Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships | Huberman Lab

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Esther Perel.

Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and one of the world's foremost experts on romantic relationships.

She's also the author of bestselling books such as Mating in Captivity and the State of Affairs.

Today's discussion focuses on what it means to be in a truly functional romantic relationship.

We discuss this from the standpoint of identity, that is, how people both try to hold onto and evolve their identities within a relationship, and how a truly functional romantic relationship indeed evolves over time from a standpoint of curiosity and adventure, but also one in which people need to hold

on to certain components of themselves.

We explore what conflict in relationships looks like and the dynamics that underlie those conflicts, so focusing less on specific scenarios, but rather the dynamics that exist in conflicts in romantic relationship across all different situations and different combinations of people.

And of course, we also talk about what healthy conflict resolution looks like, what a truly effective apology looks and sounds like, and we explore the erotic aspects of relationships, comparing and contrasting, for instance, love and desire, how sometimes those things run in parallel in the same direction,

how sometimes those run in opposite directions and how people can explore their own notions, their own models of love and desire in order to have more effective romantic relationships.

By the end of today's episode, you will learn from the world's foremost expert on romantic relationships, how to find, build and revive romantic relationships that feel most satisfying to all partners involved.

I'm also pleased to announce that Esther Perel has just released a new course on intimacy.

You can find a link to that course in the show note captions, as well as links to her books, her podcast and other resources about romantic relationships.

Before you begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

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And now for my discussion with Esther Perel.

Esther Perel, welcome.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

There are so many questions and curiosities and puzzles and challenges around the topic of romantic relationships.

But what I really want to know is to what extent is the decision to even think about being in a relationship of the romantic type a extension of our identity?

Or is it really a willingness to potentially embrace a new identity?

And I asked this somewhat abstract question for a very specific reason.

And the reason is the following.

I think everyone who's been in a romantic relationship or even who just wants one is familiar with the kind of yearning or interest or curiosity.

And then also with the fact that just like the development of our physical body, it has an arc across the lifespan that a relationship has a sort of developmental arc.

There's the first meeting, the first week, the first month, et cetera.

And so much of what I've seen in your work and in the discussion about relationships in the public sphere seems to be trying to understand how we change in terms of what we want and what we ask for, what we feel willing to ask for, et cetera, across this arc of the relationship.

But what I want to know is, is the decision to enter a romantic relationship, a willingness, conscious or unconscious, to actually change who we are?

In other words, are we entering a relationship to just be ourselves and find someone with whom we go lock and key?

Or are we really saying, hey, even whether or not we realize or not, if we're pursuing a relationship, are we really basically saying, I'm willing to become a different person by virtue of being in a relationship?

I think it is both, completely both.

We meet an other in order to find ourselves and we meet an other and want to be surprised by the self we have unknown.

I think that all of us come into this world with a fundamental set of dual needs.

We need security and we need freedom and adventure.

And we need togetherness and we need separateness.

So in the relationship, you come in order to create that identification, but also that differentiation.

It's a dialectic all the time.

But what's interesting is even if I choose you because you represent sometimes the parts of me that are more challenging or that I disavow or that I prefer to outsource so I don't have to be too vulnerable about them, what draws me to you in the beginning, because it is different, that I think may expand me

and make me change, is also the very thing that becomes the source of conflict later, because we want to change, but up to a point, not too much and not on your terms.

So we want change, but we sometimes are afraid of change.

And so we let the other person represent the part of us that would want to change.

But then we disconnect from it.

So you can you become the representative of that.

I am drawn to the fact that you are stable, grounded, structured, solid, reliable, on time, you name it.

I know that this is something that I would like to be more of and just a very simple example.

But then I start to think of you as rigid because I get a little more than what I bargained for.

And now I start to argue with your rigidity and my desire to actually become more structured and solid and punctual and reliable has somehow disappeared.

So if I understand correctly, we seek out others in order to try and initiate the process of change that we want.

But then when we hit the friction point, meaning the point where it challenges where we are, then there's a form of resent or frustration.

Defensiveness. Defensiveness.

You know what it is?

Every system straddles stability and change and then grapples for homeostasis.

Every relationship goes through that.

Every system in nature goes through that.

But the same thing is true inside an individual.

We want change and we need stability.

And then these things sometimes are compensating each other and they are complementary and at times they both hurt.

So a very practical question.

Then what are the necessary but not sufficient elements that somebody should have in themselves before they go seeking a romantic relationship?

Meaning what is necessary in order to be able to embark on the process with any chance of success?

Barring extreme pathology, right?

Assuming that both people entering the relationship have the best of intentions to make the relationship work, in quotes.

Is it both a sense of one's own identity as well as what specifically they would like to change?

Or is it some other constellation of factors?

Different ways to answer this.

I think sometimes people say, I want to be with you because you helped me become the best version of myself.

You hear that a lot.

So what is that version?

Who is it that I want to see that I think you will help me become?

When you talk about these romantic relationships, first of all, I think there's a different answer if we're talking about cornerstone relationships or capstone relationships.

Do you know the concept?

If you don't mind defining those for the audience.

The cornerstone relationship is when we used to meet in our early 20s and together we build the foundation of our relationship.

We grew together. We saved our first monies together.

We got our first places together, et cetera.

It was very much foundational.

Capstone is the foundation has already been established because we tend to meet at this point 10, 12 years later.

So during those 12 years, I've already actually worked, so to speak, on my identity.

I have defined myself, my values, my aspirations, my constructs, how I want to see my life.

And when I meet you, you're a confirmation for all of this.

You're a confirmation of what I've already built.

And I am putting you and me as the capstone, which we put on top of what we've already created.

You and me, you've done the same thing.

So I am looking for someone who recognizes my identity, not for someone who helps me develop my identity from much earlier age.

So there's a developmental arc that changes the mandate.

I said it's both, but the priority of if it's the building of identity or the expansion of that identity, what you call change differs if you meet somebody when you're young and if you meet somebody when you're in your 30s.

What happens when people are mismatched in terms of age?

I mean, there is a big age differences a lot of the time.

And in gay relationships, you have often a major age difference that means something else, but it creates differentiation.

In straight relationships, you often have men who are a lot older than the women, very much rooted in evolutionary biology, I think, and fertility.

And now we have more and more a new phenomenon of older women with younger men, but that's actually been very rare in most cultures.

So that's shifting now towards more often people are observing older women with younger men?

You know, when you have four movies at this moment that are talking about this, then you begin to see the crescent of a new cultural phenomenon.

I think the fact that it appears in the arts and in the culture usually announces something, I wouldn't make it yet a phenomenon.

But you asked me a question before about what are the things people need?

I mean, you know, when you embark any relationship, it's, again, I tend to think as both end on a lot of things.

I come to you with a certain self -awareness.

How much self -awareness the more there is, the better.

And that self -awareness, I think, as its best translates in a sense of, you know, I think a good vow to say at the time of your wedding is, I'll fuck up on a regular basis and on occasion I'll acknowledge it.

It means that self -awareness comes within self -knowledge about your limitations, your and your ability to take responsibility for it without blame and shame.

And basically accountability.

I think accountability is an enormous component of relationship.

It's okay. We all do things.

You know, we all have our wounds and our frustrations and our expectations and our unexpressed needs and our unfulfilled longings, et cetera.

But it's a good thing to know it and to admit it and to not pretend that it's not me, but it's you.

You know, I often say that couples therapy, I am a practicing couples therapist for almost 40 years.

And couples often come to therapy thinking that you're a drop -off center.

You know, they come to deliver their problem and their problem is their partner.

And you're going to fix it.

And they're going to help you because they're an expert on what's wrong with the partner.

And it's an amazing thing how people have tremendous insight on all the shortcomings of the other person and do not see themselves as part of a system.

A relationship is a breathing living system of interdependent parts.

Do you think that's perhaps one reason why people who are in these cornerstone relationships of whom I've known many, you know, even family members of mine, you know, met in university, met their significant other and then had their first jobs, moved into the other, all the things you described that there's

this. They grow up together.

Yeah. And I think it probably happens at a stage of life when there's still a lot more neuroplasticity, frankly.

I mean, everything I know about neuroplasticity is that it exists across the lifespan, but that it tapers off significantly in one's late twenties.

Right. And, you know, fortunately it's still available, but the notion of being set in our ways is a neuroplasticity phenomenon, right?

It's the closing of the prefrontal cord.

Pretty much. Pretty much.

The fontanel is still there.

Exactly. It takes a lot more to open that plasticity later than it does earlier, certainly.

And yet it's inversely related to the self -awareness, right?

I mean, the younger we are, the less self -aware we are about our patterns because we just have less data over time.

So I could see how it'd be more difficult for somebody in their twenties to say, hey, listen, I think I have a good many virtues, but I have this severe issue with something, or this particularly frustrates me, or here's my laundry list of issues, right?

Whereas somebody in their forties or fifties or older, if pressed, could probably make that list if they were really being honest with themselves.

So it seems like - I think it's a good point.

So it seems that maybe there's a sweet spot, but that these earlier relationships, I've always been impressed by them and kind of romanticized them in my mind because that wasn't the trajectory that I took.

But they have a challenge.

