I'm Harville Hendrix and my occupation is that I help couples with their relationships I'm a couples therapist the couple is fundamentally in conflict for one one really chronic reason all across couples that is that their child their childhood has been transferred into their marriage they don't do it consciously it's like it's just what happens it grew up with the family that family shapes your experience with them that experience with them creates an image in your mind about the primary people in your life and then when you become an adult and you go in your search and find mission the falling in love experience you I see somebody across a crowded room and you move towards them like a moth to the flame and you've you know you feel all these wonderful things called romantic love and they are your dream person you do not know that there's a program running in out of your awareness in the background that's matching you with somebody similar to the caretakers with whom you grew up and matching particularly with a person with whom you will experience the worst frustrations the worst frustrations not the best experiences that you had with your caretakers and so then while they look like the person of your dreams they will become the person of your nightmares and in that leads then into the power struggle and that's when couples come to therapists and so most therapists for generations have tried to help couples talk better have better communication do problem-solving negotiation and conflict resolution doesn't work because that's a very cognitive and behavioral sort of interaction and therapists have not known for until we sort of got it out there that what they had to do was help couples understand that particular reality that their romantic attraction was based upon an unconscious image that brought them together and that apparently this is the way nature works it brings together people who are incompatible who think that they are compatible but they're fundamentally in compatible for mutual healing and growth because what we discovered in our research over the years is that if I fall in love with somebody I'm falling in love with the person who's going to activate the parts of me that need to grow the most so that it becomes a mutual growth of mutual healing process and therapists need to understand that so we teach them about that and then we teach them a relational technology that helps couples understanding that then move into altering the quality of their interactions with each other so that what we finally been able to do is to summarize us so that the relationship becomes safe if the relationship isn't safe nothing can happen in the relationship because you're going to your defenses and that means you go into the sub protective mode you learned in childhood and so you'll be stopped again so you have to learn how to create safety in the relationship the the safety is important for the connection if you don't have safety you won't get connection connection is important because that's who we are we are connecting beings it's not that's not a feeling connecting is reality you can feel it it's like this is this glass is not a feeling but I can feel it connection is not a feeling there's a reality that I can feel so how that connects with health and wellness is that if you are not experiencing connection you're experiencing anxiety and when you're experiencing anxiety you will go into defenses and then all of the relational symptoms that produce conflict and relationships happen but also it's now become very clear in the past 20 years of relational research that there's an interface between physical health and relational health in that the interface is very simple if I'm in stress because of anxiety I'm going to produce negative toxic chemicals in my bloodstream called cortisol and that cortisol is going to impact my immune system I'm therefore going to be more susceptible to diseases we'll have more physical symptoms we'll have probably in those will turn into emotional symptoms so if I'm connected and that connection is stable I'm living in a safe environment a reversal sort of occurs in which you in your newer chemistry is still impacted but this time it's endorphins and other called the pleasure chemicals a whole list of them that wouldn't need to go into and when you're generating that you're doing that in a context it's not that your body does it and then you feel better in the relationship you make the relationship safe and your body produces the neuro chemistry and then your immune system is robust your disease level goes down your symptom level goes down your longevity increases your sense of well-being increases your addictions about certain foods decreases and because you're not wanting something all the time I think they're one of the fundamental things that I've come to understand as human beings are hungry and and so they will eat anything that satisfies that hunger and food is one of the things they do but they'll also eat drugs and they'll also jump off of hot tall buildings or the rope on them they'll do anything to stimulate something that's causing that that's pleasurable and joyful and part of that not all risky sports are pathological but but they can be so part of that is to satisfy hunger and the hunger is for connection and when that connection is stable predictable reliable then you have an enormous sense of well-being everything works and when the connection isn't stable then nothing works because your whole system goes into trying to get that connection back