The couples therapists who nearly got divorced | Harville Hendrix

0:00Harville Hendrix: 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.

0:25Helen LaKelly Hunt: You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. And who you just heard there was today's speaker, relationship therapist Harville Hendricks. For about a decade, he and his wife, Helen LaKelley Hunt, appeared on Oprah at least once a year to talk about getting the love you want. And couples everywhere were using their method for transforming conflict into healing and growth. There was just one problem. Their own marriage was falling apart. A lot of the trouble came down to something most of us are probably doing.

0:58Harville Hendrix: The ordinary conversations is what we all do. They're called parallel monologues, in which you talk and the other person talks, and you're trying to control the narrative or you're waiting for the other person to stop so you can refute their commitment to their absolute truth.

1:18Helen LaKelly Hunt: In this talk, Harville shares what happened when he and Helen gave themselves one year to turn things around. He's candid about how slowly it went, including a less-than-flattering diagnosis from a fellow therapist, and about the moment they realized the problem wasn't any one fight, but the way they had come to see each other.

1:37Harville Hendrix: 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.

2:00Helen LaKelly Hunt: Harville makes the case that the kind of listening that saved his marriage works far beyond couples, in families, workplaces, even whole communities. That's coming up right after a short break.

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4:31Helen LaKelly Hunt: And now our TED Talk of the day.

4:35Harville Hendrix: I want you to meet Helen. Helen is my partner in life and work and usually my co-presenter. So she sends her regrets that she's not here today, but you'll learn more about her as I tell you our story. And I want to start our story with the fact that we have been married now for 44 years. And thank you. But during that time, we considered divorce several times, at least seriously twice. And in 1999, we actually engaged the legal process. 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.

5:42thanks to Oprah Winfrey for the preceding 10 years from 88 to 99.

5:49Harville Hendrix: 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.

6:48Harville Hendrix: 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.

7:06Harville Hendrix: You're untreatable. And I want to end our relationship with you and I'm giving you your money back.

7:18Harville Hendrix: so adding to that we were on our way to the car and we walked by a bookstore and the bookstore we decided we would go in we needed a little self-esteem boost and see um how our book was doing and we went in and it was it was face out which is what best sellers 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, and the first part of the essay, we were met with these words.

8:16This pair has the least chance

8:20Harville Hendrix: 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'd been, 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.

9:23Harville Hendrix: 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.

10:18Harville Hendrix: 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 the 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. Now, the conversation that we agreed to was not just an ordinary conversation. The ordinary conversations is what we all do. They're called parallel monologues. in which you talk and the other person talks and you're trying to control the narrative or you're waiting for the other person to stop so you can refute their commitment to their absolute truth.

11:06Harville Hendrix: Our conversation was going to be a dialogical conversation. By the way, the monological conversation is vertical and top-down. So the dialogical conversation is lateral. 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 this structure. Starts with an appointment. but you always ask us, now a good time to talk. Then you go through three steps in the structure, which is mirroring.

11:58Harville Hendrix: Mirroring is what turns listening into engagement. Then you go through 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.

12:53Harville Hendrix: 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.

13:13Harville Hendrix: 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.

13:59Harville Hendrix: 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 and 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.

14:53Harville Hendrix: And also, we were sort of serious, so we injected humor. 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. How come negative, 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 gonna not fulfill the deal.

15:43Harville Hendrix: 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.

16:39Harville Hendrix: 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, 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.

17:34Harville Hendrix: So we wind up with these three affirmations. One is you cannot love whom you do not know. And you cannot know without listening. so that listening is the first act of love. This is available to anyone, and as we have experienced, it's never too late to start listening and loving. Thank you. Thank you.

18:13Helen LaKelly Hunt: That was Harville Hendricks at TED 2026. If you are curious about TED's curation, please visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Aspen Fitzgerald Dorsey, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Shu Han Hu, Debbie Rolfe, Emma Tobner, Connor Titsworth, Tanzika Sungmar Nivong, Isaac Waiten, and Hannah Yu. Additional support from Isabella Aslarona, Daniela Ballarezzo, Valentina Bohanini, Ban Ban Chang, Christopher Faze Bogan, Cinnamon Horn, Lainey Lott, Matthew Polis, and Yadi Vasquez.

18:58Helen LaKelly Hunt: 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.

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