The sacred space

"Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it necessary?
Is it true? Does it improve on the silence?"
Shirdi Sai Baba

"I have been talking about the vital role that safety plays in creating lasting love. Two people cannot be passionate friends unless they feel safe in each other's company. Couples need to feel physically safe, to be sure, but they also need to feel emotionally safe. Without safety, they cannot say what's on their minds, express their full range of feelings, or be who they really are. They cannot lay down their armor and connect, even if they truly want to. We are all built that way. Danger activates our defenses."
Harville Hendrix, Getting all the Love You Want

on life and caring

"One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others."
Lewis Carroll

"When we were infants, unable to meet our physical and emotional needs, pain and pleasure came magically from the outside world. When the bottle or the breast appeared, our hunger was satisfied. When we were cuddled, we felt soothed. When we were left alone in our cribs to cry, we felt angry and afraid. As we grow older, our old Brain remained frozen in this passive worldview: good feelings and bad feelings were created by the actions of other people; we couldn't take care of ourselves; others had to do it for us. The part of me that hurt couldn't accept love from within myself because I had no way to receive self-love. Nor does anyone else. Salvation is not an 'inside' job; it is the outcome of being nourished by others."
Harville Hendrix, Getting all the Love You Want 

The power struggle

"Even today, I am impressed by how aggressively each of us defends our seperate reality. It must be connected to our fear of the loss of self. If I see it your way, I will have to surrender my way. If I feel your experience, I will have to invalidate mine. If what you say is true, then what I say must be false. There can be only one center of the universe and that center is me! But if I muster the courage to suspend my own point of view for a moment and then manage to see a fraction of your reality, something miraculous happens. First of all, you feel safer around me. Because I am no longer challenging your worldview, you can start to lower your defenses. As you do this, you become more willing to acknowledge a portion of my reality. Because I have abandoned my centrist position, you are more willing to let go of yours. To our mutual surprise, a drawbridge descends on its rusty hinges, and you and I connect."
Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want

The fear of pleasure and other stuff

"People believe that separation opens their eyes to their self-defeating behaviors and gives them an opportunity to resolve those problems with a new partner. But unless they understand the unconscious Desire that motivated their dysfunctional behavior in the first relationship, and learn how to satisfy those desires with the new partner, the second relationship is destined to run aground on the same submerged rocks."

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"But there are other, subtler reasons the exercise works so well. One is that it helps people erode the infantile belief that their partners can read their minds. During romantic love, people operate out of the erroneous belief that their partners know exactly what it is that they want. When their partners fail to satisfy their secret desires, they assume that they are deliberately depriving them of pleasure. The romanticizing exercise prevents this downward spiral by requiring couples to tell each other exactly what pleases them, decreasing their reliance on mental telepathy."

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"Random reinforcement, one of the principles of behavioral science, is the idea that a pleasurable action loses its effectiveness if it's repeated with predictable regularity.
[...] A behaviorist would say that the reason routine gifts aren't as exciting is that the " psychoneurological system has become desensitized to predictable, repetitive pleasure. " [...] A curve ball needs to be thrown in now and then to pique their interest. "

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"I knew that when couples have fun together they identify each other as a source of pleasure and safety, which intensifies their emotional bond."

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"On a conscious level, we go to great lengths to seek happiness. Why, then, should we be afraid of it? To make sense of this reaction, we need to remember that the sensation of being fully alive is deeply pleasurable. When we were young children, our life energy was boundless and we experienced intense joy. But some of our pleasure was curtailed by our caregivers so that we could be safe and conform to social norms: " Girls don't yell and run." "Don't jump on the couch." "Be careful! Come down from that tree." "You're making too much noise." But our fun was also cut short because it threatened the repressed state of our caregivers. [...] As these limits were imposed on us, sometimes in punitive ways, we began to make an unlikely association between pleasure and pain. [...] On an unconscious level, this negative stimulus triggered the fear of death. Eventually we limited our own pleasure so that we could reduce our anxiety. We learned that to be fully alive was dangerous.
However, applying the strange logic of children, we didn't blame our parents or society for equating pleasure with pain; it simply appeared to be our lot in life. We told ourselves, "My parents limited my pleasure, so I must not have been worthy of it." It was somehow safer to believe that we were intrinsically undeserving than to believe that our parents were incapable off meeting our needs or had deliberately diminished our happiness. Gradually we developed a built-in prohibition against pleasure. "

Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want

Imago Dialogue / Becoming dialogical

Sobre Harville Hendrix