Once a couple has made a commitment to stay together and to take part in a program of marital therapy, the next logical step is to help them become allies, not enemies. It's fruitless to take two people who are angry with each other and try to lead them along a path of spiritual and psychological growth - they spend too much time trying to knock each other off the road.  In order to make the surest and fastest progress toward their relationship vision, they need to become friends and helpmates.
     But how is this going to happen?  How can couples put an end to their power struggle when they haven't had the opportunity to resolve their fundamental differences?  Love and compassion are supposed to come at the end of the therapeutic process, not at the beginning.
     I found a solution to this dilemma in my studies of the behavioral sciences.  I learned that I could influence the way a couple feel about each other bv helping them artificially reconstruct the conditions of romantic love.  When two people treat each other the way they did in happier times, they begin to identify each other as a source of pleasure once again, and this makes them more willing to take part in intensive therapy.
 

Insight and Behavioral Change

Years ago I was resistant to the idea of such a direct approach to the alteration of mv clients' behavior.  Coming from a psycho­analytic tradition, I was taught that the goal of a therapist was to help clients remove their emotional blocks.  Once they had correctly linked feelings they had about their partners with needs and desires left over from childhood, they were supposed automatically to evolve a more rational, adult style of relating.
     This assumption was based on the medical model that, once a physician cures a disease, the patient automatically returns to full health.  Since most forms of psychotherapy come from psycho­analysis, which, in turn, has its roots in nineteenth-century medicine, the fact that they rest on a common biological assumption is not surprising.  But years of experience with couples convinced me that a medical model is not a useful one for marital therapy.  "When a physician cures a disease, the body recovers spontaneously because it relies on genetic programming.  Each cell of the body, unless it is damaged or diseased, contains all the information it needs to function normally.  But there is no genetic code that governs marriage.  Marriage is a cultural creation imposed on biology.  Because people lack a built-in set of social instructions, they can be trapped in unhappy relationships after months or even years of productive therapy.  Their emotional blocks may be removed, and they may have insight into the cause of their difficulties, but they still cling to habituated behaviors.
     Like many marital therapists, I came to the conclusion that I would have to play an active role in helping couples redesign their relationships.  Insight into childhood wounds is a critical element in therapy, but it isn't enough.  People also need to learn how to let go of counterproductive behaviors and replace them with more effective ones.
 

