Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Huberman Lab

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Episode: Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships

Author: Scicomm Media
Duration: 02:06:13

Episode Shownotes

In this episode, my guest is Esther Perel, a world-renowned psychotherapist, relationship expert, and bestselling author. She explains healthy romantic relationship dynamics and how to achieve them. The answer includes curiosity not just about the other person but, more importantly, about who we can evolve into through healthy relating. Esther

explains the fundamental differences and challenges in relationships formed at different stages of life. We also discuss relationship conflict and how to give and receive a true apology. Additionally, we discuss fidelity, breaches of trust, reviving relationships, and tools for understanding your needs regarding love and desire in a relationship. The episode will help listeners understand the key elements to find, build, and revive deeply satisfying romantic relationships. Access the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Esther Perel's new Desire courses are launching tomorrow, September 17—use code HUBERMAN15 for 15% off any course through December. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman David Protein: https://davidprotein.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Esther Perel 00:02:03 Sponsors: David Protein, LMNT & Helix Sleep 00:06:33 Romantic Relationships, Change & Self 00:11:18 Cornerstone vs. Capstone Relationships, Age Differences 00:16:53 Young vs. Older Couples, Dynamic Relationships 00:20:13 Identity & Relationship Evolution 00:26:00 Curiosity, Reactivity 00:30:29 Sponsor: AG1 00:31:59 Polarization, Conflict; Coherence & Narratives 00:38:21 Apologies, Forgiveness, Shame, Self-Esteem 00:45:00 Relationship Conflict 00:53:48 Sponsor: Function 00:55:35 Verb States of Conflict; Emotion, Narratives vs. Reality 01:00:10 Time Domains & Hurt; Caretaker & Romantic Relationships 01:08:03 Couples Therapy; Language & Naming 01:20:15 Sexuality in Relationships 01:26:20 Tool: Love & Desire, Sexuality 01:31:28 Infidelity, “Aliveness” 01:35:17 Intimacy, Abandonment, Self-Preservation 01:41:26 Erotic Blueprints, Emotional Needs 01:49:42 Tool: Repair Work, Relationship Revival; Sincere Apologies 01:59:30 Tool: Relationship Readiness 02:03:33 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures

Summary

In this episode of the Huberman Lab podcast, hosted by Andrew Huberman, Esther Perel discusses the intricacies of healthy romantic relationships. The conversation centers on the balance of maintaining individual identity while allowing relational evolution. Key topics include relationship dynamics, conflict resolution, and the interaction of love and desire. Perel emphasizes curiosity, managing conflicts with effective apologies, and the impact of childhood experiences on adult relationship dynamics. The episode also explores intimacy, sexuality, and frameworks for understanding emotional states. Insights are provided into understanding and reviving satisfying romantic relationships through self-awareness and personal growth.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Esther Perel: How to Find, Build & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Esther Perel.

00:00:17 Speaker_02
Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and one of the world's foremost experts on romantic relationships. She's also the author of bestselling books, such as, Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs.

00:00:29 Speaker_02
Today's discussion focuses on what it means to be in a truly functional romantic relationship.

00:00:34 Speaker_02
We discuss this from the standpoint of identity, that is, how people both try to hold onto and evolve their identities within a relationship, and how a truly functional romantic relationship indeed evolves over time from a standpoint of curiosity,

00:00:49 Speaker_02
and adventure, but also one in which people need to hold on to certain components of themselves. We explore what conflict in relationships looks like and the dynamics that underlie those conflicts.

00:01:00 Speaker_02
So focusing less on specific scenarios, but rather the dynamics that exist in conflicts in romantic relationship across all different situations and different combinations of people.

00:01:10 Speaker_02
And of course, we also talk about what healthy conflict resolution looks like, what a truly effective apology looks and sounds like, and we explore the erotic aspects of relationships.

00:01:20 Speaker_02
Comparing and contrasting, for instance, love and desire, how sometimes those things run in parallel in the same direction, how sometimes those run in opposite directions, and how people can explore their own notions, their own models of love and desire in order to have more effective romantic relationships.

00:01:37 Speaker_02
By the end of today's episode, you will learn from the world's foremost expert on romantic relationships, how to find, build, and revive romantic relationships that feel most satisfying to all partners involved.

00:01:50 Speaker_02
I'm also pleased to announce that Esther Perel has just released a new course on intimacy. You can find a link to that course in the show note captions, as well as links to her books, her podcast, and other resources about romantic relationships.

00:02:03 Speaker_02
Before you begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:08 Speaker_02
It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:02:19 Speaker_02
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00:02:34 Speaker_02
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00:02:46 Speaker_02
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00:02:53 Speaker_02
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00:03:01 Speaker_02
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00:03:11 Speaker_02
And it allows me to do so without taking on an excess of calories. Again, I focus on getting most of my food from whole food sources throughout the day.

00:03:19 Speaker_02
But I typically eat a David Bar in the late afternoon when I get hungry between lunch and dinner, sometimes also mid-morning if I get hungry then.

00:03:26 Speaker_02
And sometimes I'll use it as a meal replacement, although not a complete meal replacement, it can get me to the next meal. So if I need to eat in a couple of hours, but I'm really hungry, I'll eat a David Bar.

00:03:35 Speaker_02
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00:03:44 Speaker_02
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00:03:57 Speaker_02
Again, the link is davidprotein.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.

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00:04:38 Speaker_02
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00:04:48 Speaker_02
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00:04:56 Speaker_02
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman. Again, that's drinkelement spelled LMNT.com slash Huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix.

00:05:09 Speaker_02
Again, drinkelement.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs.

00:05:20 Speaker_02
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00:05:28 Speaker_02
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00:05:32 Speaker_02
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00:05:43 Speaker_02
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00:06:19 Speaker_02
Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off mattresses and two free pillows. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get 25% off and two free pillows. And now for my discussion with Esther Perel. Esther Perel, welcome.

00:06:34 Speaker_00
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:06:37 Speaker_02
There are so many questions and curiosities and puzzles and challenges around the topic of romantic relationships. But what I really want to know is to what extent is the decision to even think about being in a relationship of the romantic type?

00:06:58 Speaker_02
a extension of our identity or is it really a willingness to potentially embrace a new identity? And I asked this somewhat abstract question for a very specific reason. And the reason is the following.

00:07:13 Speaker_02
I think everyone who's been in a romantic relationship or even who just wants one is familiar with the kind of yearning or interest or curiosity. And then also with the fact that just like the development of our physical body.

00:07:28 Speaker_02
It has an arc across the lifespan that a relationship has a sort of developmental arc. There's the first meeting, the first week, the first month, et cetera.

00:07:38 Speaker_02
And so much of what I've seen in your work and in the discussion about relationships in the public sphere seems to be trying to understand how we change

00:07:47 Speaker_02
in terms of what we want and what we ask for, what we feel willing to ask for, et cetera, across this arc of the relationship. But what I want to know is, is the decision to enter a romantic relationship, a willingness

00:08:03 Speaker_02
conscious or unconscious to actually change who we are? In other words, are we entering a relationship to just be ourselves and find someone with whom we go lock and key?

00:08:12 Speaker_02
Or are we really saying, hey, even whether or not we realize or not, if we're pursuing a relationship, are we really basically saying, I'm willing to become a different person by virtue of being in a relationship?

00:08:25 Speaker_00
I think it is both, completely both. We meet an other, in order to find ourselves. And we meet another and want to be surprised by the self we haven't known. I think that all of us come into this world with a fundamental sets of dual needs.

00:08:51 Speaker_00
We need security and we need freedom and adventure. And we need togetherness and we need separateness. So in the relationship, you come in order to create that identification, but also that differentiation. It's a dialectic all the time.

00:09:13 Speaker_00
But what's interesting is even if I choose you, because you represent sometimes the parts of me that are more challenging or that I disavow or that I prefer to outsource so I don't have to be too vulnerable about them.

00:09:28 Speaker_00
What draws me to you in the beginning, because it is different, that I think may expand me and make me change, is also the very thing that becomes the source of conflict later, because we want to change, but up to a point, not too much, and not on your terms.

00:09:46 Speaker_00
So we want change, but we sometimes are afraid of change. And so we let the other person represent the part of us that would want to change, but then we disconnect from it. So you can, you become the representative of that.

00:10:01 Speaker_00
I am drawn to the fact that you are, stable, grounded, structured, solid, reliable, on time, you name it.

00:10:08 Speaker_00
I know that this is something that I would like to be more of and just a very simple example, but then I start to think of you as rigid because I get a little more than what I bargained for.

00:10:20 Speaker_00
And now I start to argue with your rigidity and my desire to actually become more structured and solid and punctual and reliable has somehow disappeared.

00:10:30 Speaker_02
So if I understand correctly, we seek out others in order to try and initiate the process of change that we want. But then when we hit the friction point, meaning the point where it challenges where we are.

00:10:46 Speaker_02
then there's a form of resent or frustration. Defensiveness. Defensiveness.

00:10:53 Speaker_00
Yes. You know what it is? Every system straddles stability and change, and then grapples for homeostasis. Every relationship goes through that. Every system in nature goes through that. But the same thing is true inside an individual. We want change,

00:11:10 Speaker_00
and we need stability. And then these things sometimes are compensating each other and they are complimentary and at times they butt heads.

00:11:18 Speaker_02
So a very practical question then. What are the necessary but not sufficient elements that somebody should have in themselves before they go seeking a romantic relationship.

00:11:33 Speaker_02
Meaning what is necessary in order to be able to embark on the process with any chance of success. Barring, you know, extreme pathology, right?

00:11:45 Speaker_02
Assuming that both people entering the relationship have the best of intentions to make the relationship work, in quotes. Is it both a sense of one's own identity as well as what specifically they would like to change?

00:12:00 Speaker_02
or is it some other constellation of factors?

00:12:05 Speaker_00
Different ways to answer this. I think sometimes people say, I wanna be with you because you helped me become the best version of myself.

00:12:16 Speaker_02
Yeah, you hear that a lot.

00:12:17 Speaker_00
And so what is that version, you know? Who is it that I want to see that I think you will help me become?

00:12:24 Speaker_00
When you talk about these romantic relationships, first of all, I think there's a different answer if we're talking about cornerstone relationships or capstone relationships. Do you know the concept?

00:12:36 Speaker_02
if you don't mind defining those for the audience.

00:12:37 Speaker_00
So the cornerstone relationship is when we used to meet in our early twenties and together we build the foundation of our relationship. We grew together. We saved our first monies together. We got our first places together, et cetera.

00:12:57 Speaker_00
It was very much foundational. is the foundation has already been established because we tend to meet at this point 10, 12 years later. So during those 12 years, I've already actually worked, so to speak, on my identity.

00:13:13 Speaker_00
I have defined myself, my values, my aspirations, my constructs, how I want to see my life. And when I meet you, you're a confirmation for all of this. You're a confirmation of what I've already built.

00:13:27 Speaker_00
And I am putting you and me as the capstone, which we put on top of what we've already created. You and me, you've done the same thing.

00:13:34 Speaker_00
So I am looking for someone who recognizes my identity, not for someone who helps me develop my identity from much earlier age. So there's a developmental arc that changes the mandate. I said it's both, but the priority of if it's a,

00:13:51 Speaker_00
the building of identity or the expansion of that identity, what you call change, differs if you meet somebody when you're young and if you meet somebody when you're in your thirties.

00:14:02 Speaker_02
What happens when people are mismatched in terms of age?

00:14:05 Speaker_00
I mean, there is a big age differences a lot of the time. And in gay relationships, you have often a major, um, age difference that means something else, but it creates differentiation.

00:14:19 Speaker_00
In straight relationships, you often have men who are a lot more, a lot older than the women, very much rooted in evolutionary biology, I think, and fertility.

