The Resilient Mind - The Secrets to Deep, Meaningful Connections - Esther Perel

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Esther Perel is a renowned Belgian-American psychotherapist, celebrated for her groundbreaking work on human relationships and modern intimacy. Best known for introducing the concept of "erotic intelligence," she explores the complexities of love, desire, and connection in long-term relationships.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode was created in partnership with Tom Bilyeu. Subscribe to Tom Bilyeu’s channel for more inspiring speeches:https://www.youtube.com/c/TomBilyeu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to The Secrets to Deep, Meaningful Connections with Esther Parral. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Oh, there's a long list of things that kill relationships between partners, but you can apply a lot of these downfall principles to any other kind of relationship. and I'm not going to put them in order of importance, but the first one that popped in my head was complacency, pure laziness, the sense that people often bring the best of themselves certainly at work and in other areas and bring the leftovers to their relationships, which supposedly are meant to be so important. A lack of communication, a breakdown in communication, a profound sense of distrust, of a sense that the other person is out to get you.

rather than to be benevolent and caring of you. Contempt is the big killer. I think it's the final blow because it really implies the dehumanization of the other person. It's like I don't even, it's not that I don't care about what you think and what you feel is that you are not worthy of any attention. Violence, aggression of all kinds, the myriad of situations in which people attack each other. A complete physical disconnection. Loss of affection, loss of touch, loss of cuddling, loss of all the stuff that really connects us physically,

beyond sexuality, to each other. I mean, I can do a long list, right? Major money issues, massive amounts of tensions around money and around discrepancies of responsibility, imbalances in the relationship, in-laws, major fights. It's a combination of a number of things. You know, it's funny. I was like, I started talking and I suddenly realized

I literally was canvassing just the sessions of the week. And I could just see the enormous amount of pitfalls that I could just list as what will, you know, degrade a relationship. But when people start out and they have a lot of goodwill and they give a lot of benefit of the doubt and they make a point of thanking the other person, acknowledging what they do, validating how they feel. The experience of being seen is part of the building of the trust. the experience of being known, the experience of having somebody who has deep attention on you and is curious, fundamentally curious to get to know you. That kind of penetration that is highly erotic, as in you feel alive, you feel vibrant, not in the sexual sense of the word erotic.

This is the charge that people feel. You perk up, you sit like this. Complacency looks like this. That's the position. It's like whatever, you know, you don't notice anymore. You don't really pay attention. You start to feel like you're a function. You know, you are defined by the tasks that you do and no longer by the person that you are.

It's a multitude of those things that ultimately create step by step a disconnect, you know. That's what I mean by complacency. It's not, it's a laissez-ferre like that, you know, a lessee-ale where you don't notice things, You don't acknowledge them. And the flip side of that is that you basically just acknowledge the negative. You know, you become completely distorted in your perception. You have a big bias. Whatever is good is a given.

There's nothing to say about it. And whatever is bad can be amplified to the end degree. People in a relationship, by the way, especially when they come to couples therapy, you know, I'm a couples and family therapist. Primarily, I'm a systemically trained therapist. I deal with issues contextually. Most of the time when people come to couples therapy, they don't come to say, I came to check myself out.

Couples therapy is often a drop-off center. They come to tell you here, he's my partner, and let me tell you what I think is the matter with that person, because I'm an expert on the other person. People stop looking at themselves because they're completely focused on what's wrong and what's off and what's missing in the other. And the first thing you do in couples therapy

is you say to the people, we're going to reconfigure the lens. The day you come in and you start the session by talking about what you have done to improve things or what you have done to deteriorate things, we're working. You can have three types of dances in a couple. You can have confrontation, fight, fight. You can have fight, flight. One is fighting, the other one is leaving. And then you can have total distance and, you know, separate.

stonewalling, whatever it is, you know, flight, flight, flight on both sides. So you have all the dances. You can have one in which each person comes in and basically says, but you, he, she, they. It's the other, you know. And then on occasion, you have somebody who finally says, look, Tom, the most amazing thing about this is I do work with individuals as well. You hear the story of a person. you enter into their subjective world. They tell you this is what's going on in my house with my partner, you know,

whoever else is in the house. A few months later, you finally meet the partner. And it's like Swiss cheese. Everything that one person left out, the other person fills in. And you begin to really understand that you really need to hear the multiple voices in a relationship. A relationship is a story. When you only listen to one voice, it is phenomenal. phenomenal how the mind will curate, select, discard anything that is unconvenient, uncomfortable about me.

It's like, and we comment about that among clinicians all the time. It's like it's like because he did this. You can't believe that she said that. But of course the next person comes in and says, well, you know, she did this and this and this or he did this and this and this. And then I flipped. But all the preceding stuff gets taken out by. the first person to only talk about what the other one did to which they reacted. This notion that deteriorated relationships, high conflict relationships are often highly reactive.

