Relationship Problems? This Marriage Advice Saved My Relationship & Will Change Your Life

[Music] hey it's marie forleo and you are watching marietv the place to be to create a business and life you love and speaking of love if you're someone who wants to have a relationship that actually works over the long term this episode is a must-watch Harville hendricks and helen lick ellie hunt are partners in life and work together they have written over 10 books including three New York Times bestsellers and the mega hit getting the love you want Harville and helen co-created imago relationship therapy Harville is a couples therapist educator and clinical trainer with over 40 years experience he's been on The Oprah Winfrey Show 18 times Helen was installed in the Women's Hall of Fame for her leadership in the global women's movement Helen and Harville have been married for over 30 years have six children and live in Dallas Texas Harville and Helen thank you so much for being here thank you for having us so I want to be just really clear about this to everyone watching these two they are genius and I discovered them when Josh and I were having a really challenging time in our relationship where it was one of those times where both of us were wanting to like beat our head against the wall and we weren't communicating and we weren't listening and I discovered their work wound up doing now two workshops with them and I can tell you without a doubt we would not still have our relationship if it wasn't for you two and your work so thank you so much and I've been wanting to have this conversation for so long so I'm thrilled that you're here thank you so I believe that what you have put together the body of work and the tools that you teach like when I experienced the workshop I'm like why are we not teaching this in school so why doesn't everyone know this I mean we had such breakthroughs and anyone else that I've sent and recommended to your workshop has had such tremendous breakthroughs so you know the times we're living in right now they're challenging tell us about your mission about being and this is a note that I took at one of the workshops about being cultural disruptors oh so you want to start with that you're the one that came up with the mistake so the mission as cultural disruptors I think that I need to start with we are Lane in the bowling alley is actually working privately with couples so therefore we either in a workshop a public workshop are organic in a and office and what two things had gotten clear to us over the years and one is that what couples what changes couples then the privacy of the office or in a workshop is something that can be extracted from that environment and put in the public domain the second thing is that we became aware that we are we would that we are sort of entrepreneurial and we are interested in a new cultural interested and healthy environment but you can't get that by working just in the privacy of the clinic or in workshops you actually have to address I sometimes think assault the culture itself because what was clear is that what goes on in the clinic that people bring us problems are culturally induced and if you don't deal with the culture that induces the problem that shows up in the clinic then the culture will keep sending people to the clinic to workshops and so forth so we began to think about moving out of the clinic into the public and beginning and doing what we call relationship education and and and do it at such a scale that we call the movement so they could actually get attention not for attention sake but so that we began to rethink the nature of relationship and rethink the kind of environment in which that relationship was possible and can be sustained so to do that you have to change the value system of the culture and the value system of Western civilization has been the individual and look inside yourself and look out for yourself and that is the best thing you can do for yourself what we've discovered is that is not actually right that we all live in a context we all live in a relationship we live in an interconnected universe and if we just look out for ourselves then we're actually going against nature that when we look out for others that is that's in our best interest because that sustains the the connection so we want to facilitate and as much as we could possible and get as many people as we can to join us because nobody can do this by themselves we want to move toward creating a relational civilization in which everybody is equal everybody is safe and all conversations are safe it's sort of what we're up to so let me just add to that there's a micro and a macro so you started off saying you know this stuff should be done in school like we teach so many other things what's important to people is their relationships why don't we teach relationship in school and the answer is that until recently the relational sciences have been very murky hmm like people there was marriage therapy people would go to marriage therapy I did got a divorce he did he got a divorce like it's a it it wasn't always a very precise science and then in the 1990s there were breakthroughs in neuroscience and a few other things that made it now the marriage therapists are now much more effective at working with the couples and so effective that exactly what you're saying it should be taught in school it could even be taught in kindergarten and we have a story about that let me tell you later but also the big one Marie marriage licenses shouldn't it be like driver's licenses oh my goodness you're about to make the most important decision in your life shouldn't you read a book and have to pass a test before and and show some proficiency before you get your license oh my goodness people marry and then you just have these terrible wrecks yeah so and it's just heartbreaking in their hearts break but we could tea before getting a driver's life of mares license we there could be some things that are helped that couples can learn to do and we could easily do lower divorce rate we could really end worse on the planet if we did school and and pre marriage work but so that's the micro of what we're doing and then I just love that I'm married to this man who just is so cosmic in the vision that it's also so doing a couple by couple it looks like we're doing couples work or family work but it's toward building a relational culture and a new relational civilization it's so inspiring and again I've experienced it