November 11, 2021 • 63 mins
In this episode, I talk to renowned psychotherapist and author Esther Perel about love and relationships. We tackle the true essence of the word “eros” and “freedom” in the context of romantic relationships. Esther offers her perspective on marriage and affairs, getting to the root cause of why people cheat. With the redefinition of fidelity and sexuality, our current society is still learning how to navigate new patterns of relationships. We also touch on the topics of soulmates, masculinity, how to keep passion alive during a global pandemic, and Esther’s practice as a cross-cultural therapist.
Bio
Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and a New York Times bestselling author, recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on modern relationships. Fluent in nine languages, she hones a therapy practice in New York City and serves as an organizational consultant for Fortune 500 companies around the world. Her celebrated TED Talks have garnered more than 30 million views and her best-selling books Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs are global phenomena translated into nearly 30 languages. Esther is also an executive producer and host of the popular podcast Where Should We Begin? And How’s Work? Her latest project is Where Should we Begin − A Game of Stories with Esther Perel.
Website: www.estherperel.com/
Instagram: @estherperelofficial
Topics
00:02:14 Adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic
00:05:04 Social connection during the pandemic
00:10:41 “The erotic is an antidote to death”
00:16:02 True freedom in relationships
00:21:05 Soulmates don’t exist
00:25:38 Why people in happy marriages cheat
00:33:54 Where Should We Begin?
00:38:00 Redefining marriage, fidelity, and sexuality
00:45:30 Esther’s cross-cultural approach to therapy
00:48:35 Esther’s interest in cultural transitions, identity, and relationships
00:54:01 The masculine obsession with power
00:59:13 The Great Adaptation
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey everyone, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. I'm especially
excited for today's episode. For one, we are relaunching the
podcast with Stitcher. They are one of the leading podcast
networks and we're really looking forward to working with them
to bring the podcast to the next level. Second, I'm
really excited about our guest today is Staire Parrell. Astaire
is a psychotherapist and a New York Times bestselling author
(00:28):
recognizes one of today's most insightful and original voices on
modern relationships. In this episode, I talked to Astaire about
love and relationships, especially in the age of a global pandemic.
Astaire also offers her perspective on how to keep passion
alive during your marriage, as well as affairs getting to
the root cause of why people cheat. We also tackle
(00:48):
the essence of the words arrows and freedom, and we
touch on the topics of soulmates, affairs, masculinity, and Estaire's
practice as a cross cultural therapist. I've been looking forward
to this conversation with this Stare for years, and I'm
delighted to finally be able to bring it to you all. So,
without further ado, I bring you a Stare Perrell. Start
(01:12):
It's so great to chalt you today. I've been looking
forward to this for years. Actually, it's pleasure to be here.
You patient. You've been very patient. I have been, and
you know, my mom told me patience often pays off.
So I'm very excited to chat with you. Why is woman?
I remember at the American Psychological Association conference, we were
(01:35):
also captivated by your keynote. We were at the front row,
and we we came up to you afterwards this couple
of years. I don't know if you remember this, and
we're so we you know, we didn't expect, you know,
you'd actually show up, but we're like, oh, we just
wanted to invite you to our our division ten social,
you know, for our arts thing. And then you came in.
I think with your you believe that you're you're you
came in with your husband, and we're like, oh my god,
is there to our to our social You You made
(01:57):
our lives. So I just want to thank you so
much for your great viciousness over the years. I'm very
happy when I make the right decisions at a certain
point and someone reminds me and it was just like
a small thing to do that other people remember so
I like when I thought, well, yeah, I really really
made our lives, so thank you. So I want to
(02:18):
start off by asking, you know, really, how are you?
You know, how are you during this pandemic? How's it
affected you as a therapist, as a human? I think
the best way I can answer you is to tell
you that when I was looking for the topic of
our annual Sessions Live Virtual Training conference, which is our
(02:40):
fifth and I was thinking what is on the mind
of therapists today, mine and everybody else. I'm a practitioner,
I'm you know, I am leaving the parallel experience that
a lot of my clients are experiencing. And I really thought,
here it is the great adaptability. How can we stay
(03:00):
grounded when the ground is moving? And the way is
how can therapists and clients stay grounded when the ground
is moving? Because I was feeling well, okay, fine, but unmoored.
I felt like the structure of my life has so
fundamentally changed and it ain't going back. I felt that
(03:22):
by not being able to go home for two years
to Europe, you know, so many things have happened. I
felt that parts of me that come alive in those
other languages when I am in the other parts of
my life have been completely dormant, and I thought, what
is my adaptability? You know, how do It's no longer
(03:43):
coping just coping and waiting and adjusting to the It's
really what is adaptability going to look like for me
and for my field and for all people working in
the field of relationships and well being for that matter.
So that's how I'm doing. I'm thinking about adaptability. I'm
thinking about mass mutual reliance. Who have I reached out to,
(04:05):
who has been a part of my circle? And what
has happened to so many that I have not been
in touch with? And I'm thinking about the concept of
post traumatic growth. At what point we do? What do
we learn from here? And how will it actually strengthen
me and strengthen my children, my partner, you know. So
(04:26):
that's how I am doing. It's a I translate often
what is happening to me, and then I look, am
I alone? Or is this actually quite reflective what many
many friends and colleagues are going through? And then I
name it in my professional life, but in fact it's
a reflection of my own internal life as well. Yeah, wonderful,
(04:50):
you know. My author Jordan Feigel and I wrange a
book on those traumatic growth right now, we're going to transcend.
We're actually we're actually undercut, you know about transit. We're
actually have a contract to write a workbook which will
be out next year on the post pandemic growth. That's
a follow up. And so this topic is right on
fresh in my mind, and well it's on the stress
(05:11):
on everyone's minds right now. And you know, I'm just
wondering from a therapy perspective, you know, do you with
relationships and working with couples, have you how's the nature
of some of your ideas you talked about in the
past kind of need to be adapted for pandemic eraror
where couples are together so much that it's hard to
get that mystery that you talk about in your in
(05:31):
your books, you know, that excitement, that unpredictability. So what
do we have right now? Right? I mean, I'm going
to continue it in the framework of the conference because
I literally had to articulate it for myself, that very
question that you're asking me. Right, So, social connection at
this moment, it's three parts. I'm thinking about intimate relationships
(05:56):
because that is the essence of my work, the relationship
between the client and the provider, the practitioner, the therapist
of all sorts, and the relationship of the therapists in
their own personal life with their partners, with their romantic partners,
or with their friends, family, etc. So it is a
triad going on. You know, there's eighteen months of prolonged uncertainty,
(06:19):
mixed with grief, mixed with loss, mixed with a fundamental
shift that we have to make away from silo driven
lives approaches and therapy for that matter too, to a
collective perspective, to a pluralistic perspective, and pandemics, like all disasters,
(06:43):
are relationship accelerators. They basically put you in touch with mortality.
They put you in touch with an existential fragidity, the
fact that life can change at any moment. Your house
can burn, your land can be flooded. Here you know,
your health can be destroyed overnight. And when you are
(07:04):
in touch with mortality, you say life is short. And
when you say life is short, you say what is
important to me? What do I want? And what do
I no longer want to live with? To endure, to tolerate,
to do in my life, etc. And so that's what
happens to relationships at the same time as people have
spent more time with their families and partners than they
(07:26):
ever have in decades. And at the same time that
I say that you cannot ask one person to give
you what an entire village should provide, that's exactly what happened.
People go home with one person that was supposed to
replace everybody. And there is a lot of upheaval going
on in relationships at this point, for those who have
been together the retrofit and for those who are just
(07:50):
starting out and trying to understand. So it's a very
interesting thing. At the same time as we have this
enormous uncertainty and overlapping global crisis, we also have glimmers
of clarity about what really matters for us in life
at this point and what we need to do to
protect our relationships, to invest and replenish our relationships, and
(08:11):
to stay connected. It is what occupies me on a
personal level at this moment. It's what occupies me with
sessions live at this moment kind of in the thralls
of this because I think that is so much going
on relationally speaking, in light of what we are going
through Yeah, for sure. And I really like this that
(08:31):
you mentioned that our priorities have shifted in a lot
of cases. You know, in your book Meeting in Captivity,
you ask the question can we desire what we already have?
And it seems like this question takes a different little
bit of a different flavor during the pandemic, because we
might have a lot more gratitude for what we have
in a way that we never had before. Maybe we
realized we took for granted our relationships right in some ways.
(08:54):
So the second part of that sentence in Mating in
Captivity was to say, you never have your partner. It's
an illusion to think that they belong to you. At best,
they are on loan with an option to renew if
you act towards your partner. You know. So in this moment,
(09:17):
some people are more grateful and realize, you know, you're
here today. I want to savor I want to savor us,
my family, what we have created together, et cetera. And
in some other situations it is there is a deadness
that and languishing the name that the word that Adam
(09:38):
grants so put back in the public space here that
I can no longer tolerate that. There's what I call
the death of ros, the death of the energy that
fuels us with the liveness and vibrancy and vitality and
life force that it has to do with playfulness and
curiosity and imagination and meaning and the poetry that comes
(10:01):
in our relationship. When that whole thing is gone and
people start to feel like I'm just a function, what
do we have together? I don't exist for you as
a person. There's a lack of care, there's a lack
of fundamental interest in who I am, and vice versa.
So you have both things going on in this moment.
(10:21):
It's not just I'm grateful for what I have, it's
also I realize what I don't have and what I
no longer can want to live without. Sure both are possible,
even simultaneously. Yes, yeah, yeah, you've got a push pull
and you know, like I love you, but I also
(10:42):
missing out on all those other stuff. So you've mentioned
that the erotic is the antidote to death. That's a
really profound statement that I want to unpack a little bit,
especially in the pandemic kind of situation. What is the
erotic mean? First of all, you know, I get a sense.
You know, you're using it in a sense that's broader
than just penetrative sex. You know, there's a there's a's
(11:05):
a whole spirit, it's a whole way of being, in
a kind of humanistic psychology or from sort of era
kind of way. So I'd love to hear some of
your thoughts that so. I you know, when I think
of my definition or not my definition, when I think
about the way I define the erotic, I think about
the Zohar, the Jewish Kabbalah, I think about the mystic
(11:30):
sense of the word. I think about Audrey Lord and
her writings about what it means to reclaim, a process
of reclamation of one's ability to experience pleasure and dignity
and connection and control. I am really not talking about
it in the most narrow sexual sense that modernity has
(11:52):
given the word. It's a word that really needs to
be resuscitated in its full meaning. Heros is life force.
Heros is what makes you feel alive. You know, if
you want to look at it from the sexual point
of view, people can have sex and feel nothing. Doing
it doesn't tell you anything about the experience, but the
quality of the experience. The poetics that you're attached to it.
(12:15):
That is what makes it erotic, that aliveness, that feeling touched,
you know. So this is true in marriage too. You
can have a marriage that isn't dead, and you can
have a marriage or a relationship that is alive. And
that aliveness has to do with how people preserve a touch,
a contact with curiosity, exploration. It is the antidote to
(12:39):
death because when you are curious and exploratory and discovering
and playful and imaginative, you feel like there is still
so much to learn, to discover and to live. That
makes it the antidote to death. Death is when there
is nothing more. Heros makes you feel like there's still
so much to live, to breed, to connect with people,
(13:03):
et cetera. The notion that the eros is an antidote
to death or deadness is that you feel in touch
with the erotic when you experience whatever it is that
you do with what is called flourishing or flow or
aliveness or radiance. All these words you know, and they
(13:23):
have to and they come with power and dignity and
self love and connection to others. They are quite all encompassing.