And then you only see what the other person did to which you reacted and they made you do this. And if they hadn't done A, you wouldn't have done B without realizing that your B is there A. So it's a combination of things. I am fluent in nine languages. Yes. So language and words and naming is extremely important to me. I think that it absolutely organizes ourselves cognitively, physically, emotionally. So naming is framing.

But the naming itself needs to then become. also particular to the person. So what you will notice when you hear, what should we begin or how his work, is that I will paraphrase a person. I will talk in the first person, imagining what it is that they may be feeling. And then I will say,

hot or cold? Like, you know, the old game I used to play as a kid. And then if they say hot, then I will say, now say it again in your own words. Because language shapes the experience. That's Foucault. That's not me. And once you tell a story, you experience the story the way you have told it.

I would say that in where should we begin and in my clinical work, because they're the same. My goal has always been that you come in with a story in session one, and at the end of the session, you need to live with a different story. Because we come wedded to that story. And that story articulates our experience and the meaning we get. give to our experience and the title we gave to our relationship and the fate we give to our relationship. If by the end of the three hours of the first session, you live with a different story, there is movement. The words no longer stick to your skin. And now we can begin to

explore what else is here. So this is very much, this is crucial for me at all times, but it is uniquely important now in thinking about work and relationships in the workplace as well, because we may use the same language, as in we may use the same words, but the meaning of these words have something completely different. So you really want to make sure that you don't assume, I know what you're saying, ask, remain curious at all times, what does that mean for you? and who told you that? So if I talk about money, if I talk about gender equality,

if I talk about the role of the woman in the home, if I talk about the role of the child in the home, if I talk about the aspirations that we bring to marriage, you know, I work with people who come from cultures where marriages and happiness have nothing to do with each other. The happiness comes from the children.

The happiness comes from doing the right thing and maintaining your status and your place in the community. The happiness doesn't come from talking intimate pillow talk with your partner. That's not the point. So marriage is the word, but the definition of marriage is completely different. I did a course now for three weeks in a row. It was called Forbidden Conversations, Death, Sex and Money. I had people from 41 countries.

The word sex is a word, but the meaning of it, how it is taught, what you're allowed to experience, what you're allowed to expect, how do you establish the trust? All of these are culturally defined. Money, you bet, you know. So when I ask people, what is a couple for you? How do you define a marriage? What are the expectations that you bring to marriage? And how are your expectations different from the generations that preceded you?

Let's do a genogram. Let me go down three generations. What did your grandfather and your grandmother think is marriage? What did they think was the role of the parents vis-à-vis the children? What was their alliance or their loyalty to their own parents? How much were they allowed to do what they want and they should do what is right for them? And how much did they learn that what is right for them

is never separate from how it affects those that are close to them? As in individualism versus collectivism. This thing about doing the right thing, when I arrived to the U.S., I worked for many years, almost 20 years, with a real focus on working with mixed couples, interracial, interreligious, and intercultural families. And this notion of, do I have a right to marry who I want? That's a given for you in North America. That is not a global given. And so when people struggled with that, somebody would say, you should do what's right for you.

well the vast majority of the world has never raised their children to do what's right for them they raise the children to do what's expected from them you bring that person and everybody today is a global nomad of sorts you know people are moving around all the time and it looks like because they work in tech or they work in certain enterprises that look like they are homogenized in some way that they think alike, and they don't. If IBM takes 20,000 people that work in their company, they don't think alike.

They don't value trust in the same way. They don't have the same conception of what does it mean to speak up? So I may think you never say anything. Well, you may think that that's how you maintain harmony. I think, you know, you're not engaged. You think you're engaged in preserving the well-being of the group. and I will add one piece. The defining of the terms is directly connected with the meaning of these terms.

We are meaning-making creatures. We don't live outside of meaning frameworks. It's not just what is this. It's therefore what does it mean for you? How does that define the way that you look at your life, the way that you define success, the way that you define loyalty, the way that you define closeness?

it's not we need to be aware of it. It's a total given that when a person speaks in their speech is them, their family and the group that they grew up with, the world they grew up in. These things are always intertwined with each other. I make it explicit because otherwise people swim in molasses and they have no idea what's happening to them. It's cloud-fries. It lightens up. It brings air. It, you know, it's, ah, that's why I never knew, you know.

You say we never talk. I think we don't stop. That 65% of startups fail because the relationship between the co-founders breaks down. And that comes from a professor at Harvard, actually. And of course, now I'm going to blank on his name. But he'll come back. I found that incredible because I'm thinking, what an enormous waste of grit I Because probably among these people, there were some unique discoveries that will be completely wasted.

