Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel - The Arc of Love - A Romantic Revival

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

This episode contains discussions of a death by suicide. Please take care listening. The suicide of his first wife left four traumatized children in its wake; she's spent six years putting the pieces back together. They're both ready to experience joy in their marriage, but can't quite figure out how. Esther coaches them through the difference between survival vs. revival, and how to live after loss. What you are about to hear is a series Esther calls The Arc of Love. Each session centers around a couple’s story. Whether it’s issues of trust and betrayal, care and aggression, closeness and distance, repair and rupture, polyamory or monogamy. The episodes can be listened to in any order you want but were curated with a beginning, middle, and end. For the first time on the U.S. stage, Esther invites you to an evening unlike any other. Join her as she shines a light on the cultural shifts transforming relationships and helps us rethink how we connect, how we desire – and even how we love. To find a city near you, go to https://www.estherperel.com/tour2024 Want to learn more? Receive monthly insights, musings, and recommendations to improve your relational intelligence via email from Esther: https://www.estherperel.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What you are about to hear is a series Esther calls the arc of love. Each session centers around a couple's story, whether it's issues of trust and betrayal, care and aggression, closeness and distance, repair and rupture, polyamory or monogamy. The episodes can be listened to in any order you want, but we're curated with a beginning, middle and end. As always,

none of the voices in this series are ongoing patients of Esther Perel's. Each episode of Where Should We Begin is a one-time counseling session.

For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, names and some identifiable characteristics have been removed, but their voices and their stories are real.

In this next session, we will be talking about death by suicide. I want to take a moment to warn you in case this material is not for you. I became an infant parent when I got married to four kids who lost their first mom to suicide. My first wife took her life on St. Patrick's Day of 2011. A year later, we met and we've been picking up the pieces. This next couple has confronted death in their midst. For the past six years, this event has been at the center of their family life. Over these now six years that I've been in their lives, we have been in that survival mode. It has been the most heart-wrecking yet profound experience of love in my entire life.

They are now ready to live again. As a New Year's resolution, the couple chose a word for themselves. An aspiration. Revive. And I have a sense that they came to work with me so that together they can transition from not dead to alive and from survival to revival. This is Where Should We Begin with Astaire Perel. She's not like anyone I've ever met, which is why I knew I needed to get a ring pretty quick

because I thought if I don't, someone else is going to sweep her off her feet. When you say she's not like anyone you've ever met. Well, the depth, the types of things that stir her heart and her soul, it's refreshing. That's what drew me to her, was her ability to go there. And to take you there. Yeah, to take me there. It's caused some friction along the way because it's tough to learn when you haven't grown.

It doesn't come natural. To you. To me, right. And so there's been times where she has talked about wanting to connect deeper or go deeper. And I'm thinking, we already are. This is more connected than I've ever been before. And so in that sense, there's some difficulties.

What other important parts of your lives do I need to know? I guess one of the reasons we've come is the, the long, arduous journey after a suicide and the impact that that's had on me and on the kids. I've been gone a lot through the years with the military, just knowing that I've missed a lot of things. And my family history is an interesting one.

Mom and dad divorced when I was two years old, and they both got remarried and had kids and so I kind of bounced between the two families and my stepmother was not particularly a wonderful stepmother to have, was not a very nurturing person. Is that an understatement? Oh yeah. So say it as it is. Yeah, she was, she just wasn't a good person, you know. She was very manipulative. She was verbally abusive and a couple times physically. And then after they divorced, my dad had custody of me instead of my mom. So. How come? The simple terms that I was told that I went with my dad was because she wasn't ready to settle down. And he was.

There's a lot that's probably buried in that statement. And I haven't really wanted to know the why. The theme of children that are abandoned by their mother runs through generations for you. Sure. It's a nice way of saying it. She wasn't ready to settle down. Right. And your children, you think, were abandoned by their mother.

Oh, sure. When she died by suicide. Absolutely. Absolutely. How do you think your experience with your mom translates into what goes on between you and your kids vis-a-vis their mom? I don't know that there was a deep attachment with my mom. I might have got that up until the age of two, but I don't remember that. And then the stories I've heard with my stepmom, you know, as a three-year-old, when she came into my life, my aunt said she remembers seeing me try to crawl up

into my stepmother's lap and pushing me away. And so I had that, being pushed away from her, and then my mom just wasn't there for the first, from age two to six probably. So there's a gap there that I don't really remember much time with her. Right. And we have two kinds of memory. We have explicit memory and implicit memory. And explicit memory is kind of the conscious awareness of facts. But implicit awareness and implicit memory lives in our body. And the body remembers.

