A Brave New Conversation with Esther Perel

How do we cope with the perils of living in a hyper-polarized world? What’s the secret to navigating our divided relationships? Do we distance ourselves from people we don’t agree with—a strategy more and more clients are testing out? How do we remain hopeful when our country’s future looks bleak? On a sunny morning in March 2025, six thousand therapists have signed up to listen to a panel of experts talk about one of the most complicated, overwhelming problems we’re facing as a country today. Hoping for answers, those of us attending in person are squeezed into rows of sturdy upholstered chairs in a massive, gilded ballroom.

These panelists have written books, given TED Talks, and even founded therapy approaches. If anyone has access to the emotional and psychological antidote to our political anxiety, it will be a group of fearless thought-leaders like this one. As we wait, a lively singer prances across the stage belting a Miley Cyrus song into a mic. Though it’s 8:45 a.m., we dance and sing along, despite our dark thoughts. We welcome this mindless distraction as we block out, just for a second, the ideological civil war raging around us.

At last, the music ends, and the audience chatter dwindles as the panelists make their way onstage. Mary Alice Miller, a former Vanity Fair editor, takes the chair at the far end, holding a sheaf of papers. She’ll be moderating this Psychotherapy Networker Symposium event, which has been given the ambitious title “Bridging Divides: Exploring Polarization in Therapy and Society.” Bill Doherty—renowned couples therapist and cofounder of a grassroots organization called Braver Angels—follows, plucking at his suit jacket before taking the adjacent chair. Mónica Guzmán, author of the book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, climbs on stage next. And finally, Esther Perel—world-famous relationship expert, bestselling author, podcaster, cultural oracle, and champion of all that’s maddeningly complicated and uncomfortable about our work—crosses the stage and takes the last armchair.

Ahhh. The room breathes a collective sigh of relief. In a pale blue pantsuit and white canvas sneakers, Perel looks equal parts familiar and mysterious, approachable and larger than life. As the embodiment of modern wisdom and insight into the paradoxes of the human condition, it feels like there’s no one better to lead our journey and deliver us to a place of hope, confidence, and maybe even a distinctively Perelian form of heterogenous harmony.

“Over 6,000 therapists are joining us today,” Miller begins. “But even though we’re a large audience, we want this to feel like a living room conversation—a brave one, of course, given the context: global uncertainty, algorithms that prioritize emotions and extreme points of view, and a deep mistrust and anger toward ‘the other side.’”

Perel smiles, undaunted. “Therapy often follows the trends of society,” she reminds us. “For a while, our field was into mindfulness. Then it was attachment. Then the self and interiority. Then the brain and neuroscience. We forgot about the world. Now, all of a sudden, the world has reappeared in our consulting rooms: politics, religion, class, poverty, fires, climate change. This is where we find ourselves focused now, and why we’re having a thought-provoking, somewhat disturbing, remember-to-breathe kind of conversation about it.”

If you’ve been following Perel’s 20-year trajectory from unknown family therapist to therapist rock star, you already know that thought-provoking conversations are her happy place. And for this conference, geared toward her professional tribe, she’s hand-picked the cadre of people on stage to help her explore the messy, uncomfortable intersection between political crises and personal conflicts.

The Blues Can’t All Move to Canada

“In the past year, how many of you have had conversations in your sessions about polarization?” Perel asks the audience. Hands float into view. “About whom you’re voting for?” A lot more hands come up. “About whether you believe in God?” A few more hands. “About where you stand on abortion? Trans issues? Whether you’re a Zionist?” At this point, most of the audience has their hands in the air. Perel asks her fellow panelists if she’s missed something. Then, her face lights up, and she asks one final question: “About whether someone should cut off contact with their mother, brother, or friend over political differences?” With this one, a collective groan of acknowledgment rises into the air.

“Until now, I’d always thought it was a virtue not to discuss these types of things with clients.” She pauses, and in a burst of wry outrage exclaims, “Now it’s seen as a vice!”

Doherty, the lone older white man on the stage, nods. In his half-rim glasses and navy-blue blazer, he looks professorial and playful, like Steve Martin if he’d just stepped off the set of the old TV sitcom Father Knows Best. He’s also a seasoned couples therapist who’s witnessed not only society’s various twists and turns, but our field’s responses to them. “In the 1960s,” he tells the audience, “only five percent of Americans said they’d be uncomfortable with their child marrying somebody of the other political party, even though interracial and inter-religious marriages tended to cause quite a stir. Today, it’s reversed. About six percent report discomfort with interracial marriages, and 45 percent report being uncomfortable with inter-political marriages. In many ways, politics has become the new ‘other.’”