But what it also says to me is that relational intelligence, which is also the ability to hold multiple perspectives, multiple ways of viewing something at the same time, and to be able to tap into nuance and ambiguity is key. You know, it's really that is, it's not just they're not stupid, you know, of course I know this guy. It's kind of what are these people doing to each other that they're landing in a place where they end up saying such a thing when in fact they think the opposite? So I'm thinking, you know, to put it in context, yesterday I worked with a session on a session for how his work. And the woman, she's a white woman, this white woman who has worked with a, a woman. a black, gay, male supervisor. They've had a very, very close relationship

working together for a number of years and a deep friendship. She thinks she left the job because they were stuck in a salary negotiation. And on some level, she feels that he didn't stand up for her. But she thinks this is the story of two dear friends. And that's the context. He thinks this is not just two friends.

This is two friends of which one is black and one is white, and of which one person it was going to look a certain way if he continues to negotiate on behalf of a white woman's salary while there's a lot of other people there whose salaries are not being touched. She can psychologically their relationship and individualize it and make it just about him and her. He can never separate the friendship from the larger categories that they both inhabit. A few days earlier, I'm talking to.

So this is the clarification. It's like, you know, to allow him and her to basically realize that they've been mourning a different story. And they came, they've had a conversation in their head for a year with each other. And they literally came to try to have this conversation once and for all, you know, by me basically holding a container for them. And a few days before, I'm working with a couple that own a gym. he

he's the tech he's the thinker he's the synthesizer he puts it all out there and then he you know she goes in she's the intuitive you know

in the beginning this was very attractive to them it was a complementarity that's another major rule of relationship the very thing that people often come in

fighting over is what was once originally very attractive to each other when the meaning of the day difference was different. So now I'm tracking with them. How did this thing that once was so attractive to them become a thing from which they fight with each other at home, they go and have

staff meetings and they basically do their fights in front of the staff? Not good. It's not a good idea, right? So we're looking at how did the complementarity turn into a polarization, you know. But here is the, as I'm saying this, probably the last thing, this is a whole seminar on working on relationship, is to explain to people this. You never fight over the thing that you think you're fighting over or talk or argue whatever it is. It's not the content. It's rarely the content. If I think that you don't care about me, no matter what we talk about, the fact that that's what I think is going to permeate how I interpret what you're saying. If I think that you want my well-being, I will interpret everything you say from that angle. The process,

shapes the experience. The form is more important than the content. This is like golden rules if you want to write down the 10, you know, and with that comes the notion that people fight over three things primarily, power and control, trust and closeness, respect and integrity. And once you know that, you start to look, you don't listen for the noise and the content, especially when people have 20 years together, you know, there's a lot of stories. They can come back to. You just look, what is it that they are really fighting over? What do they experience from each other at that moment? Is it about power? Is it about trust or is it about recognition? It's actually respect and recognition, but the recognition is about integrity. This is coming from

the work of Howard Markman. This is not my original thinking. And there have a few more. But what it means is, am I seen? Is the question of recognition. Am I seen? You know, and this scene is a very, very important experience of bonding. You know, you like evolutionary thinking. You know, it is 18 centimeters between the baby and the parent. It is through the eyes that this bonding takes place.

The mirror neurons are formed that the oxytocin is released. I mean, it is really profound in our scheme of bonding. So you have one is power. You have one is trust, and then you have another one, which is you can call it respect and recognition and you can call it integrity. But in the end, it is about, you know, the full definition of the word integrity, integré, which is integrated, as well as it is morally unified, it is also integrated. So it's essential to people. It's that you don't distort my intention.

It's that you know where I'm coming from. It's that you're all interrelate, you know. They're all interrelate. But that's the notion. The opposite of respect and recognition is humiliation, shaming. I would say this. Ask yourself, what have I done lately to affirm the importance of my relationships in my life? Is there someone I owe a phone call to? Not a text. A phone call. Is there someone I need to talk to that I've been meaning to reach out to? Is there someone I owe an apology to? Is there someone, someone, someone,

who I could help in this moment. Anytime you do for others, you actually, A, are less depressed, and B, you feel better about yourself. So that's the first one. Second one is what have I done to nurture my connections? You know, am I feeling, how am I doing? Just kind of sit for a minute and just draw it on a piece of paper.

How am I doing? Then you take two objects, just right now, You sit wherever you are in front of you and you look. One object that represents an aspect of your relationship story that you would like to leave behind, that you would like to free yourself from, that no longer serves you. And another object that represents an aspect of your relationship story that you would like to foster, to harness, to maintain, to develop further. And put these two objects next to you on your desk.

And every day, you just ask yourself, what have I done about this one? and why am I doing about that one? Where am I coming from and where do I want to go? Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes. Download the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes.