Harville Hendrix
Episodes
Notes
TED Talks Daily · The couples therapists who nearly got divorced | Harville Hendrix
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How Did Harville Hendrix Save His Own Marriage?
Harville Hendrix says the marriage was saved when he and Helen LaKelly Hunt stopped treating each other as a resource and started treating each other as a gift, after a year of trying to remove criticism.
Both had felt invisible since childhood. His sharecropper parents both died before he was six, and three older sisters passed him around because they were poor. Hunt grew up in a mansion while her parents were busy with money and philanthropy, and maids cared for her. They had been relating to professional personas, not to who they were. They found they liked each other.
The first three months brought only X marks on the calendar. A daily appreciation and some humor left them only 50 perc
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How Do You Break the Cycle of Criticism in a Relationship?
Harville Hendrix says a couple breaks a cycle of criticism by taking unrelenting negative scrutiny out of the relationship and replacing ordinary argument with a conversation in which both people listen and talk without criticizing.
In the third session, a New York therapist nearly yelled that he and Helen LaKelly Hunt were the couple from hell and untreatable, ended the work, and returned the money. The same morning, a book called Astrology for Couples said the Virgo and Aquarius pairing has the least chance of all couples in that system for a happy relationship, because of their unrelenting scrutiny of each other. Hunt, the initiator in the relationship, proposed putting the divorce on ho
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Did Harville Hendrix Almost Get Divorced?
Harville Hendrix says he and his partner, Helen LaKelly Hunt, had been married 44 years, and they nearly ended it. Across the marriage they considered divorce several times, seriously at least twice, and in 1999 they started the legal process and were on the way to divorce court.
In 1999, a million couples applied for and got divorces. What set them apart was that they were among the most visible couples therapists in the world. For the ten years from 1988 to 1999, Oprah Winfrey featured their book, Getting the Love You Want, and their work on her show at least once a year, for an audience of 10 million. Millions of couples were using their process while the marriage was falling apart. They