And the body remembers particularly when you try to get close to your wife. Do you ever connect those dots? You probably have. It's so clear say more i think that's the root of a lot is what happened with his mom and stepmom the root of a lot of what disconnection between us. For a while, I thought it was what happened with his former wife. But then the more I learned, it was kind of like, oh, this really isn't.

It just continued through her. He couldn't trust his own mother, but then the mother figure in his life, his stepmother. So he built up a wall and said, I'm not going to trust or be confident in pursuit of me, secure in knowing that it's not going to be a rejection. I think sometimes I struggle with coming in to the level of connection that she's desiring, not out of fear, but simply out of not, I don't know what you're talking about. It's almost like speaking a different language.

I have a good example. Oh, okay. If I'm upset, to me the natural response is come in and hug me, like comfort me. Yeah. upset, to me the natural response is come in and hug me, comfort me. And he just stands and looks at me, stares at me, and it feels like where I want connection, it's just there's no movement. You freeze? Yeah. I do freeze in those situations, but it's not out of fear.

It's not feeling, I guess. That's what freezing is. Okay. In tracking the brain's responses to trauma, we are often familiar with fight and flight. But we also have freeze. And sometimes it seems to me that the freeze points to an even more overwhelming set of experiences that were just simply too much to absorb and left the person frozen, helpless, and in a state of terror. And do you know where in your body you freeze? No.

Is it a knot in your stomach? Is it a constriction in the chest? Is it a stiffening of the hands? I've never stopped to think about that. That's right. So I don't know. Feelings are embodied experiences. If you can't move, it doesn't mean you're feeling nothing. Yeah.

Sometimes it means you're feeling so much that the system is on overload and you shut down. Instead of going to your head, I'm going to suggest you go to your body. body because the same way that you wanted a hand to reach out to you when you were upset is what she's talking about but you didn't get that hand I think you compound that underlying storyline with everything that I went through with my former wife, it culminated in a suicide. But it had been at least three years of daily wondering, am I going to come home from work and find her or the kids hurt? And seeking help never really didn't really work. Nothing seemed to help. But I know for a fact that she had multiple affairs.

It was years of rediscovering or realizing that the life that I thought I had wasn't the life that I had. What I learned from his description is that there was way more than just the series of infidelities. A month before his wife took her life, she asked for a divorce. And after she died, he learned of the extensive, multiple years of drug abuse, the neglect and the danger that the children were put in. And here he is not just angry at the fact that she killed herself, but at the consequences

of her behavior on her children. So he's angry at a dead woman and he's stuck and he doesn't know where to go. He's just gone through so much. So it's always been easier to just feel numb. But not allow yourself to grieve. I think that's been the thing I've not really ever seen that side of him is grief. I've seen a lot of things. I've seen anger and numbness. I've seen resolve, but I haven't really seen grief at all. It's been strange because I feel like I've somehow grieved for the loss. It's like they haven't been able to access that for themselves.

So it's almost this place where I've grieved and just felt such heartbreak. The best way for me to describe what suicide is like, you have an earthquake. In the initial earthquake, there's damage, but there's actually more destruction that comes in the aftershock. And that's what I entered into, is the aftershock. And when we first met, there was a resiliency. But he wasn't that far removed from it. It was about a year removed from his former wife passing. And I was such a different person. And I didn't really need anything from him at the time on my own and independent and he and would initiate and just all these different ways and

I'd never experienced that on that level physically as well well we were apart because I was we were in different states so not not really physically no but I was okay with that because of my past, my history with, I've endured rape, I have a long history of a lot of sexual trauma, of abuse, of all kinds of things. And I'd done a lot of work to find healing so that when I did come to a place where I was ready to say yes to a man, I would feel like my idea of sexuality and sensuality was restored. She has done the basic initial work on her traumatic experiences. And she already knows that she is ready to open up and welcome someone and connect with a man sensually, sexually, as she says. I'm beginning to understand even more what they mean when they say we want to revive. And from where I come from, as a child of Holocaust survivors,

I grew up with people who talked about the horrors with flat affect. It's actually very familiar to me. I know that dissociative state. And I also know those who tried so hard to not just not be dead and survive, but to really reconnect with a sense of aliveness and vitality and vibrancy and risk-taking and joy. And that's where she wants to place herself. Trauma work, and especially work around sexual trauma, sometimes is very good at removing the cast and dealing with the pain,

but stops short of helping people to actually rehabilitate that limb that is now free of a cast so that it can run and dance and be free again. It's about beating back the deadness and the loss to reclaim the sense of aliveness and vitality. We have to take a brief break Stay with us I think a really key component to our marriage is when we got married, we'd been together for a year and a half. And a week after our honeymoon, he left for six months for work.

