Drs. Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks (Interview Archive)
Gay: When we started out, there was nobody ahead of us showing the way. Katie: No role models at all. So we made a decision to treat our own relationship as a working experiment, a place to test what a close partnership could actually become. That has been the thing we've cared most about for the past 35 years. Gay: We came together in 1980. During the first decade or so, we were also doing a lot of work with other couples, and because we happened to be partners who worked side by side, we kept attracting couples who did the same. Working with your partner is sort of the Olympic event of relationships.
Eric: That's true.
Gay: Many of the methods we developed for guiding people through the rough patches came out of that period, and they fed into our book, Conscious Loving. As you mentioned, that book is what first got Oprah's attention. We appeared on her show a couple of times, and some years after that we wrote The Conscious Heart. Now we have a follow-up aimed at couples in the middle of their lives, Conscious Loving Ever After, due out in 2015.
Katie: What we care about is the place where conscious loving meets body intelligence. For a long time psychology assumed the traffic ran one direction: your mind reshapes your body. We've been paying attention to the reverse, how a shift in the body can reorganize your thinking, your emotional patterns, even the whole relationship.
Gay: Let me give you an example of body intelligence doing its work. A client came to me years ago, and it was one of the first times I watched this process unfold right in front of me. She was gripped by anxiety. Her husband had just told her he was starting an affair with another woman, and she was coming apart over it. As we talked, I noticed her breathing had the sound of a freight train, hard and fast. So I asked her to do one simple thing: turn her attention to that breath and locate the feelings sitting underneath it, then let herself actually feel them with her awareness instead of blowing them out through all that heavy breathing. Once she did, the breathing settled and the anxiety drained out of her body. What remained was the raw material underneath it, the fear and anger and grief, the kind of emotion that can only be met in the body. By handling those feelings in a new way, physically, she got through something that had been making her miserable, and she did it fast, even while she was still working on the problem itself.