You see, when you grow up together, you often put a knot of energy into the building of the unit.

And that unit then is supposed to become your base, your scaffolding from which two individuals can begin to grow and to define themselves.

When you meet later, you are already two individuals that have defined themselves who now have to find a way to create the energy to come together.

So it's a different movement.

It's a different choreography.

I think that the challenge for young couples today who meet early in college and have known often only themselves and a few people in their teenage years, et cetera, or none, is what happens when they begin to change individually.

Can the relationship expand enough to broaden the envelope to let these two people emerge individually, or is the jacket too tight?

Is the vest too tight?

And often it becomes a bit of a crisis.

Because they grew together on the basis of this togetherness.

And sometimes they can.

And sometimes it just feels like in order to become adults, it may need to happen with a different partner.

And that's why I always say, I think this moment we have two or three relationships or marriages in our adult lives, in the West.

And some of us will do it with the same person.

But the relationship has to change.

It's like the person changes the relationship, but the relationship makes room for the person to change.

This is dynamic. That just feels like such a true statement to me, because in my professional life as a developmental neurobiologist, there's a saying.

People always think of development and then adulthood.

But all of life is one big development.

That's absolutely correct.

And the great psychologist Erickson spoke about the different sort of death, which nowadays hopefully will extend into people's 80s, 90s, or even beyond.

Well, his last stage is the generative stage.

It's actually an amazing...

I mean, he's the most articulate theoretician of stages of life.

I agree. If people haven't seen those stages, we'll put a link to them in the show note captions.

But the idea is that you're basically grappling with some basic struggle that you either reconcile or you don't at every stage.

So you could imagine that these, let's say these three marriages, let's imagine a couple that meets in their 20s and does three marriages, which implies a couple of divorces in between, maybe not legal divorces, across their lifespan.

They really are, according to the Erickson Theory of Development or any neurobiological examination of brain development, different people in their 20s versus 40s versus 60s, 70s, 80s.

So this notion of three different marriages to me seems both logical and very grounded in what we know about the biology of the brain and the self.

A good metaphor is rooted in science.

And yet it's also kind of a radical idea when one hears it for the first time.

It framed in the context of with the same person, it sounds kind of lovely and romantic.

Okay, they meet, it's lovely, they have their first marriage.

Then there's some challenge, they overcome, they do a second marriage, then some challenge and a third marriage.

And maybe there's even grandchildren you imagine, maybe even great grandchildren.

There's all this kind of romantic notions built up around it.

But then there's also the reality that for many people, more than half, there's a fracture of the first marriage and that they either remain single or marry again.

And so what do you think dictates whether or not a person can go through these series of evolutions and actually find and create love again and again and again, either with the same person or with someone new, or in some cases, I guess, three different partners?

I mean, what is the sort of requirement?

Is it a willingness to accept this model and understand that who they are at 50 is going to be very different than who they were in their 20s?

A good question is a question that has many answers.

There's different ways to answer this.

I think that more than thinking about it as they were able to overcome crises, it's really the ability to redefine oneself and to redefine a relationship.

It's much more creative than problem solving.

You can overcome a crisis and put it aside and stay the same.

This is much more of a generative experience.

It's a creative experience is that you actually become a different unit.

The power dynamic is different.

The interdependency is different.

The erotic charge is different.

The connection to the outside world is different.

It's really enlivening.

I think everybody understands the difference between a relationship that is not dead and a relationship that is alive.

I am not there to help people survive.

My work is about more than that.

It's about helping people to feel alive.

The redefinition of having the same relationship with the same person, it has to be alive, not just not dead.

If sometimes that alive means going to a new person, a new country, a new city, a new social circle, a new profession, a new a lot of things that we today have access to to change, things that people did once.

When I ask an audience if your grandparents grew up in the same neighborhood or in the same town and worked in the same company, most people raise their hands.

Then I go down the generations and then now it's like how many of you have had three jobs in the last five years?

This notion that we can create new things for ourselves is actually one of the greatest things that has happened in the realm of relationships.

We can have kids much later.

We can join somebody who has already had those children.

We can marry in our 60s for the first time.

We can live in a trip threesome.

There's a plasticity, if you want to use the word, to the world of relationship today that is extremely rich and expansive but demands a set of skills to negotiate, to understand the uncertainty that comes from having to make so many decisions.

At the time, in the past, none of us made decisions about most of these things that were handed down to us.

That level of freedom is utterly rich but comes with a tremendous amount of anxiety and demands maturity.

Sometimes couples have become so entrenched and so locked in their story and confusing their story with the truth and feeling that they're living next to someone who has a completely different version of the story that they cannot talk to.

There is no greater polarization sometimes than a couple that once agreed on a lot of things.

There's no way change can enter this system.

When I hear your answer, what comes to mind is that, again, as a neurobiologist, the human brain has this amazing capacity to focus on past, present, or future.

Sometimes two of those three things, it's kind of hard to think about all three at once, but it sounds to me as if one of the more functional attributes that somebody can have if they want to navigate relationship in a healthy way is to be able to at least temporarily discard with one's story about one's

past and even their past identity.

The word that was coming up over and over again in my mind, as you answered, was this word you used earlier, which was curiosity.

I'm wondering if what you're referring to is a curiosity on the part of hopefully both people in the relationship as to what the relationship could become and who oneself could become.

My definition of curiosity is an interest in finding out but without an emotional attachment to what the outcome is.

This is what we train scientists to do.

You want to get the answers, but you can't get emotionally attached to the answer being A or B.

That's anti -curiosity.

Real genuine curiosity is about the process, the verb action of wanting to figure out something, but not being attached to a particular outcome.

As you were describing the functional trajectory of relationship, I was thinking, okay, so if one could approach relationship with a willingness to discard stories about one's past and maybe even a sense of one's identity of past, be willing to let go of that a little bit, and just be curious about where could this go

if I let the relationship guide my evolution of identity a bit.

That takes, as you said, some boldness because it's kind of scary.

Not knowing who one is going to become if they let the other person maybe lead for a while or if they were to lead for a while.

Are these the sorts of dynamics that you're referring to?

I think you almost articulated one of the most important pieces of my work.

Curiosity is one of the top words for me because it stands in opposition to reactivity.

And reactivity reinforces the cycle.

It just creates narrow repetition, rapid cycles of escalation.

It usually involves defense and attack and blame, et cetera.

Curiosity is an active engagement with the unknown.

And I like when you say without the attachment to the outcome or the emotional investment, I think that's absolutely accurate.

And much of what I do is try to have people switch from reactive to curious.

But that curiosity means that they're willing to enter empathically and respectfully into the realm of another person whose narrative is completely different.

I'm very invested and familiar with the neurosciences and the whole work on the brain in relationships.

But I am very interested in narrative because I believe that the story shapes the experience.

And when people hold on to the story and they don't think it's a story, they think it's fact.

This is what happened last night.

I'll tell you what you did.

I'll tell you what happened.

That's not the case.

And they don't see this as a subjective rendering.

It's totally valid, but it's valid as your experience.

And much of couples' conversations is pseudo -factual talk, but it is actually subjective.

Once you get that, you can become curious.

Once you are curious, you open up.

But it is very challenging when people are hurt, wounded, defensive, holding tight to invite that curiosity.

What's happening in their bodies is about shutdown and defense and self -protection.

And you want, I'm doing this physically to you because this is where the brain and the neurobiology in that moment is going against what actually is in their best interest, psychologically and existentially.

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I am a firm believer that when we are in a stress response, that we become locked in a time domain, and not to spin off into attention about this, but put differently when we are relaxed, we can think about time and our life and other things happening around us and others in a far more dynamic way.

The stress response is about solving for the feeling now.

It has no sense about or it doesn't allow us a window into the cognition or emotions that are related to what could be, even though we desperately want out of there.

And there's all sorts of evolutionary reasons why this would be the case.

But I feel like a statement that you made, which is that a curiosity and a willing to discard with one's own narratives, and in particular what you said about that people perceive their own experience as fact when in actuality, it's just two different stories.

Neither person is correct or one person, but people have these stories which are almost confabulation at some point, but they feel so true to all of us when we experience them.

I also feel like that's a lot of what's happening in culture at large.

People diametrically opposed camps really believe that the same thing is a reflection of two completely different series of facts.

And it seems almost unsolvable at the level of culture.

There's just too many people, but at the level of two individuals, I feel like it ought to be tractable.

I have gone to a lot of meetings in the last year on issues of polarization on societal levels.

And I often think like, what is a psychologist or a couple of therapists doing in those meetings?

Why am I invited here?

And then I think, you know what?

You actually have a lot of experience with polarizations sitting for a long time with couples who once actually thought in the presence of the other, I discover myself now can be so at odds.

They're sitting in the same room.

They're listening to the same session.

They have a complete different interpretation of what I said and what it meant.

And they leave and you wonder, did it happen in the same room?

And the same thing is about what they describe about the night before.

It's like, and if you didn't see them together and you saw them each alone, you would be completely mistaken because it's like Swiss cheese.

Everything that one has left out is where the other one starts.

So we learn a lot from doing couples work around the process of polarization, around the process of intractable conflict, around the sense that you are my enemy.

And there is nothing in what you say that I can recognize or be empathic towards or understanding.

I think on a societal level, the people who have studied intractable conflict basically have a method of how you bring two opposing parties, factions, tribes who have been in conflict and at war for a long time and how you bring them together.

There is actually a method, a process.

It's not written in stone, but you certainly don't start by talking about the things that drive you completely apart and unable to talk to each other.

You start by finding some elements of your shared humanity.

In a couple, because that is the space we talk about now, in a couple, it's an incredible thing how people can literally think that the other person wants their demise.

You live day in, day out with someone who you really think wants to hurt you is your enemy.

And sometimes there is evil.

There's people who don't have good intentions, but in many situations, it's also a projection.

It's also experiences that you've had in the past.

And this is where what's interesting is that the narrative, the conscious narrative lives here and what you call the brain that can only locate itself in three temporal, and the brain and the physiology are in a different time.

Implicit memory is completely influencing explicit narrative.

Yeah. People are incredibly prone to confabulation based on these unconscious things going on.

And it's kind of a scary thought.

If I feel it, this is what's happening.

Right. And because we are creatures of meaning, we need to reconcile those things and we need coherence in our narratives.

And that coherence is what is so difficult for when you work with people who are, what is it that they're holding on to?

I mean, one of the classic examples is someone says, I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to.

And the other one says, that's not the case.

If someone tells you, I didn't mean to hurt you, you would think that someone would say, that's reassuring.

I like to hear that.

I hope that's true.

Makes me feel a lot better.

Rather than proving to you that that's not true.

You wanted to step on my toes.

You intentionally put those heels on or those shoes or those fists to step on me.

And that coherence of maintaining the idea that if I feel that you hurt me, you must have been wanting to hurt me rather than, you know, I can be hurt.

And that doesn't mean you intentionally were trying to do anything.

It's as if I need to justify my being hurt by the intention of what you did and to just make sure sometimes that's the case.

There's not that there are people who intentionally want to hurt some people.

But at other times what I'm highlighting is that the coherence to make sense of why I'm feeling this way demands that I also define what you are trying to do to me.

I mean, and in reality, most people are terrible at understanding how they themselves feel, let alone someone else's intentions.

I mean, if somebody apologizes and says, listen, I'm truly sorry, I screwed up.

And the other person says, I don't believe you.

I think what they're really saying, you can tell me if I'm wrong, is I don't feel better as a consequence of your apology.

That's because your apology I screwed up is incomplete.

Most of the time people say that I made a mistake, I'm sorry.

But it doesn't acknowledge what the other person felt in response to what we did.

So let's say that the apology also includes that I really messed up.

It makes total sense that you would be upset.

We had an agreement that we would meet at seven and I didn't get home until nine and I didn't notify you until eight.

I would be upset too.

That's totally justified.

That sucks. That's got to really suck.

At that point, if the other person still feels like it's still frustrating, presumably it's because either this is a pattern.

So this one apology doesn't encapsulate all the litany of other things that relate to this, a feeling unseen or unappreciated.

There's often a lot more behind the event.

Right. Or yeah, it could be a pattern of apologies that don't equate to change or it could be a pattern of an apology that doesn't encapsulate all the other things that weren't voiced.

Because sometimes people won't voice their grievances because they for whatever reason, but there's a lot of resent that's built up.

So in that moment when somebody tells another that they are not convinced, emotionally convinced, what are the tools that you give each in order to be able to navigate that sticking point?

I think apology is an amazing topic in the real move relationship.

It's a huge piece. Apology, forgiveness, ownership, responsibility, accountability, that whole range of things.

I think if you give that apology, many times somebody, and it's not that you're doing this every Tuesday, the person will probably just say, thank you.

If you have someone who can't receive an apology and the apology is sincere, that's the first and foremost thing that accompanies an apology, then you begin to ask, why is this person struggling to receive this?

Because it is the thing that you should be getting.

And then you start to ask yourself, is it because if I accept your apology, it's as if I agree that what you did wasn't so bad.

It is repairable. And in order to really make clear that the grievance is big, I cannot receive your apology.

That's one of the dynamics that often occurs in that moment.

And so you ask sometimes, you sit and you see.

You see somebody who pretends to say, I'm sorry.

You see somebody who just says, come on, what's the big deal?

And then you see people who really are sincere.

And then you watch what's happening to the other person.

Are they relieved? Are they suspicious?

Are they feeling like they would dissolve a certain element of their identity if they don't hold on to this?

Is it as if they're saying, you can get away with it?

It's not as bad because accepting the apology is to minimize the issue.

And then you switch to burden on the other side.

In Judaism, you apologize three times.

And if after the third time and you've done a real reckoning apology, if after three times the other person does not accept it, the burden passes over to the other person.

Interesting. This is my money desk.

And I think it's an incredibly interesting idea that at some point the person has made the amends when they have.

And when you cannot receive it, then now the burden passes on you.

I'm just going to hover there for a second because I agree that apology is such an interesting and important concept.

And you mentioned that accepting somebody's apology at an emotional level, not just saying, thank you, I accept your apology, but really internalizing that and allowing space for it to shift your experience of the thing that hurt.

And by the way, accepting the apology doesn't yet mean that you forgive.

Forgive is your freedom.

You decide at what point you do it and you may do it alone.

It's not always a dyadic experience.

Apology is a dyadic experience, but forgiveness is freedom.

Yeah. I appreciate that distinction now that you've given it.

I mean, I appreciate you giving that distinction.

I did not make that distinction.

I love this topic because it's really so many things happen underneath.

There's issues of shame around apology.

What's the difference between shame and responsibility?

What is the capacity of a person to have real distress rather than empathic distress?

Real empathy into a lot of things.

The people who can never apologize.

Is that right? Oh yeah.

Because to do so would what for them?

Shame. I think a lot of that piece is around shame.

Because self -esteem, as my friend Terry Reuel says, is your ability to see yourself as a flawed individual and still hold yourself in high regard.

When you admit your flaw, it means there's something wrong with you.

Then it's very hard to say, I'm sorry.

This is the essence.

How do you see yourself as imperfect, flawed, but you still respect yourself and you hold yourself in high regard?

If you can do those two things, you can apologize very easily.

Well, I find that so much of being an adult, again, in quotes, involves the disambiguating two things.

One is we're taught to really trust our own experience, to some extent, to stand our ground when we know A is true and B is false.

But then also part of being an adult is admitting when we're wrong.

There's no rule book, no real -time rule book for that, especially given that people have different versions of the same thing often.

But it seems to me that one of the great challenges in not just in romantic relationship, but in relationships of all kinds, is to really be able to slow down and enter the state of mind and body that allows us to do the kind of processing you're talking about.

So at a very practical level, I'm curious.

Let's say a couple comes into your office and they're dealing with either a single hurt or a litany of hurts or something like that.

Do you believe it's important for them to shift out of their emotional state to be able to process differently?

At the beginning of a session, do you have them do a couple deep breaths together?

Do you have them recall a time when they felt particularly bonded?

Is there an effort to shift their somatic state in order to bring their mind to a place of more curiosity or is going straight to the issue often the best way in?

First of all, I like that it's interesting we're going from apology to conflict.

It makes total sense.

I spent the last year creating a whole course on conflict and how do you turn conflict into connection?

What is good conflict?

You know, I think conflict is inherent to relationships.

And then what are problematic ways to deal with conflict?

Yes, on some level, there is very little you can hear if you are in a state of hyperarousal, if you are in a position of self -protection.

I mean, all these stressful places, all these cortisol levels going up, etc., are not going to help you.

But at the same time, you can't, in the moment that someone is completely agitated, talk to them about trusting.

It's just like the physiology is not corresponding.

So, it's a real dance.

I don't do the breath often, sometimes.

I actually don't do anything all the time.

I am working like a tailor.

I do fittings. I mean, I think the richness of therapy is in its art on some level, maybe.

But sometimes I just say, I think you need to stand up and move and just listen to what your partner has to say, but don't sit.

Sometimes I say, don't look at each other.

Sometimes I say, turn to each other.

Some things are better done face to face, and some things are better done side by side, parallel play, fishing.

There's a lot of things like driving.

Every parent who's ever had a kid in the back knows this.

You have both. You have moments when you need to be able to look into each other, and then you have moments where you just need to do something about the side by side.

Then, it's also the limits of words.

When is it we're talking because we are homo sapiens, but in fact, if we were animals, we would be just making noises.

We're not really making sense, so stop talking.

What I try very hard to do is to not let people show the worst side of themselves.

They can do that at home.

They don't need to come and shame themselves in my office.

I do know that certain situations will draw the worst out of people, but that doesn't mean that that's who they are.

That's one of the big things as a therapist is to not fall for that because if you met these people alone, they would be charming.

If you had met them maybe two years before, they would have been charming too.

Something's happening between them.

That is, making them act and react from places of deep hurt and fear and attack and aggression.

Sometimes I see them alone.

I don't think that you are capable of having this conversation at this moment because you're not willing to take any responsibility when you're sitting next to your partner.

You're in a blame fest.

We're not going to do that, so I'm going to talk with you alone.

Then, I'm going to prepare you to come to your partner with at least one or two things that you can own.

