

And a guy named Stephen Porges has worked about 30 years on this, and he says, “Safety has to be located in the body.” Not just outside the body, but in the body. And it’s only located in the body if it’s safe outside. He calls it social engagement. If I’m safe outside, then my body goes safe inside. Now I can thrive. But if I don’t have that safety, I can only survive. And the difference between those two is categorical. One is the feeling of full aliveness, and the other one is the feeling of anxiety. And those two sensations constitute the two radical possibilities of human beings. And marriages in which couples are present to each other without judgment, both feel alive. Marriages where they’re not present to each other because they’re criticizing, both feel anxious, and then all their defenses come up, and now they have problems.

JJ: Right.

Harville: And they go to the therapist with their symptoms. “We don’t have sex anymore” or “We don’t listen to each other” or “We don’t seem to talk” and all kinds of problems. But if they get present to each other and have this technology by which they can do that over and over and over again. And if they rupture it, they can go back and do it. It’s like if you hit the tennis ball wrong, you can practice it again. But if you want to play tennis, you’re going to hit it wrong, but you have to recover and then practice the right swing until you get it down. And the same thing happens. So, we have this thing called zero negativity as a pledge. And we used to have it only with couples. And as we’ve been working here in Dallas, we’re aware that zero negativity needs to be in classrooms, it needs to be in corporations, it needs to in churches. Gosh, there’s so much negativity in congregations.

JJ: Totally. Fear-based shaming and…

Harville: Yeah. And “You don’t believe what I believe,” and “You see Jesus that way, but you know, Jesus was the other way.”

Harville: And “If you don’t believe it my way, you’re going to go to hell.” All of that sort of thing. All of that produces negative energy, which means it triggers the survival directive. Now I can only protect myself from you. But when I’m safe with you, I don’t have to think about survival. I can then flow with you. And then I think we’re in the quantum field where the energy is flowing back and forth between the polarities. We arose out of the quantum field, and the energy flows back and forth. And it’s a real feel. It’s not just an empty space between us. The space between us is filled with the energy from the quantum field. And when you put negative energy into that field, it exacerbates. And if you put positive energy, it does the same thing, but you get a different outcome. One is called cohesion. The other one is called chaos.

JJ: Well, I see that there’s something coming out. I know you mentioned the book that’s the 30th year of “Getting the Love You Want” in January, I think. But do you have another book coming out called “The Space Between”?

Harville: Oh, it’s out now.

JJ: Oh, it’s out now?

Harville: Yep. That’s available on Amazon. And then next year, we’ll also come out with one that may not be of too much interest to your listeners, but it will be “The Clinical Professional Textbook for Therapists.” So, we’re finally moving from a trade book into a professional clinical book.

JJ: Well, I might be interested in that. I would be interested in that. Harville, can I ask a somewhat personal question. It’s not too personal. It’s just really about your birthday. Would you be willing to share with me what your astrological sign is?

Harville: Well, I was born in September.

JJ: September…? What’s your date, your birthday? Not the year, just the day.

Harville: 6th.

JJ: Okay, you’re a Virgo.

Harville: I’m a Virgo.

JJ: And what’s Helen?

Harville: And Helen is April the 28th.

JJ: She is a Taurus. Okay.

Harville: Once we looked up in an astrology relationship book, what with those two signs, how would they react, and it exactly described us. It said that you’d drive your relationship into the ground by being incessantly critical of each other. When we read that, we said, “Oh. No wonder this life has been hard.

JJ: Yep. Absolutely.

Harville: And basically, what we did was we moved negativity out. We took a deep dive. They call it cold turkey. We said, “Today we stop.” And what we discovered is that was really hard. And as we researched what happens when you put a new program into the brain, in about 30 days, that new program ruptures the brain’s homeostasis, and then the brain goes into chaos. Now you feel worse than you did before, because the brain’s survival is with the other model, but you put in this new behavior called zero negativity, and the brain has been surviving because it was negative. You take that out, the brain now goes into chaos. So, you have to keep going with the new behavior so the brain can discover, “Okay, we took out negativity but we’re not dead.” And then it integrates negativity as a survival process. And you have to do it for about 90 days before the brain settles down with “Okay, I don’t have to be critical anymore. If I’m curious, I can be open to new information. If I’m critical, I’m saying the new information is too threatening.” So, change means you can’t just do it once. You’ve got to do the same thing precisely over and over again for about 90 days.

JJ: Perfect.

Harville: Build that new neuron, and the brain says, “Ah. This is even better than I had before. It feels better.”

JJ: Are you still doing workshops? Are you still working with patients at all? Are you still doing workshops?

Harville: We don’t do couple’s clinic, couple’s therapy anymore. But we do six workshops a year across the country. We go to Omega twice, [01:12:29] twice. We are now going to Multiversity this year, and we go there twice a year. And we are going to start next year with Esalen.

JJ: Yay! You’re coming to Esalen. Okay, great. Do you know when? Do you have dates already for Esalen?

Harville: They are set, but I don’t carry them in my mind. I know it’s early in the year. I think it’s sometime in January.

JJ: Okay. I will look it up.

Harville: Yeah, it’s on our harvilleandhelen.com website.

JJ: Okay. So, everyone listening, harvilleandhelen.com. I will do a little bit of an intro too, if you haven’t already listened to this, and make sure everyone knows where to get all the information, and to get Harville’s new book, and to connect with them. And they will be back. We’re going to do some promotion for the new 30th edition. Is that what it is, 30th?

Harville: 30th anniversary.

Harville: Yes. Well, I think “Keeping the Love You Find,” we were asked to write that book for people who were looking for love. “Getting” was written for couples. “Keeping the Love You Find,” it has in it “If you want to find the love of your life and keep them, you have to do this.” And so, in it is a proposal which we call utilitarian dating. And that is, you haven’t found the love of your life yet, but there’s somebody that you like well enough to date. Use that relationship to learn all of the things you need for a relationship that would really work. And this is what I’ve said to my daughter who’s looking: “Every guy that you’re with, it provides you with an opportunity to know how to be in relationship.” And it’s amazing she’s done that, and every guy she brings home is better than the last one. And, well, she’s not quite there yet. She’s now looking for the one that’s… I think she’s one guy away.

JJ: From the one. Well, I had some friends who got divorced a couple of years ago, and my plea to the wife, as well as to the husband, was “I’m not saying you need to stay together, but why not uncover? Why not do the imago therapy? Uncover why you attracted each other in the first place, and start to work on that, because you’re just going to attract the same person again if you don’t clean that up.” So, it doesn’t mean you’re going to stay together. Just go figure it out so you don’t repeat the pattern.

Harville: That is the best advice you can give because you don’t change when you divorce. You just change partners.

JJ: Exactly.

Harville: You replay the same drama that you did before.

JJ: You take you with you. So, if you aren’t different when you take you with you, you will keep repeating the same thing over and over again. Lessons will be repeated until they’re learned.

Harville: Yes. You are whoever you are.

JJ: Yes. Excellent. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time, and I hope that I can have you and Helen back on when we want to promote the next book coming out. And I definitely will send everyone. There will be social media posts, and this is going to go on YouTube, as well as I’ll extract the audio and put it on my podcast. And my listeners are very, very…they trust me a lot. They do all the things I tell them to. So, if we want them to go buy the book, listen up, everybody. Get the books. Get the workbook. Do it yourself. If you’re single, do it, because then you’re going to understand a little bit more about what you are… And Harville, would you say that someone who’s single could do that “creating your imago” exercise and maybe start to reflect on the past relationships and on the 

Harville: There’s individual work done, but it has a caveat to it: that it’s not just mental work. You can behave differently in your friendships and with transient lovers. You can behave differently. But you can’t just stay in your mind like many people. And I have no criticism of meditation and mindfulness, but if you say mindfulness is going to change your life, it’s actually going to change your awareness of yourself. But you have to then move into an interactive space to actually change your brain. And so, you can do all the mindfulness, and I recommend it, and then go do something, and that will change you. But if you just do mindfulness and think, “That’s going to change me,” nope. You’ve got to move into the discomfort zone behaviorally, then the change can occur. We call it the space between. It’s where life happens, and that creates the space within. And the space within is the house of memory and imagination, but the outside is the space of interaction that produces those internal memories.

And what you want, and this to me was one of the great insights that I had one time with Helen, was I got to decide what kind of memories I want, and I can create them by my interactions with Helen. And if I want a memory of us yelling at each other, just yell at her. But if I want a memory of us connecting, then I have to prize her, praise her, connect with her, keep her safe, so that she knows I’m an okay person to be around, and her brain is going to do all this stuff. Helen doesn’t consciously say, “You’re not a safe person.” The brain says, “Last time you were with him, it was a bad experience.” So, she’s going to experience herself cautious, or vice-versa. So, you have to have a history of predictable safety in the interactions. And that’s why marriage takes a long time and some knowledge to ever stabilize, so that you now would never leave it because it took so much time to get that environment safe. And the other person would have to go through the same training process because, as human beings, we don’t naturally know how to be safe. We just know that’s our deepest desire, but we have no idea how to get there. And we usually think it’s other people’s fault. But we can create our own environment by what we put into it.

JJ: I use a very mind-body-soul integrated approach. I’m all about integration, because information without integration is pretty much useless. Like you said, that’s what mindfulness is: if you’re mindful of your bad behaviors, or mindfulness of your triggers. We haven’t changed the trigger. We haven’t healed that.

Harville: Right.

JJ: Right. So, it’s very important. So, everyone, make sure to go to Harville’s website. I’ll put all the links for everything you need to know. And check out all the books. Buy all the books. Do all the books.

Harville: Thank you. Would you become my publicist?