Caring Behaviors

The place where a behavioral approach proved especially useful was in solving the problem I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, that of quickly restoring a couple's sense of love and goodwill.  In his book, Healing Couples Change: A Social Learning Approach to Marital Therapy, psychologist Richard Stuart presents an exercise for couples that helps them feel more loving toward each other simply by engaging in more loving behaviors.  Called "Caring Days," the exercise instructs husbands and wives to write down a fist of positive, specific ways their partners can please them.  For example, a man might write down: "I would like you to massage my shoulders for fifteen minutes while we watch television." Or "I would like you to bring me breakfast in bed on Sunday morning." The husbands and wives are to grant each other a certain number of these caring behaviors a day, no matter how they feel about each other.  Stuart discovered that, when the exercise was successful, it generated "significant changes in the details of the couple's daily interaction during the first seven days of therapy, a very firm foundation upon which to build subsequent suggestions for change.'
     To see whether or not this behavioral approach actually worked, I decided to try it out on Harriet and Dennis Johnson.  I chose the Johnsons because they were as unhappy with each other as any couple in my practice.  One of Harriet's main anxieties was that Dennis was going to leave her.  In a desperate effort to hold his interest, she flirted conspicuously with other men.  To her dismay Dennis responded to her flirtatious behavior the same way he responded to just about everything else she did - with stoic reserve.  During one session, he mentioned that he was even trying to adjust to the fact that Harriet might one day have an affair.  His quiet heroics exasperated his wife, who was trying everything within her power to penetrate his defenses and get him to be more interested in her.  Those rare times when she managed to get him riled up, he would behave in typical isolater fashion and flee the house.  Most of their fights ended with Dennis's zooming off to safety in his Audi sedan.
     To lay the groundwork for the exercise, I asked Dennis and Harriet to tell me how they had treated each other when they were first in love.  As I listened to them, I had the strange feeling that they were talking about two different people.  I couldn't imagine Dennis and Harriet going on long Sunday bike rides together, leaving work to meet each other at the movies, and calling each other on the phone two or three times a day.
     "What would happen," I asked them when I recovered from my amazement, "if you were to go home today and start doing all those things again?  What if you were to treat each other the same way you did when you were courting?" They looked at me with puzzled expressions.
     "I think I would feel very uncomfortable," Dennis said after a moment's reflection.  "I don't like the idea of acting differently from the way I feel.  It would feel ... dishonest.  I don't have the same feelings toward Harriet that I used to, so why should I t-reat her as if I did?"
     Harriet agreed.  "It would feel like we were playacting," she said.  "We may not be happy, but at least we try to be honest with each other."
     When I explained that taking part in the experiment might help them over their impasse, they agreed to give it a try, despite their initial objections.  I carefully explained the exercise to them. They were to go home, make their lists, and volunteer to give each other three to five of those behaviors a day.  The behaviors were to be gifts.  They were to view them as an opportunity to pleasure each other, not as a bartering tool.  And, most important of all, they weren't to keep score.  They were to focus only on the giving end of the equation.  They left the office promising to give the exercise an honest effort.
     At the beginning of their next appointment, Dennis reported on the results of the experiment.  "I think you're really on to something, Harville," he said.  "We did what you asked us to do, and today I feel a lot more hopeful about our marriage."
     I asked him to tell me more.
     "Well, the day after our appointment, I found myself driving around town in a black mood," Dennis volunteered.  "I can't even remember what made me feel so down.  Anyway, I decided that it was as good a time as any to do what you asked, so I stopped off at a variety store and bought Harriet some flowers.  That was one of the requests on her list.  So I gritted my teeth and picked out some daisies, because I remembered she always liked daisies.  The clerk asked me if I wanted a note card and I said, 'Why not?' I remember saying to myself, 'We're paying Dr. Hendrix a lot of money to make rhinos better, so I'd better do this all the way.' When I came home, I signed the card 'I love you.'" He paused for a moment.  "The thing that surprised me, Harville, was that, as I handed Harriet the flowers, I really did care for her."
     "And when I read the card,' Harriet added, "tears came to my eyes.  It's been so long since he's told me he loved me." They went on to describe all the other things that they had done to please each other.  She had cooked him pot roast and potato pancakes, his favorite dinner.  He had agreed to curl up together in bed as they fell asleep 'instead of turning his back to her.  She had gotten out her yarn and needles and started knitting him a sweater vest.  As they were recounting these events, there seemed to be remarkably little tension between them.  When they left the office, I noticed that as Dennis helped Harriet on with her coat she smiled and said, "Thank you, honey." It was a little thing, but it was the kind of pleasurable give-and-take that had been so absent in their relationship.
     I asked Dennis and Harriet to continue to give each other caring behaviors, and at each session they reported a gradual improvement in their relationship.  They not only were treating each other more kindly, but were also more willing to explore the issues that underlay their discontent.  They spent less of their time in my office complaining about each other and more time exploring the childhood issues that were the reasons for their unhappiness in the first place.
     Because Stuart's exercise proved so helpful for Dennis and Harriet, I used it as a model for an expanded exercise that I labeled "Reromanticizing" because it effectively restored the conflict-free interactions of romantic love. I introduced the Reromanticizing exercise to my other clients, and, almost without exception, when couples began artificially to 'increase the number of times a day that they acted lovingly toward each other, they began to feel safer and more loving.  This 'intensified the emotional bond between them, and as a result they made more rapid progress in their therapy.
I will explain the details of the Reromanticizing exercise more fully in Part HI.  When you carefully follow the directions, you, too, will experience an immediate improvement in the climate of your relationship.  The exercise is not designed to resolve your deep-seated conflicts, but it will re-establish feelings of safety, and pleasure and set the stage for increased intimacy.
 

Why Does It Work?