firsthand which is why we're having this conversation right now and I remember when I discovered about safe conversations and about how because I didn't understand how your work was broadening out into the culture and I got so excited but let's bring it back just for a moment to the imago dialogue process because I feel like that tool is so transformative and when Josh and I learned it and actually started practicing it and we still use it I could think of you know a few months ago we were butting heads and I was like we need to dialogue we need to dialogue immediately and it took a fight that was at like a nine or a ten where both of us felt so frustrated and within three or four minutes we were hugging and I was crying and I'd softened up and I'm like this is magic for those who may not be have been exposed to your work yet can you explain just the structure of the imago dialogue process and why this works like magic well I'm not sure why it works like magic we keep getting that that rapport and works in our marriage too so we made up theories about why who works like magic and part of the theory comes from people who report you're doing that it does do that um and so I'll tell you what it is first and then and then I thought about and and your thought about what why does it work so well it's a structured conversation that's the first thing and the structure turns out to be important and because most of us think we know how to talk and it's just like we think we know how to be in a relationship or we know how to be a parent or there are lots of things we think just come with nature and if you have to learn about it no I I just want to be free and flow that but we discovered that in in the clinic that couples come there to talk but if we allow them to talk they hurt themselves like they do outside of the clinic so we created a structured way they could talk and it's basically a three step process which is if you want to talk to Joe you have to say is now a good time to have a conversation that's the first structure is that you make an appointment and most of us never do that we will like I call it movie house Crashers and walk into your movie house and you're running your movie and you're really engaged which is you're in a world I walk into your theater and throw my movie on your screen then say by the way would you look at my movie and turn yours off and that's a way most conversations start is the collision of two people who are in their own worlds and so if you say is now a good time to talk then I can say well I'd like to finish my movie first or I'm sure I'll be glad to turn off my movie and and talk and especially if you tell me what you want to talk about so there's now a good time to talk about our sex life or where we're going for dinner or whatever you want to talk about put a topic in there so so that I know what I'm turning my movie off to talk about because otherwise I may turn it off and you're gonna say well I want to discuss the budget or why you didn't call me yesterday and I may not want to talk about that right now but I can say no so the first thing of the structure he knows that when you say when you are available well and which which means there has to be a kind of promise and a predictability which is also creates what we think is the non-negotiable quality of any healthy relationship is safety yes I have to know when I'm with you I'm not going to be hurt by you and I mean by her not even frown that you know or glared at or especially talked to in a bad tone of voice or for even worse bad words like I'm a jerk or something like that then the second so when you still start talking what's important is that that Joe are you whoever is listening listens and that they say back so they do what we call mirroring and the mirror is so if I got it you want to talk about and are talking about what happened last night at the dinner table or where we want to set a kid to call whatever it was I mirrored back with accuracy now accuracy is a problem because the brain retains in a resting state only about 13 percent of what's coming into it because the brain is running its own movie and it's very hard to let in know the stuff so you have to say did I get it and that's the checkout Andrew and Joe may say well and that was pretty good or well this also said something like that and you want to get it as accurate as possible because the brain wants to be fully mirrored doesn't want a partial mirror and so it's important if somebody feels that didn't get fully mirrored to say well that was a third of what I said or a fourth of what I said but I also said some other things that I would also like to be sure you heard could I send out again so that's the accuracy thing then then we come to what what Helen and I called the magic question which is is there more about that just even saying it yes does something because most people say are you done yet yeah can can I talk now I mean I would like to talk now or I've heard enough from you I want to want to tell you about me but if you do that you activate a defense and therefore the conversation now has changed and you're in to some competition for the conversational space instead of and a flow and you know when you're in that you don't like it you know but you know how to get out of it yes and most people don't had to get out ever so if you say is there more about that and you say it with interest the partners defenses relaxes because now instead of knowing that you're about to take the reigns they know you just handle the reigns back and that you're saying I'm interested in you had even if it brings up almost tears and my feeling just to talk about the meaning of experiencing interest yes mmm defenses relax then you access words about your inner state that you have not put into words before and so you discover you're saying something new and your partner is hearing something new and so that's that becomes a creative process deepening and creative process so the person will listen and mirror all that back with accuracy and when the person says is there is there more and part of someone dies I think I'm I think I'm done I got all that well let me see if I got it all oh I will say that I want to summarize it so I forgot it all you said a B and C and so forth did I get it all yes you got it all then the second step those are sub steps within mirroring but then the second big step is called validation now validation is a bigger step I can listen to you and I can get what you're saying and I cannot