00:14:30 Speaker_00
But, and now we have more and more a new phenomenon of older women with younger men, but that's actually been very rare in most cultures.

00:14:40 Speaker_02
So that's shifting now towards more often people are observing older women with younger men?

00:14:46 Speaker_00
You know, when you have four movies at this moment that are talking about this, then you begin to see the crescent of a new cultural phenomenon.

00:14:54 Speaker_00
I think the fact that it appears in the arts and in the culture usually announces something, I wouldn't make it yet a phenomenon. But you asked me a question before about what are the things people need? I mean,

00:15:08 Speaker_00
You know, when you embark any relationship, it's, again, it's, I tend to think as both end on a lot of things. I come to you with a certain self-awareness. How much self-awareness, the more there is, the better.

00:15:23 Speaker_00
And that self-awareness, I think, as its best translates in a sense of, you know, I think a good vow to say at the time of your wedding is, I'll fuck up on a regular basis and on occasion I'll acknowledge it.

00:15:40 Speaker_00
It means that self-awareness comes within self-knowledge about your limitations and your ability to take responsibility for it without blame and shame, and basically accountability. I think accountability is an enormous component of relationship.

00:15:57 Speaker_00
It's okay, we all do things. You know, we all have our wounds and our frustrations and our expectations and our unexpressed needs and our unfulfilled longings, et cetera.

00:16:09 Speaker_00
But it's a good thing to know it and to admit it and to not pretend that it's not me, but it's you.

00:16:16 Speaker_00
You know, I often say that couples therapy, I am a practicing couples therapist for almost 40 years and couples often come to therapy thinking that you're a drop-off center.

00:16:27 Speaker_00
You know, they come to deliver their problem and their problem is their partner. and you're going to fix it. And they're going to help you because they're an expert on what's wrong with the partner.

00:16:39 Speaker_00
And it's an amazing thing how people have tremendous insight on all the shortcomings of the other person and do not see themselves as part of the system. A relationship is a breeding, living system of interdependent parts.

00:16:53 Speaker_02
Do you think that's perhaps one reason why people who are in these cornerstone relationships, of whom I've known many, even family members of mine, met in university, met their significant other, and then had their first jobs, moved in together, all the things you described, that there's this- They grow up together.

00:17:11 Speaker_02
Yeah, and I think it probably happens at a stage of life when there's still a lot more neuroplasticity, frankly.

00:17:16 Speaker_02
I mean, everything I know about neuroplasticity is that it exists across the lifespan, but that it tapers off significantly in one's late 20s. And, you know, fortunately, it's still available.

00:17:26 Speaker_02
the notion of being set in our ways is a neuroplasticity phenomenon, right?

00:17:30 Speaker_00
It's the closing of the prefrontal cortex.

00:17:32 Speaker_02
Pretty much, pretty much. The fontanelle is still... Exactly, it takes a lot more to open that plasticity later than it does earlier, certainly. And yet it's inversely related to the self-awareness, right?

00:17:44 Speaker_02
I mean, the younger we are, the less self-aware we are about our patterns because we... just have less data over time.

00:17:51 Speaker_02
So I could see how it'd be more difficult for somebody in their 20s to say, hey, listen, I think I have many virtues, but I have this severe issue with something, or this particularly frustrates me, or here's my laundry list of issues, right?

00:18:05 Speaker_02
Whereas somebody in their 40s or 50s or older, if pressed, could probably make that list if they were really being honest with themselves. So it seems like- I think it's a good point.

00:18:15 Speaker_02
So it seems that maybe there's a sweet spot, but that these earlier relationships, I've always been impressed by them and kind of romanticized them in my mind, because that wasn't the trajectory that I took.

00:18:28 Speaker_00
But they have a challenge. You see, when you grow up together, you often put a lot of energy into the building of the unit.

00:18:38 Speaker_00
And that unit then is supposed to become your base, your scaffolding from which two individuals can begin to grow and to define themselves.

00:18:46 Speaker_00
When you meet later, you are already two individuals that have defined themselves who now have to find a way to create the energy to come together. So it's a different movement. It's a different choreography.

00:18:59 Speaker_00
I think that the challenge for young couples today who meet early in college and have known often only themselves and a few people in their teenage years, et cetera, or none, is what happens when they begin to change individually.

00:19:14 Speaker_00
Can the relationship expand enough to broaden the envelope, to let these two people emerge individually, or is the jacket too tight? Is the vest too tight?

00:19:27 Speaker_00
And often it becomes a bit of a crisis because they grew together on the basis of this togetherness. And sometimes they can, and sometimes it just feels like, is this, that in order to become adults, it may need to happen with a different partner.

00:19:49 Speaker_00
And that's why I always say, I think this moment, we have two or three relationships or marriages in our adult lives in the West. And some of us will do it with the same person, but the relationship has to change.

00:20:05 Speaker_00
It's like the person changes the relationship, but the relationship makes room for the person to change. This is dynamic.

00:20:12 Speaker_02
If that just feels like such a true statement to me, because in my professional life as a developmental neurobiologist, there's a saying, people always think of development and then adulthood, but all of life is one big developmental arc.

00:20:26 Speaker_02
And the great psychologist Erickson spoke about the different sort of challenges that people face from birth all the way until death, which, you know, nowadays hopefully will extend into people's 80s, 90s, or even beyond.

00:20:39 Speaker_00
Well, his last stage is the generative stage. It's actually an amazing, I mean, he's the most articulate theoretician of stages of life.

00:20:48 Speaker_02
I agree. If people haven't seen those stages, we'll put a link to them in the show note captions. But the idea is that you're basically grappling with some basic struggle that you either reconcile or you don't at every stage.

00:20:57 Speaker_02
So you could imagine that these, let's say these three marriages, let's imagine a couple that meets in their twenties and does three marriages which implies a couple of divorces in between, maybe not legal divorces, across their lifespan.

00:21:11 Speaker_02
They really are, according to the Erickson theory of development or any neurobiological examination of brain development, different people in their 20s versus 40s versus 60s, 70s, 80s.

00:21:22 Speaker_02
So this notion of three different marriages to me seems both logical and very grounded in what we know about the biology the brain and the self.

00:21:32 Speaker_00
So, and yet- A good metaphor is rooted in science.

00:21:37 Speaker_02
And yet it's also kind of a radical idea when one hears it for the first time. It framed in the context of with the same person, it sounds kind of lovely and romantic. Okay, they meet, it's lovely. They have their first marriage.

00:21:50 Speaker_02
Then there's some challenge they overcome. They do a second marriage, then some challenge and a third marriage. And maybe there's even grandchildren you imagine, maybe even great grandchildren.

00:21:58 Speaker_02
There's all this kind of romantic notions built up around it. But then there's also the reality that for many people, more than half, there's a fracture of the first marriage and that they either remain single or marry again.

00:22:12 Speaker_02
And so what do you think dictates whether or not a person can go through these

00:22:18 Speaker_02
series of evolutions and actually find and create love again and again and again, either with the same person or with someone new, or in some cases, I guess, three different partners. I mean, what is the sort of requirement?

00:22:33 Speaker_02
Is it a willingness to accept this model and understand that who they are at 50 is going to be very different than who they were in their 20s?

00:22:41 Speaker_00
You know, a good question is a question that has many answers. There's different ways to answer this.

00:22:50 Speaker_00
I think that more than thinking about it as they were able to overcome crises, it's really the ability to redefine oneself and to redefine the relationship. It's much more creative than problem solving.

00:23:04 Speaker_00
You can overcome a crisis and put it aside and stay the same. This is much more of a generative experience. It's a creative experience, is that you actually become a different unit. The power dynamic is different. The interdependence is different.

00:23:19 Speaker_00
The erotic charge is different. The connection to the outside world is different. It's really, it's enlivening. I think everybody understands the difference between a relationship that is not dead and a relationship that is alive.

00:23:39 Speaker_00
I am not there to help people survive. My work is about more than that. It's about helping people to feel alive. And the redefinition of having the same relationship with the same person, it has to be alive, not just not dead.

00:24:00 Speaker_00
And if sometimes that alive means recreating a new, you know, going to a new person, a new country, a new city, a new social circle, a new profession, a new a lot of things that we today have access to to change, things that people did once.

00:24:17 Speaker_00
You know, when I ask an audience, If your grandparents grew up in the same neighborhood or in the same town and worked in the same company, I mean, most people raise their hands.

00:24:27 Speaker_00
And then I go down the generations and then now it's like, how many of you have had three jobs in the last five years? So this notion that we can,

00:24:37 Speaker_00
create new things for ourselves is actually one of the greatest things that has happened in the realm of relationships. We can have kids much later. We can join somebody who has already had those children. We can marry in our 60s for the first time.

00:24:52 Speaker_00
We can live in a threesome. There's a plasticity, if you want to use a word to the world of relationship today.

00:25:03 Speaker_00
that is extremely rich and expansive, but demands a set of skills to negotiate, to understand the uncertainty that comes from having to make so many decisions. At a time in the past, none of us made decisions about most of these things.

00:25:20 Speaker_00
They were handed down to us. So that level of freedom is utterly rich, but comes with a tremendous amount of anxiety and demands maturity.

00:25:31 Speaker_00
And sometimes couples have become so entrenched and so locked in their story and confusing their story with the truth and feeling that they're living next to someone who has a completely different version of the story that they cannot talk to.

00:25:49 Speaker_00
Like there is no greater polarization sometimes than a couple that once agreed on a lot of things that you just think there's no way change can enter this system.

00:25:59 Speaker_02
Okay, so when I hear your answer, what comes to mind is that, again, as a neurobiologist, I think the brain, the human brain has this amazing capacity to focus on past, present, or future.

00:26:12 Speaker_02
And sometimes two of those three things, it's kind of hard to think about all three at once. But it sounds to me as if one of the more functional attributes that somebody can have if they want to navigate relationship in a healthy way,

00:26:28 Speaker_02
is to be able to at least temporarily discard with one's story about one's past and even their past identity. And the word that was coming up over and over again in my mind, as you answered, was this word you used earlier, which was curiosity.

00:26:44 Speaker_02
And I'm wondering if what you're referring to is a curiosity on the part of hopefully both people in the relationship as to what the relationship could become and who oneself could become

00:26:56 Speaker_02
And my definition of curiosity is an interest in finding out, but without an emotional attachment to what the outcome is. This is what we train scientists to do.

00:27:07 Speaker_02
You want to get the answers, but you can't get emotionally attached to the answer being A or B. That's anti-curiosity. Real genuine curiosity is about the process, the verb action of wanting to figure out something, but

00:27:22 Speaker_02
not being attached to a particular outcome.

00:27:24 Speaker_02
And as you were describing sort of functional trajectory of relationship, I was thinking, okay, so if one could approach relationship with a willingness to discard kind of stories about one's past and maybe even a sense of one's identity of past, be willing to let go of that a little bit and just be curious about like, where could this go if I let the relationship guide my evolution of identity a bit?

00:27:50 Speaker_02
And that takes some, as you said, some boldness, because if it's kind of scary, right?

00:27:55 Speaker_02
If you not knowing who one is going to become, if they let the other person, you know, maybe lead for a while, or if they were to lead for a while, are these the sorts of dynamics that you're referring to?

00:28:08 Speaker_00
I think you almost articulated one of the most important pieces of my work. I mean, curiosity is one of the top words for me because it stands in opposition to reactivity. Reactivity reinforces the cycle.

00:28:27 Speaker_00
It just creates narrow repetition, rapid cycles of escalation. It usually involves defense and attack and blame, et cetera. Curiosity is an active engagement with the unknown.

00:28:41 Speaker_00
And I like when you say without the attachment to the outcome or the emotional investment, I think that's absolutely accurate. And much of what I do is try to have people switch from reactive to curious.

00:28:56 Speaker_00
But that curiosity means that they're willing to enter empathically and respectfully into the realm of another person whose narrative is completely different.

00:29:05 Speaker_00
I'm very invested and familiar with the neurosciences and the whole work on the brain in relationships, but I am very interested in narrative because I believe that the story shapes the experience.

00:29:19 Speaker_00
And when people hold on to the story and they don't think it's a story, they think it's fact. This is what happened last night. I'll tell you what you did. I'll tell you what happened. That's not the case.

00:29:32 Speaker_00
And they don't see this as a subjective rendering. It's totally valid, but it's valid as your experience. And much of couples' conversations is pseudo-factual talk, but it is actually subjective. Once you get that, you can become curious.

00:29:49 Speaker_00
Once you are curious, you open up. But it is very challenging when people are hurt, wounded, defensive, holding tight to invite that curiosity. It's what's happening in their bodies is about shutdown and defense and self-protection.

00:30:13 Speaker_00
And you want, I'm doing this physically to you because you, this is where the brain and the neurobiology in that moment is going against what actually is in their best interest psychologically and existentially.

00:30:29 Speaker_02
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00:30:43 Speaker_02
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00:31:16 Speaker_02
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00:31:54 Speaker_02
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. I am a firm believer that when we are in a stress response,

00:32:04 Speaker_02
that we become locked in a time domain and not to spin off into a tangent about this, but put differently when we are relaxed, we can think about time and our life and other things happening around us and others in a far more dynamic way.

00:32:21 Speaker_02
The stress response is about solving for the feeling now. it has no sense about, or it doesn't allow us a window into the cognition or emotions that are related to what could be, even though we desperately want out of there.

00:32:36 Speaker_02
And there's all sorts of evolutionary reasons why this would be the case. But I feel like a statement that you made, which is that a curiosity and a willing to discard with one's own narratives. And in particular, what you said about the,

00:32:51 Speaker_02
that people perceive their own experience as fact, when in actuality, it's just two different stories.

00:32:58 Speaker_02
Neither person is correct or one person, but people have these stories, which are almost confabulation at some point, but they feel so true to all of us. when we experienced them. I also feel like that's a lot of what's happening in culture at large.

00:33:12 Speaker_02
Diametrically opposed camps really believe that the same thing is a reflection of two completely different series of facts.

00:33:20 Speaker_02
And it seems almost unsolvable at the level of culture, it's just too many people, but at the level of two individuals, I feel like it ought to be tractable.

00:33:30 Speaker_00
You know, I have gone to a lot of meetings in the last year on issues of polarization on societal levels. And I often think, like, what is a psychologist or a couple therapist doing in those meetings? Why am I invited here?

00:33:45 Speaker_00
And then I think, you know what? You actually have a lot of experience with polarizations. Sitting for a long time with couples who once actually thought in the presence of the other, I discover myself. Now, you know, can be so at odds.

00:34:05 Speaker_00
They're sitting in the same room, they're listening to the same session. They have a complete different interpretation of what I said and what it meant. And they leave and you wonder, did it happen in the same room?

00:34:17 Speaker_00
And the same thing is about what they describe about the night before. It's like, and if you didn't see them together and you saw them each alone, you would be completely mistaken.

00:34:30 Speaker_00
Because it's like Swiss cheese, everything that one has left out is where the other one starts. So

00:34:39 Speaker_00
We learn a lot from doing couples work around the process of polarization, around the process of intractable conflict, around the sense that you are my enemy and there is nothing in what you say that I can recognize or be empathic towards or understanding.

00:34:58 Speaker_00
I think on a societal level, the people who have studied intractable conflict,

00:35:07 Speaker_00
basically have a method of how you bring two opposing parties, factions, tribes, you know, who have been in conflict and at war for a long time, and how you bring them together. There is There's actually a method, a process.

00:35:26 Speaker_00
It's not written in stone, but you know, you certainly don't start by talking about the things that drive you completely apart and unable to talk to each other. You start by finding some elements of your shared humanity.

00:35:42 Speaker_00
In a couple, because that is the space we talk about now, in a couple, it's an incredible thing how people can literally think that the other person wants their demise.

00:35:56 Speaker_00
You live day in, day out with someone who you really think wants to hurt you, is your enemy. And sometimes there is evil. There's people who don't have good intentions. But in many situations, it's, It's also a projection.

00:36:13 Speaker_00
It's also experiences that you've had in the past. And this is where what's interesting is that the narrative, the conscious narrative, lives here.

00:36:24 Speaker_00
And what you call the brain that can only locate itself in three temporal, and the brain and the physiology are in a different time. Implicit memory is completely influencing explicit narrative.

00:36:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, people are incredibly prone to confabulation based on these unconscious things going on. And it's kind of a scary thought.

00:36:46 Speaker_00
If I feel it, this is what's happening. That's right. And because we are creatures of meaning, we need to reconcile those things and we need coherence in our narratives.

00:36:58 Speaker_00
And that coherence is what is so difficult for when you work with people who are, what is it that they're holding on to? I mean, you know, one of the classic examples is some, you know, someone says, I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to.

00:37:11 Speaker_00
And the other one says, that's not the case. You know, like if someone tells you, I didn't mean to hurt you, You would think that someone would say, ah, that's reassuring. I like to hear that. I hope that's true. Makes me feel a lot better.

00:37:27 Speaker_00
Rather than proving to you that that's not true, you wanted to step on my toes. You intentionally put those heels on or those shoes or those fists to step on me.

00:37:43 Speaker_00
That coherence of maintaining the idea that if I feel that you hurt me, you must have been wanting to hurt me rather than, you know, I can be hurt and that doesn't mean you intentionally were trying to do anything.

00:37:56 Speaker_00
It's as if I need to justify my being hurt by the intention of what you did and to just make sure sometimes that's the case. It's not that they're not people who intentionally want to hurt some people.

00:38:10 Speaker_00
But at other times, what I'm highlighting is that the coherence to make sense of why I'm feeling this way demands that I also define what you are trying to do to me.

00:38:21 Speaker_02
I mean, and in reality, most people, are terrible at understanding how they themselves feel, let alone someone else's intentions. I mean, if somebody apologizes and says, listen, I'm truly sorry, I screwed up.

00:38:37 Speaker_02
And the other person says, I don't believe you. I think what they're really saying you can tell me if I'm wrong, is I don't feel better as a consequence of your apology.

00:38:47 Speaker_00
That's because your apology I screwed up is incomplete. Most of the time, people say that I made a mistake, I'm sorry, but it doesn't acknowledge what the other person felt in response to what we did.

00:39:03 Speaker_02
So let's say that the apology also includes that I really messed up. it makes total sense that you would be upset. You know, we had an agreement that we would meet at seven and I didn't get home until nine and I didn't notify you until eight.

00:39:19 Speaker_02
I would be upset too, that's totally justified. That sucks, that's gotta really suck. At that point, if the other person still feels like, it's still frustrating, Presumably it's because either this is a pattern,

00:39:42 Speaker_02
So this one apology doesn't encapsulate all the other, the sort of litany of other things that relate to this, of feeling unseen or unappreciated. There's often a lot more behind the event.

00:39:56 Speaker_02
Or yeah, it could be a pattern of apologies that don't equate to change, or it could be a pattern of an apology that doesn't encapsulate all the other things that weren't voiced. Because sometimes people won't voice their grievances

00:40:09 Speaker_02
because they, for whatever reason, but there's a lot of resent that's built up, right?

00:40:13 Speaker_02
So in that moment, when somebody tells another that they are not convinced, emotionally convinced, what are the tools that you give each in order to be able to navigate that sticking point?

00:40:28 Speaker_00
I think apology is an amazing topic in the realm of relationship. It's a huge piece. Apology, forgiveness, ownership, responsibility, accountability, that whole range of things.

00:40:41 Speaker_00
I think if you give that apology, many times somebody, and it's not that you're doing this every Tuesday, the person will probably just say, thank you.

00:40:53 Speaker_00
If you have someone who can't receive an apology and the apology is sincere, that's the first and foremost thing that accompanies an apology. Then you begin to ask, why is this person struggling to receive this?

00:41:14 Speaker_00
Because it is the thing that you should be getting. And then you start to ask yourself, Is it because if I accept your apology, it's as if I agree that what you did wasn't so bad. It is repairable.

00:41:35 Speaker_00
And in order to really make clear that the grievance is big, I cannot receive your apology. That's one of the dynamics that often occurs in that moment.

00:41:47 Speaker_00
And so you ask sometimes, you know, you sit and you see, you see somebody who pretends to say, I'm sorry. You see somebody who just says, come on, what's the big deal? And then you see people who really are sincere.

00:41:59 Speaker_00
And then you watch what's happening to the other person. Are they relieved? Are they suspicious? Are they feeling like they would dissolve a certain element of their identity if they don't hold on to this?

00:42:16 Speaker_00
Is it as if they're saying, you know, you can get away with it? You know, it's not as bad because accepting the apology is to minimize the issue. And then you switch to burn on the other side. You know, in Judaism, you apologize three times.

00:42:33 Speaker_00
And if after the third time, and you've done a real reckoning apology, if after three times the other person does not accept it, the burden passes over to the other person.

00:42:45 Speaker_02
Interesting.

00:42:46 Speaker_00
This is my money this, and I think it's an incredibly interesting idea that at some point, the person has made the amends when they have, and when you cannot receive it, then now the burden passes on you.

00:43:01 Speaker_02
I'm just going to hover there for a second because I agree that apology is such an interesting and important concept.

00:43:09 Speaker_02
And you mentioned that accepting somebody's apology at an emotional level, not just saying, thank you, I accept your apology, but really internalizing that and allowing space for it to shift your experience of the thing that hurt.

00:43:25 Speaker_00
And by the way, accepting the apology doesn't yet mean that you forgive. Forgive is your freedom. You decide at what point you do it, and you may do it alone. It's not always a dyadic experience.

00:43:37 Speaker_00
Apology is a dyadic experience, but forgiveness is freedom.

00:43:42 Speaker_02
appreciate that distinction now that you've given it. I mean, I appreciate you giving that distinction. I did not make that distinction before.

00:43:48 Speaker_00
I love this topic because it's so, it's really so many things happen underneath. You know, there's issues of shame around apology. What's the difference between shame and responsibility?

00:44:00 Speaker_00
What is the capacity of a person to have real distress rather than empathic distress? real empathy rather than empathic distress. So it's a portal into a lot of things, you know. There are people who can never apologize.

00:44:16 Speaker_02
Is that right?

00:44:17 Speaker_00
Oh, yeah.

00:44:18 Speaker_02
Because to do so would what for them?

00:44:21 Speaker_00
Shame. I think a lot of that piece is around shame. It's not, because self-esteem, as my friend Terry Reill says, is your ability to see yourself as a flawed individual and still hold yourself in high regard.

00:44:37 Speaker_00
When you admit your flaw, it means there's something wrong with you. Then it's very hard to say, I'm sorry. This is the essence. How do you see yourself as imperfect, flawed, but you still respect yourself and you hold yourself in high regard.

00:44:55 Speaker_00
If you can do those two things, you can apologize very easily.

00:45:00 Speaker_02
I find that so much of being an adult, again, in quotes.

00:45:05 Speaker_01
Yes, yes, you would hope.

00:45:07 Speaker_02
Involves the disambiguating two things. One is we're taught to really trust our own experience to some extent, to stand our ground when we know A is true and B is false. But then also part of being an adult is admitting when we're wrong.

00:45:31 Speaker_02
And there's no rule book, no real time rule book for that, especially given that people have different versions of the same thing often. But it seems to me that

00:45:45 Speaker_02
one of the great challenges in not just in romantic relationship, but in relationships of all kinds is to really be able to slow down and enter the state of mind and body that allows us to do the kind of processing you're talking about.

00:45:58 Speaker_02
So at a very practical level, I'm curious, let's say a couple comes into your office and they're dealing with either a single hurt or a litany of hurts or something like that.

00:46:10 Speaker_02
Do you believe it's important for them to shift out of their emotional state to be able to process differently? Do you have them at the beginning of a session, do you have them do a couple deep breaths together?

00:46:21 Speaker_02
Do you have them recall a time when they felt particularly bonded? Is there an effort to shift their somatic state in order to bring their mind to a place of more curiosity or is going straight to the issue often the best way in?

00:46:34 Speaker_00
First of all, I like that we, that it's interesting we're going from apology to conflict. It makes total sense. I spent the last year creating a whole course on conflict and how do you turn conflict into connection? What is good conflict?

00:46:49 Speaker_00
You know, I think conflict is inherent to relationships. And then what are problematic ways to deal with conflict? Yes, on some level, There is very little you can hear if you are in a state of hyperarousal, if you are in a position of self-protection.

00:47:06 Speaker_00
I mean, all these stressful places, all these cortisol levels going up, et cetera, are not going to help you. But at the same time, you can't, in the moment that someone is completely agitated, talk with them about trusting.

00:47:24 Speaker_00
It's just like the physiology is not corresponding. So it's a real dance. I don't do the breath often, sometimes. I actually don't do anything all the time. I am working like a tailor. I do fittings.

00:47:41 Speaker_00
I mean, I think the richness of therapies is in its art on some level. But sometimes I just say, I think you need to stand up and move and just listen to what your partner has to say, but don't sit. Sometimes I say, don't look at each other.

00:48:00 Speaker_00
Sometimes I say, turn to each other. Some things are better done face-to-face and some things are better done side-by-side, you know, parallel play, fishing. There's a lot of things like, you know, driving.

00:48:13 Speaker_00
Every parent who's ever had a kid in the back knows this. You have both. You have moments when you need to be able to look into each other, and then you have moments where you just need to do something about the side by side.

00:48:27 Speaker_00
Then, it's also the limits of words. When is it important to talk? And when, you know, we're talking because we are homo sapiens, but in fact, if we were animals, we would be just making noises. We're not really making sense. So, stop talking.

00:48:47 Speaker_00
What I try very hard to do is to not let people show the worst side of themselves. They can do that at home. They don't need to come and shame themselves in my office.

00:49:00 Speaker_00
And I do know that certain situations will draw the worst out of people, but that doesn't mean that that's who they are. And that's one of the big things as a therapist is to not fall for that.

00:49:11 Speaker_00
Because if you met these people alone, they would be charming. And if you had met them maybe two years before, they would have been charming too.

00:49:19 Speaker_00
So something's happening between them that is making them act and react from places of deep hurt and fear and attack and all of that and aggression. And sometimes I see them alone.

00:49:36 Speaker_00
I don't think that you are capable of having this conversation at this moment because you're not willing to take any responsibility when you're sitting next to your partner. You're in a blame fest. We're not going to do that.

00:49:46 Speaker_00
So I'm going to talk with you alone. And then I'm going to prepare you to come to your partner with at least one or two things that you can own. What am I doing to contribute to this mess? Or what am I doing to make things better?

00:50:01 Speaker_00
I like to start the session by asking, what did you, and if I'm dealing with a kind of chronic conflict, low intensity warfare, or bigger, it depends what kind, there's different kinds of, but I like to ask, what have you done this week to make things better?

00:50:17 Speaker_02
What a great question.

00:50:19 Speaker_00
What have you done to make your partner feel that they matter? rather than what happened this week. I kind of have a sense. Please do not tell me the last unraveling. I got it. It goes from zero to 60 in no time.

00:50:35 Speaker_00
And none of this, I don't need the details of the story. I need to know what you're doing to each other, what feelings you're instigating in each other. I don't need the plot. The plot is, you know, There's only three dances.

00:50:52 Speaker_00
This fight, you know, aiming at each other, withdrawing from each other, or one person withdrawing and one person pursuing. These are three types of major choreographies of conflict.

00:51:07 Speaker_00
Or quiet silence, or one goes after the other who is closing the doors and they follow them through the house. which is following them to a lot of other things. And from that place on, you decide, okay, who is doing what to whom?

00:51:22 Speaker_00
Who is feeling what at the hands of whom? How, what is influencing this? You know, this person is once again feeling that when this one didn't talk to them, they were being given the silent treatment that they used to feel when they grow up.

00:51:39 Speaker_00
And this feeling of neglect and dismissal is just crushing them because they suddenly feel like they've been rejected completely.

00:51:49 Speaker_00
And this one is feeling like they're once again being attacked and invaded by this other person who keeps following them and wants to talk when they have not again.

00:51:58 Speaker_00
and is remembering when they were living in the place where they grew up, where they couldn't wait to get out because they were feeling completely flooded and overwhelmed by the shit show of their house.

00:52:09 Speaker_00
And these two stories are now dictating what's happening between these two people. These two people are no longer adults in the room.

00:52:17 Speaker_00
Their younger selves have completely taken over, their amygdala is completely flooded, and then it matters, it depends. Sometimes,

00:52:27 Speaker_00
Because I'm a little bit narrative driven, I may make the mistake to actually go to the story when in fact these two people really put, sometimes I sit for 10 minutes quiet.

00:52:38 Speaker_00
I say, we're gonna just wait for our systems to regulate, because even I get agitated. It's not like I don't absorb it. I say, I think we need some sitting here. Sometimes I put music. I love music, so I put music.

00:52:57 Speaker_00
I just say, I don't think a single word is going to help here. And sometimes I say, I think we should stop the session. I mean, it depends. If you think there's something that can be gained, if you start to feel like it's just going to make it worse.

00:53:12 Speaker_00
And sometimes, in the middle of the session, they say, when's the last time you made him a cup of tea? And the fact that you can still make a cup of tea to someone who you would like to strangle, it's really special.

00:53:29 Speaker_00
It's amazing how we can inhabit two completely contradictory feelings at the same time. I can't stand you, get the hell out of here, and I can't imagine my life without you. Those things coexist, love and hate, side by side.

00:53:48 Speaker_02
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00:53:57 Speaker_02
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00:55:16 Speaker_02
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00:55:29 Speaker_02
Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function. There's something that I really want to revisit that you said. You said it incredibly clearly. but I have never heard this described.

00:55:44 Speaker_02
And I think it's so, so very important for people to hear and internalize, including me, that I'm going to ask us to visit it again, but not because you weren't clear, but just because I think it- No, I'm curious, what is it?

00:55:57 Speaker_02
As a biologist, when we teach biology, the good biologists, good teachers, we emphasize names only because people need to know them. This is called that, this is called that, but it's all about verbs. It's all about processes and dynamics.

00:56:12 Speaker_02
And what you just described as the three verb states of conflict, I think I've never heard articulated that way. So you described, if I understand correctly- Pursuer, pursuer. Right, either one person pursuing another.

00:56:29 Speaker_00
No, pursuer, pursuer is where people go at each other.

00:56:32 Speaker_02
Oh, pursuer, pursuer is loggerheads, okay.

00:56:33 Speaker_00
And those are escalations.

00:56:35 Speaker_02
Okay, two arrows pointing at one another.

00:56:37 Speaker_00
Two arrows, yes.

00:56:38 Speaker_02
And not in a good way.

00:56:39 Speaker_00
No, not in conflict, it's usually not a good way. And there's a whole interpretation of an attachment style that underlies why do people in the situation of threat go on the attack.

00:56:53 Speaker_00
You have two people fighting, you have two people flighting, fleeing, and you have one person who flees and one person who fights. That's another language for pursuer, pursuer, distancer, distancer, pursuer, distancer.

00:57:10 Speaker_02
And in each of those cases, it seems that the first step to getting to a more functional dynamic to try and sort this out, whatever the conflict is, is to somehow change one's mindset from talking about the story of what led there

00:57:31 Speaker_02
or stories of what led there to really starting to parse the feeling states of ourselves and hopefully empathy for the feeling state of the other.

00:57:42 Speaker_00
It's feeling states and physiological states. It's two different things. The physiology is more primitive, more basic. It's physiology, senses, feelings, thoughts.

00:57:56 Speaker_00
is the way I would, you know, but because we, I say it, you know, because we are homo sapiens and we think, we really, this thing about coherence and thinking that what we say has meaning is extremely powerful to the point sometimes of delusional.

00:58:13 Speaker_00
You know, because I have to believe this because there would be too much dissonance if what I feel and what I think and what therefore happened didn't all have a coherence to themselves.

00:58:26 Speaker_00
And, you know, sometimes when you see it in the room, you kind of say, they never said that.

00:58:34 Speaker_02
It's almost like a psychosis of sorts.

00:58:36 Speaker_00
I'm not calling either person psychotic. It's psychotic because it's a disconnection from reality. I would say it's such an inhabiting of an internal reality that it is disconnected from the possibility. And this is where curiosity comes in.

00:58:54 Speaker_00
It's the possibility that what you are experiencing is completely real in its experience. But that doesn't mean it is, factual or it is real in reality, you know, and to when I'm hurt and when I am thinking that you want to harm me,

00:59:18 Speaker_00
it's very difficult for me in that moment to be willing to be empathic towards you. And there are relationships where this is the truth. I want to constantly come back to that because not everything is imagined.

00:59:33 Speaker_01
Sure.

00:59:34 Speaker_00
You know, but there are many other relationships where why would, why, you know, why would he want Maybe he stepped away because he just thought that whatever was gonna come out of his mouth, he would regret.

00:59:54 Speaker_00
It's not because he doesn't care about you. In factually, it's the opposite. And he knows what he can sometimes say, he, they, she, it doesn't matter. But not because he wanted to just throw you to the wolves.

01:00:09 Speaker_02
it's almost like we lose our theory of mind, our ability to place ourselves in the mind of another in a healthy way when we're in these stress states. I'm curious.

01:00:20 Speaker_00
It's funny you call it stress states because stress to me is so physiological that it doesn't include the relational component. Sure.

01:00:29 Speaker_00
I mean, there needs to be a word for stress that involves the emotional reality and that emotional reality that now may be somewhat imagined and this is why it's complicated, was once true. What now is an internal truth once was what really happened.

01:00:49 Speaker_00
And that's why we imagine, and this is how we interpret the dynamic. It's very important to add that. So the past was real. There was someone in the past who actually did this to me.

01:01:03 Speaker_00
But when you do this, I think of them, I bring those two things together. I collapse the past and the present. And that's why I'm convinced this is what you're doing to me too.

01:01:15 Speaker_00
And so how do you take somebody out of their physical and mental and emotional past to be grounding themselves into the present so that they can consider that this person that is next to them is not doing to them what once was done to them?

01:01:32 Speaker_02
Right, and my mind immediately goes to what you just described as a shift from focusing mainly on the past and how it's making us feel in the present to how we're feeling in the present, acknowledging and understanding something did happen, that was real, as you said, and yet with this curious eye toward the future of what could unfold.

01:01:54 Speaker_00
That's probably the hardest nugget of couples therapy. I mean, I do individual work too, but if we talk relational therapy, this is one of those nuggets because people are not aware that they are in their past.

01:02:11 Speaker_00
They are convinced that this is in the present. It's a collapse of time zones. and realities. It's what makes us so rich.

01:02:20 Speaker_00
It's what makes us so able to be creative and artful, but it's what sometimes makes it very challenging for us, especially in romantic relationships. Because you asked At first you begin with romantic relationships.

01:02:34 Speaker_00
A lot of what we say here is true for friendships and work relationships, but there is only two relationships that mirror each other. It's the one we had with our first caretakers, mostly our parents, and the ones we have with our romantic partners.

01:02:49 Speaker_00
People can sit in the office and tell you, I don't have this with anybody else. And it's true. Often. You believe him.

01:02:57 Speaker_00
Because nobody gets as close to you and nobody elicits in you the kinds of early yearnings and emotional needs than a romantic partner. And that is very interesting.

01:03:12 Speaker_02
I don't know if it's a bug or a feature as the engineers say, but it is remarkable to me that the very same neural machinery that forms the underpinning of infant primary caretaker relationship is repurposed for romantic relationship.

01:03:33 Speaker_02
I mean, I marvel at that, right? I mean, the brain doesn't have like, oh, here's your developmental wiring circuits. And then guess what?

01:03:39 Speaker_02
You get to hit adolescence and you go through puberty and then you get this new circuit for forming a romantic attachment. The brain imaging shows us that it's repurposed.

01:03:48 Speaker_02
So it's like if you got a two plus two equals four algorithm in that circuit, let's call that securely attached. Although I realized that language is not sufficient, but for just purposes of discussion. Okay, well then great.

01:04:00 Speaker_02
Then you get healthy romantic attachments as adults or you as an adult, and perhaps you can navigate in and out of things that are unhealthy more quickly.

01:04:08 Speaker_02
However, if you got a two plus two equals five algorithm wired into that circuit, well, then you're forever looking for something that won't, that is essentially dysfunctional. That's the simplest version of this.

01:04:20 Speaker_00
Tell me more about this repurposing. It's really interesting.

01:04:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, so beautiful work by Alan Shore and others, whose work I know you're familiar with, has shown that, you know, you image the brain of infant and typically it's mother, but they've done other caretakers as well.

01:04:34 Speaker_02
And you see this incredible mirroring of, Sure, right brain, left brain activity, more dopaminergic or serotonergic activity. Basically the takeaway is that you see a lot of coherence.

01:04:44 Speaker_02
What's going on in the mother is going on in the child and vice versa. And there's a lot of reciprocity.

01:04:51 Speaker_02
But sometimes in unhealthy caretaker infant relationships, the so-called anxious, attached, dissociative, or avoidant type scenarios, the ABCD baby type thing, People can look that up. If they like, we can provide a link.

01:05:06 Speaker_02
You see a mismatch in the neurochemistry and the activation of these brain areas. In other words, the brain circuitry for attachment is set up so that anxious states are evoked when calm states should have been.

01:05:20 Speaker_01
Have there been better parenting?

01:05:21 Speaker_02
Okay, all right. But then you take those, you essentially run the same sorts of studies on romantically attached young adults or older adults. And what you see is it's the same sets of neurons, the same circuits. I mean, this is remarkable.

01:05:38 Speaker_02
Nowhere else, to my awareness, nowhere else in the nervous system do we repurpose neural circuitry

01:05:46 Speaker_02
from early in life, you know, it's as if there's a neural circuit for sensing thirst and drinking early in life, and then later it's used for sensing how to navigate a city.

01:05:55 Speaker_02
Okay, now those are two very disparate things, but this is like outrageous, right? And so I say it's either a feature or a bug, we don't know, but it is the way it is, right? I would say I wasn't consulted at the design phase.

01:06:08 Speaker_00
What do you think was the evolutionary logic of that?

01:06:11 Speaker_02
I like to think in a kind of romantic way that, some of our most important work in our lifetime is to try and resolve these developmental miswirings that are the consequence of faulty caretaker infant relationship. And you can't blame the infant.

01:06:31 Speaker_02
Now, does that mean we blame our parents to the point of ostracizing them? Well, one would hope not. Maybe in some cases that's necessary, but I think

01:06:39 Speaker_02
I like to think that what we've observed over the last 10, 20, 30 years in no small part, seriously, thanks to your work, reflects an evolution of how we are thinking about attachment, that we are actually getting better at understanding the self.

01:06:55 Speaker_02
And there's something about the human brain that wants to understand itself. So I like to think that in a hundred years,

01:07:03 Speaker_02
not only will there be more models of relationship as functional, healthy relationships, but there will also be a deeper understanding of what this whole thing of love and attachment really is. And the parallel I use is one of biology.

01:07:16 Speaker_02
We understand so much more about brain function now than we did just 10 years ago. addiction, for instance, you know, not just a condition of failure of willpower, but this understanding about dopamine, you know, and other molecules.

01:07:31 Speaker_02
I think we now look at a fentanyl addict or a heroin addict very differently. They're caught in a neurochemical algorithm that is not serving them well.

01:07:41 Speaker_02
It doesn't remove their responsibility, but there comes a point where they can't recover themselves and they need certain supports and those supports are starting to emerge now.

01:07:50 Speaker_02
So my hope is that this is built into our evolution as some sort of vector toward progress.

01:08:03 Speaker_00
You know, it's interesting because some models of couples work of couples therapy will say you have recreated with each other patterns of your early life in order to be able to transcend them.

01:08:22 Speaker_02
Right. The repetition compulsion. You get the same thing over and over again. Lord knows I've had that and some wonderful partners. And by the way, as I say that, I'm also taking 50% of the responsibility, or 100% of the responsibility for the choice.

01:08:38 Speaker_02
As they say, you didn't have six hard relationships, you had one hard relationship six times, right? And I think Paul Conti says it that way.

01:08:46 Speaker_02
But that, yes, that the repetition compulsion is a unconscious attempt to resolve the core conflict that arose during early attachment. Do you subscribe to that view?

01:08:58 Speaker_00
I think it's a very useful idea. I was thinking at one point, it's like sometimes when I listen to you and there is an exactness in the things that you describe often rooted in science and research, et cetera.

01:09:14 Speaker_00
Couples therapy or psychotherapy, relationship thinking, you don't have an exact answer. First of all, you don't have an exact answer because modern relationships are more complex than ever.

01:09:32 Speaker_00
And I don't think any relationship expert at this point can have answers. You have invitations, you have ways of thinking that are useful. And here is the question. Is it true, for me, is answered by, do the people, does it resonate for them?

01:09:50 Speaker_00
If they buy it, then it's true. It's a framework. I can analyze this tableau in multiple ways. If this is the one that resonates for you, this is what we're going to go with. And that's what makes it true. This is a very interesting thing.

01:10:08 Speaker_00
There's multiple, I mean, to me, it's interesting because there's a whole movement within the world of psychotherapy and psychology that wants to actually become much more normatized with protocols and the same thing for everyone.

01:10:22 Speaker_00
I think that much of what, at least relationship therapy, which is really the world that I practice in, is existential and it's meaning making. And there's a lot of ways to do that. So if this interpretation works for you, be my guest.

01:10:40 Speaker_00
But that's not because it is more true than another. It's the one that was useful for you. And that makes you much more humble.

01:10:49 Speaker_02
I love that answer.

01:10:51 Speaker_00
It's a little bit like when you raise kids, you know? You think that, I used to think that all these things I had done with my first one, you know, is because I had such good ideas.

01:11:01 Speaker_00
Then I had a second one and none of these things worked with them because it was a different person. You know, so I realized that the first one, it worked because there was a fit between my method and the person.

01:11:12 Speaker_00
And this is the important thing in therapy is that it's an issue of that fit is what you're looking for.

01:11:18 Speaker_02
We hear a lot these days about the different attachment styles or languages of love, you know, the love languages, you know, people will say, I, you know, I, emphasize, you know, gifts feel very rewarding or acts of, what is it?

01:11:35 Speaker_02
Words of affirmation, you know, unstructured time or et cetera, et cetera. Or people will, I think nowadays, if they look into it a little bit, they'll realize that they are either, you know, more avoidant or more anxious. These things can shift.

01:11:49 Speaker_02
I mean, I think it's wonderful that people are thinking about these things in the same way that I think it's wonderful that people understand that there's a molecule called dopamine They can do certain things, serotonin, certain things.

01:11:58 Speaker_02
But I'm curious as to whether or not you feel that the naming of things and the assignment of oneself to a category, can sometimes be limiting in terms of one's ability to really embrace this curiosity.

01:12:13 Speaker_02
And you also use the word invitation and you are describing couples therapy and healthy relationship as a bit more of an art form than a reductionist protocol oriented science, which I love.

01:12:26 Speaker_02
Because to me, despite being a scientist, some of the great mystery of life and certainly of romantic relationship is when you find yourself in,

01:12:35 Speaker_02
happy places that you didn't anticipate finding yourself or in a place of forgiveness and close friendship, when at one point you can recall being, like you said, like you just, this person is like, embodies the worst things in your mind.

01:12:50 Speaker_02
So I think, I wonder if the processes that you found useful in your clinical work, is it possible to formalize those in a way that people can start to adopt them? In other words,

01:13:07 Speaker_02
do you think that we can learn to navigate relationship in more healthy ways, not just by saying, I'm anxiously attached or avoidant or securely attached, I'm looking for someone that has that, or my love language is this, and they love to do that.

01:13:20 Speaker_02
And so therefore we're a perfect lock and key. I think people are starting to think about relationship in a more nuanced and sophisticated way. And yet also what I'm hearing is, It's a lot more dynamic than that.

01:13:31 Speaker_02
And that some of those categorizations that we assign ourselves can really perhaps be limiting to what could be.

01:13:39 Speaker_00
That's a great question, but I have a moment now as if I'm in a session with you where I have like five things that are arriving here in front of my brain and I'm thinking, which one am I gonna enter?

01:13:53 Speaker_00
I'm gonna actually start with just the actual question, but then I probably is an opportunity to say a little bit about how I approach this thing. I think some naming is, very useful. It frames it. It gives it a foundation, something to hold on to.

01:14:16 Speaker_00
language matters if we would not be having a conversation without having a shared language at this moment. But within that, you and I are using the same words and may have very different meanings attached to it.

01:14:28 Speaker_00
So that's the richness of the process is what do you mean when you say invitation, curiosity, you know, conflict, et cetera. For example, when I do the work on conflict, I did provide language.

01:14:43 Speaker_00
For example, one of the things that happens in conflict is we have confirmation bias.

01:14:49 Speaker_00
That's a cognitive framework that is often present in situations of emotional conflict, of conflict which involves always something, an emotional dimension could be political too.

01:15:01 Speaker_00
Confirmation bias means that I am looking for evidence that reinforces my beliefs, and I disregard any evidence that contradicts it. Now this happens between two people, this happens between two parties. That's a very important naming, you know.

01:15:18 Speaker_00
It's interesting. I've noticed this, this, this, this, but all you mentioned is that. Okay, cognitive bias. Another cognitive bias that is very common is fundamental attribution error. We have this idea that I am complex and you are more simple.

01:15:36 Speaker_00
If I'm in a bad mood, it's because there was traffic. There's circumstances, there's context. If you're in a bad mood, it's because you're a cantankerous person. That's just your personality.

01:15:47 Speaker_00
We'll categorize and totalize the behavior of others, and we'll have lots of nuance and poetry for our own. That's a concept. That concept is very useful. It's neutral, it doesn't blame anybody, and it says, we all do this. I like that kind of naming.

01:16:04 Speaker_00
It's very different from the kind of naming that pathologizes people, the kind of naming that unlocks you into one identity. You know, you may have addiction, and addiction may be a really important

01:16:16 Speaker_00
It may have destroyed your life, but to just say you're an addict. I've seen, so I worked in an addiction center for two years and, you know, people had a lot of, there were a lot of other things happening in these people's lives.

01:16:28 Speaker_00
And to just focus on this one thing, it reduces the person, but it also reduces your ability to do something with the person. narrows your lens. So there's always this question about how wide is the lens that you not get overwhelmed.

01:16:46 Speaker_00
So you want to make it smaller, but not that small that you're looking through a keyhole. A person is more complex than a keyhole. We don't just treat symptoms. We work with lives. That's the difference, for me anyway, in the work that we do.

01:17:04 Speaker_00
And then when you begin to think about lives, then you start to think about culture. What is happening in the world of relationships today? It's such an incredible thing that is going on.

01:17:15 Speaker_00
And if you don't put that in the broader context, I'm trained as a systemically oriented family therapist. And that means that you're looking at the interaction of different systems.

01:17:26 Speaker_00
And I think that a lot of what happens is a hyper individualization of these things. And the naming is useful when it expands your understanding.

01:17:36 Speaker_00
The naming is not useful when it locks you into a symptom, a reductionistic thing that gives false certainty to prophets. I can't agree more that naming,

01:17:55 Speaker_02
that expands one's understanding and maybe even lends itself to a hint of curiosity, stands a chance of having some rehabilitative quality to it. I feel that nowadays there's such an overuse of psychological terms.

01:18:13 Speaker_02
like narcissist gaslighting therapy terms. It's almost the way that if people were to talk about neurobiology as neurosurgeons, right? I'm not a neurosurgeon, but I have friends who are. And neurosurgery is like,

01:18:29 Speaker_02
something people train for many, many, many years for, just as being a clinical psychologist, people train for many years for and have a ton of in-office experience, real world experience.

01:18:41 Speaker_02
Nowadays, the naming and the attachment of names to particular top contour features of people out there, seems to be largely for the purpose of closing off possibility as opposed to increasing possibility.

01:18:54 Speaker_00
However- It's both, because on the one hand, more than many other forms of medicine or healthcare or care, psychotherapy, psychology, but certainly psychotherapy was always stigmatized. and still is in many parts of the world.

01:19:10 Speaker_00
It's for the crazies, it's for people, there must be something fundamentally wrong. I mean, it's something that nobody went around talking about the fact that they are in therapy.

01:19:19 Speaker_00
You went to see a therapist, you know, now you're putting it on your dating app, you know, it's a status symbol. So there is a de-stigmatizing that is very important, but there is also words that are weaponized.

01:19:31 Speaker_00
and they are not useful, and they are separating people. And we have enough separation at this moment in our societies in the West. We don't need more efforts to pull people apart.

01:19:46 Speaker_00
We need efforts to bring back the collective, the community, the shared experience, because we are too far apart. And that's why I think that some naming is useful and some naming is not always that useful.

01:20:04 Speaker_02
Well, amen to bringing people together more. Yeah, such an important mission right now.

01:20:15 Speaker_02
I'd like to explore the possibility of something that I've heard, but I don't know if it's true, that sex, which of course doesn't just include intercourse, but the things that lead into and out of sexual intercourse, but that sex is a microcosm for the relationship at large.

01:20:36 Speaker_02
Meaning that the dynamics that show up in intimate interactions are somehow reflective of a larger working out or dynamic in the relationship. To what extent do you think that's true? It's a concept that I've heard. It sounds interesting.

01:20:57 Speaker_02
And any discussion about sex tends to, you know, get people's ears pricked up because it's, depending on where you live in the world, it's either something that people talk about casually, openly, or with a lot of, you know,

01:21:10 Speaker_02
you know, electricity around it. But I always like to say, you know, as a biologist, we can all agree on one thing, which is that we're all here because sperm met egg, if not in human, in dish, and then eventually in human.

01:21:22 Speaker_02
So we're still at that point in human evolution. So what are your views about intimacy and sex as a reflection of, the relationship.

01:21:34 Speaker_02
And here, what I'm thinking of again are these, when you described conflict, you described these three different positioning of arrows, towards one another, separate, away from one another, one chasing the other.

01:21:47 Speaker_02
Is there a parallel for healthy relationship that we can offer up?

01:21:52 Speaker_00
Sexually?

01:21:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, before talking about this question of whether or not sex is a microcosm of the larger relationship, the health of the relationship.

01:22:02 Speaker_00
Let me start like this.

01:22:03 Speaker_00
I mean, I've studied sexuality for quite a few decades now in relationships, but I think maybe because of what you said around the world, love and desire are universal experiences, but the way that they are constructed are highly culturally contextual.

01:22:25 Speaker_00
And so the most archaic, rooted, traditional aspects of a culture or a society are lodged around its beliefs and attitudes and behaviors towards sexuality and relationships, especially the sexuality of women. American elections case in point.

01:22:44 Speaker_00
But this most radical progressive changes that take place in a society also occur around sexuality and relationships. Sexuality of women in particular. So sexuality is a window into a society.

01:22:58 Speaker_00
Sexuality is also a window into a relationship and into a person that invites deep listening. One of the big challenges is that modern sexuality has been, I mean, traditional sexuality was identified with procreation.

01:23:18 Speaker_00
Modern sexuality is identified with performance and outcome. Sex is something you do. To which I say, let's drop the performance and outcome for a moment, and let's think of it as an experience. So now you're gonna start to see the choreography I draw.

01:23:37 Speaker_00
When I think of sexuality as an experience and I say sex isn't just something that you do, sex is a place you go. So my question to you is, where do you go in sex? Inside yourself and with another or others?

01:23:53 Speaker_00
Do you go to seek deep spiritual union, a deep intimate connection, transcendence, do you go

01:24:01 Speaker_00
to a place for vulnerability, a place to surrender, a place to be taken care of, a place to be safely powerful, a place to be naughty, a place to have just plain fun, a place to abdicate your responsibilities of good citizenship because sexual desire is quite politically incorrect.

01:24:20 Speaker_00
Where do you go in sex? What parts of yourself do you try to connect with? What is it that you're expressing there? Sexuality is a coded language. for our deepest emotional needs. Our wounds, our fears, our aspirations, our longings, it's that.

01:24:40 Speaker_00
That is, you know, sex is never just sex, even when it's hit and run. And then it becomes really interesting.

01:24:48 Speaker_00
So one of the things that, one of the assumptions that existed very much at the heart of my field and that I challenged or questioned was that sexual problems are by definition the consequence of relationship problems.

01:25:04 Speaker_00
So you fix the relationship and the sex will follow. And I, together with many colleagues, have helped a lot of relationships get along better, fight less, laugh more, enjoy each other, and it changed nothing in the bedroom.

01:25:21 Speaker_00
Because, in fact, maybe sexuality is not a metaphor of the relationship. Maybe sexuality is a parallel narrative to the relationship. And that, in fact, when you change the sexuality in a couple, you change the whole relationship.

01:25:40 Speaker_00
but not necessarily in the other direction. So that opened up a whole, that was one of the foundational ideas for mating in captivity, my first book, because I have been trained to think like this.

01:25:53 Speaker_00
And then I began to think love and desire, they relate, but they also conflict. They're not one and the same and they don't need the same things. They don't thrive on the same elements.

01:26:04 Speaker_00
And modern relationships, romantic relationships have wanted to reconcile those two fundamental sets of human needs into one relationship. That is the grand experiment of modern love.

01:26:20 Speaker_02
And am I correct in interpreting what you just said as that love and desire are fundamentally separate, that they can exist in parallel, but that any goal of society, much less a couple, to try and unify those as one thing is, not going to succeed?

01:26:38 Speaker_00
No, no, no, not at all. It actually has been remarkably successful. The romantic ideal is tenacious. You know, many other philosophies and ideologies of the end of the 19th century have all gone. This one has survived many others.

01:26:53 Speaker_02
I'm relieved to hear you say that. Maybe I grew up on too many, I don't know how many romantic comedies I saw, but I grew up in a home where love sex and romance were discussed in very, almost ethereal terms.

01:27:08 Speaker_00
Yeah, no, no, no. I think that it's a, but it is an experiment. It's not something that we have tried throughout history, in human history. So I think that If you ask, it's an exercise I like to do sometimes.

01:27:24 Speaker_00
I say, divide your page with this line in the middle, up from top to bottom. And on the top left, you write, when I think of love, I think of. Then go to the other side, and when I think of sexuality, I think of.

01:27:41 Speaker_00
And then you go back and you say, and when I am loved, I feel. And when I am desired, I feel. When I'm wanted. And when I love, I feel. And when I want or I desire, I feel.

01:27:56 Speaker_00
And when I think about the love between me and my partner, if there is a couple, and when I think about the sexuality between me and my partner, and then you let people free associate about this.

01:28:08 Speaker_00
And there are words that you find back and forth, and then there are words who just never appear in the other column.

01:28:15 Speaker_02
Do you recommend that couples exchange these documents?

01:28:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, they do it at the same time. Then they read it out loud in front of each other. I do this in groups, you know, huge audiences as well. But what I'm asking people to see is when you look at what you responded in both categories,

01:28:31 Speaker_00
Create a line between those two. Is it a thick line, like what happens in love is completely separate for me than what happens in desire. I need a complete different set of things. I express myself differently, I interact differently.

01:28:47 Speaker_00
Or is it very much that when this exists, it completely ignites that. They are interrelated, interdependent, one feeds on each other, one reinforces the other. there is a degree of variety about that. For some people, love and desire are inseparable.

01:29:04 Speaker_00
And for some people, they are often irretrievably disconnected. And I think the model wants them to be really together. And for a lot of people, it's exactly what they aspire to. For other people, it's more challenging.

01:29:20 Speaker_02
Because somehow in them, there's a split between these two things.

01:29:23 Speaker_00
Because some people, experience love in such a way that it sometimes becomes challenging for them to make love to the person they love.

01:29:38 Speaker_00
What I mean by that is that love comes with a sense of responsibility, worry, care about the well-being of the other person. And some of us sometimes have learned to love in a way that comes with extra worry, extra responsibility, extra burden.

01:29:59 Speaker_00
We were the parents of our parents. We took care of our depressed parent. We took care of our alcoholic parent.

01:30:07 Speaker_00
We learn to love with a sense that is not free, that is not curious or playful, because curiosity cannot happen in a state of stress, as you so well said.

01:30:19 Speaker_00
When we experience love with that extra sense of burden, it is difficult to be with someone that you feel close to and at the same time go inside yourself and completely chill and relax in pleasure land.

01:30:34 Speaker_00
That's one of the scenarios, there's many others, but this is one of the more common ones, Michael Bader's work, that makes it difficult for some people to experience love and desire at the same time. The more they love,

01:30:50 Speaker_00
the more challenging the desire becomes for them. Because desire is to own the wanting. You can't make someone want. You can make someone have sex, but you can never make them want. Want is your sovereignty, your autonomy, your freedom.

01:31:05 Speaker_00
And for some people, that wanting cannot exist when they are with someone that they feel so responsible and worried and anxious about. And that's the attachment piece that you're talking about.

01:31:19 Speaker_00
So this is how the attachment style often manifests in the way that you then organize your sexual self.

01:31:29 Speaker_02
What percentage of infidelity do you think reflects somebody's inability to integrate this love component from desire component such that they find that they only experience desire or strong desire outside their committed relationship.

01:31:55 Speaker_00
Look, I wrote an entire book about infidelity as in what happens when desire goes looking elsewhere. I think that some people go outside as a response to a lot of discontents in the relationship, loneliness being the first one.

01:32:16 Speaker_00
neglect, indifference, conflict, rejection, sexual rejection in particular. But some people go outside and it has very little to do with the relationship.

01:32:34 Speaker_00
It sometimes has to do with how they organize themselves in the relationship to the degree that in order to feel a certain freedom or ability to think about themselves, they need to be outside.

01:32:49 Speaker_00
And I used to say I have seen a lot of infidelity in happy relationships. It's not always a symptom of a flawed relationship by no means.

01:32:59 Speaker_00
And that in those situations, people tell me, it's not that I wanted to find another person, it's that I wanted to find another self or to reconnect with lost parts of myself.

01:33:12 Speaker_00
And I don't say this to promote or to condone or anything, but I just listened across the globe. One word, it's not that I wanted to find another partner, it's that I wanted to find something else inside of me.

01:33:26 Speaker_00
And I don't know how to do that in the relationship that I'm in. And that's not because of the person I'm with, that's because of what I do to myself in the context of intimate connection.