And so that's what I talk about when I talk
about how do we connect to the erotic? How do
you take a routine and turn it into a ritual.
How do you take a touch that is just a
(13:46):
touch and you turn it into a touch that comes
with pleasure and joy, that is a switch from ordinary
to erotic. Yeah, I love this. I love the way
you say situated within the idea of vitality, but also imagination,
the human imagination. This is an area of mutual interest
of ourns and I really loves the humanistic psychotherapist role
(14:11):
mains work. In his book Love and Love and Will
You Know, he talks about errors in Love and will
is the human imaginations, such as a part as part
and parcel of it. You know that we can kind
of you know, sex, he said, pulls us but imagine,
but erros allows us to think more forward looking. We're
the ones that are kind of moving looking forward and
(14:34):
with hope and vitality, whereas sex and lust is we
often feel like we're being driven by it, you know.
So I just always really resonate with that kind of distinction.
Have your past. The Mexican essayst also says, you know,
sex is the pivot, It's the natural instinct. But Eroticism
is sexuality that is socialized and transformed by the human imagination.
(14:57):
Now you ask about this in relation to the pandemic,
I would say this freedom in confinement comes through our imagination.
When you see little children play during this pandemic, and
at some point they take out big boxes of Amazon
and these boxes become hots, and then they take books,
and these books becomes rocks in the river. And now
(15:19):
they're going and their playing, their imagination has taken them
out of the lockdown. When you can't leave physically, you
can leave with your mind. This is what I learned
from my own parents, who spend years in concentration camps
during the Holocaust, and I understood that idea that you
lift yourself out, you liberate yourself through your imagination. You know,
(15:47):
poetry is to prose the way that eroticism is to sex.
I love that well. I find a lot of your
writings is very poetic, even just in the kind of
cadence and upon which you write. It's it's beautiful. Thank you. Yeah.
Can we can we double click on the word freedom.
(16:08):
This is a very interesting word because I think a
lot of things that people in relationships think will bring
them freedom once they try these things, they actually they
wonder why am I not free? Why do I not
Why do I not feel free? You know? So some
people with like avoidant attachment style, for instance, may fear
a relationship or fear anything that makes them feel like
they're boxed in in any sort of way, because they'll
(16:30):
say it'll, you know, takes away my freedom. But you know,
often a lot of people the avoidant attachment style feel
report feeling lonely, and and some not always and I
was in the case, but sometimes they report feeling lowly
and report feeling well, you know that I still don't
feel free, you know, I still don't feel completely free.
So what are some misconceptions about this idea of freedom
(16:51):
and relationship? Like, you know a lot of people have
these kind of misconceptions that you know, you're you're only
free if you know you can sleep around with as
many people as possible, or you're only free of xyz.
What are some kind of misconceptions about that. It's a
complex question, you know. I think that the best way
I can answer this is to go back to the
(17:12):
spine of the book Mating in Captivity, because when it
really looked at and I borrowed it from loads of people,
but in particular I was very much influenced by the
writings of Steven Mitchell. Can love Lass, but so as
rolland Bacht, so you know a few others. But we
have two fundamental sets of human needs all of us.
(17:34):
We have a need for grounding, and we have a
need for travel or we have a need for security, safety, predictability,
and we have a need for exploration, novelty, change, curiosity, freedom.
All of us have both. But some of us come
out of our childhood wanting more protection and more commitment,
(17:57):
and some of us come out of our childhood wanting
more space and more freedom. We tend to partner with
somebody whose proclivities match our vulnerabilities, so that the solid
will often meet the liquid, the structured, the ground that
(18:18):
the anchored, you know, will be drawn by the curious,
the traveler, the ulysses and you know, and then the
ulysses will find that there is something very reassuring being
with someone who is structured, who is reliable, responsible, et cetera.
And when this works in a complementarity, it's a beautiful fit.
(18:41):
Often it becomes challenging as well in many relationships, so
freedom is, you know, the dance between autonomy and togetherness,
between separateness and connection. You need both. You needed to
feel a modicum of groundedness and something to come back
(19:04):
to the safe harbor in order to be able to
leave and to feel free. But the freedom is not
the leaving. The freedom and this is the important freedom
in the realm of sexuality and desire that I was
trying to articulate. The freedom is that while I'm away,
I'm not busy worrying about you, being anxious for you,
(19:27):
constantly fretting about how you're going to be when I
come back. It's not hard to leave physically while you
take inside of you an entire worry machine. You know.
The freedom is to know that you are okay while
I am doing my thing. That's a freedom in relationship
(19:48):
that I don't have to give up chunks of me
in order to reassure you, because my freedom is your insecurity.
What happens a lot these days in our field is
the focus went from the humanistic work after the war
that was very much focused on looking at freedom. Freedom
(20:11):
in the existential sense of the word that came with responsibility.
That you know, freedom was never a carelessness. And then
we went and we put an entire focus on the attachment,
and the notion was that a secure attachment will create
the ability to experience separateness. But separateness is what will
(20:35):
create the ability to experience an ability to surrender to
one's desire. The interesting thing is that you cannot. It's
a real contradiction. How at the same time freedom implies responsibility,
(20:56):
and at the same time, a certain kind of freedom
implies a read them and a release of the responsibility.
It's both. And yeah, that's it's really true. And just
you know, bringing this idea of this idea that this
romantic notion that love should not should not require work,
that if it's if it's meant to be, it shouldn't
(21:18):
require work. Well, I think role Made did a good
job just spelling that. And and love and will that
the human will does is an important part of it.
And you know, I read somewhere that you said you've
been married for thirty years and or at this point
it's more than thirty years, and and and it's it's
it's still has taken a lot of work, right, I Mean,
(21:38):
there's been moments where you know you have to you know,
you show, you have to reveal that. You know, there's
the imperfections of each other. I mean there's you know,
and and I think what I really liked about when
Rol we talked about is he said, well, that's you know,
you need in order for errs to happen, you need
to give it time for those those things to be resolved,
for there to be an unveiling, a real revealing of
(22:01):
each other's real self or else, you know, errors doesn't develop.
And I just want to know Clorf on that idea
a little bit. If you want to play piano, you
will continue to practice playing piano. You can call it
practicing rather than working at it. You know, the English
American English is often talking about the word work because
(22:22):
it's very Protestant influenced in that sense. It's work. You
could call it creative work. You could call it active engagement.
You can call it investment. You can call it pruning, caring, watering.
You know, basically, it's paying attention, it's nurturing it, it's
feeding it. It's not letting it just die there and agonize,
(22:44):
you know, in a complete dry land or in a pool,
you know, in a cesspool, one or the other. So
it's there is not another area in life where people
don't think that. In order to stay nimble at some
it the man's paying attention, bringing new things, refresh, renew, reset,
(23:07):
you know, except in love, because this notion of which
it just should happen, it's part. You know. There are
two main approaches that Justin lie Miller was talking to
me about. One is the destiny model of relationship. It's
meant to be. It's kind of falling from the heavens,
(23:28):
you know, divine intervention. It just is, I don't have
anything to do with it. It's so. But then when
it doesn't go well, then you say, just the opposite,
It wasn't meant to be. It's fate. It's destiny. That's
very different from the growth model. The growth model is
I make it happen. We make it happen, and sometimes
we fuck up, and sometimes we just let it become
(23:50):
lazy and complacent and we forget about each other. And
every relationship is going to go through dips at some
point the only difference is that some of us kind
of get in gear and start to resuscitate, to infuse
it back with life, with joy, with laughter, with attention,
you know, with good food, good relational food. So it's
(24:15):
very very interesting, and it goes together this idea about
it doesn't it shouldn't be work, it should just be
and errors should just flow from the heavens, you know,
while you know, like like while you're folding the laundry
for that matter, right, goes hand in hand with the
(24:36):
search today of what we call the soul meat. Your
partner in many circles today is seen as a soul meat,
a saltmate that you find, of course on an app
And what's so fascinating about that? The young analyst Robert
Johnson talks about it very beautifully, says, there is a
kind of a confluence between the religious and the relational. Today.
(24:59):
We look in relationships for ecstasy, transcendence, wholeness, meaning that
we used to look for in the realm of the divine.
A soulmate used to be God, not a living human being,
you know, And so we're looking to relationships what we
usually used to look for in religious life. And once
(25:20):
you have that relationship with a soul mad, you think
that it should that sort maid knows you inside out.
You don't have to explain anything, you know, that's all
made is an extension of you is you know, spiritually
connected to you, and you know that is not what
goes on in most relationships. That's just a fiction. So
(25:41):
why do people in happy marriages? Why are people still cheat?
Why do people in relationships that are deeply nurturing and
satisfying continue to long for other things? If you change
the word for a moment, you see, you know it
is what they do to the relationship and to their partner.
(26:03):
If you talk about what they do for themselves, they
will talk about at the heart of infidelity, you will
find lying, duplicity, betrayal, cheating. But you will also find
in those relationships that you just mentioned, specifically in what
we call the happy marriages, longing and loss and yearning.
(26:24):
And I think that the best sentence I could come
up with when I talked with so many people who
said I love my partner. This is ten years of
research with people who kept saying I love my partner,
that I am very happy here, I don't want to
go anywhere else. But and now came the second part
is that they didn't want to leave the person that
(26:46):
they were with, but what they really yearned for was
to leave the person that they had themselves become wow,
and that it wasn't that they were looking for another
person as much as they were looking for another self
or or other parts of themselves that they had completely
left aside for decades. The majority of these people have
(27:08):
been faithful for twenty years easily. So these are not cheaters.
These are people who cross the line that sometimes they
themselves never thought they would cross. And so then you
ask for a glimmer of what, why would you risk
losing everything that is so dear to you for what?
And what? And that is back to your question about
(27:31):
heros Is that the most common answer I get people
write to me from all over the world, And this
is not to promote or to justify or to minimize
the effects of infidelity on a relationship. I want to
be really clear, but I had to understand why people
did this. It's not just to understand what it does
to the people who are hurt by it. I felt alive,
(27:56):
I felt alive, I felt un aliveness I hadn't felt
in years. I didn't know this still could happen to me,
and it had had not much to do with sex.