So we started with me basically being a single parent with four kids. We're all coming out of the trauma of losing their biological mother. We were in survival mode. Stopping and hemorrhaging. Yeah. And we weren't able to focus so much on our marriage and establishing our relationship because we were trying to save some lives. Yes. It it felt like but that's why you're here today right you're here today telling me first we did marriage we did family we did children we did surviving and now we want to create our relationship. Do you come back with experiences from the military that compound some of this? I feel like for me

it was more about just being separate from my family with all the stuff going on and I would have to leave. My attachment was with my family, and it was a war zone there. So that's where the trauma was. It wasn't. You just saw something now. What did you just see? Visually? Yeah.

Well, I go back to the day I found her. And you see that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I go back to the day I found her. And you see that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That and my youngest was the only one that was home, thankfully. But she was in her crib. And so that image as well of coming home and, you know, finding my one-year-old

who had been crying for who knows how long, waiting for someone to come find her or get her out of her crib. And when you see the crib, which image is stronger, the crib or your wife? Hmm. I think maybe the crib, which is weird.

But, you know, my daughter is now, she wasn't yet two. She's now just turned nine. And she still remembers that day. She remembers being, you know, crying like she's never cried before. And that's hard, you know, because that's tangible. I don't know what my former wife was. You can assume what her emotional state was. You can assume she was sad.

You can assume she was depressed. She might have been happy. I don't know. I have no idea. But I know exactly how my daughter was. And I know that the effects linger. If you let him do this, he will cry more and you will cry less.

And you'll start to feel less, like you have to be the catalyst for all the denied emotions. And you'll revive because he won't put the mourning on you. So don't be scared for him. I'm grateful to see this. What else does she say, your daughter? What else does she say, your daughter?

What else does she say about that day? That I came and rescued her. You did? Yeah. He cries for his children, but he can't cry for himself. The baby he sees crying in the crib is his child and also himself. But I guess I also, I do struggle too with, while it was really tangible that I did rescue her and help her, with my oldest daughter and my middle son, I've not done a very good

job at rescuing them because as they've struggled with their own suicidal ideations, instead of meeting them with compassion or grace, I was really more angry. How could you do this? You know what we've been through. Why would you choose to go down this path? How could you do this? You know what we've been through. Why would you choose to go down this path? How could you do this to me again? I'm so tired of dealing with this heaviness.

The other, the scary part too, when someone is, from my perspective, when someone is at the point of being suicidal, there's nothing you can do about it. I mean, the day that my former wife committed suicide, she was at her psychiatrist's office. We're doing all the things you're supposed to do to get help, and it didn't help. And it leaves you in a weird place of feeling that you're powerless to do anything

because at the end of the day, they have their own feeling that you're powerless to do anything because at the end of the day, they have their own agency and they can choose to do that. And it led me down a path of not compassion and I didn't like it. I didn't like that I responded that way. It's impacted my relationship with my middle son. He was really struggling and I responded really out of anger. I wasn't able to rescue him. I wasn't able to meet him. Does he know you're here?

He does. Oh, he does? You've talked to him? Can you imagine, you know, we went to talk to this woman, and I was telling her how bad I feel in the way that I reacted to you. And I was so scared and felt so powerless that I got angry because it's the flip side of helplessness. I want to have the opportunity to do it differently if ever you need me again. I've had that conversation with my oldest.

I have not had that with my son. Yeah, but the son is the key one. There's no reservations in me about doing that. I just don't think I've taken the time to think that he needs that from me. And then I need that. You need it. I need that for myself. Because if you don't clear some of these clogged parts of you, you don't feel like you are entitled to pleasure.

Yeah. And your partner here wants to feel alive. And you say, I'm still making sure that nobody's dead. Yeah. When you say revive, what's your dream? What's your dream for the two of you? Delight. Say more.

Just feeling a freedom, a security. But dreams are very vivid. Yes. And they're very, very detailed. Yes. And they're very, very detailed. Yes. Him coming home from work and I'm home with the kids and his connection to me is one of instant delight and being present. What is he doing? So he comes home and what? His physical.