At Miller’s invitation, Doherty shares the story of how he cofounded Braver Angels, where a one-off workshop helping Democrats and Republicans talk to each other after the 2016 election turned into 5,000 more workshops, and an organization with 15,000 members. “I’ve never served in the military.” Doherty grows visibly emotional. “Stepping up to lead that workshop was the first time I can remember feeling a call to serve my country. Don’t get me wrong. A part of me still feels like giving up sometimes: we’re under grave threat, and bridge-building is challenging. But the political right and the political left are like a couple on the brink of divorce who can’t get divorced. We’re stuck with each other. So when people ask me, ‘Why should we keep trying to talk to each other?’ I say, ‘We have to! The alternative is coercion and violence. What can we do but keep the conversation going?’”

The question seems to hang suspended in the air like a wobbly soap bubble, soothing to contemplate but insubstantial and fragile. Therapists shift in their seats, unsure of where we go from here. It’s one thing to ask estranged partners to see things through one another’s eyes, but an entire country? Haven’t we been trying to do that for years? And look where it’s gotten us. More hate, more othering, more entrenched biases, and more widespread trauma.

In characteristic fashion, Perel forges ahead, circling Doherty’s question without answering it. “With any complex issue,” she notes, “we tend to split the ambivalence in ourselves. We cling to the side that’s convenient for us and project the part we’re less comfortable with onto others. It adds to the polarization.”

She speaks with such authority that it’s hard not to do precisely what she’s talking about: split the ambivalence about leading our own brave conversations on these topics by projecting our hunger for leadership onto Perel.But ultimately, no one on the stage or in the audience can be satisfied with this as a solution to our discomfort, and the conversation continues.

“We’re seeing a loss of faith in the very purpose of engagement,” Guzmán interjects, “to the point where people have said, ‘I’m out. Being open to learning about those who think and vote differently feels like abandoning my values. I won’t do it.’” When communities stop talking to each other and project their fears onto other communities, they end up relating more to their negative assumptions than to actual people. “Whoever is underrepresented in your life,” Guzmán says, “is going to be overrepresented in your imagination.”

“Say that again,” Perel commands. Without missing a beat, Guzmán repeats her last statement. Perel points a finger at the audience: “Write that down.”

Strong Families

Guzmán is a poster child for the very kind of engagement she’s advocating for. Along with her mother, father, and brother, she immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico and became a naturalized citizen in 2008. In high school, she recalls a Bush/Cheney sign materializing in her mother’s office. Although they’re a close family, she and her parents hold radically different political views—she’s a self-described liberal, whereas they’re two-time Trump voters.

What does it feel like when families keep talking, raising children and grandchildren, going on trips, and celebrating holidays together despite disagreeing politically? How do you make space for the shock, disbelief, and sense of betrayal that can exist? How do you quell the knee-jerk impulse to lecture, judge, or emotionally strong-arm relatives to relinquish their views and see things your way? To help us, Perel cues a clip from a Braver Angels podcast in which Guzmán interviews her own parents.

“What’s been hard for you about politics in our family?” we hear Guzmán asking them.

Her father’s voice, with the Mexican accent Guzmán says she dropped in third grade, comes in. “It always felt like we were in the middle of a disagreement that could break our relationship. I tried not to be too adamant about making my points. I worried that we’d be prevented from seeing our grandkids if fights escalated. I’d heard stories about that happening.”

“The hardest thing for me was giving up on trying to convince you,” her mother confesses. “I have a very strong sense of doing what’s right, and for me to say, ‘Okay, I won’t try to convince her anymore’—that was huge for me.”

“I never questioned my love for you guys—never,” Guzmán says to them. “But I did question if I was a bad person for not trying harder to change you, to change your minds about the liberal values I believe in.”

It’s obvious that Guzmán and her family have worked hard to stay connected. You can hear the tenderness in their voices alongside the frustration. The heartache is palpable in the audience today, too. Deep in the tissues of your aortic walls, you can sense that profound, unshakable familial love that wants both to cling and to let go. No matter what you choose to do in these situations, there’s loss and pain. And as this mix of polarized emotions envelops the room, it’s a struggle to hold all of it at the same time.

Later, Perel plays another audio clip, this time from her own podcast, Where Should We Begin? In it, she’s talking to a daughter who’s holding a similar dialectic: she reviles her father’s conservative views but knows he’d get on a plane and fly across the country to be by her side if she needed him. “In that moment, none of his belief systems or values would have the slightest importance,” Perel says. “Ideology matters, but so do people’s behaviors. Family members might not cheerlead your choices, or go with you to pride, but they’ll fly from wherever they are to be with you if you’re in trouble. I know you see your father’s values as a problem,” Perel tells the daughter, “and I understand why. But I see these differences as a strength of your family.”

Clearly, love is the alchemy here. It’s what allows people’s hearts to open—what helps them ground themselves in something bigger and more expansive than their individual agendas. But how do you tap into the alchemy of love when you can’t even drum up the ability to like someone? How do you breathe through cruel, careless othering directed at you and those you hold dear? Sometimes, love’s alchemy is out of reach.

The conversation continues, and so does the cavalcade of hard questions.

Social Atrophy and a Frictionless Life

“In your view,” Miller asks, “what’s been causing the paradigm shift into these ‘no contact’ and cutoff approaches to relationships?”

“For most of history, relationships used to be tight knots,” Perel says. “You couldn’t escape them. You couldn’t get out of your family; you couldn’t get out of your marriage. You got a lot of clarity, but very little freedom, and very little personal expression. You married one person and if you didn’t like them, the best you could hope for was an early death—theirs, of course.” Laughter erupts throughout the room.

“Since then, these structures have shifted to fluid networks,” Perel continues. “Now relationships are like loose threads. We’ve never been more free, and we’ve never been more alone. Part of our aloneness comes from all this freedom, because at the center of relationships today is an individual in search of community, an individual ruled less by values and more by feelings—primarily the feeling of authenticity. I must be true to myself. And in the name of being true to myself, I may need to forego relationships that demand a compromise. Do you follow?” People in the audience nod, raise their thumbs.

“From there,” she continues, her tone urgent, “I have to make all these hard decisions myself—with authenticity. How do I know if they’re right? We’re crippled with uncertainty, crippled with self-doubt. We have the freedom to define everything: What is a family to me? What is a couple? What is a circle of care? What are the boundaries? We talk about our family of choice very comfortably and at the same time, we’ve never been more focused on intergenerational trauma. Here are the roots and biology of everything you can’t undo, here’s what you can create, and here are all the cuts you have to make to create it. The burdens of the self have never been heavier.”

“That Miley Cyrus song we danced to before was called ‘Flowers,’” Guzmán interjects. “Just think about the lyrics. I can buy myself flowers. Talk to myself for hours. In these loosely structured relationships, where me and my authenticity are paramount, who needs you? I’m enough by myself! Look how free I am! I can talk to myself for hours, or to others who think just like me. I can love myself better than you can.”

“You can’t talk about cutoffs without talking about social atrophy. This is the biggest piece of what’s happening,” Perel says. “On the one hand, we have more freedom to negotiate our relationships than we’ve ever had, and on the other, we’ve lost the skills for those negotiations. We’ve lost the ability to tolerate ambiguity, uncertainty, experimentation, surprise, the unknown. Why have we lost these skills? Because we’re ruled by predictive technologies that promise to remove all of life’s discomforts and inconveniences. Every obstacle removed.”

“All the messy interactions we’d rather not have,” Guzmán agrees. “Gone.”

“A frictionless life.” Perel moves her hand in a gesture that evokes the flat line of an emergency room heart monitor. “But conflict is friction,” she says, raising the other hand and making a chopping motion in the air. “And so, by the way, is sex.”

Laughter washes across the stage. She smiles. Like a slightly obsessed, formidable detective, she’s linked the red threads of overlapping themes on an evidence board, creating a living, pulsing map of the current socio-political moment. In a rare flash of shyness—or maybe it’s relief at having landed the plane she built mid-air on a narrow runway—she covers her face. Then, she lowers her hand, and we get her fullest, most mischievous grin.

“Esther, talk about friction,” Doherty deadpans.

“We need friction!” she exclaims, her hands rubbing together. “Friction and obstacles. I had a conversation with Trevor Noah recently, and he said, ‘You need obstacles. Every experience with obstacles becomes the story you tell. If there’s no obstacle, there’s no story.’” She turns toward Guzmán. “You were talking about your parents, and it reminded me of how, when I was 16 or 17, we used to have these heated Friday night Shabbat dinners in my family. We had the worst screaming matches. ‘How can you think that way?’ ‘Go back to Russia!’—the whole bit. And then, in the middle of it all, someone would say, ‘The cheesecake is delicious!’ So that’s what I aspire to. That’s friction.”

Miller poses the million-dollar question: “What role do therapists play when it comes to polarization? Is it on them to provide answers?”

“No,” Perel emphatically responds. “Clients can look to us for answers, but we don’t have them.” She believes our role is both simpler and more challenging than that: we’re here to help people sit with ambiguity and uncertainty, with the unknown, with the consequences of their choices. We’re here to help them experience healthy tension and work against fragmentation—that cultural undertow pulling us to simplify complex problems by severing ties.

After the panelists leave the stage, the applause dies down, and roughly 6,000 therapists exhale. People log off computers in different time zones. And in the back of the ballroom, there’s a line of thirsty audience members by the exit pouring water into paper cups. People look dazed; others, star-struck; still others, tired and irritable. “I’ve never heard about Braver Angels….” “Anyway, this new book I read….” “Did you go to sleep or did you guys end up….” “When she was talking about trends in society….” “So that Thai restaurant we went to last year….” “Honestly, I think a Republican panelist would have….”

Mini conversations are happening everywhere at once, interspersed with coughs, exclamations, and laughter. When you relax and let the words wash over you, they thrum and vibrate in a kind of collective echo-location system, bouncing off furniture, people, and walls.

In this moment, conversation itself—with no answer, grand finale, or coda—feels like the answer we most need to hear, even if it’s not quite the one we hoped for.