They may have been sex involved, but sometimes there was
no sex involved at all, there was a sense of
a liveness of touching the essence of things. It was
(28:19):
a real existential quest. Actually, it had very little to
do with the partner and very little to do with
the relationship. This is one particular type of affairs that
is very different from the multitude of others. But if
you ask me about affairs in happy relationships, this is
probably one of the one of the more accurate descriptions
(28:41):
I have gleaned from my conversations. Kind of keeps our roads,
keep going back to errors there and the vitality in
what ways do you think an affair can be good
for a marriage? Maybe by helping people reclaim their sense
(29:04):
of errors. I mean, it's not the affair itself. Sometimes
it's the affair itself. A person suddenly is woken up
again and just you know, come and brings that energy
into the relationship. But that doesn't happen always or often
for that matter. It's the aftermath, you know. It's an
(29:27):
affair is not good for a relationship, But good can
come out of an affair. Let's put it this way, okay,
And what it does is it topples the scorecard in
the relationship because basically, an affair is a resounding no,
I don't want to go on like this, this for
the rest of my life, this for another twenty five years,
(29:48):
no more. And sometimes it relieves the other person to
say I want more too. You think I'm just happy
like this with the life we live. I think I
didn't want to re experience ABCD, you know. So it
topples the scorecard and it allows people to do a
massive reset. It allows people very very often that I
(30:11):
can say is often to have conversations with the level
of truth and honesty that they haven't had in years
because the whole thing that they were trying to protect
has fallen apart anyway, so now they can finally dig
It allows people to reconnect with their sense of desire
and they're real wanting to connect with the other person
(30:32):
rather than complacency. It jolts them out of their complacency
and they realize what they can lose and that they're
going to have to really become much more active participants
if they want this thing to remain alive. So all
of that, it allows people to change fundamental roles and
inequities in the relationship that we're no longer tolerable. It
(30:52):
allows a reset of the power dynamic, because it's not
just that the person who hasn't cheated is the good
partner just because they haven't cheated. There's a lot of
other relational betrayals in relationships. I think we have to
really not just look at this as you know, this
is the good person and this is the cruel, wrong,
liar cheater. You know, that is a version, but the
(31:14):
majority of the time in most relationships, there are there
is resentment, there is contempt, there is neglect, there is violence,
There is a lot of other relational betrayals that non
cheater you know does can't really claim moral superiority because
of that if we are really honest, when you are
in the muck of things and you talk with thousands
(31:35):
of couples who are grappling with this infidelity, so what
other goods can come out of it? You know, I've
been trying to tell you something for a long time,
and this is the first time you're actually listening. Because
it's often easy for us to say to the person,
why didn't you talk about them this? Why didn't you
bring it up? You think people haven't brought things up
for decades, But the other person wasn't interested in changing.
(31:57):
I thought you were scolding me. Tell me, I'm channeling
every conversation that I've heard. You know, it's like and
I hear it's like you know, no, I did try
to tell you and this. It took this for you
to actually listen. You know, you haven't touched me in
(32:19):
fifteen years. I'm not talking having sex. You haven't touched me.
Put your hands in my hair, stroked me, caressed me,
held my hand, gently kissed me, looked at me in
the eyes. You know. Now, you may be a very
nice person, and you may be a responsible provider, and
you may, but I am dying inside and I just
(32:43):
couldn't believe that I would live for another twenty years
and never be touched again. You don't see me. I
walk around you in every attire possible. You don't see me.
And there is no orientation and no gender who can
claim priority on this one. These are collective statements. So
it's that kind of yearning. And those people don't necessarily
(33:05):
want a divorce. It's you know, it's easy to just
say why don't you leave them? They don't want to
leave because there are other parts in the relationship as well.
But someday this part comes out and says, I can't,
I can't continue like this. So when these conversations come
out and the other person can hear it, and when
the person who has hurt can really show the remorse
(33:27):
and take the responsibility and and reinvest in the relationship,
there are the ones who have been able to really
make good of it will tell you that their relationship
is better than it was. They wish they didn't have
to go through this, but they definitely feel like this
(33:47):
took them to a place that they would otherwise not
have gone. Post traumatic growth. You know, we need to
coin something post in fidelity growth there we just coin something. Yeah, yeah,
so yeah, that's it's wonderful to hear you know, your own,
your own stories and experiences people. And then you also
(34:09):
have this podcast where people can listen in to live sessions. Boy,
that is such a great idea. Where did you get
that idea? My mentor, Salvador Minuccin said to me there
is no better theater than couple's therapy, and he wanted
to try to write plays about couples and it didn't happen.
(34:30):
In the end, he didn't write those plays, but I
felt the same. I just thought, this is the truth
behind closed doors. There's never been more expectations about romantic
life than we have today. And couples have never been
more isolated than they are today. And your best friends
can divorce and you never never saw it coming, and
nobody and people wonder all the time, you know, am
(34:53):
I alone? Is this happening to other people too? And
talk about in fidelity? Nobody will talk about it and
talk about sex and nobody will talk about it. So
you never know what happens behind closed doors. And I
just knew I couldn't work with patients. I could bring
patients to conferences, but I couldn't. So when Audible approached me,
(35:13):
they originally wanted me to do a kind of a
he said, She said, similar to the Showtime series The
Affair that I had been a consultant for. And I said,
but that's not how couple's therapy works, at least not
in my office. It's not a hehi or a he he.
It's not that binary like that. It's much more feedback loop.
It's what one person says that that brings the other
(35:35):
person to do something that then makes them reacting. You
know that Figure eight like that, and I said, I
really would like you to watch, to watch, to listen,
actually to a session, and you tell me, But I
think that these are some of the most powerful stories
one can tell. Relationships as stories. Part of my work
is to help people write a new story together and
(35:57):
then to edit often what they are writing. And we
did one episode and we are now and it became
where should we begin live Coppos therapy one time three
hour sessions with anonymous couples that will never be my patients.
(36:18):
And we are now in production of season five and
a number of these episodes do touch on the subject
of infidelity, but not only it really covers a wide range.
This week I'm doing my first episode on friends who
were estranged, so I'm interested in other pairs. And then
I decided that I would do how It Work, which
(36:41):
was the same model, but instead of just looking at
romantic pairs, I would take colleagues, co workers, family members
who work together, same model, intensive three hour, one time session.
And it became, you know, it was the first of
its kind and went all of it became a public
(37:03):
health campaign for relationships. It became a democratization of couple's
therapy for people who can't afford, don't have access, and
are in all kinds of parts of the world where
none of this happens. And it became an educational technology
on relationships of one model. You know, it's just this
one therapist here doing her best. Yeah, well sounds Spotify,
(37:29):
it's anywhere where people listen to podcasts, and it really
distigmatized therapy and especially couple's therapy as well. It really
it created a conversation in the society at large, and
then came, you know, with the pandemic and teletherapy. All
of this now is then can the couple's therapy showtime series?
(37:52):
Now is scenes of a marriage? I mean you can
see that people are deeply interested in this unit called
the couple that is meant to accomplished so much and
is often under resourced. And in the United States of
America it also is meant to be a welfare state
of too. Well, this is interesting. Let let's let's doublequick
on this idea of monogamy for a second. You know,
(38:15):
some people say it's just it's not natural. It's just
you know, from an evolutionary point of view, and and
a lot of people are experimenting with alternative things, open marriages, polyamory.
I'm you know, I'm personally I'm I'm a big believer
in whatever works, you know, for a couple, if it
works for both of them, or or more than a couple,
whatever works for whatever number of people are in a
(38:37):
polyamorous relationship. I'm just wondering, you know, some of your
thoughts and some of these alternate marriage have you seen
them really work in great beautiful ways? Have where some
challenges you've seen and people who are in these kinds
of lifestyles that come to your practice these sorts of things.
So maybe a place to start is to say that
(39:00):
I don't think as in monogamous, and then non monogamous
or polyamorous. Polyamorous is a whole range of different relational
arrangements too, and monogamous are often proclaimed monogamy and clandestine adultery.
So I think that we have to really unpack a
(39:23):
little bit. Marriage has changed throughout history. Marriage has always
been an economic enterprise. It was primarily monogamy was an
imposition on women so that the men would know who
are the children that they need to feed and who
will get the cows when they die, or the goats
or the camels. You know, all over the world. Monogamy
(39:46):
had nothing to do with love. Monogamy was an economic
arrangement and we didn't since we didn't often know paternity,
it was a way to ensure no knowledge of paternity.
Monogamy has always been one person for life, and today
monogamy is one person at a time. So the word
(40:07):
monogamous has fundamentally changed meaning too. I think that when
we bring a more socio cultural understanding to these words,
it changes the way we practice. So, you know, so
we ask people what is your arrangement? How do you
define loyalty and how do you define fidelity? Because you
(40:31):
can be loyal and not faithful, You can be loyal,
faithful and non exclusive. So what have been your definitions
around these words. In the past, they were defined by
the constructs of primarily religious institutions. Now people need to
define these by themselves, so it demands a conversation. Unfortunately,
(40:53):
in many couples, particularly in heterosexual couples, monogamy is discussed
only as there has been a big crisis monogamy has
defined as sexual exclusivity because monogamy can be defined in
various other ways too. So when you say alternative. It's
alternative to what This invites a lot of assumptions about
(41:17):
very defined concepts. We are today exploring multiple new models
of relationships. We have not eight to ten children, we
have one to three to none. That is a very
new relationship. You know, when you are farmers with eight
kids for which you needed to have ten because students survive,
(41:38):
that made for a very different marriage. When we have contraception,
that makes for a very different marriage. When we make
for women who work outside the house and are also
material providers, that changes the gender roles. When we have
queer marriages who can also have children. So I look
at the whole question of boundaries and sexual boundaries and
(42:02):
emotional commitment inside marriages as part of this greater exploration
in which people want commitment and they want freedom. This
is the fundamental thing that has happened today is that
we want both. We want the stability of committed relationships,
(42:23):
the continuity, the sense of belonging, the rootedness, the loyalty,
the reliability. And we also have redefined sexuality that is
no longer for many people just a pro creative model
of sexuality, but it is sexuality as a property of
the self as an expression of lifestyle and forms of connection,
(42:44):
and from that place one wants to negotiate that sexuality
is not just going to take place with one person,
or even that love is going to be more communal,
and we are going to create new forms of extended
family and communal living that call polyamorous. When we look
at it from that angle, we are much less judgmental,
(43:06):
We are much more curious, and probably we are more
helpful with many of our patients because it invites them
to tell us the truth so that we can actually
work with them. So when you ask me, can they work? Yes?
But the interesting thing is one doesn't ask does monogamy
work or do traditional marriages work? You know? Do they
work so well? You know? And what do we mean
(43:27):
by work they lasted for thirty years? And does lasting
just mean the only marker of success longevity or are
we looking at the quality of the relationship. So what
makes relationships work is the same everywhere. Respect, dignity, the
ability to listen to the other person, to value the
other person, to feel valued in a relationship, to experience
(43:49):
growth and hopefulness together, to be able to deal with
the crisis and the losses of life together, and it
has no difference if you are doing this within a
context of monogamy or sexual excs u civity, or if
you're doing it within the context of a long distance relationship,
a single parent family, an accordion family, a blended family,
a queer family, or a polyamorous family. Excellent point. Excellent point.
(44:13):
I have some friends in the polyamory community and they
really wanted to please ask this question. Please ask this
question because I'm not an advocate. I mean, it's gonna
It's like when you say this, it means that you're
pro or against or not. I'm just saying, you know,
in the there is no one size fits all. And
if we are going to be therapists of the moment,
(44:35):
and we're and therapy is meeting the moment, this great
adaptability that we are talking about. You have this conference
that I'm planning that is now in November. It is
you know, looking at what has happened to relationships when
people had to really be you know, resources could bring
in the grandparents, couldn't bring in childcare, couldn't bring in friends,
(44:57):
couldn't bring in all the people you know, with in
that context, let's talk about you know what makes for
a good relationship, What makes it work? What made it
work in this moment? What do we need at you know?