01:33:38 Speaker_00
And the word that you hear all over the globe, when you interview people who are in affairs, is that they feel alive. It's kind of the erotic as an antidote to deadness. They feel that aliveness. And that doesn't necessarily involve sex.

01:34:01 Speaker_00
It's about something. Aliveness is the erotic, not the sexual. And the erotic is the quality of aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, hopefulness, curiosity, imagination, playfulness. It's those elements that often people lose

01:34:21 Speaker_00
for a host of reasons, life, work, children, dying parents, illness, economic hardship, you name it. And there's a sense that they need to go elsewhere to find that.

01:34:41 Speaker_00
Some people would say bullshit justification and some people understand that at the heart of affairs, there is betrayal and long and duplicity and lying and all of that, but there is also longing and loss. on an existential level.

01:34:59 Speaker_00
That's a very different lens into this. So the people for whom that reconciliation that you talk about is more challenging are often people who are often more likely to compartmentalize.

01:35:17 Speaker_02
What you just said brings me back to this idea that we were exploring at the very beginning of this conversation, that it seems that so much of navigating relationship in healthy versus unhealthy ways depends on this internal dynamic within ourselves of an ability to be in close, intimate relationship with another.

01:35:37 Speaker_02
and yet hold on to enough of our own identity and evolve that identity within the relationship to the other.

01:35:45 Speaker_00
That is the definition of intimacy or a definition of intimacy. And that is probably the number one task of every relationship or romantic relationships is How do I get close to you without losing me? And how do I hold on to me without losing you?

01:36:06 Speaker_00
Now, you know, I said to you in the beginning that we grow up and we have both needs, togetherness and separateness.

01:36:14 Speaker_00
And then we come out of our childhoods, and some of us need more space, freedom, separateness, and some of us need more protection, connection, togetherness. Of course, we tend to meet somebody whose proclivities match our vulnerabilities.

01:36:29 Speaker_00
And so you find that in many relationships, you have one person who is more afraid of losing the other, and one person who is more afraid of losing themselves.

01:36:40 Speaker_00
one person more afraid with the fear of abandonment, and one person more afraid with the fear of suffocation.

01:36:47 Speaker_02
This is a recurring dynamic that you see. And does it swap back and forth across couples, male, female?

01:36:55 Speaker_02
I'm assuming in that example, heterosexual relationship, but even homosexual relationships, you'll see it switch back and forth, or it tends to be a pretty stable feature, meaning one person in the couple tends to be afraid of abandonment by the other, the other person more deeply afraid of abandonment of themselves.

01:37:15 Speaker_00
Right, it doesn't switch back and forth. It switches by relationship, but not within one relationship. You may have been in different roles with different partners.

01:37:26 Speaker_02
Indeed, I have. So interesting. Again, not because you weren't clear, you were incredibly clear and concise about this, but I think this is such an important concept.

01:37:39 Speaker_02
maybe you'd repeat it for us again, just so that people can really drive it into their consciousness and maybe ask themselves the question, are they more afraid of abandonment by the other or abandonment of themselves?

01:37:52 Speaker_00
You know, one of the ways that you sometimes can see this is that I mean, in the tour this week, one woman stood up and basically said, I recently divorced. I would like to be able to enter another relationship again.

01:38:06 Speaker_00
And I said, is the issue an issue of trust? Or is the issue, was there betrayal? She says, how do I allow somebody to enter into my life without losing myself?

01:38:19 Speaker_00
So it's in the language, you know, it's one person, but this could, and really, I think it's very important for me, many of these things are not gender specific, nor orientation particular, this is human.

01:38:34 Speaker_00
But then I answered a little bit with some of this and other things. And so then the next question is, how often do you not say what you really think? because you want to please, or you want to harmonize, or you want to avoid conflict.

01:38:53 Speaker_00
How often did you then resent the partner who actually stood for their ground? Because if you're afraid to lose yourself, you're often more the one who stands for your ground. You don't give in.

01:39:02 Speaker_00
And if it's rigid, you don't give in at all because you think that every time, even the language, agreeing is giving in, and giving in is losing a part of myself. I mean, it's built in. It's so, you know, it starts here and it continues all the way.

01:39:20 Speaker_00
It's like, so, it's a sequence of things. You break apart in small granular pieces. How does it play out for you when you lose yourself? What are the things you do not do that facilitate this dissolution.

01:39:41 Speaker_00
And to the other person who is, when you're afraid, sorry, of losing the other, and when you're afraid of losing yourself, like, where's your rigidity? Where is your kind of totalistic thinking? Where is this lack of flexibility?

01:40:00 Speaker_00
And that may manifest in, I don't travel to those places. You know, the sentence that indicates that we're dealing with this bigger issue is something sometimes very anodyne. You know, I don't go to those kind of restaurants.

01:40:15 Speaker_00
You know, why shall I go to those kind of places? And you kind of want to say, why is there such intensity about the restaurant? What are you fighting against and what are you fighting for? And why are you even fighting?

01:40:25 Speaker_00
We're talking about going out, supposedly meant to be fun. Now you start rewinding, you know, what is this statement connected to that we are going to have, you know, so now you have conflict meeting, identity meeting, connection to another person.

01:40:44 Speaker_00
This is when the, and it is sleuth work. It's fantastically engaging and exciting. It's like, I'm sure when you do scientific research, it's that sleuth work that you say, this thing doesn't fit at all. You know, why do you want me to wear blue shoes?

01:41:02 Speaker_00
Why do you make such a big deal out of the blue shoes? What are blue shoes for you? Don't start talking about the shoes, please. Talk about, you know, boundaries, but boundaries today is a concept that has become so ill-used almost. So it's talk about,

01:41:19 Speaker_00
how the preservation of the self now involves not wearing blue shoes. I mean, you get what I'm... I do.

01:41:27 Speaker_02
And my mind keeps flitting back to this parallel construction of these circuits were built in infancy and childhood and adolescence.

01:41:35 Speaker_02
And what kind of flashed to mind is when we are adolescents and teenagers, there's this fundamental question that we ask that rarely do we ask again later I mean, maybe people do, but the question is kind of, who am I?

01:41:50 Speaker_02
Teenagers try on a lot of different identities often and how they dress is one of the ways in which they self-identify.

01:41:56 Speaker_02
Their music, I mean, the music we listen to when we're teenagers and young adults is forever stamped into us as like some core part of our identity.

01:42:04 Speaker_02
It has an emotional weight that music that we arrive to later doesn't, unless it resonates with that early music or recapitulates that rather.

01:42:13 Speaker_02
So in my mind, I'm thinking, I wonder if these circuits that are struggling with holding onto self versus a kind of a playful, curious exploration of new things, novelty, which is so fundamental to relationship,

01:42:28 Speaker_02
And they're not, as we say as neurobiologists, are really antagonistic, that they're really in a push-pull.

01:42:34 Speaker_02
I mean, there's so many things that we're discussing today that really feel as if these are like circuits that can't be co-active easily, that we're in this internal grappling match. And what keeps coming to mind- But they also need each other.

01:42:51 Speaker_02
Right, they're like the, right, it's like the front axle and the back axle of a vehicle, like you can't exist without both.

01:42:59 Speaker_00
You just made me think of something, because you asked before that the thing about the sexuality, and I like the concept of erotic blueprints, which I work with a lot. And,

01:43:15 Speaker_00
And I try to really kind of distill it in this desire bundle course that I'm releasing. Because I thought, how can people ask themselves a set of questions?

01:43:27 Speaker_00
Like a lot of my work is about finding the good questions that will, you know, a good question is like a portal, right? And the line on top, which is the answer to your question is, tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love.

01:43:46 Speaker_00
not just how you love, but how you make love, meaning that your emotional history is inscribed in the physicality of sex. And it's all about what you asked me in the beginning, identity and change, holding onto oneself, connecting with the other.

01:44:02 Speaker_00
Sexuality is the place where this occurs at the most fundamental level. It's to be inside oneself and inside the other at the same time, their universe, not their orifices.

01:44:15 Speaker_00
That is what is the experience, that temporary oneness that then again opens up as two people. So people who struggle with that emotionally, how do I stay connected to me and then to you without these polarities, experience that in sex.

01:44:34 Speaker_00
And then you ask a set of questions. How did you learn to love and with whom? Were you protected by those people who took care of you or did you have to flee for protection? Did they take care of you or did you take care of them?

01:44:49 Speaker_00
Did they hold you, rock you, cuddle you, or did they harm you or violate you or shake you? Was it okay to laugh and to cry? Was it okay to experience pleasure? Was it safe? You know, a set of questions like that.

01:45:07 Speaker_00
And this is where people enter their erotic blueprint and get to see that their emotional challenges are directly, if you film them, if you watch them making love, you'll understand their emotional challenges. But then comes the next level.

01:45:27 Speaker_00
And if you then study their fantasy lives, then you'll understand the depth of their emotional needs, which are brought into their sexuality.

01:45:38 Speaker_02
Fascinating.

01:45:39 Speaker_00
Do you get it?

01:45:40 Speaker_02
I get it. I get it. And it makes me think that this earlier discussion we were having, you know, is sex a microcosm for the larger relationship?

01:45:51 Speaker_02
It sounds to me like the answer is yes, but especially the relationship to self and especially like there's a lot of information in one's desire template or blueprint about how one was cared for or not cared for.

01:46:08 Speaker_00
Your sexual preferences, your sexual fantasies are a translation of your deepest emotional needs. Not sexual needs, emotional needs. You know, my mother used to say, tell me about your friends and I'll tell you who you are.

01:46:26 Speaker_00
And then I said, you tell me about you sexually and I will know a heck of a lot about who you are. but you have to translate.

01:46:34 Speaker_00
The problem of sexuality in modern society is the literalness with which we approach it, and in our pornographic society, ever more so, to our detriment.

01:46:44 Speaker_02
Right, I couldn't agree more.

01:46:46 Speaker_02
And I think that there also seems to be this attempt to directly translate from, well, if somebody had issues with their mother, then they're going to have issues with women as an adult, or if they had issues with their father, they're going to have issues with men as an adult.

01:46:59 Speaker_00
That's confirmation based.

01:47:00 Speaker_02
Right, but in reality, it's the algorithm. It's the algorithm. It's that these algorithms that are laid down in our neural circuitry earlier, they don't care about male femaleness.

01:47:13 Speaker_02
I mean, it doesn't change whether or not people are heterosexual or homosexual. That's, it ain't to them, I believe. I think these are... frankly, biologically driven.

01:47:21 Speaker_02
But the idea is that our ways of being don't translate directly that way, that these are deeper processes.

01:47:28 Speaker_02
So if one had issues, for instance, with who's male and heterosexual, but they had issues with their father, they could have the same issues with women as an adult, right?

01:47:38 Speaker_02
That it could translate, that it's not always mapping male to male, female to female.

01:47:43 Speaker_00
I have a segment of my podcast, Where Should We Begin, that opens the tour, where basically they talk about how they met, and then they fight about everything all the time. And they think that they're fighting. This is the line of the show.

01:48:02 Speaker_00
They think they're fighting about the closet, the cat litter and the cat. What I think they're fighting about is that when she says, why didn't you close the closet?

01:48:11 Speaker_00
He instantly thinks of his dad, who was this military guy who told him, you know, and he's basically in a fight saying to her, you ain't telling me what to do. You ain't the boss of me.

01:48:24 Speaker_00
So she can never make a request for which he doesn't feel like she's controlling him. And he answers with this fight. And that throws her into the, she grew up all alone, you know, took care of her two siblings, mother was gone, et cetera, et cetera.

01:48:39 Speaker_00
And she hoped her whole life she would finally meet a partner and she wouldn't feel alone. And there would be somebody to support her. And every time he says to her, you ain't the boss of me, don't tell me what to do.

01:48:50 Speaker_00
She says, oh, I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. Here I am in the worst place that I always wanted to avoid. This is what they're fighting about. But they're talking about, why did you leave the cat closet open?

01:49:04 Speaker_00
This is the beautiful example. Beautiful example.

01:49:07 Speaker_02
It cuts across our preconceived notions that if somebody had a good relationship with their mother, they will have good relationship with women. If they good relationship with father, with men.

01:49:15 Speaker_00
It's a little bit more subtle and complicated nuance than that. I think the frameworks are useful, but there are frameworks. And they're models that help us to think and make sense of things.

01:49:29 Speaker_00
But it's a little bit like in science, the truth of today is the joke of tomorrow.

01:49:34 Speaker_02
I hadn't heard that, but that one's going up on X. Repair work is something that is so fundamental to healthy relationships.

01:49:49 Speaker_00
It connects to what we discussed about apology.

01:49:52 Speaker_02
What is your recommendation for how couples think about repair work? Let's assume that they're still together, and there's some, at least a hint of a hope to recover the relationship. Should repair work be framed as, you know,

01:50:12 Speaker_02
in a particular way to facilitate it? You know, how does one begin? I mean, I can sort of been, we've been doing a lot of threes today. So I can imagine mistakes, misunderstandings and betrayals, right?

01:50:26 Speaker_02
There are mistakes like I accidentally step on somebody's toes. There's a misunderstandings, two people thought the same thing and then they're outright betrayals. And my understanding from your work is that,

01:50:37 Speaker_02
You've seen many couples indeed helped many couples recover from all three of those categories to the point where they are quite satisfied with their relationship.

01:50:45 Speaker_00
There's a sequence to this and it's true in intimate relationships. It's true in friendships.

01:50:50 Speaker_00
I'm very interested in friendships these days and in friendship therapy and I do co-founders where, I mean, there's other diets that I'm very interested in beyond the romantic unit, but

01:51:02 Speaker_00
You said something before that I thought actually I may come back to when you said, you know, it's about acknowledging that you were wrong. Sometimes you may not have been wrong, but you were hurtful.

01:51:16 Speaker_00
And rather than get all, you know, I didn't do anything, I didn't do anything, it doesn't matter. what you did, even if you don't think it was anything terrible, seemed to have really upset your partner. Do you care about that?

01:51:31 Speaker_00
Or do you want to just kind of stand? So I think the first piece in repair work, and I think, by the way, that repair is not the end of the story. The revival is the end of the story. Much better word.

01:51:46 Speaker_00
the erotic recovery, erotic in my sense, in my definition of the word. So that's when I say it's not enough to survive. I'm a child of survivors. I wanted to see people who, how do they continue to live? not just how do they stay alive.

01:52:05 Speaker_00
And I think that's a fundamental difference in our lives and in our relationships. It's a huge piece of, it's really at the heart of my work and of my life, you know?

01:52:16 Speaker_00
So every trauma process, you know, of nations or of individuals demands the acknowledgement of what happened.

01:52:34 Speaker_00
And that acknowledgement involves remorse and guilt for the hurt and the harm that it caused, even if you don't feel guilty for the act itself and you think the act is justified.

01:52:50 Speaker_00
the consequences of the act on the other person is where the guilt and the remorse must take place. Without that, there is very little option for repair.

01:52:59 Speaker_00
If I don't feel that you even know what you did to me, you my dad, you my boss, you my political enemy, I mean, it's really at the root. So after you do the remorse and the guilt, the next part,

01:53:19 Speaker_00
is to be really careful that you don't sink into the self, now I'm going back to relationships, into the shame. I'm such a terrible person, how could I do something like this? So I feel so bad about myself that I still can't feel bad about you.

01:53:33 Speaker_00
Now that's narcissism. That's a different story. The point is not for you to still think that you're at the center. You were at the center when you heard, and now you're at the center of your own wound.

01:53:45 Speaker_00
It's really a process of reckoning with the other person. And it's slow and challenging for some, and it's immediate for others.

01:53:54 Speaker_00
And then I think the next piece in a relationship is not just to apologize and to show your remorse, but it's actually to show that you value the other person.

01:54:07 Speaker_00
Because hurting a person, and especially when it's betrayal and careless, is a devaluation of the other person. You didn't matter. That me mattered more than you. For whatever the reasons, it was still selfish and I devalued you.

01:54:23 Speaker_00
And to become the vigilante of a relationship is that you become the person who protects the relationship by showing that the other person really matters. And in detail, that sometimes means, you know, how are you today?

01:54:38 Speaker_00
Is there anything you want to talk about? Do you still think about it? You know, this is a big one to carry every day. Are you able to go to see this movie? Can we, you know, just without being so afraid that every time you ask,

01:54:53 Speaker_00
You're going to get blamed again or you're going to feel so bad about yourself. It's a little bit step out of yourself and just reach out and just check in half the time when you say, how are you? And do you want to talk? The person says, no, I don't.

01:55:08 Speaker_00
But I just wanted to know that you are prepared to, in case I needed to. Set the conditions. Make me feel that you value me and our relationship, which you have just trashed. And then the third thing is what I call the erotic recovery.

01:55:22 Speaker_00
It's the regeneration or the generation of new cells. And, you know, I need a new skin to come over the scab. That's the real, you know, repair is not yet healing. The healing is, I know I hurt myself somewhere. It's here.

01:55:43 Speaker_00
I can feel it when I touch it, but I don't feel it the whole time. It's not front and center every moment of my obsessive rumination. But when I touch it, it's tender, it's wounded. It's a place that I need to make sure not to hit again.

01:56:02 Speaker_00
Don't hurt me again. And don't do this to me again. I can't recover from that twice. It's very, it's that vulnerable. And then it says, let's go do new things.

01:56:12 Speaker_00
You know, erotic recovery is not about comfortable and familiar and the return to the status quo.

01:56:18 Speaker_00
Erotic recovery is about new, risky, curious, playful, unknown imagination outside of the comfort zone so that we can see ourselves anew as who we are and who we are together. And I think that's where the revival takes place.

01:56:36 Speaker_00
It's hopeful, it's possibility, it's adventure. It's got that energy.

01:56:42 Speaker_02
Beautiful, aspirational, and realistic too. This notion of, not notion, forgive me, this act of.

01:56:53 Speaker_02
truly getting outside of oneself to be present to the way the other person feels, irrespective of who was right or who was wrong, if it was a misunderstanding, betrayal, but especially in cases of betrayal.

01:57:03 Speaker_02
The exiting of, as you said, either a stance of not wanting to look at it for oneself or of self-flagellation, both are self-centered. So really getting into real genuine care for, if not caretaking, or the offer of care for the other person.

01:57:21 Speaker_00
I can't believe I hurt you that bad. You know, one of the big things is people are often shocked at the hurt. I told you I wouldn't care about what I thought, or I didn't think about it.

01:57:32 Speaker_00
I just didn't, because there is a dissociation that takes place when you take off. And so when people are faced with the raw, hurt, wound, suffering, collapse, fracture of the other person, they find it very hard to tolerate. And this has to happen.

01:57:53 Speaker_00
You have to be able to know the consequences of your action. If you want freedom in the existentialist, Sartreian terms involved, the ability to take responsibility for the consequence of your actions, this is it. I'll help you face that.

01:58:10 Speaker_00
That doesn't mean that you become the worst creature on the planet, but you have to face that.

01:58:15 Speaker_00
And that is something very hard for us because sometimes we meant it, sometimes we thought we deserve it, and sometimes we didn't think that that was going to be the case.

01:58:25 Speaker_00
And so it's sometimes easier to stand in front of someone else's anger than someone else's hurt.

01:58:33 Speaker_02
Yeah, absolutely. And what you're describing also perhaps at least partially explains why sometimes, not always, apologies are insufficient. Necessary but not sufficient because there are certain modes of apology that don't

01:58:49 Speaker_02
show us that the person who's apologizing is really outside themselves. They're in their own guilt, they're in their own shame, and therefore they're not really present to how we feel.

01:58:58 Speaker_00
There's a beautiful book by Harriet Lerner about apology that I often recommend in these situations, because she really, analyzes for you.

01:59:07 Speaker_00
If you ever do apology, you know, this concept of sincerity, of the apology that actually shows that I care about you and not just about restoring my dignity and my pride and all of that.

01:59:22 Speaker_00
You know, the maneuvers that are about self-preservation versus the maneuvers that are really about restorative justice.

01:59:30 Speaker_02
Who is ready for relationship? and for people who are not in relationship or who are, what sorts of questions should they be asking themselves? What sorts of things should we all be doing?

01:59:47 Speaker_00
You know, what's a question that I ask people often, almost in the first session, knowing yourself as well as you do, what do you think makes it hard to live with you?

01:59:59 Speaker_02
Great question. My answer is far too long to give here. Everyone will be relieved.

02:00:04 Speaker_00
That will give you some of the material about, you know, nobody's ready as in I'm prepared, I'm perfect, I'm fully baked. I say to every person, everyone has relationship issues they're going to have to address at some point in their life.

02:00:21 Speaker_00
The only question is with whom? Not if, just with whom? Who's the one that you're going to do the work with? We're all works in progress. We are notoriously imperfect, rather unpredictable.

02:00:36 Speaker_00
And many relationship problems are not problems that you solve, they're paradoxes that you have to learn to manage.

02:00:42 Speaker_02
Well, I want to make clear that, before what I say next, that if I had my way, we would continue this conversation for many hours, if not days. Perhaps there's an opportunity for that in the future.

02:00:56 Speaker_02
But I was told, and not surprisingly, that you're in tremendous demand. You're on a live tour now. I can't wait to see this. It's all sold out, so I'll have to wait like everyone else, but it sounds like an incredible experience.

02:01:09 Speaker_02
Indeed, I know some people, and I've spoken directly to them, who attended one of your lives recently, and they sound like a completely immersive and experience like no other. So I'm very excited about that.

02:01:23 Speaker_02
My only regret about your tour is that we have to halt this conversation in the next couple of minutes. And there are a couple of things I just want to reflect back to you that are all from a place of real deep appreciation.

02:01:37 Speaker_02
First of all, for bringing forward what you've brought today. You're one of these exceedingly rare people with whom when they speak, like gems just fall out of them. And I know I'm not alone in this sentiment.

02:01:52 Speaker_02
I mean, just in today's conversation, you've transformed the way that I think about relationship, self-identity, neurobiology, love, sex, so many key topics. And in a much larger way,

02:02:11 Speaker_02
as you pointed out, and I completely agree, the themes that you're talking about are not just fundamental for us to resolve as individuals.

02:02:19 Speaker_02
They are not just fundamental for us to resolve in couples or whatever relationship configuration people happen to be in.

02:02:24 Speaker_00
They're societal.

02:02:25 Speaker_02
They're societal. That we can look at anything, an election, two countries battling one another, political groups, whatever. At every level, this is what it means to be human, built up from the same fundamental circuit, same fundamental dynamics.

02:02:43 Speaker_02
And I really see you as, not just a pioneer, but the pioneer of this parting of the veil from what has, I think until this point in human history, been a lot of descriptions of things, of what's right, what's wrong, this and that.

02:02:58 Speaker_02
And some of that might be true. I don't know, I'm not qualified to know.

02:03:02 Speaker_02
but that you represent a real parting of the veil into the next evolution of what it means for humans to interact in more healthy ways and with curiosity and sense of invitation toward more love connection and peace.

02:03:16 Speaker_02
So, you know, there really aren't words to express how enthusiastic and appreciative I am of what you brought here today and what you're doing. And so I just want to say, you know, deep heartfelt thanks. And I know I speak for many, many people.

02:03:31 Speaker_00
Thank you so much.

02:03:33 Speaker_02
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about romantic relationships with Esther Perel. To find links to Esther's new course on intimacy, as well as links to her books, her podcast, and other resources, please see the show note captions.

02:03:46 Speaker_02
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02:06:01 Speaker_02
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