Pulling me close. Looking at me, holding my gaze, kissing me, feeling like I'm the only person that exists, where all of his attention is just on me in that moment. It's nothing profound or big, but it actually is. The gesture is small. The meaning is big. I have been here for everybody. And now that everyone seems to be more okay, I would like to have your attention on me. And not because you want to rescue me, but because you delight in me. When we met, I was flourishing. And I had the bandwidth when I came in.

I was full. And now I feel like deflated, exhausted. I mean, it's just been one thing after another. When we got married, he left. And that first month, I get a phone call from the high school saying our oldest had overdosed. And in that moment, I remember thinking, I need to teach these kids how to suffer well and fight for life.

It's interesting what you just, how you just put it. To suffer well and to fight for life. To me, what helps the most is to have meaning. Absolutely. The meaning is what allows us to tolerate the pain, which is what you have done in your relation to him. It's your love for him. It's your connection to him.

That's what has allowed you to tolerate all of this. Well, and when we met, I thought, here's a man who's gone through unbelievable circumstances, and he's got his act together, and he's taking care of his kids. In the face of adversity, in the face of trauma, he's rising up. And that's the kind of person I want to be connected to because it's not if we will suffer, it's when and how do we move through it. And that I want to choose life and to choose life with him.

And when you have a glimpse of that, what does it look like? I know that she has told in utter details the traumatic experiences that she went through. I don't know that she's ever had the opportunity to talk in equal details what an experience of reclaiming and awakening and delight would look like to her and this is what she's invited to do we are in the midst of our session. There is still so much to talk about.

So stay with us. Support for Where Should We Begin comes from Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform that you can use to build a website and help people find your ventures. Whether you're seeking a location for your podcast, teaching language courses or selling handcrafted ceramics, Squarespace has all the tools you need to create a home on the web. You can create a polished, professional place that connects people with whatever you are excited about.

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where people can schedule an appointment with you, browse your services, or learn more about why you do what you do. Visit squarespace.com slash Esther for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Esther to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. See, when he thinks acute pain, he sees the grip. When you see intense joy, what do you see? I can remember actually the weekend we got engaged and we were in some little tiny town.

We were waiting for the fog to lift. And we had your iPad out and we were looking at houses, making plans. And in my mind, I'm like, this is our future. He has my heart and I know I have his. And finally, like, this is the part of my life that I've been longing for. And it was, we're just sitting in some little coffee shop in an old train station, looking at houses

and thinking about, talking about our future and our dreams and and I felt like he was seeing parts of me that I hadn't even been able to share yet just him wanting to know we didn't talk about kids or anything like that I do have a tendency to get into a manage the project kind of a mindset. You know, I'm sure that talking about logistics is not that romantic, right? It's not, doesn't evoke the erotic when you're talking about logistics. But you know, a conversation where someone is deeply focused on you and attentive and curious is erotic. In the sense of you feel alive and awakened. Right.

It doesn't have to be sexual. Right. Someone's focused on you. Yeah. You enter through the eyes. You enter through the curiosity. You enter into her universe. All of that is erotic. I'm going to say it in your own words, what you're asking from him. Actually, let me reframe that, what you're offering him. My world, my inner world,

there's no one else I would rather give that to than you. But I want you to desire that and not be intimidated, but to take me places that I haven't even allowed myself. I think that was the only thing I could protect, my past experiences with abuse. I remember thinking, I can protect this part, and opening myself and saying, here I am, I'm open, you have everything, I'm not going to withhold.

And wanting to feel his desire and excitement to do that. And tell him why this is so important. Not that you haven't already, but there's something about why this is so important that I don't know he really gets yet. I think it's to feel fully safe, to feel that, to be cherished, but to feel safe, to kind of feel myself unfurl. I feel like it's almost like a release. We've only barely crossed the threshold

of what we can experience together, and we're just standing there. I'm not afraid of it and I'm not resistant to it. Sometimes I just genuinely don't even know what it means because I feel a deeper connection with her than I've ever felt with anybody. You know, I'm thinking that we'reed what she's asking from him to what she's offering him she's offering him an experience he's never had that somewhere he longs for, but doesn't even know he does. And she comes with the perfect natural healing ingredients, which is not only to make sure after her traumatic experiences to be safe and not to be hurt again, but also to actually be able to be safe so that she can open herself up again and with delight and with surrender

so every time you think you've gotten there, you're gonna think I've just begun. Mm-hmm. I want you to put your hand on her lower back, the way she likes it. And what she's also told you is that she wants you to look at her. Just linger. Does that help? Really?

We're talking. Don't talk. Whenever you want to pull back, just notice it. Take a deep breath and re-engage. Lingering means that the other person is not too much, which is what she lives with.