What will change? You know, I think that therapists sometimes
(45:19):
would would it would be very good to be in
conversation more with sociologists and anthropologists and theologians. M you know,
you need to bring back the world into the conversation
and not just you know, I'm going to stop here.
(45:39):
I love what you're saying. You know, you have described
yourself once as your therapy approach is akin to that
of an anthropologists and explore, So it sort of is
how you see yourself. Can you kind of unpack why
why both an anthropologists anthropologisan explore. I'm a systemically trend therapist,
and I may have been I was strained psychodynamically as well,
(46:03):
But I arrived in America in the heydays of systemic
family therapy and kind of found myself there. If I
had come years later, I may have been, you know,
inducted into IFS or into EFT or any of the
other schools that proliferated later. But what I do know
is I'm a cross cultural therapist. I mean, it's not
(46:24):
just that I speak nine languages. I do different therapy
in the different languages as well, I talk differently about
the same topics. There are different values that people bring
as they talk about relationships, parenting, children, death, money, illness, communication, closeness, transparency.
(46:46):
All these words are culturally embedded. They have cultural resonance,
and with culture comes class and race and history, et cetera.
And therapy that was systemic invited that like today, you
cannot do therapy without thinking about the racial reckoning, about
the public health crisis, about the climate despair, about the
(47:07):
economic beheavors. I mean, if you just stick to the
brain and you don't bring in the larger, overlapping global
crises that are affecting people's life and sense of hopefulness.
When we work these days, we are working a lot
about hopefulness and anxiety and despair. These things are not
just happening because people inside are feeling low self esteem
(47:29):
or just because they've had trauma. It's because the world
they're living in is scary, and so that's the anthropological perspective.
It's bringing back this is what you know. My whole
training on sessions is about it's a salon. I bring
(47:50):
sociologists clinicians, trauma experts, so that we have a conversation
that is broad enough that it can help us meet
the moment, rather than coming from one particular approach. What
I probably say when I do the anthropological view is
to challenge the individualistic, silo driven therapeutic approaches. I think
(48:16):
that that's where where today. Maybe it's very very important,
but we need the other view too. This is not
that or that is that we need a therapy that encompasses,
you know, the issues and if you work with refugees,
and if you work with trauma victims, and you know,
(48:37):
if you work with the large things that are entering
our office at this moment, you need to have a
cultural framework and an anthropological framework absolutely. I mean I
was really interested to see that you started off in immigration,
studying immigration, very interested in identity, issues of identity. I
was worrying how you brought some of that earlier expertise
to the work you do today. I mean, you talked
(48:58):
a little bit about that already, and glad you're so.
I started out looking at cultural transition. What I was
fascinated was how do people experience cultural transition? And I
looked at the two groups that move the most these days,
refugees and internationals, forced migration and voluntary migration. And then
(49:21):
I looked at mixed couples, interracial, intercultural, inter religious couples,
and families of all orientations, you know, who also are
in cultural transition, but it lives in their own living room.
And then I looked at technology, and that is another
cultural transition, relationships mediated with technology, and so I'm very
(49:46):
interested in how that changes the way we think about ourselves,
the way we think about how we connect to others,
the way that we straddle the continuum between autonomy and
interdependent dance, between self reliance and loyalty, between an an
individual oralistic orientation and a more collective orientation and more
(50:09):
interdependent which is what we really are looking at right now.
We have a whole day at a conference that's about
mass mutual reliance. How do you make that shift? And
that shift has to take place in therapy as well.
When people talk about resilience, they have to be able
to talk about what is collective resilience, what is collective
trauma that mandates collective resilience that goes along with mass
(50:31):
mutual reliance. That's a real different paradigm shift than the
way that we have developed, you know, and these two
conversations are happening side by side in our field at
this moment. So I have been a translator. I have
often thought that when I would write about a subject,
I should start to go and see how do other
(50:52):
disciplines write about it. When I do supervision groups, I
have people from every discipline are multidisciplinary groups, so that
we continuously have one case five approaches. And that has
to do with the cultural transition. It's really to know
(51:14):
that there is never just one way. Once you've traveled
one time to another place, you know that there is
another way to do things everything. There's another way to
deal with the baby, is the food, the job. That
multiplicity of perspectives is something that really came from looking
at these cultural transitions and how we interact with them.
(51:46):
Why did you start working with couples? Like, when did
that transition happen? I started with groups. I totally started
with groups. I started with groups before I can to
the United States. I was doing what at the time
was called you know, inter racial groups into cultural groups,
race relations, you know, political groups that came together, conflict resolution,
(52:11):
all of that. And then when I was. And then
when I came here, I had looked at cultural, racial,
and religious identity, and somebody said, would you like to
come work at a ninety second Street. Why we have
a whole program for mixed couples. Basically what they were saying,
(52:36):
would you like to look at diversity in the bedroom?
And it made it made total sense for me. So
I was training in family therapy. Couples therapy at that
time was not really central. It was a little bit
of stepchild of family therapy. And I began to be
interested in couples because I began to see that couples
(52:57):
was becoming the most important unit of the family. In
the traditional world, the family is more important than the couple,
which is, by the way, part of why infidelity does
not necessarily become a leading cause of divorce, because preserving
the family is more important than your individual response to
a couple's crisis. As the couple became more important, and
(53:21):
as you can literally say that the survival of the
family today in the West depends on the relative happiness
of the couple, nothing else, not even the kids. Kids
may delay, but that's it. Couple's therapy became like this
is the central unit to work with, and it is
very difficult and challenging and fascinating and endlessly renewing. I
(53:45):
mean you, it keeps you very humble, It does absolutely.
Have you done any readings of Urban Yam's books and
his stories, Yes, yes, yes, it's very close to my heart.
He was on this podcast recently as well, and I
see some commonalities and your informative books for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(54:08):
both of your sort of this great gift. You have
to tell stories and in ways that really resonate with
the deep humanity and all of us. It's beautiful. There's
another topic I wanted to talk about as we near
the end of our conversation. You've talked about masculinity, and
there's misconceptions about what it means to be a man
(54:29):
in a relationship, and I'm wondering if you could kind
of dispel some of those misconceptions. You know, what do
you sort of see the men that come into your
practice and how that might differ from some of the
cultural stereotypes that exists. Maybe it's a place to start
with be to say that it's not just in my practice,
I have actually had the privilege of being the only woman.
(54:51):
If I may say, or the only identified woman to
join men's groups for quite a while, I've spent retreats
of three days where I am like an anthropologist, I'm
a guest, I'm a witness to men's groups. So it's
(55:11):
much more than just you know, I do have a
very heavily male practice, and have had for more than
twenty years. I'm practicing twenty five. But it's the groups
where I really have been very, very interested in. And
I did a whole conference with sessions live on masculinity
a few years back because I, well, because me too,
(55:36):
brought all of that, of course in the open and
mandated us to once again really discuss this. But also
because I think that the lives of women will not
change until the men come along and are given some
of the same opportunities to rethink their condition, their expectations,
et cetera. And because I often think that we put
(56:03):
a lot of focus on male power, and that in fact,
I think we have more to learn when we look
at what happens with men's fear of powerlessness. We never
have to hear women be losers. Losers doesn't exist in
the feminine, neither does emasculated exist in the feminine. We
(56:26):
never have to tell a woman be a woman, show
me that you're a woman. We tell men all the
time to man up. I think that you know what
strikes me at this time when everybody is talking about
masculinity from pop culture to politics, and question what masculinity
means and how it affects us, and what are the
(56:47):
roots of masculinity and how does it shape individuals and
cultures and how has it changed across generations. For me,
there's five dimensions around masculinity that I've been interested in, identity, intimacy, sexuality, power,
and trauma. And you know, a colleague of mine once said,
if the twentieth century is the century where women made
(57:10):
major changes, the twenty first century will be the one
where the men adapt to the changes that the women
have made. So it's an interesting thing to know that
the feminist literature is unified by its sense of moral
outreach over historical subordination and exploitation of women by men,
But the men's literature is unified by a sense of
(57:32):
a crisis and of ontological anxiety. So when I try
to understand what really is the thing that I own
in I would say this, probably historically people have never
really questioned masculinity men was a given, you know. Women
were seen as basically men with genitals on the inside
(57:54):
until very late, you know. But what we do know
is that masculine is often a goal and a duty
and an objective in most societies for boys and adolescents.
We talk about masculinity as a man date, as an imperative,
you know, be a man, man up. And you have
rituals in every society for men to go and prove
(58:16):
their manliness. And if we're constantly encouraging and exhorting men
to demonstrate mandliness, then maybe it isn't as a natural
as we that would like to think. You know, even
in the absence of femininity, one doesn't doubt the identity
of women. But that's not the case for men. Being
a man requires an effort that doesn't necessarily translates to
(58:40):
the life of women. Women rarely here be a woman,
you know. The female is seen as kind of natural
and unavoidable, and masculinity is seen as something that is
hard to develop and easy to lose. And so that's
why I'm interested in the feeling of powerlessness, in the
loss of identity, in the fragility of masculinity rather than
(59:01):
just focusing in the obvious privilege and power of masculinity.
That's such a good point, that's such I love it.
You know, this idea of impotence in men doesn't just
exist in the bedroom, but you know, the feeling of
impotence in one's a man's own personal life and the
pressures they may have to succeed and dominate the competition.
(59:23):
You know, not just in the bedroom, but you know,
in terms of competition. I just love what you're saying.
I love it so much, so important. Let me end
this interview today with a question for you, a personal question.
If you were to imagine telling your own story of
the Great Adaptation to your great great grandchildren, what would
you share. Learning to live with uncertainty or accepting the
(59:46):
uncertainty of life is something that I probably grew up
with and that I think my kids may have true
epigenetics really absorb, you know. I do come from a tradition,
from a family history where we you know, where my
family lost everything, everything and everyone from one day to
(01:00:09):
the next. And so the notion of entitlement of this
is mine, of this is going to be here forever.
I never grew up with those ideas. I always thought
that whatever you have today can disappear any moment. On
the one hand, I think it has given me a
sense of dread and existential anguish that I've had to
(01:00:33):
learn to live with. On the other end, it has
made me very adaptable. I am sure you know. I
don't just speak the languages, many of them because I
love languages, it's true, but also because in a way
it allows me to enter different places and to blend
and to be a part of even if I don't belong,
(01:00:53):
I can be a part of. And I think that
all these messages of the Great adaptation of how you
look around you ground yourself in the context. You get
a sensu as to what is the lay of the land.
You don't stay focused on your siloed views of what
is normative. You think in plural terms. You become a
(01:01:17):
bridge person. You see who you can say what too,
and parts of you will live with different people and
in different situations. I think that that's how I would
describe the great adaptation. And with that, when you live
with uncertainty, the fact is you can't do it alone.
(01:01:39):
That by definition, uncertainty mandates mass mutual reliance and interdependence
and collective resilience, which are ideas that I live in
my personal life, ideas that are part of my family life,
They're part of my professional and intellectual interests, and they
are very much at the core of this conference that
(01:02:01):
I'm doing in November, because I think that this is
not the first time. You should not pretend that this
is the first time the world is in an upheaval
and we don't know where we're going. I think we
were maybe a bit hubris the thing that we did
know where we're going. I probably would say that my
(01:02:22):
great adaptation is often building within uncertainty, that this is
a given. It's a given in relationships, it's a given
in life. Security is often an illusion. Now that is
a worldview. You aspire to it, but you know that
(01:02:47):
it fundamentally exists, but can also disappear. Yeah, we've seen
that so clearly this past year and a half. So
delightful to chat with you. I'm so glad we finally
got a chance to have you in the Psycholoic Pie,
which want to wish you well with all the many
exciting things you're doing. We didn't even talk about your game.