judge it or criticize it but now I have to say something like you make sense and that means for many people if that I disagree with you therefore you don't make sense so if when I say you make sense I have to be clear and you have to be clear that I'm seeing the sense you're making because you have an inner world of your own it has its own inner logic and when I listen to it I will see the jura logical person had that think we first discovered this and working many many years ago in a mental health hospital with a schizophrenic who said he was Jesus and listening to him long enough I became clear that he made sense that he was Jesus and when I mirrored that back he said well actually my name is John he's so he recompensate it and then after you say well you make sense you say this and since you make is I can do empathy then I can imagine that you must feel the emotion with that thought that you had you must feel that so you do mirroring validating and empathizing so you want to go maybe just to add there's a phrase that I love that voice without echo dies and you may live in a relationship and maybe you don't realize your partner's longing to tell you who they are and tell you what's really going on in their life but if you've made your partner up and you think you know what's going on with your partner and you don't ask they you know they can't even tell you how they feel or what they want so it's beautiful when couples earn to become echoes for they for them to help bring both into the voice into their voice in the relationship and I love I don't hear you often talk about how when you're being married often when a person is marrying you and then they say is there more you can then say things that you didn't know you knew like new ideas come up and so it's really learning it's really teaching a couple to slow down and become present for each other's experiencing and everyone is just longing to feel understood and loved and cared about but also just just be understood and it it is a transformational process as you said and we thought for many years that you would do that so you could solve a problem and then we discovered that doing that solves the problem because the relationship becomes safe yes they'll take turns talking and it's not okay just to come in and start talking about something but with a tone and looking to I that the person feels anxious you just it's no anxiety in the relationship it's learning to live with safety you know between yeah and being present to each other is the solution not figuring out a solution yes so it's like counterintuitive and it took us what 20 years of working with couples trying to help them work things out you know that's even a phrase in the culture work things out yes well if you can connect through a safe structure of conversation and be present to each other as Ellen said with safety without judgment that is the solution and you don't need anything else after that most of your complaints was that was missing yes and now that that's there it's like well I don't care where we go to dinner yes I just love being with you two reflections to share with you so doing what I do in the world I have been to many different types of learning experiences and seminars and workshops and they've given some myself and I found it fascinating I was actually telling my team about this earlier I think it was in the first getting the love you want workshop that I did with you guys out at Omega hmm the way that you ran the workshop it was fascinating to me because it was really about teaching us the tools and the structure and you did you were so expert because I could feel sometimes folks maybe wanted to ask questions and you were amazing at expertly driving people back into the structure of the dialog and it felt like everyone's questions melted away similar to what you just shared well I have this problem I don't think this is gonna work but if they come back and use the structure it actually does to solve whatever was kind of gnawing at them initially and I've also experienced that personally where I'm like no I've got to make my point right now and then I'm like nope die can I come back to it and exactly what you said we wind up whatever that thing was is so far gone and melted and what is revealed is the sense of intimacy and joy that I think so many of us are starving for I also want to say something else in this context because we're living in such a fast-paced world where we're constantly connected to technology and everyone's constantly looking at their phones and everyone wants something quick quick quick and so I've developed this gift over the past seven years where I can kind of hear my audience as I'm having a conversation with you guys I can also hear people's like but what about or what about in their questions and so for anyone listening right now who is going well but that sounds like a lot of work or wow that sounds so kind of stilted and to talk in this way feels artificial and I remember even my own mind threw up those types of concerns when I first was learning this from you and I just want to say for anyone listening again as someone who prides myself on being a lifelong learner and the kind of pace of life that were in right now there is nothing more healing than actually learning this structure and putting it to use on a regular basis I feel like it's the perfect antidote for me in my own experience of the hectic pace of life and it brings me back to what I most want which is not necessarily more external success or notoriety or anything like that but a sense of feeling safe and loved and I just wanted to say that thank you and I have to say I don't like the structure either in fact we invented it and probably didn't actually use it in a regular way for the first 15 years of our marriage and we've experienced the challenge and it collapsed well if you mean about saying I wrote is that the quote that I wrote I wrote this book and I teach it but I don't do it yeah great well that was that I loved I don't want to interrupt the flow but that was the other thing that I loved about your workshop was because you know I've again experience so many different modalities but oftentimes I feel like people who have something to offer at least in an old paradigm it was almost as if they know better and they're here to kind of share this wisdom from a mountain and what I loved about being in your presence with like half the works I was like okay here we wrote this book but then we weren't practicing