← Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel
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- [00:00]
Esther Perel
Today's episode of Where Should We Begin? Is special. It was recorded live at Sessions Live, which is astera's annual gathering of therapists, mental health professionals, coaches, and people who are just curious about relationships and the way we connect. This year marked a series of milestones for Esther. It's 20 years from the publication of her first book, Mating in captivity. It's 10 years of sessions Live, and it's also nearly a decade of working with me on the podcast and, as you know, on Where Shall We Begin? There's this deliberate choice to focus on the session and the couple, and not much on the stair as a person, but I feel like anniversaries sometimes create spaces for different kinds of conversation. So for this session we're going to be joined by writer and journalist Mary Alice Miller, who is a colleague of mine at Esther Perel Global Media, where she is the head of content. And for this, she invited Esther to talk about Mating in Captivity and to reflect on the experiences and the influences that shaped her work, and also to revisit some of the ideas that have evolved in the 20 years since the publication of Mating in Captivity and all the questions that come with that. So here's Esther in live conversation with Mary Alice Miller.
- [01:25]
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- [02:45]
Mary Alice Miller
It's 10 years since you started Sessions Live, and it is also almost a decade since you and Jessie Baker launched your podcast where she would begin, which features real one time couples therapy sessions. Congratulations again. I will never forget the first time I heard about the podcast. It was 2017 on the new Yorker Radio Hour and I heard David Remnick interviewing you. And I was like, who is this woman with this beautiful accent? And then I heard clips from the podcast and I was like, what is going on? How is this happening? Who are these people opening up the most private dimensions of their life to the public for our benefit, to learn and to feel a sense of recognition. And I remember thinking at the time, where was this podcast when this person who I know really, really could have used this? Where was it then? And I'm so, so glad that it's been almost 10 years of it being a relational resource for so many people.
- [03:47]
Esther Perel
I call it a public health campaign for relationships.
- [03:52]
Mary Alice Miller
In 2017, for non therapists, it was absolutely unheard of to be able to listen on a stranger's therapy session. Now there are multiple television shows where you can do just that. What is it about the medium of audio? What is it about audio that allows people to connect with it so much?
- [04:10]
Esther Perel
Well, there's two things that a lot for, for me. First, nobody on the podcast has ever been a patient, nor will ever be a patient. There's thousands of people applying the first time less, because nobody knew what it was like. And I will tell you the moment when I understood the power of the audio. It's in 22, right after Australia lifts their lockdown. Melbourne had the most strict lockdown for 200 days. You could leave one hour a day, your house, in a range of 5km. People went bonkers. And they spent a lot of time listening. And they listen and it's intimate, it's in your ears. And when you listen attentively to the stories of others, you end up seeing yourself. Even if the story is not yours, you recognize something. And then when we did the Q and A, the people were asking me questions as if they had been with me, I had just not been with them. It was like a real parasocial relationship of trust. I see you, I understand you, I recognize you. It's all of that that goes into the intimacy of the audio. I think it is the first thing a baby hears in utero. It's our first sense. It's our most primary sense. When you look at others, you sometimes project onto them, but when you can't see them, you see yourself.
- [05:44]
Mary Alice Miller
And I love what you said before that it's part of a public health campaign. And I've heard you say a public health campaign for relationships, a relational health campaign. What I have come to understand, one of many things in the seven years of working together, is that each of these milestones, whether it's the podcast or meeting in captivity or. Or your second book, the state of affairs or the tour or the card game, they're all part of that much bigger project of bringing therapeutic insights into the public square. Can you say more about that?
- [06:18]
Esther Perel
There are two parts to it. The first, by the way, I had no idea what she's going to ask.
- [06:24]
Mary Alice Miller
No idea.