I want to wish that well, your new game, your
Sessions Live which we did talk a little bit about
(01:03:09):
the conference, and your podcast, your book, and just want
to thank you for your existence in this world. Thank you,
Thank you so much, a pleasure. Thanks for listening to
this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to
react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
you to join in the discussion at does Psycology podcast
(01:03:30):
dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast.
We also put up some videos of some episodes on
our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check
that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of
the show, and tune in next time for more of
the mind, brain, behavior and creativity
Hey everyone, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. I'm especially
excited for today's episode. For one, we are relaunching the
podcast with Stitcher. They are one of the leading podcast
networks and we're really looking forward to working with them
to bring the podcast to the next level. Second, I'm
really excited about our guest today is Staire Parrell. Astaire
is a psychotherapist and a New York Times bestselling author
(00:28):
recognizes one of today's most insightful and original voices on
modern relationships. In this episode, I talked to Astaire about
love and relationships, especially in the age of a global pandemic.
Astaire also offers her perspective on how to keep passion
alive during your marriage, as well as affairs getting to
the root cause of why people cheat. We also tackle
(00:48):
the essence of the words arrows and freedom, and we
touch on the topics of soulmates, affairs, masculinity, and Estaire's
practice as a cross cultural therapist. I've been looking forward
to this conversation with this Stare for years, and I'm
delighted to finally be able to bring it to you all. So,
without further ado, I bring you a Stare Perrell. Start
(01:12):
It's so great to chalt you today. I've been looking
forward to this for years. Actually, it's pleasure to be here.
You patient. You've been very patient. I have been, and
you know, my mom told me patience often pays off.
So I'm very excited to chat with you. Why is woman?
I remember at the American Psychological Association conference, we were
(01:35):
also captivated by your keynote. We were at the front row,
and we we came up to you afterwards this couple
of years. I don't know if you remember this, and
we're so we you know, we didn't expect, you know,
you'd actually show up, but we're like, oh, we just
wanted to invite you to our our division ten social,
you know, for our arts thing. And then you came in.
I think with your you believe that you're you're you
came in with your husband, and we're like, oh my god,
is there to our to our social You You made
(01:57):
our lives. So I just want to thank you so
much for your great viciousness over the years. I'm very
happy when I make the right decisions at a certain
point and someone reminds me and it was just like
a small thing to do that other people remember so
I like when I thought, well, yeah, I really really
made our lives, so thank you. So I want to
(02:18):
start off by asking, you know, really, how are you?
You know, how are you during this pandemic? How's it
affected you as a therapist, as a human? I think
the best way I can answer you is to tell
you that when I was looking for the topic of
our annual Sessions Live Virtual Training conference, which is our
(02:40):
fifth and I was thinking what is on the mind
of therapists today, mine and everybody else. I'm a practitioner,
I'm you know, I am leaving the parallel experience that
a lot of my clients are experiencing. And I really thought,
here it is the great adaptability. How can we stay
(03:00):
grounded when the ground is moving? And the way is
how can therapists and clients stay grounded when the ground
is moving? Because I was feeling well, okay, fine, but unmoored.
I felt like the structure of my life has so
fundamentally changed and it ain't going back. I felt that
(03:22):
by not being able to go home for two years
to Europe, you know, so many things have happened. I
felt that parts of me that come alive in those
other languages when I am in the other parts of
my life have been completely dormant, and I thought, what
is my adaptability? You know, how do It's no longer
(03:43):
coping just coping and waiting and adjusting to the It's
really what is adaptability going to look like for me
and for my field and for all people working in
the field of relationships and well being for that matter.
So that's how I'm doing. I'm thinking about adaptability. I'm
thinking about mass mutual reliance. Who have I reached out to,
(04:05):
who has been a part of my circle? And what
has happened to so many that I have not been
in touch with? And I'm thinking about the concept of
post traumatic growth. At what point we do? What do
we learn from here? And how will it actually strengthen
me and strengthen my children, my partner, you know. So
(04:26):
that's how I am doing. It's a I translate often
what is happening to me, and then I look, am
I alone? Or is this actually quite reflective what many
many friends and colleagues are going through? And then I
name it in my professional life, but in fact it's
a reflection of my own internal life as well. Yeah, wonderful,
(04:50):
you know. My author Jordan Feigel and I wrange a
book on those traumatic growth right now, we're going to transcend.
We're actually we're actually undercut, you know about transit. We're
actually have a contract to write a workbook which will
be out next year on the post pandemic growth. That's
a follow up. And so this topic is right on
fresh in my mind, and well it's on the stress
(05:11):
on everyone's minds right now. And you know, I'm just
wondering from a therapy perspective, you know, do you with
relationships and working with couples, have you how's the nature
of some of your ideas you talked about in the
past kind of need to be adapted for pandemic eraror
where couples are together so much that it's hard to
get that mystery that you talk about in your in
(05:31):
your books, you know, that excitement, that unpredictability. So what
do we have right now? Right? I mean, I'm going
to continue it in the framework of the conference because
I literally had to articulate it for myself, that very
question that you're asking me. Right, So, social connection at
this moment, it's three parts. I'm thinking about intimate relationships
(05:56):
because that is the essence of my work, the relationship
between the client and the provider, the practitioner, the therapist
of all sorts, and the relationship of the therapists in
their own personal life with their partners, with their romantic partners,
or with their friends, family, etc. So it is a
triad going on. You know, there's eighteen months of prolonged uncertainty,
(06:19):
mixed with grief, mixed with loss, mixed with a fundamental
shift that we have to make away from silo driven
lives approaches and therapy for that matter too, to a
collective perspective, to a pluralistic perspective, and pandemics, like all disasters,
(06:43):
are relationship accelerators. They basically put you in touch with mortality.
They put you in touch with an existential fragidity, the
fact that life can change at any moment. Your house
can burn, your land can be flooded. Here you know,
your health can be destroyed overnight. And when you are
(07:04):
in touch with mortality, you say life is short. And
when you say life is short, you say what is
important to me? What do I want? And what do
I no longer want to live with? To endure, to tolerate,
to do in my life, etc. And so that's what
happens to relationships at the same time as people have
spent more time with their families and partners than they
(07:26):
ever have in decades. And at the same time that
I say that you cannot ask one person to give
you what an entire village should provide, that's exactly what happened.
People go home with one person that was supposed to
replace everybody. And there is a lot of upheaval going
on in relationships at this point, for those who have
been together the retrofit and for those who are just
(07:50):
starting out and trying to understand. So it's a very
interesting thing. At the same time as we have this
enormous uncertainty and overlapping global crisis, we also have glimmers
of clarity about what really matters for us in life
at this point and what we need to do to
protect our relationships, to invest and replenish our relationships, and
(08:11):
to stay connected. It is what occupies me on a
personal level at this moment. It's what occupies me with
sessions live at this moment kind of in the thralls
of this because I think that is so much going
on relationally speaking, in light of what we are going
through Yeah, for sure. And I really like this that
(08:31):
you mentioned that our priorities have shifted in a lot
of cases. You know, in your book Meeting in Captivity,
you ask the question can we desire what we already have?
And it seems like this question takes a different little
bit of a different flavor during the pandemic, because we
might have a lot more gratitude for what we have
in a way that we never had before. Maybe we
realized we took for granted our relationships right in some ways.
(08:54):
So the second part of that sentence in Mating in
Captivity was to say, you never have your partner. It's
an illusion to think that they belong to you. At best,
they are on loan with an option to renew if
you act towards your partner. You know. So in this moment,
(09:17):
some people are more grateful and realize, you know, you're
here today. I want to savor I want to savor us,
my family, what we have created together, et cetera. And
in some other situations it is there is a deadness
that and languishing the name that the word that Adam
(09:38):
grants so put back in the public space here that
I can no longer tolerate that. There's what I call
the death of ros, the death of the energy that
fuels us with the liveness and vibrancy and vitality and
life force that it has to do with playfulness and
curiosity and imagination and meaning and the poetry that comes
(10:01):
in our relationship. When that whole thing is gone and
people start to feel like I'm just a function, what
do we have together? I don't exist for you as
a person. There's a lack of care, there's a lack
of fundamental interest in who I am, and vice versa.
So you have both things going on in this moment.
(10:21):
It's not just I'm grateful for what I have, it's
also I realize what I don't have and what I
no longer can want to live without. Sure both are possible,
even simultaneously. Yes, yeah, yeah, you've got a push pull
and you know, like I love you, but I also
(10:42):
missing out on all those other stuff. So you've mentioned
that the erotic is the antidote to death. That's a
really profound statement that I want to unpack a little bit,
especially in the pandemic kind of situation. What is the
erotic mean? First of all, you know, I get a sense.
You know, you're using it in a sense that's broader
than just penetrative sex. You know, there's a there's a's
(11:05):
a whole spirit, it's a whole way of being, in
a kind of humanistic psychology or from sort of era
kind of way. So I'd love to hear some of
your thoughts that so. I you know, when I think
of my definition or not my definition, when I think
about the way I define the erotic, I think about
the Zohar, the Jewish Kabbalah, I think about the mystic
(11:30):
sense of the word. I think about Audrey Lord and
her writings about what it means to reclaim, a process
of reclamation of one's ability to experience pleasure and dignity
and connection and control. I am really not talking about
it in the most narrow sexual sense that modernity has
(11:52):
given the word. It's a word that really needs to
be resuscitated in its full meaning. Heros is life force.
Heros is what makes you feel alive. You know, if
you want to look at it from the sexual point
of view, people can have sex and feel nothing. Doing
it doesn't tell you anything about the experience, but the
quality of the experience. The poetics that you're attached to it.
(12:15):
That is what makes it erotic, that aliveness, that feeling touched,
you know. So this is true in marriage too. You
can have a marriage that isn't dead, and you can
have a marriage or a relationship that is alive. And
that aliveness has to do with how people preserve a touch,
a contact with curiosity, exploration. It is the antidote to
(12:39):
death because when you are curious and exploratory and discovering
and playful and imaginative, you feel like there is still
so much to learn, to discover and to live. That
makes it the antidote to death. Death is when there
is nothing more. Heros makes you feel like there's still
so much to live, to breed, to connect with people,
(13:03):
et cetera. The notion that the eros is an antidote
to death or deadness is that you feel in touch
with the erotic when you experience whatever it is that
you do with what is called flourishing or flow or
aliveness or radiance. All these words you know, and they
(13:23):
have to and they come with power and dignity and
self love and connection to others. They are quite all encompassing.
And so that's what I talk about when I talk
about how do we connect to the erotic? How do
you take a routine and turn it into a ritual.
How do you take a touch that is just a
(13:46):
touch and you turn it into a touch that comes
with pleasure and joy, that is a switch from ordinary
to erotic. Yeah, I love this. I love the way
you say situated within the idea of vitality, but also imagination,
the human imagination. This is an area of mutual interest
of ourns and I really loves the humanistic psychotherapist role
(14:11):
mains work. In his book Love and Love and Will
You Know, he talks about errors in Love and will
is the human imaginations, such as a part as part
and parcel of it. You know that we can kind
of you know, sex, he said, pulls us but imagine,
but erros allows us to think more forward looking. We're
the ones that are kind of moving looking forward and
(14:34):
with hope and vitality, whereas sex and lust is we
often feel like we're being driven by it, you know.