it and here was the outcome and now we do practice it and it works and it was just lovely yeah you have to get in the trenches and and I'm an academic so I could figure it out yeah but was not and for a long while was not even interested in doing it shall I know mentioned something that you were saying just about how artificial it seems though like oh this structure and many people respond that way at first and they go I want to be authentic like I want to you know I'm not going to use the structure and in our workshops and working with couples everyone suddenly realizes after they begin using it that it provides safety and also I will mention to your viewing audience that men love the structure better than the women so hello you know it used to be that honey can we talk oh no no you know the fear oh no but if it's taking turns talking guys love the fact that when they're talking if their partner tends to be more of the part talker that they've got their time and their partner stops their own conversation mirrors back and says is there more and then all this stuff that men are slow to bring into their relationship it's something safe to bring it and they're not interrupted and they're not told that they shouldn't think that way no I have the right to their own feeling and point of view and and and I think part of that is that they know what's coming next oh yeah you know we learn from from the from the neurosciences that the brain needs prediction in order for them to feel safe so if I know that we're gonna have a dialogue and not just you got to talk I don't know what you're gonna say right I'm gonna have a dialogue I know what's coming next right you got I'm gonna mirror or you were gonna mirror and we're gonna do and do this thing so it creates safety I also wanted to follow up on what you said right after Harville explained it you said now that sounds like a lot and in the workshop I thought oh but then when you did it in the workshop when you were saying how you were experiencing it yes what happens to Murray we believe is you said you had all these points you wanted to make - Josh yeah you know and he was now stuck all weekend where you could make the points to him yeah but then you were invited into just becoming present for each other but then it was so wonderful and yes we encourage couples if I were to summarize what you said to have a better relationship it's really about shifting from judgment to curiosity and wonder that we're taught in our world to get things right you know we are taught to predicates like speak words and our parents are so proud of her children and we can say words Val or our kindergarten teacher gives us skull stars if we can do things before the other kids and if we do a book reports and in high school we get great grades we go to good college graduate from good college you know making speeches and book you know and analyzing things get to and get a better job and rewarded for talking and making a case well but no one rewards us for listening and and no one wards us for being curious but what our partner is logging for is for us to be curious about them and and wonder what's going on and I could always throw it then but I was doing wrong in our marriage since Harville mentioned you want you want to hear about ya house what a jerk I was yeah but for me when I'm proposed and when I heard he wanted to write a book and he told me what was in the book and we had been dating and I thought I just want I want to help get this book written so I proposed marriage to him even though we fought a lot on our dating I thought I just got to help get this book written and so I also wanted to help him improve his wardrobe and his social skills well I'm from high society he's a sharecroppers son so I was gonna tell him what he did wrong at dinner you know if no one was laughing at the jokes I mean they loved sometimes nobody funny funny and his parenting skills needed tweaking and so um I and I'm real good with technical assistance I'm very succinct and I'm accurate and I wasn't even gonna charge him but for some reason he totally was miserable and so so one day I realized that he just wanted me to ask him how he was feeling every day and that's and ask him and so I suddenly realized poor horrible other people will tell him if he has finished between his teeth right now I don't have to do that so so so it's all about shifting from judgment to curiosity and wonder and if you do that in your relationship you begin to have the relationship of your dreams I want to move on to one of the second lessons that was huge I want to talk about how toxic negativity is both from a neuroscience perspective maybe we can talk a little bit about the zero negativity challenge yeah well um shall I start off with that would you like to do we don't usually tell the story the fortune cookie well should I tell them tell them yeah okay so so our marriage was so miserable that we we lived in New York City top therapists in the world so I said Harper we need to see a therapist I dragged him to a therapist so the therapist would fix it and we were smarter than that therapist so we fired that there but they went to another therapist and they weren't very smart either so we fired them and any way that went on and the fifth therapist called us the couple from hell and said they didn't want to see us anymore so they fired us as a client so we had no choice who went to the divorce lawyers and they drew up papers and and so we announced that to our children and we announced it to the imago community the community of therapists that had come together to learn this and then after a while I mean it was so sad such a low point in my life and but then something happened and Harville said look why don't we try again why don't we start going on some dates so you've been out on a date and what we're gonna do on a date I go to a bookstore me that's what we love to do so we went to the bookstore instead of going to philosophy and psychology I said why don't we go to the occult section I'd love to learn to read your palm and like we can do palm reading and like do something that we don't usually do and we found a book on relationships relational astrology that's it and so you make take his birthday and my birthday and it gives you a message for any couple in this couple and so it said we sat down on the floor and open it up and it said you're about to decimate your relationship unless you give up if with all the scrutiny you give each other we were scrutinizing each