Esther Perel's Blog, page 11

December 12, 2014 2:00-4:00 PM

Workshop at Brief Therapy Conference

Hyatt Regency Orange County

11999 Harbor Blvd.

Garden Grove, California

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The Brief Therapy Conference is the only comprehensive multidisciplinary conference in the world. Therapists/clinicians from major schools discuss and demonstrate their approaches. The stellar faculty has included representatives from Brief Psychoanalytic Therapy, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, Cognitive Behavioral, Ericksonian, and Solution Focused Therapy, to name a few.

December 12-13, 2014

Keynote Presentation at Brief Therapy Conference

Hyatt Regency Orange County

11999 Harbor Blvd.

Garden Grove, California

More Information

The Brief Therapy Conference is the only comprehensive multidisciplinary conference in the world. Therapists/clinicians from major schools discuss and demonstrate their approaches. The stellar faculty has included representatives from Brief Psychoanalytic Therapy, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, Cognitive Behavioral, Ericksonian, and Solution Focused Therapy, to name a few.

November 15, 2014

8:30 AM to 4:30 PM (CST)

Austin in Connection

Austin, Texas

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Austin In Connection fosters healthy relationships through the integration of emerging science and practice.

The Commons Center at JJ Pickle Research Campus

10100 Burnet Road

Austin, TX

From “Rethinking Couples Therapy: The Hard Questions and The Nuts & Bolts” teleclass with Esther Perel and Terry Real. The full teleclass series is available for purchase here.

Therapists inform their therapy based on the context they live in, and the values they bring to their ideas and ideals of coupledom.

These are my existential and clinical assumptions that inform my work.

I believe that life is complex. This belief gives me a lot of tolerance for ambiguity. I don’t always believe the answers are clear. Through this, I am able to do a lot of work by keeping people in a situation of ambivalence and have a lot of patience for that. This is especially important when working with infidelity.

I also vacillate between a world view of truth is subjective and couples’ work takes place within a social construct on one hand. And then I also adhere to a view of fact is a fact (i.e. poverty is poverty). I want to understand when something is a social construct and a subjective truth, and when something is clear cut, factual.

People hold contradictory and powerful emotions toward people they love. Someone can simultaneously hate and love their partner. They can experience both aggression and connection towards a person. These emotions can change day by day. I will search for the other side that supersedes the emotion and feeling of today. For example, when a patient comes in angry and tells an angry story, I will get them to tell the happier side. I look at the dialectic between love and anger, as interdependent emotions.

I am beginning to reject the concept of failed marriage. The common belief is that a marriage that ends is deemed a failed marriage, and only marriages that last until the couple dies are considered a success. Many relationships last for decades and accomplish a lot. I believe saying goodbye and end a marriage does not necessarily mean failure. One of my couples in therapy wrote to each as they were giving back their rings that, they both were grateful to what they had build together and that they will always cherish it. Ending like that, with appreciation for what they had in the past, may be a new way to look at divorce.

I no longer take for granted that a couple is monogamous and that monogamy is a matter only of sexual exclusiveness. This helps me be clear and comfortably ask questions about sexuality as an integrated part of couples therapy.

I pay attention to see what I avoid, what intimidates me, where are my discomforts and where in my body I feel them. If I feel emotions (i.e. discomfort, envy, etc.) it is important to notice and track them.

When you invite couples to talk about something that clearly is not be part of your world? How do you respond? (position of authority, looking for the problem in it, emphasize relationship and trust, ask questions about it, etc)? I now look at whether I invite people to talk to me about aspects of their life that differ from mine. If they do, do I address that in a way that benefits me, or benefits the couple?

November 5, 2014 at 7:00 pm

French Institute: Alliance Française (FIAF)

With international couples therapist and author of Mating in Captivity Esther Perel, and syndicated sex advice columnist Dan Savage.

New York City, New York

Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street

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Why do people cheat? Could your relationship survive an affair?

Join us for a discussion about commitment, jealousy, and betrayal in the 21st century.

Presented as part of The Art of Sex & Seduction Series curated by journalist & writer Erica Lumière

November 3, 2014

The Curated Forum For New Gen Real Estate Leaders

Ritz Carlton in South Beach, Florida

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October 30, 31, November 1, 2, 2014

St Julien Hotel

Boulder, Colorado

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Success 3.0 Summit in Boulder, Colorado. The Summit is being created to bring together dozens of the world’s leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and change-agents to articulate a new, transformative narrative success for individuals, companies and society, as well as discourses of conscious living and success that incite personal, social & global change.

October 30, 2014

Keynote Presentation at The 2014 Imago Relationship Institute Annual Conference

Tysons Corner, Virginia (DC area)

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Why doesn’t good intimacy guarantee good sex? Why does great sex so often fade for couples who claim to love each other as much as ever? Can we want what we already have? Why does the transition to parenthood so often spell erotic disaster?

Join Esther Perel, as she shares her bold, provocative new take on intimacy and sex that shakes up traditional thinking about keeping desire alive in a long-term relationships. She will show how love and desire relate, but also conflict. She will discuss how the need for security and closeness can co-exist with our quest for separateness and freedom. In this session, Esther will tackle eroticism as a quality of aliveness and vitality in relationships extending far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques, frequency and performance.

October 20-21, 2014

Centro Aigle Buenos Aires, Argentina

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I will be the keynote speaker at this year’s annual Imago Relationships International Conference on October 30th in Washington, DC. I will be speaking on how we can our need for secure attachment and our need for freedom and separateness. In the afternoon I will participating in a panel of noteworthy Imago therapists We will be discussing how to work with couples around intimacy and sexuality, how to help couples come out of emotional and sexual impasses, and how to bring an in-depth discussion to the interplay between these dialectic needs we bring to our adult intimacies. I look forward meeting all of you and being in dialogue with you.

Click Here to Register for the 2014 IRI Conference