So I just always really resonate with that kind of distinction.
Have your past. The Mexican essayst also says, you know,
sex is the pivot, It's the natural instinct. But Eroticism
is sexuality that is socialized and transformed by the human imagination.
(14:57):
Now you ask about this in relation to the pandemic,
I would say this freedom in confinement comes through our imagination.
When you see little children play during this pandemic, and
at some point they take out big boxes of Amazon
and these boxes become hots, and then they take books,
and these books becomes rocks in the river. And now
(15:19):
they're going and their playing, their imagination has taken them
out of the lockdown. When you can't leave physically, you
can leave with your mind. This is what I learned
from my own parents, who spend years in concentration camps
during the Holocaust, and I understood that idea that you
lift yourself out, you liberate yourself through your imagination. You know,
(15:47):
poetry is to prose the way that eroticism is to sex.
I love that well. I find a lot of your
writings is very poetic, even just in the kind of
cadence and upon which you write. It's it's beautiful. Thank you. Yeah.
Can we can we double click on the word freedom.
(16:08):
This is a very interesting word because I think a
lot of things that people in relationships think will bring
them freedom once they try these things, they actually they
wonder why am I not free? Why do I not
Why do I not feel free? You know? So some
people with like avoidant attachment style, for instance, may fear
a relationship or fear anything that makes them feel like
they're boxed in in any sort of way, because they'll
(16:30):
say it'll, you know, takes away my freedom. But you know,
often a lot of people the avoidant attachment style feel
report feeling lonely, and and some not always and I
was in the case, but sometimes they report feeling lowly
and report feeling well, you know that I still don't
feel free, you know, I still don't feel completely free.
So what are some misconceptions about this idea of freedom
(16:51):
and relationship? Like, you know a lot of people have
these kind of misconceptions that you know, you're you're only
free if you know you can sleep around with as
many people as possible, or you're only free of xyz.
What are some kind of misconceptions about that. It's a
complex question, you know. I think that the best way
I can answer this is to go back to the
(17:12):
spine of the book Mating in Captivity, because when it
really looked at and I borrowed it from loads of people,
but in particular I was very much influenced by the
writings of Steven Mitchell. Can love Lass, but so as
rolland Bacht, so you know a few others. But we
have two fundamental sets of human needs all of us.
(17:34):
We have a need for grounding, and we have a
need for travel or we have a need for security, safety, predictability,
and we have a need for exploration, novelty, change, curiosity, freedom.
All of us have both. But some of us come
out of our childhood wanting more protection and more commitment,
(17:57):
and some of us come out of our childhood wanting
more space and more freedom. We tend to partner with
somebody whose proclivities match our vulnerabilities, so that the solid
will often meet the liquid, the structured, the ground that
(18:18):
the anchored, you know, will be drawn by the curious,
the traveler, the ulysses and you know, and then the
ulysses will find that there is something very reassuring being
with someone who is structured, who is reliable, responsible, et cetera.
And when this works in a complementarity, it's a beautiful fit.
(18:41):
Often it becomes challenging as well in many relationships, so
freedom is, you know, the dance between autonomy and togetherness,
between separateness and connection. You need both. You needed to
feel a modicum of groundedness and something to come back
(19:04):
to the safe harbor in order to be able to
leave and to feel free. But the freedom is not
the leaving. The freedom and this is the important freedom
in the realm of sexuality and desire that I was
trying to articulate. The freedom is that while I'm away,
I'm not busy worrying about you, being anxious for you,
(19:27):
constantly fretting about how you're going to be when I
come back. It's not hard to leave physically while you
take inside of you an entire worry machine. You know.
The freedom is to know that you are okay while
I am doing my thing. That's a freedom in relationship
(19:48):
that I don't have to give up chunks of me
in order to reassure you, because my freedom is your insecurity.
What happens a lot these days in our field is
the focus went from the humanistic work after the war
that was very much focused on looking at freedom. Freedom
(20:11):
in the existential sense of the word that came with responsibility.
That you know, freedom was never a carelessness. And then
we went and we put an entire focus on the attachment,
and the notion was that a secure attachment will create
the ability to experience separateness. But separateness is what will
(20:35):
create the ability to experience an ability to surrender to
one's desire. The interesting thing is that you cannot. It's
a real contradiction. How at the same time freedom implies responsibility,
(20:56):
and at the same time, a certain kind of freedom
implies a read them and a release of the responsibility.
It's both. And yeah, that's it's really true. And just
you know, bringing this idea of this idea that this
romantic notion that love should not should not require work,
that if it's if it's meant to be, it shouldn't
(21:18):
require work. Well, I think role Made did a good
job just spelling that. And and love and will that
the human will does is an important part of it.
And you know, I read somewhere that you said you've
been married for thirty years and or at this point
it's more than thirty years, and and and it's it's
it's still has taken a lot of work, right, I Mean,
(21:38):
there's been moments where you know you have to you know,
you show, you have to reveal that. You know, there's
the imperfections of each other. I mean there's you know,
and and I think what I really liked about when
Rol we talked about is he said, well, that's you know,
you need in order for errs to happen, you need
to give it time for those those things to be resolved,
for there to be an unveiling, a real revealing of
(22:01):
each other's real self or else, you know, errors doesn't develop.
And I just want to know Clorf on that idea
a little bit. If you want to play piano, you
will continue to practice playing piano. You can call it
practicing rather than working at it. You know, the English
American English is often talking about the word work because
(22:22):
it's very Protestant influenced in that sense. It's work. You
could call it creative work. You could call it active engagement.
You can call it investment. You can call it pruning, caring, watering.
You know, basically, it's paying attention, it's nurturing it, it's
feeding it. It's not letting it just die there and agonize,
(22:44):
you know, in a complete dry land or in a pool,
you know, in a cesspool, one or the other. So
it's there is not another area in life where people
don't think that. In order to stay nimble at some
it the man's paying attention, bringing new things, refresh, renew, reset,
(23:07):
you know, except in love, because this notion of which
it just should happen, it's part. You know. There are
two main approaches that Justin lie Miller was talking to
me about. One is the destiny model of relationship. It's
meant to be. It's kind of falling from the heavens,
(23:28):
you know, divine intervention. It just is, I don't have
anything to do with it. It's so. But then when
it doesn't go well, then you say, just the opposite,
It wasn't meant to be. It's fate. It's destiny. That's
very different from the growth model. The growth model is
I make it happen. We make it happen, and sometimes
we fuck up, and sometimes we just let it become
(23:50):
lazy and complacent and we forget about each other. And
every relationship is going to go through dips at some
point the only difference is that some of us kind
of get in gear and start to resuscitate, to infuse
it back with life, with joy, with laughter, with attention,
you know, with good food, good relational food. So it's
(24:15):
very very interesting, and it goes together this idea about
it doesn't it shouldn't be work, it should just be
and errors should just flow from the heavens, you know,
while you know, like like while you're folding the laundry
for that matter, right, goes hand in hand with the
(24:36):
search today of what we call the soul meat. Your
partner in many circles today is seen as a soul meat,
a saltmate that you find, of course on an app
And what's so fascinating about that? The young analyst Robert
Johnson talks about it very beautifully, says, there is a
kind of a confluence between the religious and the relational. Today.
(24:59):
We look in relationships for ecstasy, transcendence, wholeness, meaning that
we used to look for in the realm of the divine.
A soulmate used to be God, not a living human being,
you know, And so we're looking to relationships what we
usually used to look for in religious life. And once
(25:20):
you have that relationship with a soul mad, you think
that it should that sort maid knows you inside out.
You don't have to explain anything, you know, that's all
made is an extension of you is you know, spiritually
connected to you, and you know that is not what
goes on in most relationships. That's just a fiction. So
(25:41):
why do people in happy marriages? Why are people still cheat?
Why do people in relationships that are deeply nurturing and
satisfying continue to long for other things? If you change
the word for a moment, you see, you know it
is what they do to the relationship and to their partner.
(26:03):
If you talk about what they do for themselves, they
will talk about at the heart of infidelity, you will
find lying, duplicity, betrayal, cheating. But you will also find
in those relationships that you just mentioned, specifically in what
we call the happy marriages, longing and loss and yearning.
(26:24):
And I think that the best sentence I could come
up with when I talked with so many people who
said I love my partner. This is ten years of
research with people who kept saying I love my partner,
that I am very happy here, I don't want to
go anywhere else. But and now came the second part
is that they didn't want to leave the person that
(26:46):
they were with, but what they really yearned for was
to leave the person that they had themselves become wow,
and that it wasn't that they were looking for another
person as much as they were looking for another self
or or other parts of themselves that they had completely
left aside for decades. The majority of these people have
(27:08):
been faithful for twenty years easily. So these are not cheaters.
These are people who cross the line that sometimes they
themselves never thought they would cross. And so then you
ask for a glimmer of what, why would you risk
losing everything that is so dear to you for what?
And what? And that is back to your question about
(27:31):
heros Is that the most common answer I get people
write to me from all over the world, And this
is not to promote or to justify or to minimize
the effects of infidelity on a relationship. I want to
be really clear, but I had to understand why people
did this. It's not just to understand what it does
to the people who are hurt by it. I felt alive,
(27:56):
I felt alive, I felt un aliveness I hadn't felt
in years. I didn't know this still could happen to me,
and it had had not much to do with sex.
They may have been sex involved, but sometimes there was
no sex involved at all, there was a sense of
a liveness of touching the essence of things. It was
(28:19):
a real existential quest. Actually, it had very little to
do with the partner and very little to do with
the relationship. This is one particular type of affairs that
is very different from the multitude of others. But if
you ask me about affairs in happy relationships, this is
probably one of the one of the more accurate descriptions
(28:41):
I have gleaned from my conversations. Kind of keeps our roads,
keep going back to errors there and the vitality in
what ways do you think an affair can be good
for a marriage? Maybe by helping people reclaim their sense
(29:04):
of errors. I mean, it's not the affair itself. Sometimes
it's the affair itself. A person suddenly is woken up
again and just you know, come and brings that energy
into the relationship. But that doesn't happen always or often
for that matter. It's the aftermath, you know. It's an
(29:27):
affair is not good for a relationship, But good can
come out of an affair. Let's put it this way, okay,
And what it does is it topples the scorecard in
the relationship because basically, an affair is a resounding no,
I don't want to go on like this, this for
the rest of my life, this for another twenty five years,
(29:48):
no more. And sometimes it relieves the other person to
say I want more too. You think I'm just happy
like this with the life we live. I think I
didn't want to re experience ABCD, you know. So it
topples the scorecard and it allows people to do a
massive reset. It allows people very very often that I
(30:11):
can say is often to have conversations with the level
of truth and honesty that they haven't had in years
because the whole thing that they were trying to protect
has fallen apart anyway, so now they can finally dig
It allows people to reconnect with their sense of desire
and they're real wanting to connect with the other person
(30:32):
rather than complacency. It jolts them out of their complacency
and they realize what they can lose and that they're
going to have to really become much more active participants
if they want this thing to remain alive. So all
of that, it allows people to change fundamental roles and
inequities in the relationship that we're no longer tolerable. It
(30:52):
allows a reset of the power dynamic, because it's not
just that the person who hasn't cheated is the good
partner just because they haven't cheated. There's a lot of
other relational betrayals in relationships. I think we have to
really not just look at this as you know, this
is the good person and this is the cruel, wrong,
liar cheater. You know, that is a version, but the
(31:14):
majority of the time in most relationships, there are there
is resentment, there is contempt, there is neglect, there is violence,
There is a lot of other relational betrayals that non
cheater you know does can't really claim moral superiority because
of that if we are really honest, when you are
in the muck of things and you talk with thousands
(31:35):
of couples who are grappling with this infidelity, so what
other goods can come out of it? You know, I've
been trying to tell you something for a long time,
and this is the first time you're actually listening. Because
it's often easy for us to say to the person,
why didn't you talk about them this? Why didn't you
bring it up? You think people haven't brought things up
for decades, But the other person wasn't interested in changing.