other just everyday so we bought the boat took it home and and then oh and I think I'll so we got a fortune cookie that said something about the negative relationship so I said Harville why don't at the end of every day let me get a calendar and let me see if we can make it through one day without negativity I mean I wasn't being negative I was helping powerful I wasn't being negative but if it landed negatively on him the definition of negativity if you experience something as negative you can think you're being funny you're telling a funny joke but if your partner isn't laughing he may have said something that was really negative and no so so at the end of the day if we made it through a day we get a smiley face and at the end of the day there either of us had negativity we did a friendly face and we just frowny face right face we were trying so hard not to be negative but that we practice practice and eventually began to change and we learned it's not what you say it's how you say it you should be able to say anything if your quote giving up negativity but our process teaches a couple how to bring up any topic in a way that's less negative and if it's less negative then there partner there's more incentive for their partner to hear and take it in yeah because the negative transaction is if it to give it a definition is a put-down yes and it can be mild put-down like wet or a really gross but down like you know I don't ever want to see you again you really are whatever and call you by names and you're talking about the neuro chemistry of that is that it's really interesting that negativity activates the emotional brain the amygdala in in the in the limbic system and just starts squirting cortisol into the system and cortisol makes you feel weary and alert and and like you're looking for the predator and it's a very old mechanism and in the right they the most embrace is the oldest as the second oldest mechanism in the brain anyway and so when you feel that deluge of cortisol then you just go into alert and you obviously then in insulate yourself with with the protective armor and you you aware of everything so you really can connect then you can't relate then you can be tactical and strategic but you can't be relational because to be relational you have to be vulnerable and it can't be vulnerable if you defended yes so it does that and and and some people live off of cortisol and because that's the only stimulate they get and we want to be stimulated we want to feel alive and you know you feel really alive when you are looking for the tiger that may be kind of pounce on you in a few minutes for in the form of your partner don't know what's gonna happen right so the neural chemistry of that is very is it's not only powerful and and it's self absorbing I you can't see another person for who they really are when you're when you're into that state so it's some powerful and self absorbing and can become addictive so many people I think when Trudel what we noticed was that when we finally began to see our relationship is we didn't have so many problems we just had a tonal problem which was how we talk with each other about the problems made the problem seem monumental yes and never solved because we were always into the tone and as we've been able to sort that out and talk to couples about that nearly every couple says yeah I know that I get that and that when you go to to a connecting process even though it's difficult different challenging without judgment then the problem is solvable because you're not having to deal with the emotional injury should give each other along the way so we've said it's just absolutely necessary yes for a long time we thought it was like a luxury and could you ask couples to do that and and then finally the logic of the imago system itself is when they've said you know the logic of the system is zero negativity because it's absolute safety yes and you're not safe if your partner put you down or if you put your partner down they're not safe and without safety you can't connect anyway so you have to take out all of the negativity that triggers the amygdala because if you don't do that you will never trigger the endorphins so she can't have endorphins and cortisol at the same time and the endorphins you have a good feeling and with cortisol you have this very feeling that I'm in danger so I want to say and give Helen credit for this is that and Helen came up with this calendar idea which I hated it was like oh we got to be kidding we're gonna sit here every night and and fir and for a while we took we did markers and we'd have a red marker if we got through a day and a black marker if we didn't and the first three probably three months there were maybe two red checkmarks and all the other 88 or more black but we got to this but this one thing is that we don't ask couples to do anything we haven't done and especially anything that doesn't work yes because we tried it all put ourselves I think Helena says in public that if if you think your marriage is bad you should see our marriage and if you think you can't make it we made it you can make it much worse we have the marriage of our dreams now yeah this just took a while well but everyday I'm just the luckiest woman on the planet waking up and I tell them that at least twice a day yeah once the Venice mutual just to have a partner I mean this is the other thing of graciousness and gratitude just have a working partner not somebody who says well you do the best you can and I'm gonna be myself but you know you both have to agree that you're going to you know ride this donkey together yes and and we call that a conscious partnership it's a it's not a competition it's a partnership and so you have to engage in the same behaviors and you know you're gonna blow it but you have a part of you says well you know let's try it again yep instead of come out of here or whatever well and the donkey happens to be learning to love which is like the most important task we're given as human beings is trying to learn to love someone and you know and most of the great world religions you know that compassion is the highest form of human potential any any of the world religions and being raised Christian I think Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment you know there were 12 10 commandments and he said there there are two commandments and they're equal love God and love your neighbor as yourself it's all about love yes and I'm married to someone who has learned to