Transcript of The couples therapists who nearly got divorced | Harville Hendrix

So that's no big deal. In 1999, a million couples applied for and got divorces. What made us different from that is that when we were on our way to the divorce court, we were among the most visible couples therapists in the world, thanks to Oprah Winfrey. For the preceding 10 years, from '88 to '99, Oprah had featured our book Getting the Love You Want and our work on her show at least once a year to her 10 million audience around the world.

So millions of couples around the world were using our process, but our marriage was falling apart. So we decided that we would have to withdraw from our public commitments and go back into a private life because of the incongruity between the public and private stuff.

So we did that. And when we told Oprah we would not be available for the show anymore, she said, "Well, when you all work it out, Harville, call me." So we decided that we would go to therapy, and we went to see a therapist in New York City, considered the best couples therapist in New York. And in the third session, she nearly yelled at us and said, "You are the couple from hell.

You're untreatable, and I want to end our relationship with you, and I'm giving you your money back." So adding to that, we were on our way to the car, and we walked by a bookstore. In the bookstore, we decided we would go in, we needed a little self-esteem boost, and see how our book was doing. And we went in, and it was face out, which is what bestsellers that's the position in the bookstore.

So we turned around and continued out of the bookstore, and we went through the astrology section. And we looked up, and there was this big book called Astrology for Couples. Curious, being a couples expert, supposedly, at least theoretically, I pulled the book down, opened it to the Virgo-Aquarius pairing, and the first paragraph, in the first part of the essay, we were met with these words.

"This pair has the least chance of all couples in the system for a happy relationship because of their unrelenting scrutiny of each other." So we sort of looked at each other and wondered who else had been looking at us, because the serendipity was that in one morning, a distinguished therapist in New York City, where the great therapists are, and an astrology book had agreed on what was wrong with our marriage.

So on the way home, Helen, who is the initiator in the relationship, came up with this idea. She said, "Why don't we put our divorce process on hold, interpret the diagnosis that we're getting as a challenge, and put ourselves " or actually, what she said is, "Practice what you preach," which was the relationship therapy process, and so we would go through it ourselves.

So after haggling with her for a while about that and not listening, we decided that we would do that. So we gave ourselves a year and then a vision that at the end of that year, we would stop the divorce process if we both felt safe in our relationship and that we also were experiencing with each other regularly joyful aliveness.

That would be worth working for. So in order to do that, we had to listen to that diagnosis and get because this is a zero-negativity marriage. We had to get that unrelenting negative scrutiny out of our relationship. So that was the goal. The methodology was that we were going to monitor ourselves daily and weekly, have a conversation. So daily, the monitoring was we'd put a check mark on a day of the calendar if it was negativity-free, and if we had any negativity, we'd put an X, and we'd monitor that daily.

Everybody is equal. So that we call a dialogical conversation. We define dialogical conversation as two people listening without criticizing, talking without criticizing, listening without judgment, and connecting beyond your differences. So it's a powerful conversation. It has a structure. You have to go through the structure. It starts with an appointment. You always ask us, "Now, good time to talk?"

Then you go through three steps in the structure, which is mirroring. Mirroring is what turns listening into engagement. Then you go through a validation process in which you differentiate from each other so each can have an affirmation of the correctness of their separate points of view, that it is possible to do that. And then you do empathy, in which you express your acceptance of and experience of their feelings, and then that's a connecting process.

So we had three topics to run through that, and we had now a year to do that. So the first topic was, "How are we feeling in our relationship?" So I asked Helen that, and she asked me that. And after a few weeks of talking, it got really clear that neither of us felt safe nor visible in our relationship. So that was striking, that we both felt the same way and with the same intensity.

So we wondered, "Is this connected to our childhoods?" Because as a therapist, childhood is the source of everything that shows up in adulthood as something that you don't really want. So we found that it really was. I grew up on a farm to parents who were sharecroppers, and both of them died before I was six, and I was reared by my older sisters, of whom I had three, and they passed me around because they were poor and could keep me only for a little while.

So I didn't feel visible in my growing up. And Helen, on the other end of the economic spectrum and social spectrum, grew up in a mansion. Her parents were busy making money, wealth, and doing philanthropy. And so there were maids who ran her house, and their job was to also care for her, so she felt essentially invisible to her parents. So that invisibility was there. But in the process of discussing all this, we came to this conclusion.

We really don't know each other really very well. We know and have been relating to each other's professional personas, to our defenses, how we protect ourselves, but we haven't really felt safe enough to be who we really are. And in the process of talking and listening, we came to the conclusion of who we are and that we sort of liked each other. So how did we do in our monitoring? Well, the first three months, we made no progress at all.

We had X's all over the calendar. So we decided to add a new quality called appreciation so that we would give each other appreciations on a daily basis. And also, we were sort of serious, so we injected humor. The next three months, we took an evaluation of our relationship, and we were only 50% of the way there. So this was getting to be challenging and puzzling for us.

Why were we holding on to negativity? So we made a radical decision that our marriage as a system required negativity and that what we needed to do was change the system itself into another system in which it would not require negativity. Because the system we were in, we saw each other as resources for each other. And therefore, as a resource, you're always going to not fulfill the deal, and there will always be a basis then for frustration and criticism.

But we decided we would change the perception of each other from a resource into a blessing or a gift, and that we would base that on the fact that each of us were creatures of nature, that each of us had intrinsic value, and that we were valuable because we existed, and that we would honor that value because we existed. And so practicing that for the next three months, our impasse dissolved.

We began to feel safe with each other and seen by each other. Our problems became decisions to make rather than issues to debate. So we were at the end of that process, and that was 26 years ago. And by the way, Oprah called, so we went back into the public life. So what we want to say in conclusion is that over these past 20 over about 10 or 12 years ago, we moved dialogue from couples into the world, or we extended it into all ecosystems, found it works equally well there.

So we launched, 12 years ago, a global social movement to teach dialogue to 2.4 billion people in the world by 2050, which is the tipping point of the world's population on that day. In order to usher in a relational civilization in which everybody will relate laterally and equally, and everybody will be seen, heard, valued, and included.

Additional support from Isabella Oslarona, Daniela Balareso, Valentina Bojanini, Banban Chang, Christopher Fazzie Bogan, Cinnamon Horn, Laney Lott, Matthew Polis, and Yadi Vasquez. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.