(31:57):
I thought you were scolding me. Tell me, I'm channeling
every conversation that I've heard. You know, it's like and
I hear it's like you know, no, I did try
to tell you and this. It took this for you
to actually listen. You know, you haven't touched me in
(32:19):
fifteen years. I'm not talking having sex. You haven't touched me.
Put your hands in my hair, stroked me, caressed me,
held my hand, gently kissed me, looked at me in
the eyes. You know. Now, you may be a very
nice person, and you may be a responsible provider, and
you may, but I am dying inside and I just
(32:43):
couldn't believe that I would live for another twenty years
and never be touched again. You don't see me. I
walk around you in every attire possible. You don't see me.
And there is no orientation and no gender who can
claim priority on this one. These are collective statements. So
it's that kind of yearning. And those people don't necessarily
(33:05):
want a divorce. It's you know, it's easy to just
say why don't you leave them? They don't want to
leave because there are other parts in the relationship as well.
But someday this part comes out and says, I can't,
I can't continue like this. So when these conversations come
out and the other person can hear it, and when
the person who has hurt can really show the remorse
(33:27):
and take the responsibility and and reinvest in the relationship,
there are the ones who have been able to really
make good of it will tell you that their relationship
is better than it was. They wish they didn't have
to go through this, but they definitely feel like this
(33:47):
took them to a place that they would otherwise not
have gone. Post traumatic growth. You know, we need to
coin something post in fidelity growth there we just coin something. Yeah, yeah,
so yeah, that's it's wonderful to hear you know, your own,
your own stories and experiences people. And then you also
(34:09):
have this podcast where people can listen in to live sessions. Boy,
that is such a great idea. Where did you get
that idea? My mentor, Salvador Minuccin said to me there
is no better theater than couple's therapy, and he wanted
to try to write plays about couples and it didn't happen.
(34:30):
In the end, he didn't write those plays, but I
felt the same. I just thought, this is the truth
behind closed doors. There's never been more expectations about romantic
life than we have today. And couples have never been
more isolated than they are today. And your best friends
can divorce and you never never saw it coming, and
nobody and people wonder all the time, you know, am
(34:53):
I alone? Is this happening to other people too? And
talk about in fidelity? Nobody will talk about it and
talk about sex and nobody will talk about it. So
you never know what happens behind closed doors. And I
just knew I couldn't work with patients. I could bring
patients to conferences, but I couldn't. So when Audible approached me,
(35:13):
they originally wanted me to do a kind of a
he said, She said, similar to the Showtime series The
Affair that I had been a consultant for. And I said,
but that's not how couple's therapy works, at least not
in my office. It's not a hehi or a he he.
It's not that binary like that. It's much more feedback loop.
It's what one person says that that brings the other
(35:35):
person to do something that then makes them reacting. You
know that Figure eight like that, and I said, I
really would like you to watch, to watch, to listen,
actually to a session, and you tell me, But I
think that these are some of the most powerful stories
one can tell. Relationships as stories. Part of my work
is to help people write a new story together and
(35:57):
then to edit often what they are writing. And we
did one episode and we are now and it became
where should we begin live Coppos therapy one time three
hour sessions with anonymous couples that will never be my patients.
(36:18):
And we are now in production of season five and
a number of these episodes do touch on the subject
of infidelity, but not only it really covers a wide range.
This week I'm doing my first episode on friends who
were estranged, so I'm interested in other pairs. And then
I decided that I would do how It Work, which
(36:41):
was the same model, but instead of just looking at
romantic pairs, I would take colleagues, co workers, family members
who work together, same model, intensive three hour, one time session.
And it became, you know, it was the first of
its kind and went all of it became a public
(37:03):
health campaign for relationships. It became a democratization of couple's
therapy for people who can't afford, don't have access, and
are in all kinds of parts of the world where
none of this happens. And it became an educational technology
on relationships of one model. You know, it's just this
one therapist here doing her best. Yeah, well sounds Spotify,
(37:29):
it's anywhere where people listen to podcasts, and it really
distigmatized therapy and especially couple's therapy as well. It really
it created a conversation in the society at large, and
then came, you know, with the pandemic and teletherapy. All
of this now is then can the couple's therapy showtime series?
(37:52):
Now is scenes of a marriage? I mean you can
see that people are deeply interested in this unit called
the couple that is meant to accomplished so much and
is often under resourced. And in the United States of
America it also is meant to be a welfare state
of too. Well, this is interesting. Let let's let's doublequick
on this idea of monogamy for a second. You know,
(38:15):
some people say it's just it's not natural. It's just
you know, from an evolutionary point of view, and and
a lot of people are experimenting with alternative things, open marriages, polyamory.
I'm you know, I'm personally I'm I'm a big believer
in whatever works, you know, for a couple, if it
works for both of them, or or more than a couple,
whatever works for whatever number of people are in a
(38:37):
polyamorous relationship. I'm just wondering, you know, some of your
thoughts and some of these alternate marriage have you seen
them really work in great beautiful ways? Have where some
challenges you've seen and people who are in these kinds
of lifestyles that come to your practice these sorts of things.
So maybe a place to start is to say that
(39:00):
I don't think as in monogamous, and then non monogamous
or polyamorous. Polyamorous is a whole range of different relational
arrangements too, and monogamous are often proclaimed monogamy and clandestine adultery.
So I think that we have to really unpack a
(39:23):
little bit. Marriage has changed throughout history. Marriage has always
been an economic enterprise. It was primarily monogamy was an
imposition on women so that the men would know who
are the children that they need to feed and who
will get the cows when they die, or the goats
or the camels. You know, all over the world. Monogamy
(39:46):
had nothing to do with love. Monogamy was an economic
arrangement and we didn't since we didn't often know paternity,
it was a way to ensure no knowledge of paternity.
Monogamy has always been one person for life, and today
monogamy is one person at a time. So the word
(40:07):
monogamous has fundamentally changed meaning too. I think that when
we bring a more socio cultural understanding to these words,
it changes the way we practice. So, you know, so
we ask people what is your arrangement? How do you
define loyalty and how do you define fidelity? Because you
(40:31):
can be loyal and not faithful, You can be loyal,
faithful and non exclusive. So what have been your definitions
around these words. In the past, they were defined by
the constructs of primarily religious institutions. Now people need to
define these by themselves, so it demands a conversation. Unfortunately,
(40:53):
in many couples, particularly in heterosexual couples, monogamy is discussed
only as there has been a big crisis monogamy has
defined as sexual exclusivity because monogamy can be defined in
various other ways too. So when you say alternative. It's
alternative to what This invites a lot of assumptions about
(41:17):
very defined concepts. We are today exploring multiple new models
of relationships. We have not eight to ten children, we
have one to three to none. That is a very
new relationship. You know, when you are farmers with eight
kids for which you needed to have ten because students survive,
(41:38):
that made for a very different marriage. When we have contraception,
that makes for a very different marriage. When we make
for women who work outside the house and are also
material providers, that changes the gender roles. When we have
queer marriages who can also have children. So I look
at the whole question of boundaries and sexual boundaries and
(42:02):
emotional commitment inside marriages as part of this greater exploration
in which people want commitment and they want freedom. This
is the fundamental thing that has happened today is that
we want both. We want the stability of committed relationships,
(42:23):
the continuity, the sense of belonging, the rootedness, the loyalty,
the reliability. And we also have redefined sexuality that is
no longer for many people just a pro creative model
of sexuality, but it is sexuality as a property of
the self as an expression of lifestyle and forms of connection,
(42:44):
and from that place one wants to negotiate that sexuality
is not just going to take place with one person,
or even that love is going to be more communal,
and we are going to create new forms of extended
family and communal living that call polyamorous. When we look
at it from that angle, we are much less judgmental,
(43:06):
We are much more curious, and probably we are more
helpful with many of our patients because it invites them
to tell us the truth so that we can actually
work with them. So when you ask me, can they work? Yes?
But the interesting thing is one doesn't ask does monogamy
work or do traditional marriages work? You know? Do they
work so well? You know? And what do we mean
(43:27):
by work they lasted for thirty years? And does lasting
just mean the only marker of success longevity or are
we looking at the quality of the relationship. So what
makes relationships work is the same everywhere. Respect, dignity, the
ability to listen to the other person, to value the
other person, to feel valued in a relationship, to experience
(43:49):
growth and hopefulness together, to be able to deal with
the crisis and the losses of life together, and it
has no difference if you are doing this within a
context of monogamy or sexual excs u civity, or if
you're doing it within the context of a long distance relationship,
a single parent family, an accordion family, a blended family,
a queer family, or a polyamorous family. Excellent point. Excellent point.
(44:13):
I have some friends in the polyamory community and they
really wanted to please ask this question. Please ask this
question because I'm not an advocate. I mean, it's gonna
It's like when you say this, it means that you're
pro or against or not. I'm just saying, you know,
in the there is no one size fits all. And
if we are going to be therapists of the moment,
(44:35):
and we're and therapy is meeting the moment, this great
adaptability that we are talking about. You have this conference
that I'm planning that is now in November. It is
you know, looking at what has happened to relationships when
people had to really be you know, resources could bring
in the grandparents, couldn't bring in childcare, couldn't bring in friends,
(44:57):
couldn't bring in all the people you know, with in
that context, let's talk about you know what makes for
a good relationship, What makes it work? What made it
work in this moment? What do we need at you know?
What will change? You know, I think that therapists sometimes
(45:19):
would would it would be very good to be in
conversation more with sociologists and anthropologists and theologians. M you know,
you need to bring back the world into the conversation
and not just you know, I'm going to stop here.
(45:39):
I love what you're saying. You know, you have described
yourself once as your therapy approach is akin to that
of an anthropologists and explore, So it sort of is
how you see yourself. Can you kind of unpack why
why both an anthropologists anthropologisan explore. I'm a systemically trend therapist,
and I may have been I was strained psychodynamically as well,
(46:03):
But I arrived in America in the heydays of systemic
family therapy and kind of found myself there. If I
had come years later, I may have been, you know,
inducted into IFS or into EFT or any of the
other schools that proliferated later. But what I do know
is I'm a cross cultural therapist. I mean, it's not
(46:24):
just that I speak nine languages. I do different therapy
in the different languages as well, I talk differently about
the same topics. There are different values that people bring
as they talk about relationships, parenting, children, death, money, illness, communication, closeness, transparency.