help people learn love it was keep the love of romance instead of inevitably the romantic love turns to disillusionment but um it's cute the donkey image I'm I think donkey riding a donkey but Jesus wasn't I wasn't yeah something but you gotta get in together and close the door and say we're not getting out of this buggy yeah and no matter how bad it gets in here and you know what happens when you do that you say well if it's not gonna get if we're not I mean if we can't get off this train yeah I think I'm I have to change because I don't want to live the way we're living yeah because I've always had an exit and which you know 50% of couples tank is the divorce that we went actually through the divorce papers but if you say I'm not getting off the train then it has to get better and and that's one of the benefits of the of closing the door to the exit yes sometimes then in your brain because the brains always want to get out of the pain too but if there's no way off this train except to change and make it safe here then all of your creativity will begin to move in the direction of the of the welfare of the brain because the brain was to be safe because it knows that's the only way we'll survive yes or thrive respect can survive without safety but it can thrive without safety and it doesn't want to just sit there you know surviving because the brains got stuff to do unless it's scared and then it only has one thing to do stay alive yes and it doesn't have to stay alive then it's got lots of things to do like creativity and exploration and curiosity and that's our true nature when it expresses itself until the negativity comes so when Harville was doing this a minute ago so when I kept asking him what would he write in his book and did it uh and and we kept dating and dating and and I said finally I said oh Harville this reminds me of Martin Buber and he said I don't like Martin Buber no what is this for the remind you of and I said well Martin Buber the Jewish mystic said that if two people learn to shift from treating each other as an eye it like you're in it to make my life happy and maybe you feel the same and to an eye though right two people learn to serve each other uber says that the universal energies begin to flow through the two people and into the space between and he said oh that's gobbledygook I think but but then no but then more and more I mean began to take that idea and really that's how horrible is sort of understanding that the power isn't necessarily me getting mentally healthier fixed by their post or Harville fixed by a therapist or his a spiritual retreat or psychology retreat or whatever it's not either of us getting fixed but if two two if both of us learn to fix the between the collateral is we get healthier but it's the between that we that needs doctoring and Harville is so brilliant it's saying simply what what is needed to help couples connect and he has now moved the theories matured where it's really about taking care of it between yes and I think that's a great place to start talking about your work with communities and safe conversations 360 you know it's on the website which by the way it looks fantastic we're doing such a great job and I felt like there were some very sobering stats on the website that I pulled just in terms of the state of relationship in our lives and the impact that negativity and having negative relationships chronically over the long term can have on us as individuals and as a society you have a hundred percent of people in a negative relationship have a greater risk of cardiac death that's a hundred percent hmm so a hundred percent of people in a negative relationship have a greater risk of cardiac death and a sixty percent drop in productivity as a result of a breakdown in the marriage there was also one other thing that the breakdown of relationships leads to the breakdown of family leads to the breakdown of our economy which leads to the breakdown of our culture do you want to tell us about your work that you're doing now to take this again out of the clinic and and kind of beyond individuals and more towards society no um yeah and I'd like to start it by saying that in 1977 we actually began this work in Helens living room when we were in one of our meltdowns and Helen said why don't we just stop in one of us talk and the other one listened and so I'm and I'm a therapist and go to the my office that day or had just come from it oh but that was the beginning of the dialogue process and and then we experimented with it and introduced it to couples and couples gave us feedback and we finally got these three steps that I was talking about and that became the therapeutic intervention and imago and that's what we became clear is in fact fact there was a a a research project with kindergarten kids in actually in Israel long ago now and they taught kindergarten kids dialogue and these kids were picked it up and began to train their parents in dialogue they wanted their parents to listen and they would say to their parents Mira me Mira me and the parents that you could give it enough information to know what the kids were doing and these kids were followed all the way through to high school and they had a dissonant nobody else in the school learned this this was just one class one researcher who wanted to see this if they'd known what was going to happen they probably taught those school but this one class were the most relationally competent and emotionally resilient class in school they stood out as being you know just human beings who knew how to operate with other human beings and to thrive so that was a long ago and we didn't do much about that we just said oh that's really interesting but things like that began to help us understand that dialogue which we rebranded as safe conversation for for the Dallas project and for this project could become the the language of of everybody that talking is the most dangerous thing people do in listening is the most infrequent thing people do and when you talk with judgment then you will polarize but if you can talk without judgment you can connect beyond your differences and that difference is the big challenge everybody has I mean how am I gonna deal with you if you are african-american if you're a Muslim if you're if Angelico Christian or a Christian or a Democrat or Republican everybody's different everything in the whole universe is different and there's no particle like another particle similar but not identical so the difference is the