What am I doing to contribute to this mess?

What am I doing to make things better?

I like to start the session by asking, if I'm dealing with a kind of chronic conflict, low intensity warfare or bigger, it depends what kind of ...

There's different kinds of ...

But I like to ask, what have you done this week to make things better?

What a great question.

What have you done to make your partner feel that they matter?

Rather than, what happened this week?

I kind of have a sense.

Please do not tell me the last unraveling.

I got it. It goes from zero to 60 in no time.

None of this. I don't need the details of the story.

I need to know what you're doing to each other, what feelings you're instigating in each other.

I don't need the plot.

The plot is, you know, there's only three dances.

This fight aiming at each other, withdrawing from each other, or one person withdrawing and one person pursuing.

These are three types of major choreographies of conflict.

Quiet silence, or one goes after the other who is closing the doors and they follow them through the house, which is following them to a lot of other things.

From that place on, you decide, okay, who is doing what to whom?

Who is feeling what at the hands of whom?

What is influencing this?

This person is once again feeling that when this one didn't talk to them, they were being given the silent treatment that they used to feel when they grew up.

This feeling of neglect and dismissal is just crushing them because they certainly feel like they've been rejected completely.

This one is feeling like they're once again being attacked and invaded by this other person who keeps following them and wants to talk when they have not taken.

It's remembering when they were living in the place where they grew up, where they couldn't wait to get out because they were feeling completely flooded and overwhelmed by the shit show of their house.

These two stories are now dictating what's happening between these two people.

These two people are no longer adults in the room.

Their younger selves have completely taken over, their amygdala is completely flooded, and then it matters.

It depends. Sometimes, because I'm a little bit narrative driven, I may make the mistake to actually go to the story when in fact these two people, sometimes I sit for 10 minutes quiet.

I say, we're going to just wait for our systems to regulate, because even I get agitated.

It's not like I don't absorb it.

I say, I think we need some sitting here.

Sometimes I put music.

I love music, so I put music.

I just say, I don't think a single word is going to help here.

Sometimes I say, I think we should stop the session.

I mean, it depends if you think there's something that can be gained if you start to feel like it's just going to make it worse.

Sometimes, in the middle of the session, they say, when's the last time you made him a cup of tea?

And the fact that you can still make a cup of tea to someone who you would like to strangle, it's really special.

It's amazing how we can inhabit two completely contradictory feelings at the same time.

I can't stand you, get the hell out of here, and I can't imagine my life without you.

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There's something that I really want to revisit that you said.

You said it incredibly clearly, but I have never heard this described.

And I think it's so, so very important for people to hear and internalize, including me, that I'm going to ask us to visit it again, but not because you weren't clear, but just because I think - No, I'm curious, what is it?

So as a biologist, when we teach biology, the good biologists, good teachers, we emphasize names only because people need to know them.

This is called that, this is called that, but it's all about verbs.

It's all about processes and dynamics.

And what you just described as the three verb states of conflict, I think I've never heard articulated that way.

Right. So you described, if I understand correctly - Pursuer, pursuer.

Right. Either one person pursuing another - No, pursuer, pursuer.

Oh, pursuer, pursuer is loggerheads.

Those are escalations.

Two arrows pointing at one another and not in a good way.

No, not in conflict.

It's usually not a good way.

And there's a whole interpretation of an attachment style that underlies why two people in the situation of threat go on the attack.

You have two people fighting.

You have two people fighting, fleeing, and you have one person who flees and one person who fights.

That's another language for pursuer, pursuer, distancer, distancer, pursuer, distancer.

And in each of those cases, it seems that the first step to getting to a more functional dynamic to try and sort this out, whatever the conflict is, is to somehow change one's mindset from talking about the story of what led there, or stories of what led there, to really starting to parse the feeling

states of ourselves and hopefully empathy for the feeling state of the other.

It's feeling states and physiological states.

It's two different things.

The physiology is more primitive, more basic.

It's physiology, senses, feelings, thoughts is the way I would ...

But because we, I say it, because we are homo sapiens and we think, we really, this thing about coherence and thinking that what we say has meaning is extremely powerful to the point sometimes of delusional.

Because I have to believe this because there would be too much dissonance if what I feel and what I think and what therefore happened didn't all have a coherence to themselves.

And sometimes when you see it in the room, you kind of say they never said that.

It's almost like a psychosis of sorts.

I'm not calling either person psychotic.

It's psychotic because it's a disconnection from reality.

I would say it's such an inhabiting of an internal reality that it is disconnected from the possibility, and this is where curiosity comes in.

It's the possibility that what you are experiencing is completely real in its experience, but that doesn't mean it is factual or it is real in reality.

When I'm hurt and when I am thinking that you want to harm me, it's very difficult for me in that moment to be willing to be empathic towards you.

And there are relationships where this is the truth.

I want to constantly come back to that because not everything is imagined.

But there are many other relationships where why would he want, maybe he stepped away because he just thought that whatever was going to come out of his mouth, he would regret.

It's not because he doesn't care about you.

In fact, it's the opposite.

And he knows what he can sometimes say, he, they, she, it doesn't matter, but not because he wanted to just throw you to the wolves.

It's almost like we lose our theory of mind, our ability to place ourselves in the mind of another in a healthy way when we're in these stress states.

It's funny you call it stress states, because stress to me is so physiological that it doesn't include the relational component.

There needs to be a word for stress that involves the emotional reality.

And that emotional reality that now may be somewhat imagined, and this is why it's complicated, was once true.

What now is an internal truth, once was what really happened.

And that's why we imagine, and this is how we interpret the dynamic.

It's very important to add that.

So the past was real.

There was someone in the past who actually did this to me.

But when you do this, I think of them, I bring those two things together.

I collapse the past and the present.

And that's why I'm convinced this is what you're doing to me too.

And so how do you take somebody out of their physical and mental and emotional past to be grounding themselves into the present so that they can consider that this person that is next to them is not doing to them what once was done to them.

And my mind immediately goes to what you just described as a shift from focusing mainly on the past and how it's making us feel in the present to how we're feeling in the present, acknowledging and understanding something did happen that was real, as you said, and yet with this curious eye toward the future

of what could unfold.

That's probably the hardest nugget of couples therapy.

I mean, I do individual work too, but if we talk relational therapy, this is one of those nuggets because people are not aware that they are in their past.

They are convinced that this is in the present.

It's a collapse of time zones and realities.

It's what makes us so rich.

It's what makes us so able to be creative and artful, but it's what sometimes makes it very challenging for us, especially in romantic relationships.

Because you asked at first to begin with romantic relationships.

A lot of what we say here is true for friendships and work relationships, but there is only two relationships that mirror each other.

It's the one we had with our first caretakers, mostly our parents, and the ones we have with our romantic partners.

People can sit in the office and tell you, I don't have this with anybody else.

And it's true. Often you believe them because nobody gets as close to you and nobody elicits in you those kinds of early yearnings and emotional needs than a romantic partner.

And that is very interesting.

I don't know if it's a bug or a feature as the engineers say, but it is remarkable to me that the very same neural machinery that forms the underpinning of infant primary caretaker relationship is repurposed for romantic relationship.

I mean, I marvel at that, right?

I mean, the brain doesn't have like, oh, here's your developmental wiring circuits.

And then guess what?

You get to hit adolescence and you go through puberty and then you get this new circuit for forming a romantic attachment.

The brain imaging shows us that it's repurposed.

So it's like if you got a two plus two equals four algorithm in that circuit, let's call that securely attached, although I realize that language is not sufficient, but for just purposes of discussion.

Okay, well then great.

Then you get healthy romantic attachments as adults or you as an adult, and perhaps you can navigate in and out of things that are unhealthy more quickly.

However, if you got a two plus two equals five algorithm wired into that circuit, well, then you're forever looking for something that is essentially dysfunctional.

That's the simplest version of this.

Tell me more about this repurposing.

It's really interesting.

Yeah, so beautiful work by Alan Schor and others has shown that you image the brain of infant and typically it's mother, but they've done other caretakers as well.

And you see this incredible mirroring of sure, right brain, left brain activity, more dopaminergic or serotonergic activity.

Basically the takeaway is that you see a lot of coherence.

What's going on in the mother is going on in the child and vice versa.

And there's a lot of reciprocity, but sometimes in unhealthy caretaker infant relationships, the so -called anxious, attached, dissociative, or avoidant type scenarios, the ABCD baby type thing.

People can look that up.

They like, we can provide a link.

You see a mismatch in the neurochemistry and the activation of these brain areas.

In other words, the brain circuitry for attachment is set up so that anxious states are evoked when calm states should have been.

Have there been better parenting?

Okay, all right. But then you essentially run the same sorts of studies on romantically attached young adults or older adults.

And what you see is the same sets of neurons, the same circuits.

I mean, this is remarkable.

Nowhere else to my awareness, nowhere else in the nervous system do we repurpose neural circuitry from early in life.

It's as if there's a neural circuit for sensing thirst and drinking early in life.

And then later it's used for sensing how to navigate a city.

Okay, now those are two very disparate things, but this is like outrageous, right?

And so I say it's either a feature or a bug, we don't know, but it is the way it is, right?