- [06:24]
Esther Perel
Just so you know, we may work together, but I think relationships are changing at such a speed at this moment. The norms, the rules, the definitions, and we really need to make it up as we go. And so to have a place that isn't just about tips, but a place that is also about interpreting what is happening, making sense out of it. Mnuchin, one of my main mentors, always said, if you think right, you will act better, rather than just tell me what to do. You have to understand why you're doing it and why it matters in this way. So this, to me, the notion that, you know, and the more AI is entering into our lives and the more relational intelligence and relationships will become basically the cutting edge in work and in other areas of our lives. So that is one piece. The second thing is, when I started, I just wanted. I feel like the office is getting too close. I want to open the door and I want to lower the walls, and I want people in the general, in the public square to have an access to the insights and the revelations and the changes that take place inside the session. Not enough people can come to therapy, and therapy is not the anything that helps people. So I thought, how do we take this stuff out of the office and make it into the public square? And the podcast was one way to do so. The fact that there are so many people here, normal people who are just here because it's interesting to you, has kind of is part of the destigmatization of therapy. This thing that happens behind closed doors in which, you know, stuff gets shared that nobody gets to talk about. We are living more and more in a psychologized society, I think sometimes in an overly psychologized society too. But it's clear that this is no longer just a practice on the side, hidden quiet that nobody talks about. It is hip to put your therapist's name on your hinge profile of sorts. Maybe not the therapist's name, but certainly the fact that you're in therapy, it no longer means you're mad or you're s. It means you're evolved. This is a major cultural shift.
- [08:56]
Mary Alice Miller
I know people who actually won't go on a date with someone unless they are in therapy. Who else knows people who. This is like a. I will. Right. Well, we have a huge bias in this space, Right. Because we've got a ton of therapists. So we probably know lots of people who say this, at least in the privacy of therapy, if not more publicly.
- [09:15]
Esther Perel
I also think you know, where I'm from. I'm from Belgium, but French Belgium. This whole part of Europe. I grew up with psychoanalysts being philosophers and public intellectuals because psychoanalysis in Europe was not medicalized. It became part of the medical profession. Here you had a license. And from that moment on it became more of a medical practice and less a mental health practice and less of a cultural practice. I think that psychologists and I'm talking about people in the field. It doesn't have to be what your degree is. Have a tremendous contribution to make in the public discourse and in the cultural conversations about what's going on in our lives. And we should not leave that. Excuse me. Only to influencers. I said excuse me. Don't mean to offend anyone, but when you have 40 years of practice sitting in the trenches, you have a certain experience and it can be useful to the society at large.
- [10:27]
Mary Alice Miller
So I want to go way back when you just said. She just said 40 years of therapy. She has been a therapist for 40 years, which is again, what you were saying before I came on stage, who has stayed in the same job for that long. 40 years is really. It's impressive.
- [10:44]
Esther Perel
That's because there's no ageism in our field. It's one of the few fields the more you age, the better you become. It's like good wine.
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Mary Alice Miller
It is like good wine. So I want to go way back. This is like further, further back than 40 years to when you were a little kid. And keep in mind, she does not know what I'm going to ask her. This is improv. What is the earliest moment you can recall being interested in relationships? And I'm thinking of the Esther Perel growing up in her parents small family business shop. I'm thinking of the Esther Perel playing behind the house in the woods and acting out characters. What's the earliest moment you can recall being interested in relationships?
- [11:38]
Esther Perel
Wow. I have a few that stand out, but. So I come from a community that is all Holocaust survivors, which means nobody had grandparents. Most of the families were two people who met right after the war. Most of the time, I have nothing, you have nothing. I'm alone, you're alone. Let's get married. That was the contract. Basically, we survived, and we make families. And we make families immediately, because that is the way that we know that we are still human. So these children become these very symbolic creatures. And that I understood very quickly. I just always asked, why don't I have grandparents? Why don't I have uncles? Why don't I have cousins? You know, why are we so small? But then there was another event that I remember vividly. The main thing of the things you remember is you wonder why is it that. That I remember. So I'm about. Probably 10 years old, and I'm watching Sissi, Princess of Austria. Any of you have ever. Romy Schneider, you know, Sissi. It's the romantic schmaltz par excellence. And I go to my mother, who, at that time, most of her friends had lost their husbands. And I said, maman, they must be so sad that they've lost. She says they're relieved. They don't have to wash anybody's socks anymore. And I told to myself, wow, that cured me of any romantic marriage from a very different angle, you know. And then the other piece that really interested me about relationships, and it's something that I talked with Ruth Cohn that. Who's going to be talking here as well, Is that my community? And I say it about my community. I think this applies to all trauma. This is not a unique experience of ours. There were two groups of people in my community. They were the people who did not die, and they were the people who came back to life. You can let that sink in. This is true for relationships. You work with couples who are. Who are not dead and who are trying to survive. Or couples or relational systems or triples or families or friendships. All relational systems here. And you work with people who are really craving that aliveness. I saw people who were basically. You entered their homes and you felt the morbidity. They were living tethered to the ground. The world is an unsafe place. You have to be vigilant at all times. You can't really enjoy, because if you enjoy, you're not being careful. You can't laugh out loud, because if you laugh out loud, you're not paying attention. And you basically shield yourself constantly. And then I saw people who experienced the erotic as an antidote to death. It's that definition of eroticism that really interested me. And how do you cultivate that aliveness. Why is it that the same experience breaks one and strengthens the other? It's one of the most important questions we sit with with our clients all the time. You know, why did it break your brother? And it made you who you are? So those questions of relationships were really interested then. I hated school. That's probably the last thing now, I mean, to hate at school. I hated the stringent discipline of my. My school, especially my high school. You know, I come from six hours of Latin a week, two hours of Greek, four languages. It's just like. And this child meant nothing. The material mattered, and the child had no value. So I got interested in all the people who wrote about alternative education. And alternative education meant rejection of authority. Well, that's a relationship theme as well. So those were. And then I began reading, you know, RD Lang and all these people, and I just. And I was good at it. That's another thing I saw. My friends would confide in me. You know, I had an ability of not trusting what you see.
- [15:51]
Mary Alice Miller
I'm just curious for the people who are clinicians in the audience, how many of you relate to that moment of. My friends all confided in me.
- [16:01]
Esther Perel
My friends, my family, my parents, my divorcing parents. I mean, many of us have been talented, but also triangulated.
- [16:11]
Mary Alice Miller
And the other thing that stood out to me about what you just said, among many things, is why? Is what breaks one brother what makes the other stronger? And I'm wondering how many of you relate to that in your offices and in your relationships, in your families and your friends.
- [16:31]
Esther Perel
Don't you find this one of the most interesting questions? Why one? And you know what? Because it. Whatever. I don't have to say whatever.
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Mary Alice Miller
When did you realize that these interests could actually be a job?
- [16:47]
Esther Perel
I mean, a job. Okay, so I speak nine languages. My mother thought I should be an interpreter or a lawyer. She thought I argued well. And I honed my chops with her, that was for sure. But then I thought, I'm going to go study psychology. I thought, it's interesting. People are interesting. Relationships are interesting. So then I am the product of mentorship. I actually have no fancy degrees. I have an MA and I'm getting a PhD this week, by the way. I forgot
- [17:28]
Mary Alice Miller
you remembered.
- [17:29]
Esther Perel
From my graduate school. School. But I Never did the PhD. I went for teachers. I thought, I'm a disciple. I learn on the job. I need to see it being done, to see how I can do it myself. And I arrived to Boston and I went to the Cambridge Family Institute because my husband said. I said, I have too much personality to be an analyst. And no offense to analysts who are here. No, no, no, no. It has nothing to do with. It's like I can't stick. I can't just.
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Shh.
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So my husband said, Jack saw. He said, you should go to the family therapy centers because Peggy Papp is there too, and she also comes from theater. And so I knocked at the door and I just said, I would like to train here. So I had done puppetry, and I went to a bunch of people doing family therapy with kids, and I said, would you like a puppeteer in your sessions? And I followed three therapists for about a year, hours upon hours during the week, and I had puppets with me. And then when they would do the sessions, I would bring it to the family, to the parents, to the kids. And that's kind of how I thought, oh, I can integrate my passion for theater with my interest in psychology. That's kind of how it started.
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Mary Alice Miller
Do you remember when I said, she has a theater background? It is very specifically with puppets and other plays.
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Esther Perel
And I've continued to use puppets in therapy, only Zoom killed everything creative.
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Mary Alice Miller
Well, actually, I mean, Zoom also made it possible, brought out a lot of creative things in you. There's tons of things that we did on Zoom, particularly in the pandemic lockdown, that we would have never done before.
- [19:18]
Esther Perel
That is true.
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- [20:00]
Esther Perel
I could tell you about it, or I could let my producer, Jessie tell
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- [20:07]
Esther Perel
I guess one of the things I will say is that it's been so easy to just incorporate into our lifestyle. It's just sitting at the end of our kitchen bar. I just easily, you know, make a small pile on my cutting board and just drop it into the mill. So by the time I get up in the morning, everything is dehydrated into kind of a brown potpourri and eventually will end up, you know, being repurposed in my garden.
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Esther Perel
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- [21:56]
Esther Perel
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- [21:58]
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Esther Perel
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Esther Perel
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- [22:48]
Esther Perel
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- [23:14]
Mary Alice Miller
So what were the early years of learning and training to become a therapist? Like you've told me that in the 80s and 90s specifically sex was actually taboo in couples therapy. Why is that? And when did that start to shift?
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Esther Perel
I mean basically this whole body of work, mating and all of that starts with the Clinton scandal. That's what inspired me. I thought, this is so interesting. I will give it to you from a European point of view. I just, it was like, you know, America will let people divorce three, four times without blinking an eye and disrupt and dismember the entire family system. But you have one infidelity and you're an infidel for life. The rest of the world that values family above couple actually have always opted the other way around by the courtesy of women, let's be clear. And I thought, that is so interesting. It's not like the French just cheat better and do it more and all of that. It's actually not at all. The Americans cheat, no less. They just feel more guilty. But what is interesting is you preserve the family. And in order to preserve the family, you make a different compromise. And so the compromise is not about your own happiness or unhappiness. The compromise is for the goodness of the collective. And that is pretty much true in many other parts of the world as well. So I write about the Clinton scandal, and I just go to the Networker conference, and I meet my other major mentor, Rich Simon, and he says, what are you thinking about these days? And I blurt out, I'm thinking about Americans and sex. And he says, why don't you write something about it? I said, this makes for great dinner conversation, but I don't know that I can write an article. So anyone who's ever written for Rich Simon knew that there was a verb called to be Simonized, and that meant 11 versions of the same article until you have finally articulated what you had to say. And it became In Search of Erotic Intelligence. That article comes out in 2002, and it goes viral in the beginning of viral. And what I knew from then, I had had one hour of training in sexuality in my seven years of training in couples and family therapy. That is not unusual. Anybody can identify with this. Yeah, this is really not unusual. And I also had ingurgitated a whole bunch of beliefs that were basically presented like truths rather than dogmas. And one of them was, sexual problems are the consequence of relationship problems. If you fix the relationship, the sex will follow just like that. And I had done so much work where people got along much better, laughed more, fought less. You know, everything was much better in the kitchen, and it did absolutely nothing in the bedroom. And I know that I'm not the only one who knew that. But when you did change the sexuality, you actually changed the entire dynamic. The other way around was different. So that was my first thing. Sexuality was not a metaphor of the relationship. It was a parallel narrative, and it speaks its own language, and it acts by different rules. Love and desire, they relate and they also conflict. I had zero experience in the field of sexuality. They accepted me first before the couple's
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world
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because it was written from somebody. It's like a foreigner who comes to a place and Writes a whole article about that place and has a point of view that none of the locals have ever thought about it, had that experience to it. And that's the beginning. And slowly, there were people. Pat Love, Michelle Weiner, Davis, David Schnarch. They were major people who were trying to integrate couples therapy and sexuality. But the vast majority of the field of sexuality dealt with function, dysfunction, performance. 97% of the research on desire was on women. Because men don't have free desire problems. They want it all the time. You know that now that kind of a bunch of biases and biases, and they're an incredible group of people that will talk at our event that. That have inspired me in all of this. I did not do this alone. So that's. That's. And the couples therapy world didn't really want to talk about sex. So this. Because it's all relationships. So, you know, we just focus. I mean, you could do couples therapy for five years and not a single time would the therapist ask you, and what happens between you sexually? And that was not unusual.
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Mary Alice Miller
Ah, so no.
