Getting the Love You Want is a relationship advice book that focuses on how childhood wounds influence our relationships. It has lots of practical exercises to heal childhood wounds and improve our relationships.
TPM Scientific Check: Unproven hypotheses. Men better include agency alongside communion
This book prioritizes communion over agency, which can backfire for men. It presents a popular therapy-based model of relationships. However, it relies heavily on clinical observations and speculative theories, with limited empirical backing.
While some insights may be useful, readers should prioritize evidence-based frameworks such as evolutionary psychology, social exchange theory, and power dynamics. Men specifically should prioritize self-sufficiency to maintain long-term attraction.
Overview
- We have wounded children looking for salvation
- We look for partners with the same traits as our parents
- We appreciate partners with complementary traits to feel whole again
- We can consciously fix our childhood traumas with our partners
- Understand first our wounds
- Share them in an atmosphere of safety and trust
- Focus on our partner’s needs to help them heal
Notes
Above everything, we seek connection, says Harville Hendrix.
And what brings most couples to therapy is a lack of connection between them and the world around them. Their relationships are more of a “me VS you” than “us” (also read: how to fix combative relationships).
And the reason why they fail at connecting, says the author, is because of their childhood. Children need an attuned parent.
Attuned Parenting
Children need a caregiver who is present both physically and emotionally. It’s a caregiver who soothes you and takes care of you. An attuned parent also encourages the baby to express all emotions by accepting them.
“are you angry, do you want to stop playing”?
“happy baby, you are such a happy baby”
Attuned parents raise children who are more likely to create solid and satisfying relationships as adults. They are not attracted to people who abuse them and attract good mates with ease because they have a positive self-image (read how low self-esteem gives you abusive relationships).
My note:
Harville is basically describing a secure attachment type.
When Children Experience Rapture
The rapture children experience and that which scars them as adults are:
- Neglect (not attending to our needs)
- Intrusion (meeting their own needs through us)
The author says most children suffer both wounds as many families tend to have a neglecting parent and an intrusive one.
Fixing Child Wounds (& Relationships)
By connecting with our partners deeply we fix our children’s wounds heal. It’s because our unconscious mind doesn’t differentiate between the present and the past.
Hence building a strong connection with our partners both improves our relationships and fixes our old wounds.
Important note: you cannot connect if there’s lots of negativity in the relationships (also read the four Horsemen that destroy relationships).
The 5 Secrets of Great Relationships
Hendrix says that if he were to take all the insights he accumulated over thirty years and sum them up, it would be this:
- Accept that your partner is not you
- Be an advocate of your partner’s uniqueness
- Make your relationship a holy space removing all negativity
- Respect your partner’s boundaries
- Practice the Imago Dialogue (mirroring, validating, and empathizing, below)
This is the author explaining Imago:
Attraction Models
The author explains why we are attracted to certain people and summarizes the theories.
Biological Theory
We pick mates that enhance the chances of offspring survival. Men go for beauty and fertility (young age) and women go for alpha qualities (also read The Selfish Gene and The Moral Animal).
Exchange Theory
Social psychology postulates we pick mates that are more or less our equal (also read The Social Exchange Rule).
That much is true and has been shown in multiple studies.
Persona Theory
This refers to how a potential mate enhances our own self-esteem, and that we tend to pick mates who make us look good (also read how to have perennial high self-esteem).
Harville says there is some truth in this theory.
The Unconscious Drives Us Back to The Caregiver
The theory Harville Hendrix add is that of the unconscious mind pulling us towards mates that resemble our caregivers. It’s something he sees over and over in therapy.
Why We Look for Our Parents
The author says that we seek mates who are similar to our caregivers to heal child wounds.
Our old brains believe we have finally found the ideal candidate to make up for the psychological damage of our childhood.
Indeed we look both for positive and negative traits from our parents, but the negative traits are far more influential.
Push or Pull & Attachment Theory
Parents who push children away raise children with an insatiable need for closeness (anxious), and parents who smother their children and never let them explore raise children who crave personal space (avoidants).
My Note: the theory makes sense… In theory. I am an avoidant and my parents gave me all the freedom in the world.
