Esther Perel's Blog, page 14

October 30, 2014

The 2014 Imago Relationship Institute Annual Conference

Tysons Corner, Virginia (DC area)

More Information

July 9, 16, 23, 30

Love, Sex, and Power

Online Workshop

After years of requests, I am offering my first Online Relationship Workshop for you: Love, Sex & Power.

Do you have questions about fostering excitement in your relationship and deepening your connection with your partner? I’ve got answers.

This four-class online course starts on July 9th and is a rare opportunity to engage in honest conversation about the topics we’re most silent about: sex and intimacy. Experienced from the comfort and privacy of your own space.

Can’t join live? No problem! All classes are recorded and available for download.

Register and you’ll receive handouts and recordings to listen at your convenience.

What you can expect:

Each class will be a combination of lively discussion, case study examples, hands-on suggestions and participant Q&A to help you tackle your toughest relationship problems and keep your romance going for the long run. Singles and couples from all sexual orientations are welcome.

For more information or to register, click HERE.

For many mothers, sex turns from an expression of love, intimacy and desire into an obligation. They lose track of their own desire, their own pleasure, their own motivations, and they feel like sex has become ‘just another thing that I have to do to take care of someone else’. Women with young children are overwhelmed by care-giving responsibilities and sex simply becomes another source of resentment.

…

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Christina is a woman who’s so constantly involved in being a mother and caring for others that when her husband initiates sex, she confuses offer and demand. She fails to see his advances as an invitation and responds as if it is one more obligation. Instead of seeing a man, she reacts to him as if he is one more child who needs something from her. ‘I already have two children, I don’t need a third.’

See my suggestions for couples like Christina and her husband, including self-care, sex dates, and restoring control in Wise words: Esther Perel on sex and relationships on Psychologies UK.

July 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30, 2014

Teleclass with Esther Perel and Terry Real

5 Wednesdays, 2-3pm ET.

Can’t join live? No problem! All classes are recorded and available for download.

Register and you’ll receive handouts and recordings to listen at your convenience.

Join two world-renowned relationship experts for an exciting and rewarding 5-session course exploring clinical perspectives and interventions for the really tough situations you face in couples therapy. This PRACTICAL workshop will give you skills you can use on Monday morning. Using case examples and hands-on interventions, this teleseminar will focus on:

This 5 session course will cover the following topics:

1. How to approach a first session to set up the therapy: motivation and readiness; tools and strategies; interaction with therapist – moving couples from resentment to understanding, accountability, repair and appreciation.

2. New narratives: The healing power of reframing: How to construct new, empowering stories; how do we create with our clients stories that are dissimilar enough from those they walk in with to promote change and similar enough to be taken in.

3. We all marry our unfinished business: Working with family of origin. An in-depth discussion of how to work with a partner’s childhood and their multigenerational legacy as it impacts the couples now.

4. Therapists’ use self and self-preservation. A close look at your existential and clinical assumptions, your moral values and personal experiences and how they influence your therapeutic work.

5. Talking about sexuality with couples: Introducing a non-shaming sex positive vocabulary. Strategies for couples to step out of sexual impasses and reconnect with the erotic.

Register on Terry Real’s website

The following segment is from the second session of Anatomy of Couples Therapy: Challenges & Choices teleclass with Terry Real. The class is still available for purchase on Terry Real’s website.

When we talk about self-destructive behaviors, it is so different when we look at it in the context of infidelities as if when we look at it in the context of other expressions of self-loathing, of rage, of entitlement. The interesting thing of talking about infidelity is, why people will act in a way where they could be taking the risk of losing everything – their family, their children, their reputation, their hard won existence for a glimmer of what? People do this, there must be something massively compelling on the other side. We can emphasize the self-destructiveness or we can emphasize the longing, the quest of what one finds there. It was one of the most powerful ways people have of beating back deadness. And more often with their life, I don’t always think that there is this defacto, something missing in the relationship, as if the relationship had this it would inoculate us against this wanderlust. For some people it’s an experience of autonomy, of self affirmation as in, this thing I do totally for myself. I have been doing for others, my self-destruction is actually been I have sacrificed myself in the context of my life. I’ve only thought about everybody else’s needs and I have not attended to mine at all. It becomes a kind of redefinition of where is the sacrificial life. I present this narrative not as an endorsement but as a story I have often heard.