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Esther Perel
Yeah. I mean, I'm not deluded.
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Mary Alice Miller
So what happens in your office with your clients when you start bringing up sex?
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Esther Perel
The first thing that happens is that your patients size you up. Are you someone I can talk about this with or not? I mean, many of us have gone to therapies where some of our major issues were not addressed because we took one look at the therapist. Of course, it was challenging for us to bring it up, but we also took one look at the therapist and said, no, not with you. So I would ask in the first session, like, I would ask about where you live and the economic issues and racial issues, cultural issues, religious issues, and also sexually. And not, do you still have sex? And not, how often do you have sex? Because none of that gives us any information. So then I began writing up what are interesting questions. And then after they've sized you up, they look to the person next to them to see, can I really say what I think? And then I understood that couples therapy that involves sexuality needs to have sessions that don't involve the other person. And that means that I say it up front. When I work with you, I will see you together and sometimes alone. And when I see you alone, those will be confidential sessions in which both of you, both of you can tell me things that are private to you and that you may not yet or may not want your partner to know. That is a position. It has its problems. It has worked better for me than to work and be the fool of the village.
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Mary Alice Miller
So you're inviting them to speak to you? I'm interested in two things. First thing, what are they saying? Second thing, what are you hearing underneath what they're saying?
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Esther Perel
I begin to understand there's a few things and a couple of call outs here as well. So what people begin to explain to me once you're not asking them about what do you do, then you start to turn the question into where do you go? Where do you go in sex? What parts of you do you connect with? What do you seek to express there? Is it a place for surrender? Is it a place for spiritual union? Is it a place to safely be dominant, to safely surrender, to be playful, to be mischievous, to not be your perfect citizen? What is, is this space? If it's a play space, what do you play there? And that language invites people to think about it completely differently. Same with fantasy. I mean some of the people, Jack Morin and Michael Bader, I mean I was reading like a mile a minute about how to think about this and Jaya. So Jaya, we met in 2006 and I can't tell you how much I learned from Jaya because she was doing the bodywork, the practice in front of me and I was doing the relational part. We were doing this in tandem and I saw the translation. It was like the text and the translation of the text in its physicality. And that was a whole other level of digging deep into what is the erotic mind, what is the sanctuary where people go? What are the psychological needs that people express through this sexual language etc, etc and attachments. Of course
- [31:50]
Podcast Advertiser/Host
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- [34:28]
Jed (Pseudonym, guest)
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Geico Advertiser
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- [34:48]
Jed (Pseudonym, guest)
But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the Geico app and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened.
- [34:55]
Geico Advertiser
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- [35:00]
Mary Alice Miller
Okay, so 2006 is also the year that Mating in Captivity is published. So I had the privilege of working with you on the new preface for the 20th anniversary edition, which I hope all of you will read. It was really, really fun to work on and really moving. There were so many surprises in that process. And part of what we wanted to do as our creative process was to actually interview people who had been involved in the book. So publisher, agent, researcher, we were. We rooted deep.
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Esther Perel
We had people who are featured in the book, too.
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Mary Alice Miller
Yes. And we have many, many hours.
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Esther Perel
Can I say what we wanted to do and didn't get to do? Just so you can kind of see what you missed, but we miss it too.
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Mary Alice Miller
There was.
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Esther Perel
There's a couple that I wrote about in the Book.
- [35:52]
Mary Alice Miller
This is where we're going.
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Jed (Pseudonym, guest)
Yeah.
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Podcast Advertiser/Host
Oh, really?
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Esther Perel
Yeah.
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Mary Alice Miller
This is exactly where we're going. Yeah.
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Esther Perel
Yeah.
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Mary Alice Miller
Okay. All right. Improv. Yes. We really wanted to meet with a couple who is in the book. And I distinctly remember you said, I know just the person, not the couple, just the person. And there's a couple in the book if you're very, very. If you're a mating in captivity. Close reader. The couple's pseudonyms are Jed and Coral. And we set up a call with Coral and we had a fantastic catch up with her. You continued to work with CORL for many years after the book. And after the book, they actually separated. They divorced. And you've cited them as an example of a beautiful divorce. First, I'd love to know why you cite them as an example of a beautiful divorce. And then I'm gonna ask you about.
- [36:52]
Esther Perel
I mean, at that time, I am writing as much as I'm learning about what I'm writing. It's not like I have the experience yet. And it's a profound sexual incompatibility. He's heavily into bdsm and she couldn't bear the ropes. She couldn't. She couldn't care less. It's not her template. It's not at all her blueprint. But they are deeply attached, deeply connected. And this goes on for a long time. And I tried everything I knew, but I also had a sense that this is not. This is if those parts of themselves remain as important as they are, and they were, for him, essential. I don't know where this is going to go. And he would say to me, help me leave. Help me leave. Then when I would try to go in the direction of helping me, he would say, you don't understand how connected I move. I will have this moment. I can't imagine my life without her. So then I would say, well, then there is. And we were going like this, and they do separate. And basically I had a sense for a long time. So why did. I thought they were a good divorce? Because they got along. She has two kids with another person. She actually goes to take care of the baby when the newborn, when the other baby is being born. They just really are nicely related. They wish well for each other, and they welcome each other's partners, and they raise their son together. And it's just done in a nice, caring, warm, friendly. He says, all credit to her. All credit to her.
- [38:25]
Mary Alice Miller
And am I remembering correctly that. So when he. They both get remarried. Interestingly, she married another Judd, again pseudonym,
- [38:34]
Esther Perel
but who was equally into bdsm, but she didn't know it.
- [38:42]
Mary Alice Miller
There are actually a lot of. In a room full of people interested in relationships, there's so much more we could say about this. And I'm actually going to point you back to the book, since we won't have time to go into all of it. But am I remembering correctly when he got remarried, they're having a kid, a new baby, and he actually calls to say, would you mind watching our baby while. Yeah, would you mind watching our toddler
- [39:12]
Esther Perel
and her mother couldn't make it to town and they were living around the corner from each other. So at 4:00 clock in the morning, she dresses up and goes and takes care of their baby while she goes to give birth his new wife. That's what I call a nice divorce. Would we agree? Okay.
- [39:25]
Mary Alice Miller
Yeah. We meet with Coral, and Coral's fantastic and super generous with her time and her insights and her reflections on the experience. And she brings up Jed. And I took a liberty and I asked, do you think Jed would be open to meeting with us? And she said, let me ask him right now. And she texted him and Jed said yes. Why were you hesitant to meet with Jed?
- [39:55]
Esther Perel
Because we all carry names of couples or people where we know we didn't deliver. And I knew he left mad, and I knew that basically I disappointed him. Not I disappointed him, but he was angry. He was angry. And I've always remembered him for that, not for every other piece of the story. I just think it's very important to carry a few cases in our heads where we didn't do well. It just matters. And not doing well can take all kinds of different approaches, but it was that. And I didn't know, would this guy still want to talk to me. Not only did he want to talk to me, but he brought all his notes. People, 15 years later, and he remembers and I don't, you know, not as much. And he said. And you said this, and you said that. And when you said this, it's very powerful because we don't have the opportunity to go back to people we don't see anymore. We know nothing about their lives very often. And I wanted to have the whole relational system on stage here. It's graduation. That's the only reason it didn't happen.
- [41:20]
Mary Alice Miller
We invited them. They were open to it. We wanted to have them on stage and talk through all of this. And that child that they co parent is graduated from high school right now.
- [41:30]
Esther Perel
College.
- [41:31]
Mary Alice Miller
I'm sorry, College. What is time? Yeah.
- [41:37]
Esther Perel
Yeah.
- [41:38]
Mary Alice Miller
And there's something he said, yeah.
- [41:40]
Esther Perel
What? He said, yes.
- [41:42]
Mary Alice Miller
And I have to say, being a fly on the wall. Being a fly on the wall for these conversations. And I should clarify, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a clinician, I'm a journalist. But we have a similar ethos around confidentiality sources. You know, there's a protectiveness there. And I wasn't even sure I was supposed to be there. I was like, should I leave? Because you and Jed, and separately, you and Coral were really going there. And I was so, so grateful that they let me be there and witness it, because I got to hear Jed say to you, and, you know, you and I had been. You were nervous about it. Before we got on with him, we were really, like, trying to regulate. He said, I was angry with you for years, and I haven't been angry with you for years since. I've been grateful. And I'm really curious what it's like to hold. To hold a client or a case for 15 years where you felt like you failed and then to have this reparative experience.
- [42:49]
Esther Perel
I think that my most direct thing about a situation like this is as a parent. I mean, there's a lot of things we've said to our kids, and we hope one day they will actually see why we needed to say that or do that versus, you know, that it will. So it was very, very moving. Basically, the very same thing that I told him that he was so angry about for so many years, he then turned it around and it became the thing that actually had opened up a whole bunch of space for him. And it's. I mean, I was in tears. He kind of was in tears. She was in tears. Oh, yeah. It's a once. You don't have many of those. You don't. I mean, I like when people write to me 10 years later and all of that, but this, it's moving. It's not like you say, oh, I was right. There's none of that. It's just very moving. It's like, wow. Because a good therapist continues to live in the lives of their patients after they are gone. But a bad therapist or a therapist who didn't do good work, it's not even a bad therapist if you didn't deliver. If something happened, there was a breach, there was a rupture somewhere. That, too, continues to live. I remember my first therapist like it's yesterday, and it wasn't good.
- [44:15]
Mary Alice Miller
If mating in captivity asked, can we want what we already have? What is the question you want to carry into the next 20 years, knowing that we're going to talk about this on the next panel quite a bit more.
- [44:34]
Esther Perel
I mean, mating explores the sustainability of desire over the long haul. I think at this moment, many people are struggling to ignite the desire in the first place. We're in a different landscape. So this question about cultivating aliveness is really central to me, I think. What's some of the questions that we have?
- [45:00]
Mary Alice Miller
I mean, there's hundreds. You know, this wasn't a fair question to ask you because there's actually hundreds of questions that we're carrying into the next 20 years. But I think you've nailed the one that I hoped you would say, which is the question of how do we cultivate aliveness in a time of disruption? And it is the question that I think, aside from Estaire's presence, drew most of you into this gathering because it's our thematic for this year. I mean, there are so many forces that shut down our sense of aliveness.
- [45:32]
Esther Perel
So I will tell you, I think a question that occupies me. There are many, but one of the questions is I think that when you live with a phone in your hand with a bunch of apps that deliver very precise answers, where you go, what you do, what you listen to, what you watch next, how you get there. God forbid you took a wrong turn and discovered a coastline that you didn't know existed. You know, something happens to curiosity, to experimentation, to dealing with the unknown, to dealing with making wrong choices and then correcting them. And I think what is fascinating me with it, it's really a technological question, but it's not about technology. It's about how our expectations around predictability and perfection that technology is putting in front of us are warping our expectations with other humans. How, you know, how are we going to deal with the messiness of human life? The bumps, the smells, the caretaking descendants that always stays with me. Now, when we become accustomed to always on demand, immediate delivery of our every delight, how are we going to deal with the fact that people are by their very nature, imperfect and unpredictable? And I think that something is shifting like that inside of us. And so what are many people doing? And the younger we go, the more they do it is avoid. Basically avoid. And with an overemphasis on comfort and security and an under emphasis on risk, which I connect to creativity, to resilience, and to eroticism and aliveness. So that nexus is where I find myself really preoccupied at this moment.
- [47:38]
Mary Alice Miller
Esther, thank you for not only the last 20 years, but for all of it and for this conversation.
- [47:46]
Esther Perel
Thank you.
- [47:46]
Mary Alice Miller
Thank you.
- [47:57]
Esther Perel
Where Should We Begin With Esther Perel is produced by Magnificent Noise. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast network in partnership with New York Magazine and the Cut. Our production staff includes Eric Newsome, Destry Sibley, Sabrina Farhi, Kristen Muller, and Julian Hutt. Original music and additional production by Paul Schneider. And the executive producers of Where Should We Begin? Are Esther Perel and Jessie Baker. We'd also like to thank Courtney Hamilton, Mary Alice Miller and Jack Saul.
- [48:31]
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