(46:46):
All these words are culturally embedded. They have cultural resonance,
and with culture comes class and race and history, et cetera.
And therapy that was systemic invited that like today, you
cannot do therapy without thinking about the racial reckoning, about
the public health crisis, about the climate despair, about the
(47:07):
economic beheavors. I mean, if you just stick to the
brain and you don't bring in the larger, overlapping global
crises that are affecting people's life and sense of hopefulness.
When we work these days, we are working a lot
about hopefulness and anxiety and despair. These things are not
just happening because people inside are feeling low self esteem
(47:29):
or just because they've had trauma. It's because the world
they're living in is scary, and so that's the anthropological perspective.
It's bringing back this is what you know. My whole
training on sessions is about it's a salon. I bring
(47:50):
sociologists clinicians, trauma experts, so that we have a conversation
that is broad enough that it can help us meet
the moment, rather than coming from one particular approach. What
I probably say when I do the anthropological view is
to challenge the individualistic, silo driven therapeutic approaches. I think
(48:16):
that that's where where today. Maybe it's very very important,
but we need the other view too. This is not
that or that is that we need a therapy that encompasses,
you know, the issues and if you work with refugees,
and if you work with trauma victims, and you know,
(48:37):
if you work with the large things that are entering
our office at this moment, you need to have a
cultural framework and an anthropological framework absolutely. I mean I
was really interested to see that you started off in immigration,
studying immigration, very interested in identity, issues of identity. I
was worrying how you brought some of that earlier expertise
to the work you do today. I mean, you talked
(48:58):
a little bit about that already, and glad you're so.
I started out looking at cultural transition. What I was
fascinated was how do people experience cultural transition? And I
looked at the two groups that move the most these days,
refugees and internationals, forced migration and voluntary migration. And then
(49:21):
I looked at mixed couples, interracial, intercultural, inter religious couples,
and families of all orientations, you know, who also are
in cultural transition, but it lives in their own living room.
And then I looked at technology, and that is another
cultural transition, relationships mediated with technology, and so I'm very
(49:46):
interested in how that changes the way we think about ourselves,
the way we think about how we connect to others,
the way that we straddle the continuum between autonomy and
interdependent dance, between self reliance and loyalty, between an an
individual oralistic orientation and a more collective orientation and more
(50:09):
interdependent which is what we really are looking at right now.
We have a whole day at a conference that's about
mass mutual reliance. How do you make that shift? And
that shift has to take place in therapy as well.
When people talk about resilience, they have to be able
to talk about what is collective resilience, what is collective
trauma that mandates collective resilience that goes along with mass
(50:31):
mutual reliance. That's a real different paradigm shift than the
way that we have developed, you know, and these two
conversations are happening side by side in our field at
this moment. So I have been a translator. I have
often thought that when I would write about a subject,
I should start to go and see how do other
(50:52):
disciplines write about it. When I do supervision groups, I
have people from every discipline are multidisciplinary groups, so that
we continuously have one case five approaches. And that has
to do with the cultural transition. It's really to know
(51:14):
that there is never just one way. Once you've traveled
one time to another place, you know that there is
another way to do things everything. There's another way to
deal with the baby, is the food, the job. That
multiplicity of perspectives is something that really came from looking
at these cultural transitions and how we interact with them.
(51:46):
Why did you start working with couples? Like, when did
that transition happen? I started with groups. I totally started
with groups. I started with groups before I can to
the United States. I was doing what at the time
was called you know, inter racial groups into cultural groups,
race relations, you know, political groups that came together, conflict resolution,
(52:11):
all of that. And then when I was. And then
when I came here, I had looked at cultural, racial,
and religious identity, and somebody said, would you like to
come work at a ninety second Street. Why we have
a whole program for mixed couples. Basically what they were saying,
(52:36):
would you like to look at diversity in the bedroom?
And it made it made total sense for me. So
I was training in family therapy. Couples therapy at that
time was not really central. It was a little bit
of stepchild of family therapy. And I began to be
interested in couples because I began to see that couples
(52:57):
was becoming the most important unit of the family. In
the traditional world, the family is more important than the couple,
which is, by the way, part of why infidelity does
not necessarily become a leading cause of divorce, because preserving
the family is more important than your individual response to
a couple's crisis. As the couple became more important, and
(53:21):
as you can literally say that the survival of the
family today in the West depends on the relative happiness
of the couple, nothing else, not even the kids. Kids
may delay, but that's it. Couple's therapy became like this
is the central unit to work with, and it is
very difficult and challenging and fascinating and endlessly renewing. I
(53:45):
mean you, it keeps you very humble, It does absolutely.
Have you done any readings of Urban Yam's books and
his stories, Yes, yes, yes, it's very close to my heart.
He was on this podcast recently as well, and I
see some commonalities and your informative books for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(54:08):
both of your sort of this great gift. You have
to tell stories and in ways that really resonate with
the deep humanity and all of us. It's beautiful. There's
another topic I wanted to talk about as we near
the end of our conversation. You've talked about masculinity, and
there's misconceptions about what it means to be a man
(54:29):
in a relationship, and I'm wondering if you could kind
of dispel some of those misconceptions. You know, what do
you sort of see the men that come into your
practice and how that might differ from some of the
cultural stereotypes that exists. Maybe it's a place to start
with be to say that it's not just in my practice,
I have actually had the privilege of being the only woman.
(54:51):
If I may say, or the only identified woman to
join men's groups for quite a while, I've spent retreats
of three days where I am like an anthropologist, I'm
a guest, I'm a witness to men's groups. So it's
(55:11):
much more than just you know, I do have a
very heavily male practice, and have had for more than
twenty years. I'm practicing twenty five. But it's the groups
where I really have been very, very interested in. And
I did a whole conference with sessions live on masculinity
a few years back because I, well, because me too,
(55:36):
brought all of that, of course in the open and
mandated us to once again really discuss this. But also
because I think that the lives of women will not
change until the men come along and are given some
of the same opportunities to rethink their condition, their expectations,
et cetera. And because I often think that we put
(56:03):
a lot of focus on male power, and that in fact,
I think we have more to learn when we look
at what happens with men's fear of powerlessness. We never
have to hear women be losers. Losers doesn't exist in
the feminine, neither does emasculated exist in the feminine. We
(56:26):
never have to tell a woman be a woman, show
me that you're a woman. We tell men all the
time to man up. I think that you know what
strikes me at this time when everybody is talking about
masculinity from pop culture to politics, and question what masculinity
means and how it affects us, and what are the
(56:47):
roots of masculinity and how does it shape individuals and
cultures and how has it changed across generations. For me,
there's five dimensions around masculinity that I've been interested in, identity, intimacy, sexuality, power,
and trauma. And you know, a colleague of mine once said,
if the twentieth century is the century where women made
(57:10):
major changes, the twenty first century will be the one
where the men adapt to the changes that the women
have made. So it's an interesting thing to know that
the feminist literature is unified by its sense of moral
outreach over historical subordination and exploitation of women by men,
But the men's literature is unified by a sense of
(57:32):
a crisis and of ontological anxiety. So when I try
to understand what really is the thing that I own
in I would say this, probably historically people have never
really questioned masculinity men was a given, you know. Women
were seen as basically men with genitals on the inside
(57:54):
until very late, you know. But what we do know
is that masculine is often a goal and a duty
and an objective in most societies for boys and adolescents.
We talk about masculinity as a man date, as an imperative,
you know, be a man, man up. And you have
rituals in every society for men to go and prove
(58:16):
their manliness. And if we're constantly encouraging and exhorting men
to demonstrate mandliness, then maybe it isn't as a natural
as we that would like to think. You know, even
in the absence of femininity, one doesn't doubt the identity
of women. But that's not the case for men. Being
a man requires an effort that doesn't necessarily translates to
(58:40):
the life of women. Women rarely here be a woman,
you know. The female is seen as kind of natural
and unavoidable, and masculinity is seen as something that is
hard to develop and easy to lose. And so that's
why I'm interested in the feeling of powerlessness, in the
loss of identity, in the fragility of masculinity rather than
(59:01):
just focusing in the obvious privilege and power of masculinity.
That's such a good point, that's such I love it.
You know, this idea of impotence in men doesn't just
exist in the bedroom, but you know, the feeling of
impotence in one's a man's own personal life and the
pressures they may have to succeed and dominate the competition.
(59:23):
You know, not just in the bedroom, but you know,
in terms of competition. I just love what you're saying.
I love it so much, so important. Let me end
this interview today with a question for you, a personal question.
If you were to imagine telling your own story of
the Great Adaptation to your great great grandchildren, what would
you share. Learning to live with uncertainty or accepting the
(59:46):
uncertainty of life is something that I probably grew up
with and that I think my kids may have true
epigenetics really absorb, you know. I do come from a tradition,
from a family history where we you know, where my
family lost everything, everything and everyone from one day to
(01:00:09):
the next. And so the notion of entitlement of this
is mine, of this is going to be here forever.
I never grew up with those ideas. I always thought
that whatever you have today can disappear any moment. On
the one hand, I think it has given me a
sense of dread and existential anguish that I've had to
(01:00:33):
learn to live with. On the other end, it has
made me very adaptable. I am sure you know. I
don't just speak the languages, many of them because I
love languages, it's true, but also because in a way
it allows me to enter different places and to blend
and to be a part of even if I don't belong,
(01:00:53):
I can be a part of. And I think that
all these messages of the Great adaptation of how you
look around you ground yourself in the context. You get
a sensu as to what is the lay of the land.
You don't stay focused on your siloed views of what
is normative. You think in plural terms. You become a
(01:01:17):
bridge person. You see who you can say what too,
and parts of you will live with different people and
in different situations. I think that that's how I would
describe the great adaptation. And with that, when you live
with uncertainty, the fact is you can't do it alone.
(01:01:39):
That by definition, uncertainty mandates mass mutual reliance and interdependence
and collective resilience, which are ideas that I live in
my personal life, ideas that are part of my family life,
They're part of my professional and intellectual interests, and they
are very much at the core of this conference that
(01:02:01):
I'm doing in November, because I think that this is
not the first time. You should not pretend that this
is the first time the world is in an upheaval
and we don't know where we're going. I think we
were maybe a bit hubris the thing that we did
know where we're going. I probably would say that my
(01:02:22):
great adaptation is often building within uncertainty, that this is
a given. It's a given in relationships, it's a given
in life. Security is often an illusion. Now that is
a worldview. You aspire to it, but you know that
(01:02:47):
it fundamentally exists, but can also disappear. Yeah, we've seen
that so clearly this past year and a half. So
delightful to chat with you. I'm so glad we finally
got a chance to have you in the Psycholoic Pie,
which want to wish you well with all the many
exciting things you're doing. We didn't even talk about your game.
I want to wish that well, your new game, your
Sessions Live which we did talk a little bit about
(01:03:09):
the conference, and your podcast, your book, and just want
to thank you for your existence in this world. Thank you,
Thank you so much, a pleasure. Thanks for listening to
this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to
react in some way to something you heard, I encourage
you to join in the discussion at does Psycology podcast
(01:03:30):
dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast.
We also put up some videos of some episodes on
our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check
that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of
the show, and tune in next time for more of
the mind, brain, behavior and creativity
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