In some situations: I have taken care of my four kids, I have taken care of my dying mother, I have taken care of my helpless father, I have taken care of my employees, I have taken care of my alcoholic sibling, I have taken care of my unemployed husband or partner, and I find myself in the libidinal space of an affair in which I can, for the first time, attend to myself. That is one place where I know I’m not taking care of anybody else. It is not only transferential, it is a difficulty in differentiating, in holding on to me, in the context of others, that requires I go elsewhere in a secluded place that is disconnected from my life through the secrecy, my life can’t enter in there and therefore nobody can come in and ask me anything. This is one discourse I hear from unfaithful partners, there are so many. And of course as they talk about themselves they are not thinking of the implications, only the motivations.

We will continue the dialog on tough challenges you face in couples therapy in our newest teleclass series, starting June 2nd. Register for Rethinking Couples Therapy: The Hard Questions and The Nuts and Bolts

Terry Real and I are continuing our teleclass series with an exciting and rewarding 5-session course exploring clinical perspectives and interventions for the really tough situations you face in couples therapy. This practical workshop will give you skills you can use on Monday morning.

Class starts July 2nd – All classes are recorded and available for download. Can’t join live? No problem! Register and you’ll receive recordings and handouts to listen at your convenience.

EARLY BIRD pricing is available NOW through Friday, June 20th (save 45$!)

This 5 session course will cover the following topics:

1. How to approach a first session to set up the therapy: motivation and readiness; tools and strategies; interaction with therapist – moving couples from resentment to understanding, accountability, repair and appreciation.

2. New narratives: The healing power of reframing: How to construct new, empowering stories; how do we create with our clients stories that are dissimilar enough from those they walk in with to promote change and similar enough to be taken in.

3. We all marry our unfinished business: Working with family of origin. An in-depth discussion of how to work with a partner’s childhood and their multigenerational legacy as it impacts the couples now.

4. Therapists’ use self and self-preservation. A close look at your existential and clinical assumptions, your moral values and personal experiences and how they influence your therapeutic work.

5. Talking about sexuality with couples: Introducing a non-shaming sex positive vocabulary. Strategies for couples to step out of sexual impasses and reconnect with the erotic.

You can still register for this class after the start date.

Recordings of each session will be emailed to you for you to download and listen to again or if you missed any class live. DETAILS ON JOINING THE CALLS WILL BE EMAILED TO YOU ONCE YOU HAVE REGISTERED.

CEUs: 5 Continuing Ed Credits will be offered when the course has completed. Instructions to request credits will be emailed to all registrants after the final class July 30th. Cost is $20 payable at that time.

Register here: Rethinking Couples Therapy: The Hard Questions and The Nuts and Bolts

In case you missed it, I was Colbert’s guest on The Colbert Report Monday June 9th. The episode is currently available on Comedy Central’s website. I believe the video is only viewable by those in America. If a clip becomes available on YouTube, I’ll share it here.

Just a quick reminder to watch The Colbert Report on Monday 6/9 (Comedy Central, 11:30pm ET) to see just how nervous I am! Before and after the show we will be answering your questions on Twitter and Facebook so please join the conversation (include @EstherPerel so I’m sure to see your question).

See the full line-up for next week including me

These are highlights from a teleclass I did with Tammy Nelson. You can purchase recordings of this class at her website: The New Monogamy; Love, Sex and Fidelity

Phase two could be labeled the Investigative Phase – what was happening, how did this happen, what was going on? As much as the betrayed can remain open, curious and take it in (may take quite some time), it will help the couple begin to take in what was happening for the unfaithful to get to that point.

There’s a common path of couples – Commitment for life immediately creates regression back to what we know of life-long connection: family. We are no longer 2 adults hanging out, partying together, focusing on our desire for each other. We begin almost immediately repeating developmental patterns that we’ve learned from childhood. Within a month to a year, we begin to parentify our partner, i.e. “I can’t believe you never pick up your socks!” Parentifying the relationship desexualizes the partnership. Now we are no longer 2 equal partners, now you’re my parent nagging me and why would I want to have sex with you? We either stay in the child-like dependent relationship expecting our partner to fill all of our needs like a mother or father, or we rebel like an adolescent. It depends on the developmental need and the role you play in the relationship. Then we begin to try and find ourselves outside of the relationship. The affair becomes a way to fill a developmental need in the unfaithful. Growth is trying to happen. Unfortunately, this scenario set up the person to have to “leave” to become an individual. In adolescent rebellion, one has no choice but to break the pattern/role/relationship with partner because that’s what adolescents do.