The fear that it's too much. She's too much. And what your wife here wants is to step out of the ER, to stop just thinking, I can do the suffering. She wants to feel that she too deserves to feel good, cherished, not just not damaged, not just not in pain, adored, sensual. She told the rapist,

there's a part of me you'll never have, but now she wants that part of her to be shared with someone. It's hard to know for me how to lead in that direction. Do you know that when you were just looking at her and smiling, you were doing it? I didn't know that. I definitely don't give this to you. I get distracted quickly with other things. And my mind lingering is 10 seconds and that's not lingering. Like this is easy. It's easy to sit with you. This isn't difficult. I'm actually a little embarrassed that this is a way to you. And I've been struggling with all these other more complicated things

and more words or more action. And it's just to just kind of sit and be. Be present. Yeah. It's the not having to think of everyone else. It's someone thinking of me. Mm-hmm. Like, I can handle hard, but being alone, it's like, the image that always comes to my mind is a house that's been incinerated.

And there's like a brick column or wall left. And everyone's scattered and I'm the only one left holding it up. I'm thinking, I want to let go. I want to leave. But there's no one to help me. And when she says all of this, the way she knows that she can feel alone but not be alone is by the strength of your grip. That's all you need to do. Because if you hold tight, she can let go. And these moments I want him to hold me.

Okay. Then ask him. Well, I will say I feel like I have been good at asking. And he doesn't do it? What does he do? Then he freezes? Mm-hmm. Or explains.

Because what happens to you then? You do the same as you did with your boy? Well, maybe that, but I think maybe more so prepping myself that she's going to leave. Because people, that's because... That's what all women have done in my life. Right. I'm just standing by, not an active participant in her emotions

because I can't be a part of it because I've invested so many years trying to be a part of it because I've invested so many years trying to be a part of other people's emotional state and it having no impact that it then shuts me down to say it's outside my scope. And you would think that someone who had gone through this, I wouldn't respond that way. And I don't know why I do. No, no.

You make perfect sense. Really? Actually, of course. Of course. I feel so helpless. You can leave. You can kill yourself. You can reject me.

That's what all the important women in my life have done. When you feel bad, the best thing I can do is brace myself. That's probably a good way to put it. I'm just bracing myself for what's going to come and I don't know what's coming. Right. I'm not going anywhere. No, you're not.

Neither am I. I know. I want these other women to get out of the way. How do we retrain the body, I guess? So the first thing you do is you breathe. When you tighten, breathe. You can also joke with her and just say, I've just had a visit of unwanted women. So everybody knows what's happening. The only thing you cannot do is explain to her why life is going to remain lifeless for her for much longer.

And for you. Enough talk. And this is a moment where I seek for an experience. And I've known that she's a deeply musical person from their intake form. And so I suggest. Do you sing to him? I haven't in a long time.

I haven't felt the inspiration. I haven't felt the desire. And I don't like that. I don't like that that part of myself has gone dormant. The reason I want you to sing is because voice is crucial. Every baby recognizes a voice. Every kid who is left misses the voice. You can still see the person.

You can't hear them. And when you sing to him, it does to him what it does to you when he touches you. It will help him with the freezing. That's going to fill him up. Is there a song you know you love? Yes. Yes.

It isn't your sweet conversation that brings this sensation sensation Let it go Oh no It's just A nearness I'm nervous in my voice. I love you. There is no greater victory against a rapist than to experience full sexual and erotic intimacy with somebody else.

That's when you can say to someone, you have not taken the best of me. And you can give that to her. I want to give that to her. Because as much as she wants to come alive, I do too. And I've been at a loss sometimes for how to get there. As long as you tell her I do too, rather Rather than just I don't know how. Yeah. We're good. Yeah. That will take her out of the ER. Yeah.

I will do that. I'm looking forward to this. I do too. She's got a good voice doesn't she one of the things we get asked the most on this podcast is i wish i knew what happened to the couples i wish i heard from them six months, a year, two years later. And in this case, you can. A few years after Esther recorded this original session, she sat back down with them to see what distance and a new country and a brand new life did for this couple. You can listen to the session later this week

in Esther's office hours on Apple subscriptions. You just heard a classic session of Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with New York Magazine and The Cut. To apply with your partner for a session on the podcast, for the transcripts or show notes on each episode, or to sign up for Esther's monthly newsletter, go to estherperel.com. Esther Perel is the author of Mating in Captivity in the State of Affairs. She also created a game of stories called Where Should We Begin?

For details, go to her website, estherperel.com.