nature of nature but there's a push in on the human side of nature that that you have to be like me in order for you to be accepted by me in so you know our group is the group and we see these things so about what was said about seven years so about seven or eight years ago Harville had this vision he had said earlier Helen don't people get it the healthy couple is the upriver prevention that prevents down river cleanup I thought it was amazing when he said that that we wouldn't have to put funding into chemical addiction and teen pregnancy and street gangs know if kids like being at home and they retain what they learn at school and they'd be better students if their parents weren't fighting so I just thought that was so awesome he said that but then he said it's gotten so lasered and simple let's get this out of the clinic and into the culture and he suggested we pulled together the other top relationship scientist in the culture we contact John and Julie got Minh Sue Johnson and her beloved who's a businessman working with you know behind her wonderful therapy Ellen and Pete Bader Dano and Dan Siegel and interpersonal neurobiology works with couples and his wife and we met about maybe two or three others and we met and they said yes this shouldn't just be in the therapy offices let's get it out so they met twice a year and they decided that Harville and I should go and experiment in one city and see if we could get it into one city and maybe after that city that they would do it someone we'd get a documentary done and it would go to other cities so we went to tell us about four years ago and we didn't want to start an organization we just said does anyone want this workshop we we have a a five-hour workshop we had reduced our 18 hour workshop to five hours and the low-income part of Dallas wanted it they said let's take your workshop we'll do a Spanish translation of the PowerPoint slides and of the manual Harville I made little cartoons and they gave it to 50 couples and that they had simultaneous translation there I didn't realize I thought more would be bilingual than there were but really most of them didn't speak any English and several of them couldn't even read and out of that 50 couples they loved it five hours later it was like oh wow and we had provided daycare so we started do it they said they said you changed our marriage our whole community needs please do this again as soon as possible we'll bring our friends so a month later Pinkston high school the low-income part of Dallas and then it began to six months later the governor heard I mean sorry the mayor heard what we were doing and he said he invited us to be on the mayor's poverty task force so they get it that strengthening the family strengthening strengthens the economics of the city and the breakdown of the family exacerbates the downward spiraling of poverty and so so we want to take over from there well we've not we now have a training program you know people are coming to get trained and teaching this in their different ecosystems and in addition to dialogue and teaching a couple to problem solve together called converting a frustration into a whisk which you learn to ask for what you want in a healthy relationship we teach communal aughh where people can do this in groups so people are coming from you know they're coming and then they're taking it to the police stations and to schools and they get training in Tobruk rooms to veterans and and oh and all parts of Dallas there's an Chinese group in Dallas and and an Indian community in Dallas and by popular demand descendants stems that Harville said was the three steps of dialogue they've now been translated into eleven women 11 languages embossed in Hebrew in Farsi and Alec and people said not only are you fixing the distance between the couple there's so much tourism in Dallas and there's a low end community in Dallas in a wealthy it's called The Tale of Two see East Dallas is sort of doesn't like that they feel like they are the tale of two cities and people have told us you know healing the connection between the different parts of Dallas so it's just such beautiful work just so the numbers have grown we started off as 50 and then we got it to about a thousand couples which was really amazing that you can actually it was a condensed workshop like the one that you went through but I think it was a six hour workshop in in the huge Colosseum and then we streamed it discovered streaming I didn't know much about streaming and so the executive director who was doing that streamed it and I think now it has been picked up in 175 countries brilliant by over 500,000 people so what's exciting about that is that what helps a couple in the clinic will help anybody in any ecosystem and if you improve talking ie without judgment so that you can connect you actually help satisfy the deepest yearning of the human heart and it's sad that we human beings don't know naturally how to do and we we have to learn that just like we have to learn you have to learn how to be married I don't know how to be married yeah because you don't know how to talk yeah and so what what works there and you were giving those statistics which I'm delighted that you have put out because I don't carry all those numbers around in my head I just know that the negativity in relationships that produces stress in marriages produces stress and kids is the source of at least nine major social human problems all the way from divorce to domestic abuse children switching in school addictions violence crime just go on down the list that we pour money into the symptom you can't fix this problem by treating symptoms you can maybe reduce a symptom for a little while but the cause is the stress in primary relationships and that stress shows up in a corporation in the in the way the bosses and employees relate to each other are the way the bosses relate to each other there's a family overlay because everybody comes out of a group called the family and they take that into their workplace into their worship place into the learning place and all kinds of things happen you wonder what is going on here well what's going on here is the past is repeating itself in the present and and the past doesn't know how to connect it doesn't know how to relate we lost that early in childhood and the human race has not generically across generations known how to be safe obviously we wouldn't have we wouldn't have a civilization built on war which we do have although there is now a