Why is this simple exercise so effective?  The obvious reason is that, through daily repetitions of positive behaviors, the old brain begins to perceive the partner as "someone who nurtures me." Painful injuries are overlaid with positive transactions, and the partner is no longer categorized as a bringer of death but as a wellspring of life.  This opens the way for intimacy, which is only possible in a context of pleasure and safety.
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 spouses fail to satisfy their secret desires, they assume that the spouses are deliberately depriving them of pleasure.  This makes them want to deprive their partners of pleasure.  The Reromanticizing exercise prevents this downward spiral by requiring couples to tell each other exactly what pleases them, decreasing their reliance on mental telepathy.
Another consequence of the exercise is that it defeats the tit­for-tat mentality of the power struggle.  When couples take part in the Reromanticizing exercise, they are instructed to pleasure each other on an 'independent schedule; they mete out a prescribed number of caring behaviors a day, regardless of the behaviour of their partners.  This replaces the natural tendency to hand out favors on a quid pro quo basis: You do this nice thing for me, and I'll do that nice thing for you.  Most marriages are run like a commodities market, with loving behaviors the coin in trade.  But this kind of "love" does not sit -well with the old brain.  If John rubs Martha's shoulders in the hope that she will let him spend the day going fishing, a built-in sensor in Martha's head goes: 'Took out!  Price tag attached.  There is no reason to feel good about this gift, because I'll have to pay for it later." Unconsciously she rejects john's attentions, because she knows that they were designed for his benefit, not hers.  The only kind of love that her old brain will accept is the kind with no strings attached: "I will rub your shoulders because I know that you would like it." The back rub has to come as a "gift."

This need to be "gifted" comes straight out of our childhood.  When we were infants, love came without price tags.  At least for the first few months of our lives, we didn't have to reciprocate when we were patted or rocked or held or fed.  And now, in adulthood, a time-locked part of us still craves this form of love.  We want to be loved and cared for without having to do anything in return.  When our partners grant us caring behaviors independent of our actions, our need for unconditional love appears to be satisfied.
A third benefit of the exercise is that it helps people see that what pleases them is the product of their unique makeup and life experience and can be very different from what pleases their partners.  Often husbands and wives cater to their own needs and preferences, not each other's.  For example, one woman I worked with went to a great deal of trouble to give her husband a surprise fortieth-birthday party.  She invited all his friends, cooked his favorite foods, borrowed a stack of his favorite 1960s rock­and-roll records, and organized lively party, games.  During the party, her husband acted as if he were enjoy himself, but a few weeks later, in the middle of a counseling session, he got up the courage to tell his wife that he had been secretly miserable.  "I've never liked having a fuss made about my birthday," he told her.  "You know that.  And especially not my fortieth birthday.  What I really wanted to do was spend a quiet evening at home with you and the kids.  Maybe have a homemade cake and a few presents. You're the one who likes big noisy parties!"
His wife had taken the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," a little too literally.  She had unwittingly given her husband a party that suited her tastes, not his.  The Reromanticizing exercise circumvents this problem bv training couples to "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them." This turns their random caring behaviors into "target' behaviors, behaviors that are designed to satisfy their partners' unique desires.

The final benefit of the Reromanticizing exercise is that, when couples regularly give each other these target behaviors, they not only improve the superficial climate of their relationship, but also be in to heal old wounds.  I have an example from my personal 91
history.  My wife, Helen, and I faithfully perform the same exercises that I assign my clients, and the Reromanticizing exercise is one that we have done so many times it has become integrated into our relationship: lt's something we do without thinking.  One of the things that I ask Helen to do for me is to turn down the covers before we go to bed.  This request comes from an experience I had over forty years ago.  After mv mother died, I was taken in by my sister, Maize Lee.  She was only eighteen at the time and recently married, but she did a wonderful job of caring for me.  One of the things that touched me most was that she would always find rime to go into my room before bedtime, turn down mv covers, and put out a glass of orange juice or milk for me to drink.  Today, when Helen turns down the covers for me before I climb into bed, I remember Maize Lee and all that she did for me, and I feel very loved indeed.  On a deep level, this simple action is re-creating the vital parent/child bond.  I feel secure again, and the injury of my childhood is repaired in an adult relationship that has become a zone of love and safety.
 

The Surprise List

After introducing the Reromanticizing exercise to scores of couples, I began to nonce a curious phenomenon: the positive value of doing this exercise seemed to flatten out after a few months.  The couples were faithfully following the instructions, but they were no longer experiencing the deep pleasure they had had when they began the exercise.  It occurred to me that maybe I needed to build into the exercise the concept of random reinforcement.  Random reinforcement, one of the principles of behavioral science, is the idea that a pleasurable stimulus loses its effectiveness if it's repeated with predictable regularity.  Random rewards, on the other hand, create an air of uncertainty and expectancy, and increase the impact of the reward.  This concept was discovered accidentally by a group of scientists who were training laboratory animals by rewarding them with treats.  One day the apparatus that dispensed the treats malfunctioned, and the animals were not rewarded for their efforts.  The next day the machine was repaired and the regular reward schedule was resumed.  To the trainers' surprise, the animals were even more highly motivated to perform than before.  An unpredictable schedule of rewards actually, improved their performance.
     The phenomenon of random reinforcement can easily be observed in daily life.  Most husbands and wives give each other presents on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas and anniversaries.  These gifts are so customary that they are almost taken for granted.  Although the presents may be enjoyed, they don't carry the same emotional impact as a present that is given as a total surprise.  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." The same principle applies to the Reromanticizing exercise.  When couples become locked 'into a particular kind of caring behavior - for example, when they give each other back rubs every night before bed or a bouquet of flowers every Saturday - they begin to derive less pleasure from them.  A curve ball needs to be thrown in now and then to pique their interest
     To add this element of suspense, I created the idea of the Surprise List exercise.  These were caring behaviors above and beyond those requested by the spouse.  A person generated the list by paying close attention to the partner's wishes and dreams.  A woman who casually mentioned to her husband that she liked a dress she saw in a store window might be delighted to find that very dress - in the correct size - hanging in her closet.  A man who expressed his interest in Gilbert and Sullivan might open the mail and find a love note from his wife and two tickets to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.  When couples added unanticipated pleasures like these to their daily regimen of caring behaviors, the beneficial effect of the exercise continued on a gentle rise.
 

The Fun List

As time went on, I made a final addition to the Reromanticizing process.  I asked couples not only to give each other caring behaviors and surprises, but also to engage in several high-energy, fun activities a week.  These were to be spontaneous, one-on-one activities like wrestling, tickling, massaging, showering together, jumping up and down., or dancing.  Competitive sports like tennis qualified only if a couple could play the came without stirring up tension.
    The reason I added this additional element was that most of the activities that people wrote down on their caring-behavior lists turned out to be fairly passive, "adult" activities; they had forgotten how to have fun together.  As soon as I noted this trend, I surveyed all my clients and found that the average amount of time they spent playing and laughing together was about ten minutes a week.  Improving this bleak statistic became a priority to me, because I knew that when couples have exuberant fun together they identify each other as a source of pleasure and safety, which 'intensifies their emotional bond.  When the old brain registers a positive flow of energy, it knows that the activity that triggered it is connected to life and safety, and the partners begin to connect with each other on a deeper, unconscious level.