I would say I wasn't consulted at the design phase.

What do you think was the evolutionary logic of that?

I like to think in a kind of romantic way that some of our most important work in our lifetime is to try and resolve these developmental miswireings that are the consequence of faulty caretaker infant relationship.

And you can't blame the infant.

Now, does that mean we blame our parents to the point of ostracizing them?

Well, one would hope not.

Maybe in some cases that's necessary.

But I like to think that what we've observed over the 10, 20, 30 years in no small part, seriously, thanks to your work, reflects an evolution of how we are thinking about attachment, that we are actually getting better at understanding the self.

And there's something about the human brain that wants to understand itself.

Very interesting. So I like to think that in a hundred years, not only will there be more models of relationship as functional, healthy relationships, but there will also be a deeper understanding of what this whole thing of love and attachment really is.

And the parallel I use is one of biology.

We understand so much more about brain function now than we did just 10 years ago.

Addiction, for instance, not just a condition of failure of willpower, but this understanding about dopamine and other molecules.

I think we now look at a fentanyl addict or heroin addict very differently.

They're caught in a neurochemical algorithm that is not serving them well.

It doesn't remove their responsibility, but there comes a point where they can't recover themselves and they need certain supports and those supports are starting to emerge now.

So my hope is that this is built into our evolution as some sort of vector toward progress.

You know, it's interesting because some models of couples work, of couples therapy will say you have recreated with each other patterns of your early life in order to be able to transcend them.

Right. The repetition compulsion.

You get the same thing over and over again.

Lord knows I've had that and some wonderful partners.

And by the way, as I say that I'm also taking 50 % of responsibility or 100 % of the responsibility for the choice.

As they say, you didn't have six hard relationships.

You had a one hard relationship six times.

And I think Paul Conti says it that way, but that yes, that the repetition compulsion is a unconscious attempt to resolve the core conflict that arose during early attachment.

Correct. Do you subscribe to that view?

I think it's a very useful idea.

You know, I was thinking at one point, it's like sometimes when I listen to you and you know, there is an exactness in the things that you describe often rooted in science and research, et cetera, couples therapy or psychotherapy relationship thinking.

It's, you don't have an exact answer.

It's first of all, you don't have an exact answer because modern relationships are more complex than ever.

And I don't think any relationship expert at this point can have answers.

You have invitations, you have ways of thinking that are useful.

And here is the question.

Is it true for me is answered by, do the people, does it resonate for them?

If they buy it, then it's true.

It's a framework. I can analyze this tableau in multiple ways.

If this is the one that resonates for you, this is what we're going to go with.

And that's what makes it true.

This is a very interesting thing.

There's multiple, I mean, to me it's interesting because there's a whole movement within the world of psychotherapy and psychology that wants to actually become much more normalized with protocols and the same thing for everyone.

I think that much of what at least relationship therapy, which is really the world that I practice in, is existential and it's meaning making.

And there's a lot of ways to do that.

So if this interpretation works for you, be my guest.

But that's not because it is more true than another.

It's the one that was useful for you.

And that makes you much more humbled.

I love that answer.

It's a little bit like when you raise kids.

I used to think that all these things I had done with my first one is because I had such good ideas.

Then I had a second one and none of these things worked with them because it was a different person.

So I realized that the first one, it worked because there was a fit between my method and the person.

And this is the important thing in therapy is that it's an issue of that fit is what you're looking for.

We hear a lot these days about the different attachment styles or languages of love.

The love languages, people will say, I emphasize, gifts feel very rewarding.

Words of affirmation, unstructured time, et cetera, et cetera.

Or people will, I think nowadays, if they look into it a little bit, they'll realize that they are either more avoidant or more anxious.

These things can shift.

I think it's wonderful that people are thinking about these things in the same way that I think it's wonderful that people understand that there's a molecule called dopamine.

They can do certain things, serotonin and certain things.

But I'm as to whether or not you feel that the naming of things and the assignment of oneself to a category can sometimes be limiting in terms of one's ability to really embrace this curiosity.

And you also use the word invitation and you are describing couples therapy and healthy relationship as a bit more of an art form than a reductionist protocol oriented science, which I love.

Because to me, despite being a scientist, some of the great mystery of life and certainly of romantic relationship is when you find yourself in happy places that you didn't anticipate finding yourself or in a place of forgiveness and close friendship, when at one point you can recall being, like you

said, this person embodies the worst things in your mind.

So I wonder if the processes that you found useful in your clinical work, is it possible to formalize those in a way that people can start to adopt to them?

In other words, do you think that we can learn to navigate relationship in more healthy ways, not just by saying I'm anxiously attached or avoidant or securely attached.

I'm looking for someone that has that or my love language is this, and they love to do that.

And so therefore we're a perfect lock and key.

I think people are starting to think about relationship in a more nuanced and sophisticated way.

And yet also what I'm hearing is it's a lot more dynamic than that.

And that some of those categorizations that we assign ourselves can really perhaps be limiting to what could be.

It's a great question, but I have a moment now as if I'm in the session with you where I have like five things that are arriving here in front of my brain.

And I'm thinking, which one am I going to enter?

I'm going to actually start with just the actual question, but then I probably is an opportunity to say a little bit about how I approach this thing.

I think some naming is very useful.

It frames it. It gives it a foundation, something to hold on to.

Language matters if we would not be having a conversation without having a shared language at this moment.

But within that, you and I are using the same words and may have very different meanings attached to it.

So that's the richness of the process is what do you mean when you say invitation, curiosity, conflict, et cetera.

For example, when I do the work on conflict, I did provide language.

For example, one of the things that happens in conflict is we have confirmation bias.

That's a cognitive framework that is often present in situations of emotional conflict, of conflict, which involves always something an emotional dimension could be political too.

Confirmation bias means that I am looking for evidence that reinforces my beliefs.

And I disregard any evidence that contradicts it.

Now this happens between two people.

This happens between two parties.

That's a very important naming.

It's interesting. I've noticed this, this, this, this, but all you mentioned is that.

Cognitive bias. Another cognitive bias that is very common is fundamental attribution error.

We have this idea that I am complex and you are more simple.

If, if, if I'm in a bad mood is because there was traffic, you know, the circumstances, there's context.

If you're in a bad mood is because you're a cantankerous person.

That's just your personality, you know, we'll categorize and totalize the behavior of others.

And we'll have lots of nuance and poetry for our own.

That's a concept. That concept is very useful.

It's neutral. It doesn't blame anybody.

And it says, we all do this.

I like that kind of naming.

This is very different from the kind of naming that pathologizes people, the kind of naming that unlocks you into one identity.

You know, you may have addiction and addiction may be really important.

It may have been, have destroyed your life, but to just say you're an addict.

I've seen, so I worked in an addiction center for, for two years and you know, people had a lot of, there were a lot of other things happening in these people's lives.

And to just focus on this one thing is it reduces the person, but it also reduces your ability to do something with the person.

It narrows your lens.

So there's always this question about how wide is the lens that you, that you not get overwhelmed.

So you want to make it smaller, but not that small that you, that you're looking through a keyhole.

A person is more complex than a keyhole.

You know, we don't just treat symptoms.

We work with lives.

That's the difference of, for me anyway, in the work that we do.

And that, and then when you begin to think about lives, then you start to think about culture.

What is happening in the world of relationships today?

It's such an incredible thing that is going on.

And, and if you don't put that in the broader context, I'm trained as a systemically oriented family therapist.

And that means that you're looking at the interaction of different systems.

And I think that a lot of what happens is a hyper individualization of these things.

And the naming is useful when it expands your understanding.

The naming is not useful when it locks you into a symptom and a reductionistic thing that gives false certainty to profits.

I can't agree more that naming that expands one's understanding and maybe even lends itself to a hint of curiosity, stands a chance of, of having some rehabilitative quality to it.

I feel that nowadays there's such an overuse of psychological terms like narcissists, gaslighting therapy terms.

It's, it's almost the way that if people were to talk about neurobiology as neurosurgeons, right?

I'm not a neurosurgeon, but I have friends who are.

And neurosurgery is like something people trained for many, many, many years for, just as being a clinical psychologist, people trained for many years for and have a ton of in office experience, real world experience.

Nowadays, the naming and the attachment of names to particular top contour features of people out there seems to be largely for the purpose of closing off possibility as opposed to increasing possibility.

However. It's both because on the one hand, more than many other forms of medicine or healthcare or care, psychotherapy, psychology, but certainly psychotherapy was always stigmatized and still is in many parts of the world.

It's for the crazies.

It's for, it's for people.

It's, there must be something fundamentally wrong.

I mean, it's something that nobody went around talking about the fact that they are in therapy.

You went to see a therapist, you know, now you're putting it on your, on your dating app, you know, it's a status symbol.

So there is a de -stigmatizing that is very important, but there is also words that are weaponized and they are not useful and they, and they are separating people.

And we have enough separation at this moment in our societies in the West.

We don't need more efforts to pull people apart.

We need efforts to bring back the collective, the community, the shared experience, because we are too far apart.

And that's why I think that some naming is useful and some naming is not always that useful.

Well, amen to bringing people together more.