new theory out that I really love which is that civilization to not progress by war it would progress by the common people between the wars who created new communities of empathy and stabilize the war was a disruption of that so there was there's something in us that knows what we need but not in us the skills to know how to get what we need and sustain it so Helen I we are we're older and we won't say how old and you know we've already run our or you run our labs and we don't really have anything else we have to do because we know I don't know if we even want to do it but we just decided we would um we test this and so we test it on whole ecosystem the size of a city and so it's moving through that city and as a result of the exposure through the screaming it's now and participated in by seven countries 38 states and I think about 400 50 people have decided to be trained leaders to pick it up and start delivering it in their ecosystems and their cities in their states it's really sort of bizarre the work in Dallas has parts that are hard to it particularly explaining to people what it is we do yeah like we love you for many reasons but part of it is you get the importance of this yes but what is so easy and rhapsodic ly wondrous is the training program we haven't put money into getting a sophisticated training program it's our you know agenda we type up the night before and just PowerPoint slides and and little money and marketing I mean the last workshop a woman I didn't even know she she came in from Singapore she flew in we usually only have about 3035 but they fly in from my couple recently flew in from Switzerland into the training program and we have let's see one of our trainees who flew in from New York Pollyanna in Baldwin they took it to Africa and they did it where South Africa yeah there's Sun sorry I don't know the name of the country but then like one woman came from the Chinese community in Dallas that it added uh but then she took it to China and another took it had took it to the Indian community in Dallas but then she went to India and taught it in the school there so like this little work we're doing it's the holy spirit like flapping her rings just all over the place that's sort of how I think about it so because it's all unanticipated like we had no idea that that our little effort in Dallas would be what a tract interest so far in mind well I hope that it continues to and I just want to I want to let you finish I feel like you know one more thing well yes go for it well we're just gonna say that I that we have enough sort of proof now yes and that end credibility that we're getting ready to go to scale and we don't quite know what that means but it means that we only have nine billion customers yeah we have to get to everybody talks yeah and so and hardly anybody listens so what we do and when people know what you do is some people asked me the other day what do you do i said i help people talk without polarizing and that's what we do and so it's not complicated it's just hard to learn it's hard to practice it's hard to sustain it but is that simple yeah able to talk to another human being without pissing them off and connecting with them so that you feel safe with that person and they feel safe with you that is the desire of the human heart I'm sure that's what our true nature is and that's why we work so hard everybody worked so hard to try to do it but without the technology they blow it and so the simple technology helps people do something that that is our nature it is simple that's his gift we've been called the Steve Jobs of relationship like we take something murky and Papapa and he gets the credit but um it's we were and I asked him if we could write a book making married simple that's sort of for the truck driver I like it too by the way and he's I guess simple and I lutely Aryan getting a loved one but it's hard to internalize you have to practice if you practice it it you you can do it yes but it's not like it comes naturally so you're really rewiring your brain shifting from that lower brain to the upper frame where you can problem solve and collaborate yeah anyway so I want to thank you guys so much from my heart to yours for the work that you do thank you guys I'm telling you everyone who's watching this right now will put links to their books anytime that you guys do save conversations I know there was one last year around thing giving that we broadcast out and yes yes yes yes I know some people in our audience actually they wrote to me they're like that was amazing so I'll continue to support your work and just thank you for being you and for the difference that you're making in the world mm-hmm thank you for having this on and to be with you and to be able to talk about it we appreciate you an honor to be here you're on the journey with us now we would love to hear from you out of all the amazingness that you just heard what's the single biggest insight you're taking away and most importantly how can you put that into action starting right now now as always the best conversations happen after the episode over at marieforleo.com so go there and leave a comment now while you're there be sure to subscribe and become an MF Insider you'll get instant access to an audio I created called how to get anything you want plus some exclusive content special giveaways and some personal updates from me that I don't share anywhere else stay on your game and keep going for your dreams because the world really does need that special gift that only you have thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time on marietv b-school is coming up we want in for more info and free training go to join b-school com rewarded for talking and making a case well but no one rewards us for listening and and no one wards us for being curious but what our partner is longing for is for us to be curious about them

Channel: Marie Forleo

Views: 341,186

Keywords: Marie Forleo, Maria Forleo, personal development, personal growth, self-help, motivation, inspiration tips, inspiration, spiritual tips, self-help tips, be motivated, productivity, MarieTV, career tips, small business tips, tips for business people, tips for entrepreneurs, marriage counseling, marriage counseling and relationship advice, marriage advice, marriage counselling and relationship advice, Harville Hendrix, Helen LaKelly Hunt, Imago community, Imago Dialogue

Id: 8133Tf1CAHQ

Length: 63min 21sec (3801 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018