JJ: Can I become your publicist? You have no idea. I sent you a show that I already did. I wanted you to listen to it because I wanted you to understand how much I support imago therapy, how much I tell everybody, “Don’t waste your time going to couples therapy. If it’s not imago, don’t do it.” Because you have to take on that responsibility. Because to me, couples therapy, I mean, I work with people all the time, both on a physical level with training and exercise and nutrition, but also on a life coaching level and even in relationships and with law of attraction and astrology. And at the end of the day, I see people wanting to go… Again, I believe in the therapeutic process, but I don’t believe in all therapies. Because if you’re going to entertain that I’m going to blame you for this, and you’re going to blame me for this, all this top level conversation, this is not what’s going on. We’re not going to get anywhere if it’s just a fight and a battle about what you didn’t say or what you didn’t do. If you can take responsibility for what you brought into this and what’s being triggered within you, you start from a place of empowerment and not being a victim. And then there’s someplace to go with that. And for me, that’s my whole brand: empowerment and taking responsibility for literally everything you possibly can, even how someone responds to you, by the way that you use quantum physics and your visualization and your own expectation, that zero negativity of being in that positive place. If you expect someone to show up negatively, they’re going to. But if you can tap into the parts of them that you love and that you’re projecting out that positive energy, you’re more likely to get that than something else. So, it’s that integration. And I’m a fan. I’m a big fan, so I’ll be happy to keep spreading the word.

Harville: And I’m your fan now with this interview. You’re amazing.

JJ: Well, thank you. And I’d love to promote people to come to the workshops as well. I’d like to commit, although I don’t have the date yet, but I will be at Esalen. I keep using the excuse that I’m looking for either me teaching at Esalen, which is in process, or going to something that really... And it would be a dream for me to come to a workshop with you personally.

Harville: Oh, I’d love for you to be there. Yeah.

JJ: Yes, I would love to do that. So, hopefully, everyone listening, you can join us at Esalen, hopefully, on January 2019 to do an imago workshop with the Harville Hendrix and Helen Hendrix.

Harville: Yes, Helen LaKelly Hunt.

JJ: Helen LaKelly Hunt. Sorry about that.

Harville: She didn’t take my last name, so that was one of our big arguments for a long time. But then we discovered that was a cultural problem.

JJ: Isn’t it, though? Isn’t it? I am glad you’re mentioning that because that was a problem in my relationship.

Harville: Well, a lot of psychology is actually stimulated by cultural value systems. But we don’t know that. We just think, “Gosh, you’re just having a problem.” No. The value system of our culture says you should take your husband’s last name. “Well, but I’m a feminist, and feminists don’t do that.” “Well, blah blah blah.” But if you realize that was a cultural problem for women that they were subservient to men for all the years of their lives up until 1920, hell yes, you should keep your own name. It doesn’t mean we can’t have a relationship.

JJ: Thank you.

JJ: Thank you. And I think too, for me, it became a lineage issue. My last name is Greek: Flizanes. And at our Greek Flizanes family reunion, there’s four of us left: my mother (although she’s not blood), but my father, my mother, my brother, and myself. And I don’t have any kids, and my brother is not married, and so, at this point, after this, it’s like after this, there’s no more Flizanes. There’s this sort of like “I love who I am. I love what it’s brought me, and I don’t want to change it. It’s my identity. I worked really hard at that.”

Harville: You can keep it.

JJ: Keep it. Right. And so, thank you for mentioning that at the end of the show. I’m definitely keeping that part.

Harville: And the culture should get off your back, because we are in a different world. It’s an amazing paradox that we’re going into, I think, and will be for the next 50 to 100 years, where difference will be valued and connection will be possible. But when difference is not valued, connection is impossible. So, we have to do that. And one difference is the individual is prized and honored for being an individual, and with that, they can then be in relationship because they’re not being excluded or devalued. So, it’s kind of a paradox that the more you amplify the value of the local, the more responsible for the locals you connect globally. But if you devalue the local, then there’s no connection globally, and then you have chaos. And it’s just logical that all of us are equal. We should accept our equality. And it should be reflected in all of our social and political and economic institutions. And in fact, when it’s not, those institutions are pathological. The big journey or the big job we’ve all got is to help institutions organize themselves in such a way they’re compatible with nature. And everything is equal in nature, including all human beings. So, therefore, if you’ve got a program, does it support human equality universally? Then I’ll support it. If it doesn’t, I’m not going to support it because that’s sick. What’s healthy is everybody is okay, no matter what you think. They are okay. Eric Burns said that long ago when he said, “I’m okay, you’re okay.” But he was talking about psychology. But what we now know is that okayness is actually built into the fabric of nature itself, into the fabric of being. And it’s our problem when we don’t make the local, i.e. you or me, or your gender, or your race, or your political or religious things, okay. It’s our problem, that is, we are the pathological ones, not you.

JJ: Well, thank you for that. I’m sure everyone was going “Amen” on that. We’re all equal. We’re all good. We’re all okay. Like you said, it makes logical sense.

Harville: And we need laws to support that.

JJ: Yeah. There should be.

Harville: There should be. All right.

JJ: Well, thank you so much, sir. I look forward to connecting with you and your lovely wife in the near future to promote your book. And I really appreciate you taking the time out today for both me and my audience. And I will be meeting you sometime in the near future in person at a workshop.

JJ: I would love to.

Harville: Thank you.

JJ: Thank you.

Harville: Bye-bye, JJ.

JJ: Bye-bye, Harville