I, yeah, such an important mission right now.

I'd like to explore the possibility of something that I've heard, but I don't know if it's true, that sex, which of course doesn't just include intercourse, but the things that lead into and out of sexual intercourse, but that sex is a microcosm for the relationship at large.

Meaning that the dynamics that show up in intimate interactions are somehow reflective of a larger working out or dynamic in the relationship.

To what extent do you think that's true?

It's a concept that I've heard.

It sounds interesting and any discussion about sex tends to get people's ears pricked up because it's, depending on where you live in the world, it's either something that people talk about casually openly or with a lot of electricity around it.

But I always like to say, as a biologist, we can all agree on one thing, which is that we're all here because sperm met egg, if not inhuman in dish, and then eventually inhuman.

So we're still at that point in human evolution.

What are your views about intimacy and sex as a reflection of the relationship?

And here, what I'm thinking of again are these, when you describe conflict, you describe these three different positioning of arrows towards one another, separate away from one another, one chasing the other.

Is there a parallel for healthy relationship that we can offer up?

Sexually. Yeah. Before talking about this question of whether or not sex is a microcosm of the larger relationship, the health of the relationship.

Let me start like this.

I mean, I've studied sexuality for quite a few decades now in relationships, but I think maybe because of what you said around the world, love and desire are universal experiences, but the way that they are constructed are highly culturally contextual.

And so the most archaic, rooted, traditional aspects of a culture or a society are lodged around its beliefs and attitudes and behaviors towards sexuality and relationships, especially the sexuality of women.

American elections, case in point, but the most radical progressive changes that take place in a society also occur around sexuality and relationships, sexuality of women in particular.

So sexuality is a window into a society.

Sexuality is also a window into a relationship and into a person that invites deep listening.

One of the big challenges is that modern sexuality has been, I mean, traditional sexuality was identified with procreation.

Modern sexuality is identified with performance and outcome.

Sex is something you do, to which I say, let's drop the performance and outcome for a moment and let's think of it as an experience.

So now you're going to start to see the choreography I draw.

When I think of sexuality as an experience and I say sex isn't just something that you do, sex is a place you go.

So my question to you is where do you go in sex?

Inside yourself and with another or others?

Do you go to seek deep spiritual union, a deep intimate connection, transcendence?

Do you go to a place for vulnerability, a place to surrender, a place to be taken care of, a place to be safely powerful, a place to be naughty, a place to have just plain fun, a place to abdicate your responsibilities of good citizenship because sexual desire is quite politically incorrect.

Where do you go in sex?

What parts of yourself do you try to connect with?

What is it that you're expressing there?

Sexuality is a coded language for our deepest emotional needs.

Our wounds, our fears, our aspirations, our longings, it's that.

Sex is never just sex even when it's hit and run and then it becomes really interesting.

So one of the things that one of the assumptions that existed very much at the heart of my field and that I challenged or questioned was that sexual problems are by definition the consequence of relationship problems.

So you fix the relationship and the sex will follow.

And I, with many colleagues, have helped a lot of relationships get along better, fight less, laugh more, enjoy each other, and it changed nothing in the bedroom because, in fact, maybe sexuality is not a metaphor of the relationship.

Maybe sexuality is a parallel narrative to the relationship.

And that, in fact, when you change the sexuality in a couple, you change the whole relationship, but not necessarily in the other direction.

So that opened up a whole, that was one of the foundational ideas for mating in captivity, my first book, because I have been trained to think like this and then I began to think love and desire, they relate, but they also conflict.

They're not one and the same and they don't need the same things.

They don't thrive on the same elements.

And modern relationships, romantic relationships, have wanted to reconcile those two fundamental sets of human needs into one relationship.

That is the grand experiment of modern love.

And am I correct in interpreting what you just said as that love and desire are fundamentally separate, that they can exist in parallel, but that any goal of society, much less a couple, to try and unify those as one thing is not going to succeed?

No, no, no, not at all.

It actually has been remarkably successful.

The romantic ideal is tenacious.

Many other philosophies and ideologies of the end of the 19th century have all gone.

This one has survived many others.

I'm relieved to hear you say that.

The romantic. Maybe I grew up on too many, I don't know how many romantic comedies I saw, but I grew up in a home where love, sex, and romance were discussed in very, almost ethereal terms.

No, no, no. I think that it's a, but it is an experiment.

It's not something that we have tried throughout history, in human history.

So I think that if you ask an exercise I like to do sometimes, I say, divide your page in a, with this line in the middle, up from top to bottom.

And on the top left, you write, when I think of love, I think of.

Then go to the other side, and when I think of sexuality, I think of.

And then you go back and you say, and when I am loved, I feel.

And when I am desired, I feel.

When I'm wanted. And when I love, I feel.

And when I want, or I desire, I feel.

And when I think about the love between me and my partner, if there is a couple.

And when I think about the sexuality between me and my partner.

And then you let people free associate about this.

And there are words that you find back and forth.

And then there are words who just never appear in the other column.

Do you recommend that couples exchange these documents?

Yeah, they do it at the same time.

Then they read it out loud in front of each other.

I do it in groups, you know, huge audiences as well.

But what I'm asking people to see is when you look at what you responded in both categories, create a line between those two.

Is it a thick line?

Like what happens in love is completely separate from me than what happens in desire.

I need a complete different set of things.

I express myself differently.

I interact differently.

Or is it very much that when this exists, it completely ignites that they are interrelated interdependent.

One feeds on each other.

One reinforces the other.

There is a degree of variety about that.

For some people, love and desire are inseparable.

And for some people, they are often retrieve irretrievably disconnected.

And I think the model wants them to be really together.

And for a lot of people, it's exactly what they aspire to.

For other people, it's more challenging.

Because somehow in them, there's a split between these two things.

Because some people experience love in such a way that it sometimes becomes challenging for them to make love to the person they love.

What I mean by that is that love comes with a sense of responsibility, worry, care about the well -being of the other person.

And some of us sometimes have learned to love in a way that comes with extra worry, extra responsibility, extra burden.

We were the parents of our parents.

We took care of our depressed parent.

We took care of our alcoholic parent.

We learned to love with a sense that is not free, that is not curious or playful, because curiosity cannot happen in a state of stress, as you so well said.

When we experience love with that extra sense of burden, it is difficult to be with someone that you feel close to and at the same time go inside yourself and completely chill and relax in pleasure lands.

That's one of the scenarios.

There's many others, but this is one of the more common ones, Michael Bader's work, that makes it difficult for some people to experience love and desire at the same time.

The more they love, the more challenging the desire becomes for them, because desire is to own the wanting.

You can't make someone want.

You can make someone have sex, but you can never make them want.

Want is your sovereignty, your autonomy, your freedom.

For some people, that wanting cannot exist when they are with someone that they feel so responsible and worried and anxious about.

That's the attachment piece that you're talking about.

This is how the attachment style often manifests in the way that you then organize your sexual self.

What percentage of infidelity do you think reflects somebody's inability to integrate this love component from desire component, such that they find that they only experience desire or strong desire outside their committed relationship?

Look, I wrote an entire book about infidelity as in what happens when desire goes looking elsewhere.

I think that some people go outside as a response to a lot of discontents in the relationship, loneliness being the first one, neglect, indifference, conflict, rejection, sexual rejection in particular.

But some people go outside, and it has very little to do with the relationship.

It sometimes has to do with how they organize themselves in the relationship to the degree that in order to feel a certain freedom or ability to think about themselves, they need to be outside.

I used to say, I have seen a lot of infidelity in happy relationships.

It's not always a symptom of a flawed relationship by no means.

In those situations, people tell me it's not that I wanted to find another person, it's that I wanted to find another self or to reconnect with lost parts of myself.

I don't say this to promote or to condone or anything, but I just listened across the globe.

One word, it's not that I wanted to find another partner, it's that I wanted to find something else inside of me.

I don't know how to do that in the relationship that I'm in.

And that's not because of the person I'm with, that's because of what I do to myself in the context of intimate connection.

And the word that you hear all over the globe when you interview people who are in affairs is that they feel alive.

It's kind of the erotic as an antidote to deadness.

They feel that aliveness.

And that often doesn't necessarily involve sex.

It's about something.

Aliveness is the erotic, not the sexual.

And the erotic is the quality of aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, hopefulness, curiosity, imagination, playfulness.

It's those elements that often people lose for a host of reasons.

Life, work, children, dying parents, illness, economic hardship, you name it.

And there's a sense that they need to go elsewhere to find that.

And some people would say bullshit justification.

And some people understand that at the heart of affairs there is betrayal and long and duplicity and lying and all of that, but there is also longing and loss on an existential level.

That's a very different lens into this.

So the people for whom that reconciliation that you talk about is more challenging are often people who are often more likely to compartmentalize.

What you just said brings me back to this idea that we were exploring at the very beginning of this conversation, that it seems that so much of navigating relationship in healthy versus unhealthy ways depends on this internal dynamic within ourselves of an ability to be in close intimate relationship

with another and yet hold on to enough of our own identity and evolve that identity within the relationship to the other.

That is the definition of intimacy or a definition of intimacy.

And that is probably the number one task of every relationship, romantic relationships is how do I get close to you without losing me?

And how do I hold on to me without losing you?

Now, you know, I said to you in the beginning that we grow up and we have both needs togetherness and separateness.

And then we come out of our childhoods and some of us need more space, freedom, separateness.

And some of us need more protection, connection, togetherness.

Of course, we tend to meet somebody whose proclivities match our vulnerabilities.

And so you find that in many relationships, you have one person who is more afraid of losing the other and one person who is more afraid of losing themselves.

One person more afraid with the fear of abandonment and one person more afraid with the fear of suffocation.

This is a recurring dynamic that you see.

And does it swap back and forth across couples, male, female?

I'm assuming in that example, heterosexual relationship, but even homosexual relationships, you'll see it switch back and forth or it tends to be a pretty stable feature.

Meaning one person in the couple tends to be afraid of abandonment by the other, the other person more deeply afraid of abandonment of themselves.

Right. It doesn't switch back and forth.

It switches by relationship, but not within one relationship.

You may have been in different roles with different partners.

Indeed, I have. So interesting.

Again, not because you weren't clear, you were incredibly clear and concise about this, but I think this is such an important concept.

Maybe you'd repeat it for us again, just so that people can really drive it into their consciousness and maybe ask themselves the question, are they more afraid of abandonment by the other or abandonment of themselves?

You know, one of the ways that you sometimes can see this is that, I mean, in the tour this week, one woman stood up and basically said, I recently divorced, I would like to be able to enter another relationship again.

And I said, is the issue an issue of trust or is the issue, was there betrayal?

What's led, she says, how do I allow somebody to enter into my life without losing myself?

So it's in the language, you know, it's one person, but this could, and really, I think it's very important for me, many of these things are not gender specific, nor orientation particular.

This is human. But then I answered a little bit with some of this and other things.

And so then the next question is, how often do you not say what you really think?

Because you want to please, or you want to harmonize, or you want to avoid conflict.

How often did you then resent the partner who actually stood for their ground?

Because if you're afraid to lose yourself, you're often more than one who stands for your ground.

You don't give in because you, and if it's rigid, you don't give in at all, because you think that every time, even the language agreeing is giving in and giving in is losing a part of myself.

I mean, it's built in.

It's so, you know, it starts here and it continues all the way.

It's like, so, gentlemen, I mean, and it's like, it's a sequence of things.

You break apart in small granular pieces.

How does it play out for you when you lose yourself?

What are the things you do not do that facilitate this dissolution?

And to the other person who is, when you're afraid, sorry, of losing the other, and when you're afraid of losing yourself, like, where's your rigidity?

Where is your kind of totalistic thinking?

Where is this lack of flexibility?

And that may manifest in, I don't travel to those places.

You know, the sentence that indicates that we're dealing with this bigger issue is something sometimes very anodyne.

You know, I don't go to those kinds of restaurants.

You know, why should I go to those kinds of places?

And you kind of want to say, why is there such intensity about the restaurant?

What are you fighting against?

And what are you fighting for?

And why are you even fighting?

We're talking about going out, supposedly meant to be fun.

Now you start rewinding, you know, what is this statement connected to that we are going to have, you know, so now you have conflict meeting, identity meeting, connection to another person.

This is when the, and it is sleuth work.

It's fantastically engaging and exciting.

It's like, I'm sure when you do scientific research, it's that sleuth work that you say, this thing doesn't fit at all.

You know, why do you want me to wear blue shoes?

Why do you make such a big deal out of the blue shoes?

What are blue shoes for you?

Don't start talking about the shoes, please.

Talk about, you know, boundaries.

But boundaries today is a concept that has become so ill -used almost.

So it's talk about how the preservation of the self now involves not wearing blue shoes.

I mean, you get what I'm...

I do. And my mind keeps flitting back to this parallel construction of these circuits were built in infancy and childhood and adolescence.

And what's kind of flashed to mind is when we are adolescents and teenagers, there's this fundamental question that we ask that rarely do we ask again later in life.

I mean, maybe people do, but the question is kind of, who am I?

You know, teenagers try on a lot of different identities often and how they dress, you know, is one of the ways in which they self -identify their music.

I mean, the music we listen to when we're teenagers and young adults is forever stamped into us as like some core part of our identity.

It has an emotional weight that music that we arrived to later doesn't unless it resonates with that early music or recapitulates that rather.

So in my mind, I'm thinking, I wonder if these circuits that are struggling with holding onto self versus a kind of playful, curious exploration of new things, novelty, which is so fundamental through relationship.

And they're not, they're, as we say, as neurobiologists are really antagonistic, that they're really in a push pull.

I mean, there's so many things that we're discussing today that really feel as if these are like circuits that can't be coactive easily, that they're like we're in this internal grappling match.

And what keeps coming to mind - But they also need each other.

Right. They're like the, right.

It's like the front axle and the back axle of a vehicle.

Like you can't exist without both.

You just made me think of something.

Because you asked before that the thing about the sexuality and I like the concept of erotic blueprints, which I work with a lot and I try to really kind of distill it in this desire bundle course that I'm releasing.

Because I thought, how can people ask themselves a set of questions?

Like a lot of my work is about finding the good questions that will, a good question, this is like a portal, right?

And the line on top, which is the answer to your question is, tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love.

Not just how you love, but how you make love, meaning that your emotional history is inscribed in the physicality of sex.

And it's all about what you asked me in the beginning, identity and change.

Holding onto oneself, connecting with the other.

Sexuality is the place where this occurs at the most fundamental level.

It's to be inside oneself and inside the other at the same time.

Their universe, not their orifices.

That is what is the experience.

That temporary oneness that then again opens up as two people.

So people who struggle with that emotionally, how do I stay connected to me and then to you without these polarities, experience that in sex.

And then you ask a set of questions.

How did you learn to love and with whom?

Were you protected by those people who took care of you or did you have to flee for protection?

Did they take care of you or did you take care of them?

Did they hold you, rock you, cuddle you, or did they harm you or violate you or shake you?

Was it okay to laugh and to cry?

Was it okay to experience pleasure?

Was it safe? A set of questions like that.

And this is where people enter their erotic blueprint and get to see that their emotional challenges are directly, if you film them, if you watch them, making love, you'll understand their emotional challenges.

But then comes the next level.

And if you then study their fantasy lives, then you'll understand the depth of their emotional needs, which are brought into their sexuality.

Fascinating. You get it?

I get it. I get it.

And it makes me think that this earlier discussion we were having, you know, is sex a microcosm for the larger relationship?

It sounds to me like the answer is yes, but especially the relationship to self and especially the, like there's a lot of information in one's desire template or blueprint about how one was cared for or not cared for.

Your sexual preferences, your sexual fantasies are a translation of your deepest emotional needs, not sexual needs, emotional needs.

You know, my mother used to say, tell me about your friends and I'll tell you who you are.

And then I said, you tell me about you sexually and I will know a heck of a lot about who you are.

But you have to translate.

Don't, the problem of sexuality in modern society is the literalness with which we approach it.

And in our pornographic society, ever more so to our detriment.

Right. I couldn't agree more.

And I think that there also seems to be this attempt to directly translate from, well, if somebody had issues with their mother, then they're going to have issues with women as an adult.

Or if they had issues with their father, they're going to have issues with men as an adult.

That's confirmation bias.

Right. But in reality, it's the algorithm.

It's the algorithm that these algorithms that are laid down in our neural circuitry earlier, they don't care about male -female -ness.

I mean, it doesn't change whether or not people are heterosexual or homosexual.

It ain't to them, I believe.

I think these are, frankly, biologically driven.

But the idea is that our ways of being don't translate directly that way, that these are deeper processes.

So if one had issues, for instance, with their male and heterosexual, but they had issues with their father, they could have the same issues with women as an adult.

Right. That it could translate, that it's not always mapping male to male, female to female.

I have a segment of my podcast, Where Should We Begin, that opens the tour where basically they talk about how they met, and then they fight about everything all the time.

And they think that they're fighting, this is the line of the show, they think they're fighting about the closet, the cat litter, and the cat.

What I think they're fighting about is that when she says, why didn't you close the closet?

He instantly thinks of his dad, who was this military guy who told him, and he's basically in a fight saying to her, you ain't telling me what to do, you ain't the boss of me.

So she can never make a request for which he doesn't feel like she's controlling him.

And he answers with this fight, and that throws her into the, she grew up all alone, took care of her two siblings, mother was gone, et cetera, et cetera.

And she hoped her whole life, she would finally meet a partner and she wouldn't feel alone, and there would be somebody to support her.

And every time he says to her, you ain't the boss of me, don't tell me what to do.

She says, oh, I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life.

Here I am in the worst place that I always wanted to avoid.

This is what they're fighting about.

But they're talking about, why did you leave the cat closet open?

Beautiful example. Beautiful example.

It cuts across our preconceived notions that if somebody had a good relationship with their mother, they will have good relationship with women, if they had a good relationship with father, with men.

It's a little bit more subtle and complicated, nuanced than that.

I think the frameworks are useful, but there are frameworks and they're models that help us to think and make sense of things.

But it's a little bit like in science, the truth of today is the joke of tomorrow.

I hadn't heard that, but that one's going up on X.

Repair work is something that is so fundamental to healthy relationship.

It connects to what we discussed about apology.

What is your recommendation for how couples think about repair work?

Let's assume that they're still together and there's some, at least a hint of a hope to recover the relationship.

Should repair work be framed in a particular way to facilitate it?

How does one begin?

We've been doing a lot of threes today, so I can imagine mistakes, misunderstandings, and betrayals.

There are mistakes like I accidentally step on somebody's toes, there's misunderstandings, two people tell the same thing, and then they're outright betrayals.

My understanding from your work is that you've seen many couples, indeed helped many couples recover from all three of those categories to the point where they are quite satisfied with their relationship.

There's a sequence to this, and it's true in intimate relationships, it's true in friendships.

I'm very interested in friendships these days and in friendship therapy.

I do co -founders work.

There's other diets that I'm very interested in beyond the romantic unit, but you said something before that I thought actually I may come back to.

When you said it's about acknowledging that you were wrong, sometimes you may not have been wrong, but you were hurtful.

Rather than get all, I didn't do anything, I didn't do anything, it doesn't matter.

What you did, even if you don't think it was anything terrible, seemed to have really upset your partner.

Do you care about that?

Or do you want to just kind of stand?

I think the first piece in repair work, and I think by the way that repair is not the end of the story.

The revival is the end of the story.

Much better word. The erotic recovery, erotic in my sense, in my definition of the word.

That's when I say it's not enough to survive.

I'm a child of survivors.

I wanted to see people who, how do they continue to live?

Not just how do they stay alive?

I think there's a fundamental difference in our lives and in our relationships.

It's a huge piece of, it's really at the heart of my work and of my life.

Every trauma process, of nations or of individuals, demands the acknowledgement of what happened.

That acknowledgement involves remorse and guilt for the hurt and the harm that it caused, even if you don't feel guilty for the act itself, and you think the act is justified.

The consequences of the act on the other person is where the guilt and the remorse must take place.

Without that, there is very little option for repair.

If I don't feel that you even know what you did to me, you, my dad, you, my boss, you, my political enemy, it's really at the root.

After you do the remorse and the guilt, the next part is to be really careful that you don't sink into the self.

Now I'm going back to relationships, into the shame.

I'm such a terrible person, how could I do something like this?

I feel so bad about myself that I still can't feel bad about you.

Now that's narcissism.

That's a different story.

The point is not for you to still think that you're at the center.

You were at the center when you heard and now you're at the center of your own wound.

It's really a process of reckoning with the other person and it's slow and challenging for some and it's immediate for others.

And then I think the next piece in a relationship is not just to apologize and to show your remorse, but it's actually to show that you value the other person because hurting a person, and especially when it's betrayal and careless, is a devaluation of the other person.

You didn't matter. That me mattered more than you.

For whatever the reasons, it was still selfish and I devalued you.

And to become the vigilante of a relationship is that you become the person who protects the relationship by showing that the other person really matters.

And in detail, that sometimes means, how are you today?

Is there anything you want to talk about?

You know, this is a big one to carry every day.

Are you able to go to see this movie?

Without being so afraid that every time you ask, you're going to get blamed again or you're going to feel so bad about yourself.

It's a little bit step out of yourself and just reach out and just check in half the time when you say, how are you?

And do you want to talk?

The person says, no, I don't, but I just wanted to know that you are prepared to, in case I needed to.

Set the conditions.

Make me feel that you value me and our relationship, which you have just trashed.

And then the third thing is what I call the erotic recovery.

It's the regeneration or the generation of new cells.

I need a new skin to come over the scab.

Repair is not yet healing.

The healing is, I know I hurt myself somewhere.

It's here. I can feel it when I touch it, but I don't feel it the whole time.

It's not front and center every moment of my obsessive rumination.

But when I touch it, it's tender.

It's wounded. It's a place that I need to make sure not to hit again.

Don't hurt me again.

And don't do this to me again.

I can't recover from that twice.

It's that vulnerable.

And then it says, let's go do new things.

Erotic recovery is not about comfortable and familiar.

And the return to the status quo, erotic recovery is about new, risky, curious, playful, unknown imagination outside of the as who we are and who we are together.

And I think that's where the revival takes place.

It's hopeful, it's possibility, it's adventure.

It's got that energy.

Beautiful, aspirational, and realistic too.

This notion of, not notion, forgive me, this act of truly getting outside of oneself to be present to the way the other person feels, irrespective of who is wrong, if it was misunderstanding, betrayal, but especially in cases of betrayal.

The exiting of, as you said, either a stance of not wanting to look at it for oneself or of self -flagellation, both are self -centered.

So really getting into genuine care for, if not caretaking, were the offer of care for the other person.

I can't believe I hurt you that bad.

One of the big things is people are often shocked at the hurt of, I thought you wouldn't care about what I thought, or I didn't think about it.

Because there is a dissociation that takes place when you take off.

And so when people are faced with the raw hurt, wound, suffering, collapse, fracture of the other person, they find it very hard to tolerate.

And this has to happen.

You have to be able to know the consequences of your action.

If you want freedom in the existentialist sartre in terms involved, the ability to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions, this is it.

I'll help you face that.

That doesn't mean that you become the worst creature on the planet, but you have to face that.

And that is something very hard for us, because sometimes we meant it.

Sometimes we thought we deserved it.

And sometimes we didn't think that that was going to be the case.

And so it's sometimes easier to stand in front of someone else's anger than someone else's hurt.

Yeah, absolutely. And what you're describing also, perhaps at least partially explains why sometimes, not always, apologies are insufficient, necessary, but not sufficient, because there are certain modes of apology that don't show us that the person who's apologizing is really outside themselves.

They're in their own guilt, they're in their own shame, and therefore they're not really present to how we feel.

There's a beautiful book by Harriet Lerner about apology that I often recommend in these situations, because she really analyzes.

If you ever do apology, this concept of sincerity of the apology that actually shows that I care about you and not just about restoring my dignity and my pride and all of that, the maneuvers that are about self -preservation versus the maneuvers that are really about restorative justice.

Who is ready for relationship?

And for people who are not in relationship or who are, what sorts of questions should they be asking themselves?

What sorts of things should we all be doing?

What's a question that I ask people often, almost in the first session, knowing yourself as well as you do, what do you think makes it hard to live with you?

Great question. My answer is far too long to get here.

Everyone will be relieved.

That will give you some of the material about nobody's ready as in, I'm prepared, I'm perfect, I'm fully baked.

I say to every person, everyone has relationship issues they're going to have to address at some point in their life.

The only question is with whom?

Not if, just with whom.

Who's the one that you're going to do the work with?

We're all works in progress.

We are notoriously imperfect, rather unpredictable, and many relationship problems are not problems that you solve, they're paradoxes that you have to learn to manage.

Well, I want to make clear that before what I say next, that if I had my way, we would continue this conversation for many hours, if not days, perhaps there's an opportunity for that in the future.

But I was told, and not surprisingly, that you're in tremendous demand, you're on a live tour now.

I can't wait to see this.

It's all sold out, so I'll have to wait like everyone else.

But it sounds like an incredible experience.

Indeed, I know some people have spoken directly to them who attended one of your lives recently, and they sound like a completely immersive and experienced like no other.

So I'm very excited about that.

My only regret about your tour is that we have to halt this conversation in the next couple of minutes.

And there are a couple of things I just want to reflect back to you that are all from a place of real deep appreciation.

First of all, for bringing forward what you've brought today, you're one of these exceedingly rare people with whom when they speak, like gems just fall out of them.

And I know I'm not alone in this sentiment.

I mean, just in today's conversation, you've transformed the way that I think about relationship, self, identity, neurobiology, love, sex, so many key topics.

And in a much larger way, as you pointed out, and I completely agree, the themes that you're talking about are not just fundamental for us to resolve as individuals.

They are not just fundamental for us to resolve in couples or whatever relationship configuration people happen to be in.

They're societal. They're societal.

That we can look at anything, an election, two countries battling one another, political groups, whatever.

At every level, this is what it means to be human, built up from the same fundamental circuit, same fundamental dynamics.

And I really see you as not just a pioneer, but the pioneer of this parting of the veil from what has, I think until this point in human history, been a lot of descriptions of things of what's right, what's wrong, this and that.

And some of that might be true.

I don't know. I'm not qualified to know, but that you represent a real parting of the veil into the next evolution of what it means for humans to interact in more healthy ways and with curiosity and sense of invitation toward more love, connection, and peace.

So there really aren't words to express how enthusiastic and appreciative I am of what you brought here today and what you're doing.

And so I just want to say, deep heartfelt thanks.

And I know I speak for many, many people.

Thank you so much. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about romantic relationships with Esther Perel.

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[Navigating Love, Identity, and Conflict: Insights from Esther Perel]-[Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships]

📋 Summary

Navigating Love, Identity, and Conflict: Insights from Esther Perel

The Dialectic of Identity and Relationship

The Developmental Arc: Cornerstone vs. Capstone

Shifting from Reactivity to Curiosity

The Art of Apology and Repair

Love, Desire, and the Erotic

Conclusion: The Path Forward

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript