What Role Do Therapists Play?
Esther Perel • 10/23/2019
Our relational lives are undergoing a radical shift, says Esther Perel, couples therapist, bestselling author, and TED speaker. In the following video clip from her 2018 Symposium Keynote, "The Future of Modern Love," Perel explains why today's romantic landscape—and the questions we're asking ourselves about desire and couplehood—are unprecedented, and what therapists have to offer clients who come to us for guidance.
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Reconciling Sensuality and Domesticity
Esther Perel • 10/7/2019
By Esther Perel - America, in matters of sex as in much else, is a goal-oriented society that prefers explicit meanings, candor, and "plain speech." I often suggest an alternative with my clients: "If you want to create more passion in your relationship, why don't you play a little more with the natural ambiguity of gesture and words, and the rich nuances inherent in communication."
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Getting Comfortable in Couples Therapy
Esther Perel • 10/1/2019
Many traditional approaches to couples therapy are built on the assumption that if you help a couple clear up the emotional issues in their relationship, sex will automatically get better. . . . But it doesn’t seem to work that way.
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Must Parenthood Bring Down the Curtain on Romance?
Esther Perel • 5/28/2019
By Esther Perel - Sex makes babies. So it is ironic that the child, the embodiment of the couple's love, so often threatens the very romance that brought that child into being. But the brave and determined couple who maintains an erotic connection is, above all, the couple who values it. They know that it's not children who extinguish the flame of desire: it's adults who fail to keep the spark alive.
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Good Intimacy Doesn't Always Mean Good Lovemaking
Esther Perel • 4/25/2019
By Esther Perel - It’s long been the conventional wisdom among couples therapists that if couples fix the emotional issues in their relationship, their sexual lives will improve. But good intimacy doesn’t guarantee good sex.
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From the Symposium's Celebration of a Family Therapy Visionary
Esther Perel • 2/13/2019
A maverick and a visionary in the ’60s and ’70s, Salvador Minuchin put forth a brand new model of psychotherapy—family therapy. In the following video clip from the 2017 Symposium dinner event celebrating Minuchin's work, couples therapist Esther Perel shares her memories of working alongside Minuchin when she was just beginning work as a young therapist.
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Framing Intimacy as a Regular Part of Life
Esther Perel • 1/16/2019
It's not always easy to get men to talk about intimacy and sex. But according to renowned sex therapist and author Esther Perel, there's a way to weave questions and observations about sexuality throughout your dialogue with reticent male clients that expands their understanding of its significance in all aspects of life.
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Two Ways Couples Who Bounced Back Made It Happen
Esther Perel • 12/11/2018
By Esther Perel - For several years, I've been contacting couples I've treated to find out more about the long-term impact of the infidelity that brought them to therapy. What were the useful shock absorbers that sustained the couple? Did they think that therapy had helped? I identified three basic patterns in the way couples reorganize themselves after an infidelity.
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How Boomers Shaped Millennial Romance
Esther Perel • 11/14/2018
Couples therapist Esther Perel has been recognized as one of the world’s most original and insightful thinkers about couples, sexuality, and the peculiar paradoxes besetting modern marriage in the Western world. In this clip from her Networker Symposium keynote, she talks about the complicated and contradictory needs that are shaping Millennial marriage and commitment today.
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What Does It Mean to Be a “Real” Man Today?
Esther Perel • 11/8/2018
By Esther Perel - Feminism has given women a new narrative, but it hasn’t offered men a particularly new one that they can identify with. Ultimately, the lives of women will not change until the lives of men come along. What can therapists contribute to the current conversation about our gender politics and the meaning of masculinity and femininity today?
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