Feeling Rejected Scar Children
Children will invariably get the message that some of their behavior is not OK, which makes them feel like they are not accepted as a whole.
The parts that are not accepted become our “lost selves”.
And we often project the traits of our lost self that we denied into our partner. For example, we might project our repressed anger onto our partner and feel that they are angry persons.
The author says the mistake many parents do is to ignore or disapprove of a baby’s feelings.
He proposes instead that a parent always validates the child’s feelings, even when they disagree. For example, they could say:
Parent: “I can see you are mad, and you don’t want to do what I ask. But I’m the parent and you need to do what I say”.
Feeling Whole
To feel whole again we often look for complementary traits in our mates.
The Power Struggle of Dating
At a certain point, romantic love ends and the power struggle begins.
The author says that once the relationship is secure a switch happens and we activate all the latent infantile wounds.
We find that those complementary personality traits annoy us, and the traits of our lost self that we longed for now wound us. The same way our parents hurt us when they neglected or repressed us.
Only a minority of couples manage to overcome the power struggle phase. The author says that the secret is to satisfy each other’s childhood longings.
Conscious Partnership To Fix Each Other
The conscious partnership is all about fixing each other’s problems.
The book has a lot of exercises. If you feel this is an issue you have in your relationship, then I recommend you grab a copy.
I particularly liked a central tenet, which is that to be loved, we must first love.
To be loved, we must first love
Changing the approach to criticism
The author proposes a different approach to criticism in relationships.
Criticism indeed often tells as much about the criticized partner as it says about ourselves, which is what we should explore more.
Here is how to go about criticism:
- Accept that the criticism you receive from your partner has some basis in reality
- Much of the criticism of your partner is because of our own unmet (childhood) needs
- Sometimes we criticize our partner for what we lack ourselves
- Our criticism might come from our lost self and a wish to be more like what we criticize in our partner
CONS
Little Evidence Backing The Psychoanalytic Approach
The book is very ‘Freudian’, and one may argue that Freud was a genius.
But Freud also jumped to many unscientific conclusions that proved to be wrong.
And I see the same tendencies in “Getting The Love You Want“.
For example, the author says that we look for complementary traits in our partners so that we can feel whole again.
That could be the case.
But what if we want complementary traits because of the imprinting from our parents, as some theories suggest?
Or what if we look for similarities because we like and feel comfortable with what’s familiar?
All these theories seem, to me, more plausible than this “whole” theory.
Evolution & Power Dynamics Matter, But Aren’t Here
Childhood is important but it’s not everything. And probably not even the most important element.
Mate value, sexual market dynamics, and availability of options often matter far more for who we pursue, fall in love with, and end up with.
Do you think that if a guy has a shot with an attractive woman who is exactly his type, higher mate value, and he has no other option, he will not pursue her because she’s not exactly like her mother?
Please..
Drawing principles from therapy clients is textboot biased sample
I’m not convinced that you can create a comprehensive theory by looking at a therapist’s experience alone.
First, there is the issue of how the case studies were captured and recorded. Second, how large was that sample?
And third, there is self-selection bias. People who go to therapy are inherently self-selecting, and that’s a well-known sampling bias.
Confusing attachment style denomination
Hendrix ends up talking of avoidant, anxious, and secure attachment types quite a bit but never mentions the theory. And calls them in different ways such as “fusers” and “isolators”.
I found that strange because this book is basically an explanation of how attachment styles develop.
Review
Getting the Love You Want is an interesting book with some potentially valid insights and exercises to help couples, but with important limitations.
It’s not a book for everyone, possibly not for most, and most likely not for healthy and securely attached couples who didn’t have childhood issues.
It’s also not perfectly aligned with The Power Moves and it seems to speak more to a feminine quest for relationships as temples, rather than a masculine drive to achieve goals.
Check out the best relationship books or get the book on Amazon
Getting the Love You Want Summary: Heal Childhood Wound
A fantastic book on how infantile wounds affect our relationships.
URL: https://thepowermoves.com/getting-the-love-you-want/
Author: Lucio Buffalmano
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