The Fear of pleasure

With the addition of the Surprise List and the Fun List, I now had a useful tool to help couples begin therapy on a positive note.  But, like any exercise that leads to personal growth, this simple exercise was often met with resistance.  A certain degree of resistance is to be expected.  When a husband and wife have been ,treating each other like enemies for five years, it's going to feel strange to start writing love notes again.  The exercise is going to feel artificial and contrived (which, of course, it is), and to the old brain anything that is not routine and habituated feels unnatural.  The only way to lower this automatic resistance to change is to repeat a new behavior often enough so that it begins to feel familiar and therefore safe.
     A deeper source of resistance to the exercise, however, is a paradoxical one - the fear of pleasure.  On a conscious level, we go to great lengths to seek happiness.  Why 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 this vitality was limited and redirected in order for us to be social beings.  Our pleasure was curtailed so that we could be safe and conform to social norms, and also so that we would not threaten the repressed state of our caretakers.  As these limits were imposed on us, sometimes in punitive ways, we began to make the unlikely association of pleasure with pain.  If we experienced certain kinds of pleasure or perhaps a high degree of pleasure, we were ignored, reprimanded, or punished.  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 of meeting our needs or had deliberately diminished our happiness.  Gradually we developed a built-in prohibition against pleasure.
     People who grew up experiencing a great deal of repression tend to have a particularly hard time with the Reromanticizing exercise.  They have difficulty coming up with any requests, or they sabotage their partners' efforts to carry them out.  For example, one of my clients, a man with low self-esteem, wrote down on his list that he would like his wife to give him one compliment a day.  This was easy for his wife to do, because she thought he had a lot of admirable qualities.  But when she tried to give him a daily compliment, he would immediately contradict her statement or qualify it to the point where it became meaningless.  If she were to say something like "I liked the way you were talking to our son, Robbie, last night," he would nullify it with a self­criticism: "Yeah.  Well, I should do that more often.  I never spend enough time with him." Hearing anything good about himself was ego-dystonic, incompatible with his self-image.  His determination to maintain this negative opinion was so strong that I had to train him to respond mechanically to his wife's kind remarks with a "thank you" and leave it at that.
     There was one man in my practice whose resistance to the Reromanticizing exercise took a different form: he just couldn't seem to understand the instructions.  "Dr.  Hendrix," he told me after the second session devoted to an explanation of the exercise, "I just don't get the hang of this.  Now, what is it that I'm supposed to do?" I went over the instructions once again, making sure they were clearly understood.  I knew, however, that his lack of comprehension was a cover-up for his inability to ask for something pleasurable.  To help him over his emotional road­block, I told him that, even though it appeared that asking his wife to do nice things for him was solely for his benefit, it was also a way for his wife to learn how to become a more loving person - which happened to be true.  When it was put in this less self-serving context, he quickly understood the exercise.  He was able to call a truce with the demon inside of him that told him he was not worthy of love.  He took out a pencil and in a matter of minutes came up with a list of twenty-six things he would like her to do for him.
     Isolaters often have a difficult time with this exercise.  They want to cooperate, but they just can't think of anything their partners can do for them; they don't seem to have any needs or desires.  What they are really doing is hiding behind the psychic shield they erected as children to protect themselves from over­bearing parents.  They discovered early in life that one way to maintain a feeling of autonomy around their intrusive parents was to keep their thoughts and feelings to themselves.  When they deprived their parents of this valuable information, their parents were less able to invade their space.  After a while, many isolaters do the ultimate disappearing act and hide their feelings from themselves.  In the end, it is safer not to know.
     It is often the case, as I've mentioned before, that isolaters unwittingly re-create the struggle of their childhood by marrying fusers, people who have an unsatisfied need for intimacy. This way they perpetuate the conflict that consumed them as children - not as an idle replay of the past, or a neurotic addiction to pain, but as an unconscious act aimed at the resolution of fundamental human needs.  When a fuser/isolater couple does this exercise, it results in a predictable dichotomy. The isolater painfully ekes out one or two requests, while the fuser furiously scribbles a long list of "I wants." To the casual observer it appears that the isolater is a self-sufficient individual with few needs and the fuser has Stress desires.  The fact of the matter is that both individuals have the identical need to be loved and cared for. It's just that one of them happens to be more in touch with those feelings than the other.
     Whatever a person's reason for resisting this exercise, my prescription is the same: "Keep doing the exercise exactly as described.  Even if it causes you anxiety, keep it up.  Do it harder and more aggressively than before.  Eventually your anxiety will go away." Given enough time and enough repetitions, the brain can adjust to a different reality.  The person with low self-esteem can gradually carve out a more positive identity.  The isolater has a chance to discover that sharing secret desires does not compromise his or her independence.  The fear of new behaviors gives way to the pleasure they stimulate, and they begin to be associated with safety and life.  The caring-behavior exercise becomes a comfortable, reliable tool for personal growth.
 

Insight and Behavioral Change

This caring-behavior exercise, and several other exercises like it that you will have a chance to read about in coming chapters, have convinced me that insight and behavioral change make powerful allies.  It is not enough for a man and woman to understand the unconscious motivations of marriage; insight alone does not heal childhood wounds.  Nor is it sufficient to introduce behavioral changes into a relationship; without understanding the reasons behind the behaviors, couples experience only limited growth.  Experience has taught me that the most effective form of therapy is one that combines both schools of thought.  As you learn more about your unconscious motivations and transform these insights into supportive behaviors, you can create a more conscious and ultimately more rewarding relationship.