Being unfaithful is not the only type of betrayal to consider. One woman had an aversion to having sex with her husband because of his smell and I wondered if that she had kept that a secret as well. Does it cause more moral problem to sit with that secret than an infidelity? Does one type of betrayal tops all others? When I see couples come in after a revelation of an affair, emphasizing this betrayal as if it is the most important one and the 1st one, often the other partner has had their ways of leaving the relationship or betraying their partner. For example: a man doesn’t touch his wife for 8 years of marriage and when she initiated once, they made love she was able to get pregnant. After another 8 years of her trying everything she initiates an affair with a colleague and when he finds out he is distraught and hurt. She threatens therapist’s office or lawyer’s office. They come to my office and he is in detective mode, wants to know how, when, where, etc. I was puzzled by his intense curiosity about every detail of her affair when he was uninterested in all the details of what she had not done. Abandonment and betrayal can manifest itself in many ways, which is why I don’t always look at faithfulness as the virtue of all virtues. Sometimes people can be sexually faithful and can be indifferent, neglectful, dismissive – there are lots of ways to treat partner painfully and betray the emotional contract.

A lot of people have affairs on the heels of a loss. A committed husband, father, finds himself suddenly in throws of a passionate desire for another woman who has nothing to do with his life, the kind of person he has been or the kind of woman he has lived with. The betrayal for his wife is that she never imagined he could be this man because her deal for herself in marrying him was a kind of resignation of a certain erotic bond that she couldn’t have with him in return for an emotional stability, connection, security that she also wanted. So here is this man who goes and taps into a part of himself that she gave up in order to be with him and she says, “Who is this guy?” It turns out that a year earlier his mother had died, his last surviving parent. This man who has always said that his needs come second, who had learned to keep himself hidden, who had never asserted himself or put his needs up front because it was much too exposing of himself, goes into a rebellious act. When his wife speaks of how there has always been a connection for her between the emotional closeness and her sexual desire, his first thought was, “Whenever we were particularly close sexually it was not that good between us. You in relation to me because you abdicated eroticism and me because I have never been able to be ruthless, to actually unleash my desire, to not be all constantly thinking about you.” This thinking about the partner makes the partner feel that you are not there. So while you experience yourself being busy with them, they experience you as being busy with yourself. His second comment was, “I never questioned my love for her and I don’t see my affair as a threat.” It had nothing to do with each other.

The good news is, the affair can enhance their relationship by bringing this dynamic into their awareness. It can break them out of the pattern and be a relationship enhancer in that it brings the relationship back to an equal level. So they can stop blaming each other and begin to look at the three parts of Phase II:

1) What was going on for me in that moment that I felt I needed to do that; what was unfinished for me that I was acting in that developmental stage?

2) What was going on for my partner who was betrayed?

3) What was going on for us?

If you really want to understand your partner’s affair, ask them what they found there. It is a calming question because it’s a question that emphasizes differentiation, otherness; a question that says the 2 of us are having a very different experience about this same crisis. Taking them from blame to understanding is the essence of Phase II of affair recovery.

These are highlights from a teleclass I did with Tammy Nelson. You can purchase recordings of this class at her website: The New Monogamy; Love, Sex and Fidelity

There are three phases of treatment around affair recovery: a beginning, middle and end of treatment.

Phase 1 is characterized by calm, reassurance, structure, image of the container – created with my voice, my breathing, touching them, asking them to breathe, asking them to have eye-contact with me or to lower their eyes away from their partner – soothing and calming. Suggest they not make a decision to leave or stay; urge them not to decide, they are not in a position to make a decision, separate the affair from the divorce.

Reassurance: I will be here with you, I have sat with many couples through this moment, I promise you it won’t be like this forever. I don’t know where you will end up but what you will do here hopefully will give meaning to whatever happened. What you are going through is normal; it is in the nature of the beast. This is what people go through – read After the Affair by Janis Spring for more examples. Don David Lusterman recommends normalizing the flux of contradictory feelings, especially the resumed sexual hunger that is suddenly unleashed. Most clients are very uncomfortable talking about it. One partner is triggered by panic of loss and they’re talking more about their needs, unmet longings, than they have in years, and that is Normal.

Structure: I don’t think all these answers can be asked right now. I know you want to know this/this/this, take a moment with me and know that there is a difference between wanting to know and knowing. People will ask questions and not be prepared to live with what they are going to be told. They need someone to say to them, “I can see that you would want to know that; can you imagine yourself living the consequences of knowing?” This is enormously protective and containing for them.

Don’t rush in to ally with the person who is hurt. We don’t want to rush the process with empty answers about why a person did what they did.

Acknowledge that there are two people here for whom the predictable future has been disrupted. They are in this together. Neither of them knows where this is going to go. Each one is anxious and restructuring the relationship. Each is anxious about being alone, anxious about the return of the old conflict.