“When something archetypal possesses you, you’re actually owned by that energy. It’s not something you keep pumping up. It keeps flowing through you and you feel alive and energized, and more ideas come and more structure comes, and after awhile you have a vision.”
That’s Harville Hendrix speaking, so get ready. Sit comfortably. Batten down the hatches. He has paused. But not for long.
The global couples guru and former youth pastor is on his pulpit – at this moment, the phone, in advance of a speaking engagement in Toronto this week. From his home in New York, he’s letting it all flow: his history as a pioneer of the marital therapy called Imago, now practised by more than 2,000 therapists in 21 countries around the world; his Oprah Winfrey-endorsed book, Getting the Love You Want, which continues to be on bestseller lists more than 20 years since its release; his own marital mistakes (one divorce, one almost-divorce); his theory on how to be blissfully wed (it starts with banishing all negativity); his passion (he will turn 75 in the fall, but he’s not slowing down); and his vision.
It’s a big one, that vision. He’ll launch a global couples’ educational initiative (as yet unnamed) this summer, but the outcome he expects won’t come to fruition for about 50 years, he figures. Which is why he has taken to eating mainly raw foods – vegetables mostly and a little fish – and never drinks alcohol. He wants to be alive when it all begins to happen.
“We have discovered that the violence on the planet arises out of the dysfunction in the family, the core of which is the couple.” The statement gets put out there, just like that. No gentle introduction. He rephrases for clarity. “All violence on the planet is the family writ large.” He pauses as if to let his audience absorb it. “We now know where the demon is of the human tragedy, the human problem. The demon is in the family.”
I’m thinking what you’re thinking: Wow and eek and oh dear.
“Oh, yes,” he replies assuredly when I express my incredulity. His delivery is not so much fire and brimstone as water and silk. “The crystallization happened five years ago,” he explains soothingly. “It seemed kind of cliché, but that cliché was suddenly filled with luminous energy, and I thought, ‘My God, if that’s the case, I’ve been working on peace on Earth all of my life right here with these couples. So I’m not doing therapy. We’re actually doing planetary healing.’ ”
Attribute the vision to getting old. Five years ago, just as he was about to turn 70, Dr. Hendrix completed the transition of Imago into a “legacy organization, so that if I die one day” – yes, he did say if – “I want a system set up so that no one competes for supremacy.” He transferred power to a board of directors, stayed on the board for two years, and then let others run it on their own. “I didn’t have job, and I was free for the first time to think about what we have achieved.”
It had all begun in the aftermath of his first divorce in 1975. He and his wife, parents of two children, had been married for 16 years. At the time, he was a professor who taught marriage and family therapy as well as the psychology of religion at a theological seminary in Dallas. “But I was totally unconscious,” he says. “There’s no relationship between what you know and what you teach,” he adds ruefully.
