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

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Esther Perell Esther Perell is a psychotherapist and one of the world's foremost experts on romantic relationships she's also the author of best-selling books such as mating in captivity and the State of Affairs today's discussion focuses on what it means to be in a truly functional romantic relationship we discuss this from the standpoint of identity that is how people both try to hold on to and evolve their identities within a relationship and how a truly functional romantic relationship indeed evolves over time from a standpoint of curiosity 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 underly those conflicts 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 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 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 and how people can explore their own Notions their own models of Love and Desire in order to have more effective romantic Relationships 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 I'm also pleased to announce that Esther Perell 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 before you begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford 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 our first sponsor is David David makes a protein bar unlike any other it has 28 gram of protein only 150 calories and0 gram of sugar that that's right 28 gr of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein this is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar These Bars from David also taste incredible my favorite bar is the cake flavored one but then again I also like the chocolate flavored one and I like the berry flavored one basically I like all the flavors they're all incredibly delicious now for me personally I try to get most of my calories 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customized to your unique sleep needs right now Helix is giving up to 25% off mattresses and two free pillows again that's helixsleep.com huberman to get 25% off and two free pillows and now for my discussion with Esther Perell Esther Perell welcome thank you it's a pleasure to be here there are so many questions and Curiosities and puzzles and uh 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 A extend 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 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 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 Etc 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 in terms of what we want and what we ask for what we feel willing to ask for ETC across this Arc of the relationship but what I want to know is is the decision to enter a R Mantic relationship a willingness 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 we go lock and key 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 I think it is both completely both we meet other in order to find ourselves and we meet an other 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 set of dual needs we need security and we need freedom and adventure and we need togetherness and we need need separateness so in the relationship you come in order to create that identification but also that differentiation it's it's a it's a dialectic all the time 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 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 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 represent ative of that I am drawn to the fact that you are stable grounded structured solid reliable on time you name it 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 bargain for and now I start to argue with your rigidity and my desire to actually become more structured and solid and un punctual and reliable has somehow disappeared so if I understand correctly we seek out others in order to try and initiate the process of change that we want right but then when we hit the friction Point meaning the point where it challenges where we are that's right then there's a a form of um resent or frustration the reason defensiveness defensiveness you know what it is every system straddles stability and change and then grapples for homeostasis every relationship goes through that every every every system in nature goes through that but the same thing is true inside and individual we want change and we need stability and then these things sometimes are compensating each other and they are complimentary and at times they but heads so a very practical question yeah then what are the um necessary but not sufficient elements that some body should have in themselves before they go seeking a romantic relationship meaning um what is necessary in order to be able to embark on the process with any chance of success um barring you know extreme pathology right um assuming that both people entering the relationship have the best of intentions to make the relationship work in quotes yeah yeah is it both a sense of One's Own identity as well as what specifically they would like to change or is it um some other you know constellation of factors different ways to answer this um you know I think sometimes people say I I I I'm want to be with you because you help me become the best version of myself yeah you hear that a lot and so what is that version you know who is it that I want to see that I think you will help me become 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 the concept if you don't mind defining the Cornerstone relationship is is where when we used to meet in our early 20s and together we build the foundation of our relationship we grew together we saved our first monies together we got our first places together Etc it was very much foundational stone is the foundation has already been established because we are 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 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 and I am putting you and me as the CH Stone which we put on top of what we've already created you and me you've done the same thing 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 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 in your 30s what happens when people are mismatched in terms of age 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 in straight relationships you often have men who are a lot more a lot older than the women very much rooted in evolutionary bi biology I think and and fertility but um 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 so that's shifting now towards um more more often people are observing older women with younger men you know when you have four movies at this moment that are talking about this and you begin to see the the Crescent of a of a new cultural phenomenon I don't 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 you know when you Embark any relationship it's it it's uh again it's 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 and that self-awareness I think as its best translates in the sense of I you know I think a good vow to say at the time of your wedding is I'll [ __ ] up on a regular basis and on occasion I'll acknowledge it it means that a self-awareness comes within self- knowledge about your limitations your and your ability to take responsibility for it Without Blame and shame and and basically accountability I think accountability is an enormous component of relationship it's it's and 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 Etc 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 you know I often say that couple's therapy I am a practicing couple therapist for almost 40 years and couples often come to therapy thinking that you're a drop off center 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 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 do you think that's perhaps one reason why people who are in these Cornerstone relationships of whom I've known many you know um even family members of mine you know 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 um they grow up together yeah and I think it probably happens at a stage of life when there's still a lot more neuroplasticity frankly 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 right and you know fortunately it's still available but the notion of being set in our ways as a neuroplasticity pH it's the closing of the prefrontal cortex pretty much pretty much font exactly takes a lot more to open that plasticity later than it does earlier certainly and yet it's um inversely related to the self-awareness right I mean the younger we are the less self-aware we are about our patterns because we just have less data over time so I I could see how it would be more difficult uh for somebody in their 20s to say Hey listen I I think I have a a good many virtues but I have this severe issue with something or this particularly frustrates me or here's my laundry list of issues right whereas somebody in their 4S or 50s um or older if pressed could probably make that list if they were really being honest with themselves so it seems like a good point you know so it seems that um there maybe there's a sweet spot but um that these earlier relationships I've I've always um been impressed by them and kind of romanticized them in my mind um because that wasn't the trajectory that I took a challenge you see when you grow up together you often put a not of energy into the building of the unit MH and that unit then is supposed to become your base your scaffolding from which two individuals can begin to grow and to Define themselves 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 Mo movement it's a different choreography I think that the challenge for young couples today who meet early in C in college and have known often only themselves and a few people in their teenage years Etc or nonone is what happens when when when they begin to change individually can the relationship expand enough to broaden the envelope to let these two people you know emerge individually or is the jacket too tight is the vest too tight and often that it it becomes a bit of a crisis it's because they grew they grew together by by you know on the basis of this togetherness um and sometimes they can and sometimes it just feels like is this the that in order to become adults it may need to happen with a different partner 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 um it's like the person changes the relationship but the relationship makes room for the person to change this is dynamic if that just feels like such a true statement to me because uh in my um 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 art absolutely correct and the great psychologist Ericson 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 well his last stage is the generative stage It's actually an amazing I mean he's the the most articulate irti of stages of life 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 so you could imagine that these let's say these three marriages let's imagine a couple that meets in their 20s and does three marriages which implies uh a couple divorces in between maybe not legal divorces um across their lifespan they really are according to the Ericson theory development or any neurobiological examination of brain development different people in their 20s versus 40s versus 60s 70s 80s so this notion of three different marriages to me seems um both logical and very grounded in what we know about the biology of the the brain and the self so um a good metaphor is rooted in science and and yet it's also kind of a radical idea when one hears it for the first time if 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 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 grandchild there's all this kind of uh 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 and so what do you think dictates whether or not a person can go through these 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 mean what what is the sort of um requirement is it a 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 you know a good question is a question that has many answers there's different ways to answer this um I think that more than thinking about it as they were able able to overcome crisis it's really the ability to redefine oneself and to redefine a relationship it's much more creative than problem solving you can overcome a crisis and put it aside and stay the same this is much more of a 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 the the erotic charge is different the the the the connection to the outside world is different it's it's really it's it's it's en liven the you know I think everybody understands the difference between a relationship that is not dead and a relationship that is alive I I am not there to help people survive I my work would is 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 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 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 rais their hands and then I go down the generations and then now it's like how many how many of you have had three jobs in The Last 5 Years so this notion that we can 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 we can live in a in a trip trism we can there's a plasticity if you want to use a word that you that to to the world of relationship today 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 the time with in the past none of us made decisions about most of these things they were handed down to us so that level of freedom is utterly rich but comes with a tremendous amount of anxiety and the man's maturity 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 like there is no greater polarization sometimes than a couple that once agreed on a lot of things that you just think there there's no way change can end enter this system okay so when I hear your answer um 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 and sometimes two of those three things uh 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 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 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 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 you want to get the answers but you can't get emotionally attached to the answer Being A or B that's anti-c curiosity real genuine curiosity is about the process the verb action of wanting to figure out something but not being attached to a particular outcome and as you were describing of function 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 and that takes some as you said some some boldness because if it's kind of scary right if you not knowing who one is going to become if they let the other person you know maybe lead for a while or um or if they were to lead for a while are these the sorts of dynamics that you're referring to I think you almost articulated one of the most important pieces of my work um I mean curiosity is one of the top words for me um because it stands in opposition to reactivity reactivity reinforces the cycle it just creat creates narrow repetition rapid in you know cycles of escalation it usually involves defense and attack and blame Etc curiosity is an active engagement with the unknown and I like when you say without the attachment to the outcome or the emotional uh investment I think that's absolutely accurate and um much of what I do is try to have people switch from reactive to curious but that Curiosity means that they're willing to enter empathically and respectfully into the realm of another person whose narrative is completely different I'm very invested and familiar with the neurosciences and the the whole work on the brain in relationships but I am very interested in narrative because I believe that the story shapes the experience 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 you know that's not the case you know and they don't see this as a subjective rendering it's totally valid but it's valid as your experience and much of coup's conversations is pseudo factual talk but it is actually subjective once you get that you can become curious once you are curious you open up but it is very challenging when people are hurt wounded defensive um holding tight to invite that Curiosity it's it's what's happening in their bodies is about shutdown and defense and self- protection 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 exist essentially I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens ag1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs and it tastes great now I've been drinking ag1 since 2012 and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really Limited in fact I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement and I'm so glad that I made that supplement ag1 the reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from Whole Foods and minimally processed foods it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits vegetables vitamins and minerals micronutrients and adaptogens from 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we become locked in a Time domain and not to spin off into aention about this no it's not aention you know 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 the stress response is about solving for the feeling now it has no sense about um or it doesn't allow us a a window into the cognition or emotions that are related to what could be even though we desperately want out of there and there's all sorts of evolutionary reasons why this would be the case of course but um I feel like a statement that you made um which is that a curiosity and a willing to discard with one's own narratives and in particular what you said about the that people perceive their own experience as fact when in actuality it's it's just two different stories neither person is correct um or one person you know but people have these stories which are almost confabulation at some point but they feel so true to all of us when we experience them I also feel like that's a lot of what's happening in culture at large people diametrically oppose camps really believe that the same thing is a reflection of two completely different series of facts and and it seems almost unsolvable at the level of culture there's too many people but at the level of two individuals I feel like it to be um tractable you know I have gone to a lot of meetings in the last year on issues of polarization at on on societal levels and and I often think like what is a psychologist or a couple therapist doing in those meetings why am I invited here 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 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 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 complet completely mistaken because it's like swiss cheese everything that one has left out is where the other one starts so we learn a lot from doing couple's work around the process of polarization of the around the process of intractable conflict around the this sense that you are my enemy and and there is nothing in what you say that I can recognize or be empathic towards or or understand understanding I think on a societal level the people who have studied intractable conflict um basically have a method and of how you bring two opposing parties factions uh tribes you know who have been in conflict and at War for a long time and how do you bring them together there is there's actually a method a process it's not it's 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 in a couple because that that is the the the space we we talk about now in a couple it's an incredible thing how you people can literally think that the other person wants their demise you live day in day out with some someone who you have who you really think wants to hurt you is your enemy and sometimes there are there is evil you know there there's people who don't have good intentions but in many situations it's it's a it's also a projection 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 and the what you call the brain that can only locate it itself in three temporal and the brain and the physiology are in a different time implicit memory is completely influencing explicit narrative yeah people are incredibly prone to confabulation based on these unconscious things going on and it it's kind of a scary thought if I feel it this is what's happening that's right right and because we are creatures of meaning we need to reconcile those things and we need coherence in our narratives and that coherence is what is so difficult for when when you work with people who are hold 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 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 um makes me feel a lot better rather than proving to you that that's not true you wanted to step on my toes you you intentionally put those heels on or those shoes or you know those fists to to to to step on me and 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 it's as if I need to justify my being hurt by the by the intention of what you did and to just make sure sometimes that's the case it's not that there are not people who intentionally want to hurt some people 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 I mean and in reality um 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 I'm truly sorry I screwed up and the other person says um 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 that's because your apology I screwed up is incomplete most of the time people say that I made a mistake I'm sorry and but it doesn't acknowledge what the other person felt in response to what we did so let's say that the apology also includes that I you know I really messed up it makes total sense that you would be upset you know we had an agreement that we would meet at 7 and I didn't get home until 9: and I didn't notify you until 8: I would be upset too that's totally justified that sucks that's got to really suck at that point if the other person still feels like it's still frustrating um presumably it's because either this is a pattern um so this doesn't this one apology doesn't encapsulate all the other the the the sort of litany of other things that relate to this of feeling unseen or unappreciated or you know there's often a lot more behind this the event apologize many times right um 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 um doesn't encapsulate all the other things that weren't voiced because sometimes people won't voice their grievances at because they for whatever reason but there's a lot of resent that's built up right so in that moment when somebody um tells another that they are um not convinced emotionally convinced uh what what are the tools that you give each in order to be able to navigate that stick taking point 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 I think if you give that apology many times somebody and and it's not yet you're doing this every Tuesday the person will probably just say thank you 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 because it is the thing that you should be getting and then you start to ask yourself is it because if I AC accept your apology it's as if I agree that what you did wasn't so bad it is repairable and in order to really make clear that a grievance is big I cannot receive your apology that's one of the Dynamics that often occurs in that moment and 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 are sincere and then you watch what's happening to the other person are they relieved are they suspicious are they feeling like they would they would dissolve a certain element of their identity if they don't hold on to this um 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 burn on the other side you know in in Judaism you apologize three times and if after the third time and you've done a real Reckoning apology if at the three time the other person does not accept it the burden passes over to the other person interesting this is my money des and I think it's an incredibly interesting idea that at some point the person has made the amends when they have and and when you cannot receive it then now the burden passes on you I'm just going to hover there for a second because I agree that apology is such an interesting and important concept 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 the thing that hurt and by the way accepting the apology doesn't yet 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 diic experience apology is a diic experience but forgiveness is freedom yeah I appreciate that distinction um now that you've given it I mean I appreciate you giving that distinction I did not uh make that 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 what is the capacity of a person to have real distress rather than empathic distress real empathy rather than empathic distress so it it's a a portal into a lot of things you know they're people who can never apologize is that right oh yeah because to do so would what for them shame I think a lot of that pieces around shame it's not I'm because self esteem as as my friend ter says is your ability to see yourself as a flawed individual and still hold yourself in high regard 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 if you can do those two things you can apologize very easily I find that so much of being an adult again in quotes yes yes you would hope uh involves um the disambiguating two things uh 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 and um and there's no rulebook no real-time rulebook for that especially given that people have different versions of the same thing often but it seems to me that 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 so at a very practical level I'm curious let's say a couple comes into your office and they're dealing with um a either a single hurt or a Litany of hurts or something like that do you m uh 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 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 first of all I like that we that it's interesting we going from apology to conflict it makes total sense I I spent the last year creating a whole course on conflict and how do you turn conflict into connection beautiful what is good conflict you know I think conflict is inherent to relationships and then what are problematic ways to deal with conflict yes on some level you there is very little you can hear if you are in a state of hyperarousal if you are in a position of self- protection I mean all these stressful places all these cortisol levels going up Etc are not going to help you but at the same time you can't in the moment that someone is uh completely agitated talked with them about trusting it's just like the physiology is not corresponding so it's a it's a real dance um I don't do the breath often sometimes I I actually don't do anything all the time I I I'm working like a tailor I do fittings I I mean I think the richness of therapy is is is in its art on some level let maybe um 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 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 like you know driving every parent who's ever had a kid in the back knows this the the you don't you have both you have moments when you need to be able to look into each other and then in moments where you just need to do this something about the side by side 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 so 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 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 to not fall for that and just 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 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 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 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 I like to start a session by asking what did you and if I'm dealing with a kind of chronic conflict low intensity Warfare or bigger depends what kind no there's different kinds of but I like to ask what have you done this week to make things better what a great question what have you done to make your partner feel that they matter rather than what happened this week you know know I I kind of have a sense please do not tell me the last unraveling you know I got it it goes from one from 0 to 60 no time and none of this I 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 I the plot is you know there's only three dances this fight you know aiming at each other withdrawing from each each other or one person withdrawing and one person pursuing those are three types of major choreographies of conflict 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 who is feeling what at the hands of whom how what is influencing this you know um 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 and um and then and this feeling of neglect and and dismissal is just crushing them because they suddenly feel like they've been rejected completely 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 and is remembering when they were living in the place where they grew up where they couldn't wait for to get out because they were feeling completely flooded and overwhelmed by the [ __ ] show of their house and these two stories are now dictating what's happening between these two people these two people are no longer adults in the room their younger selves have completely taken over their amigdala is completely flooded and then and then it matter it depends sometimes 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 some times I sit for 10 minutes quiet I say we're going to just wait for for our systems to regulate because even I get agitated it's not like it doesn't absorb 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 you know um 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 and sometimes I in the middle of the session may 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 Str angle it's really special it's amazing how we can inhabit two completely contradictory feelings at the same time I can't stand you get me the hell out of here and I can't imagine my life without you those things coexist love and hate side by side I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing while I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health my hormone status my immune system regulation my metabolic function my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality function not only provides 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getting the test done as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are that I recently joined their Advisory Board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast if you'd like to try function go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list of over 250,000 people but they're offering Early Access to huberman lab listeners again that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function there's something that I really want to revisit that you said um you said it incredibly clearly but I have never heard this described um 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 what is it so as a biologist when we teach biology the good biologists who uh 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 and what you just described as the three verb states of conflict I think I've never heard articulated that way so you described um if I understand correctly pursuer pursu right either pursu one person pursuing another no pursuer pursu each other loger heads and those are escalations okay two arrows pointing at one another arrows and not in a good way no not in in Conflict it's usually not at a good way you know and you there are there's a whole interpretation of an attachment style that underlies why to people in the situation of threat go on the attack you have two people fighting MH 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 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 mind mindset from talking about the story of what led there 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 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 is the way I would you know but because we I say it you know because we are Homo sapiens and we think we we really this thing about coherence and thinking that what we say has meaning is is extremely powerful to the point sometimes of delusional 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 and it you know sometimes when you see it in the room you kind of say they never said that yeah it's almost like a psychosis of sorts I'm not calling either person psychotic it's psychotic because it's a disconnection from reality I would say it's such a a a a an inhabiting of an internal reality that it is disconnected from the possibility and this is where curiosity comes in 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 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 sure you know but there are many other relationships where um why would why you know why would he want maybe he he he stepped away because he just thought that whatever was going to come out of his mouth he would regret it it's not because he doesn't care about you in fact it's the opposite and he knows what he can sometimes say he day she doesn't matter but not because he wanted to just throw you to the Wolves it's almost like we lose our theory of Mind our ability to place our ourselves in the mind of another in a in a healthy way when we're in these stress States I'm curious it's funny you call it stress States because stress to me is so physiological that it doesn't include the relational components sure 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 and that's why we imagine and this is how we interpret the dynamic it's it's very important to add that so the the past was real there was someone in the past who actually did this to me but when you do this I think of them I I bring those two things together I I Collapse the past and the present and that's why I'm convinced this is what you're doing to me too and so how do you take somebody out of their physical and mental and emotional past to be grounding themselves into the present so so that they can consider that this person that is next to them is not doing to them what once was done to them 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 it that was real as you said and yet with this curious eye toward the future of what could unfold that's probably the hardest nugget of couple's 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 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 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 began with romantic relationships 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 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 because nobody gets as close to you and nobody elicits in you the kinds of early yearnings and and and and and emotional needs than a romantic partner and that is very interesting I don't know if it's a bug or a feature as the uh Engineers say but it is remarkable to me um that the very same neural Machinery that forms the under pinning of infant primary caretaker relationship is repurposed for romantic relationship I mean I Marvel at that interesting right I mean the brain doesn't have like oh here's your developmental wiring circuits and then guess what 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 so it's it's like if you got a 2 plus 2 equal 4 algorithm in that circuit let's call that securely attached although I realize that language is not sufficient but for just purposes of discussion okay well then great then you get healthy romantic attachments as adults or you you as an adult then perhaps you can navigate in and out of things that are unhealthy more quickly however if you got a 2 plus 2 equals 5 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 give me more about this repurposing it's really interesting yeah so um beautiful work by Alan Shore and others has yeah um his work I know you're familiar with has shown that you know you you image the brain of infant and typically it's mother but they've done other caretakers as well and you see this incredible mirroring of sure right brain left brain activity more dopaminergic or serotonergic activity basically the the the takeaway is that you see a lot of coherence what's going on in the mother is going on in the child and vice versa and it's there's a lot of reciprocity but sometimes in unhealthy caretaker infant relationships the so-called you know anxious attached dissociative or you know avoidant type scenarios the ABCD baby type thing people can look that up um if they like we can provide a link um you see a mismatch in the neurochemistry and the activation of these brain areas in other words that the brain circuitry for attachment is is set up so that um you know anxious states are evoked when calm States should have been um have there been better parenting okay all right but then you take those you 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 nowhere else to my awareness nowhere else in the nervous system do we repurpose neural circuitry from early in life you know it's as if there's a neural circuit for uh sensing thirst and drinking early in life and then later it's used for sensing uh how to navigate a city okay now that those are two very disperate things but this is this is like out 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 phas what you think was the was the The evolutionary logic of that 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 miswiring yes that are the consequence of um faulty caretaker infant relationship and you can't blame the infant 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 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 and there's something about the human brain that wants to understand itself very interesting so I like to think that in a hundred years 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 we understand so much more about brain function now than we did just 10 years ago addiction for instance you know not just a a condition of failure of willpower but this understanding about dopamine you know um and other molecules I think we now look at a a feny addict or a heroin addict very differently they're caught in a neurochemical algorithm that is not serving them well 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 so my hope is that this is built into our our evolution as some sort of um Vector toward progress you know it's interesting because some models of coup's work of couple's therapy will say you have recreated with each other patterns of your early life in order to be able to transcend them right the uh repetition compulsion you get the same thing over and over again Lord knows I've had that um and some wonderful partners and by the way as I say that I'm also taking 50% of the responsibility so it's all or 100% of the responsibility for the choice um as they say you didn't have six hard relationships you had one hard relationship six times right I think uh Paul kti says it that way but that yes that the repetition compulsion is a unconscious attempt to resolve the core conflict that arose during attachment correct do you subscribe to that view I think it's a very useful idea you know I was thinking at one point it's like sometimes when when when I listen to you and you know there is an exactness in the things that you describe often rooted in science and research Etc couple's therapy or Psychotherapy relationship [Music] thinking it's you don't have an exact answer um it's first of all you don't have an exact answer because modern relationships are more complex than ever 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 to the people does it resonate for them if they bite 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 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 norti with protocols and the same thing for everyone I think that much of what at least relationship therapy which is really the world in that I practice in is is existential and it's meaning making and there's a lot of ways to do that so um if this interpretation works for you be my guest 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 I love that answer 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 then I had a second one and not 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 and this is the important thing in therapy is that it it's an issue of that fit is what you're looking for we hear a lot these days about the different attachment Styles or languages of love uh you know the love languages you know people will say I you know I emphasize you know gifts feel very rewarding or acts of uh what is it words of affirmation um you know unstructured time or etc etc or people will I think nowadays if they look into it a little bit they'll um realize that they are either you know more avoidant or more anxious these things can shift I mean I think it's wonderful that 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 it can do certain things serotonin certain things but I'm curious as to whether or not you feel that the 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 and you also use the word invitation and you you are describing couple's therapy and healthy relationship as a bit more of an art form than a reductionist protocol oriented science which I love because to me you know despite being a scientist the some of the great mystery of life and certainly of romantic relationship is um when you find yourself in happy places that you didn't anticipate finding yourself or in a place of uh forgiveness and close friendship when at one point you can recall being as you said like you just this person like embodies the worst things in your mind so I think um 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 to them um in other words do you think that we can learn to navigate relationship in more healthy ways not just by saying I'm anxiously attached or avoiding or securely attached I'm looking for someone that has that or My love language is this and they love to do that and so therefore we're a perfect lock lock and key I think people are starting to think about relationship in in a more um nuanced and sophisticated way and yet also what I'm hearing is it's a lot more Dynamic than that and that some of those categorizations that we assign ourselves can really perhaps be limiting to what could be it'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 are arriving here in front of my brain and I'm thinking which one am I going to am going to enter um I I I'm going to actually start with just the the actual question but then I 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 a a found a foundation something to hold on to 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 so that's the richness of the of the process is what do you mean when you say invitation curiosity you know conflict Etc when I for example when I do the work on conflict I I did provide language for example one of the things that happens in conflict is we have confirmation bias 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 confirmation by 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 two parties this is a that's a very important naming you know it's interesting I've noticed this this this this but all you mentioned is that okay cogn bias another cognitive bias that is very common in is is fundamental attribution error you know we have this idea that I am complex and you are more simple if I if if I'm in a bad mood is because there was traffic you know the circumstances there's context if you're in a bad moon is because you're a contous person that's just your personality you know will 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 this very different from the kind of naming that pathologizes people the kind of naming that locks you into one identity you know you may have addiction and addiction may be really important that may even have destroyed your life but to just say you're an addict I've seen so I worked in an addiction Center for for two years and you know people people had a lot of there were a lot of other things happening in these people's lives and to just focus on this one thing is it it it reduces the person but it also reduces your ability to do something with the person it Narrows your lens so it's always this question about how wide is the lens that you that you don't get overwhelmed so you want to make it smaller but not that small that you that you're looking through a keyhole a person is more complex than a keyhole you know with don't just treat symptoms we we work with lives that's the difference of for me anyway in the work that that we do and that 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 and 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 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 the naming is not useful when it locks you into a symptom a a reductionistic thing that that gives false certainty to profits I no you got can't agree more that you that naming uh that expands one's understanding and maybe even lends itself to a hint of curiosity stands a chance of of having some rehabilitative um Quality to it I I feel that nowadays there's such an overuse of psychological terms um like narcissist gaslighting therapy terms it's it's almost the way that if people were to talk about neurobiology as um neurosurgeons right I'm not a neurosurgeon but I have friends who are and neurosurgery is like something people trained for many many many years for just as being a uh clinical psychologist people trained for many years for and have a ton of in Office experience uh Real World Experience 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 um closing off possibility as opposed to increasing possibility however it's both because on the one hand more than many other forms of medicine or health care or care Psychotherapy psychology but certainly Psychotherapy was always stigmatized and still is in many parts of the world it's for the crazies it's for 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 you went to see a therapist you know now you're putting it on your on your dating app you know it's a status symbol so there is a destigmatizing that is very important but there is also words that are weaponized and they are not useful and they 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 we need efforts to bring back the collective the community the the 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 well Amen to Bringing people together more I um yeah such an important mission right now I'd like to explore the possibility of something that I've heard but I don't know if it's true um 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 meaning that the Dynamics that show up in uh intimate interactions are somehow reflective of a larger um working out or or um Dynamic uh in the relationship to what extent do you think that's true it's a concept that I've I've heard um it it's sounds interesting and um uh any discussion about sex tends to you know get um people's ears bricked up because uh it's uh depending on where you live in the world it's either something that people talk about um casually openly or with a lot of um you know uh electricity around it but um 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 um sperm met egg if not inum in in Dish and then eventually inum so we're still at at that point in uh Evolution so um what are your views about intimacy and sex as a reflection of the relationship and here what I'm thinking of again are these um when you described conflict you describe these three different uh uh positioning of arrows towards one another separate away from one another one chasing the other is there a parallel uh for healthy relationship that we can offer up um sexually yeah um for uh talking about this question of whether or not um sex is a microcosm of the of the larger relationship the health of the relationship let me start like this I mean I've I I 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 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 but the 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 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 modern sexuality is identified with performance and outcome sex is something you do 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 you're going to start to see my the choreography I draw 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 do you go to seek deep spiritual union a deep intimate connection Transcendence do you go 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 nauy a place to have just plain fun a place to abdicate your responsibilities of good citizenship because sexual desire is quite Politically Incorrect 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 our longings it's that that is you know sex is never just sex even when it's hit and run and then it becomes really interesting 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 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 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 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 I have been trained to think like this and 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 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 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 no no no not at all it 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 I'm relieved to hear you say that the Romantic maybe I grew up on too many I did on I don't know how many romantic comedies I saw but I I grew up in a home where um love sex and romance were discussed in very almost ethereal terms 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 an it's an exercise I like to do sometimes I divide your page in a with a 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 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 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 and the there are words that you find back and forth and then there are words who just never appear in the other column do you recommend that uh couples exchange these documents they do it at the same time then they read it out loud in front of each other I do it 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 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 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 and for some people they are often retrieve 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 because somehow in them it's there's a there's a split between these two things some people experience love in such a way that it sometimes because becomes challenging for them to make love to the person they love 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 we were the parents of our parents we took care of our depressed parent we took care of our alcoholic parent we learn to love with a sense that is not free that is not curious or playful because curiosity cannot happen in a St state of stress as you so well said 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 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 the more challenging the desire becomes for them because desire ex is is to own the wanting it's it exists in 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 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 so this is how attachment style often manifests in the way that you then organize your sexual self what percentage of infidelity do you think reflects somebody's inability to um integrate this uh love component From Desire component um such that they find that they only uh experience desire or strong desire um outside their their committed relationship look I wrote an entire book about in about infidelity as in what happens when desire goes looking elsewhere I think that some people go outside for to ex as a response to a lot of discontents in the relationship loneliness being the first one neglect indifference um conflict rejection sex ual rejection in particular but some people go outside um and it has very little to do with the relationship 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 go they need to be outside and it's I used to say I have seen a lot of infidelity in happy Rel relationships it's not always a symptom of a flawed relationship by no means 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 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 is that I wanted to find something else inside of me 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 and the word that you hear all over the globe when people who 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 mean they often that doesn't necessarily involve sex it's about something aliveness is that the erotic not the sexual and the erotic is the quality of liveness vibrancy Vitality hopefulness curiosity imagination playfulness it's those elements that often people lose for a host of reasons life work children dying parents illness economic hardship you name it you know and there's a sense that they need to go elsewhere to find that and some people would say [ __ ] 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 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 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 and yet hold on to enough of our own identity right and evolve that identity within the relationship to the other that is the definition of intimacy or a definition of intimacy and that is probably the number one task of every relationship a romantic relationships is how do I get close to you without losing me and how do I hold on to me without losing you now you know I said to you in the beginning that we grow up and we have both needs togetherness and separateness 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 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 one person more afraid with the fear of Abandonment and one person more afraid with the fear of Suffocation this is a recurring Dynamic that you see and does it um swap back and forth across couples um male female um I'm assuming in that um example heterosexual relationship but even homosexual relationships you'll see it um 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 the other person abandonment by the other the other person more deeply afraid of Abandonment of themselves right it it doesn't switch back and forth it switches by relationship but not within one relationship you may have been a different in different roles with different partners indeed I have uh so interesting again not be because you weren't clear you were incredibly clear and concise about this but I think this is such an important concept 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 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 and I said is the issue an issue of trust or is the issue was there betrayal was it what's LED she says how do I how do I allow somebody to enter into my life without losing myself 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 this is human but and I answered a little bit with some of this and 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 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 because you some 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 a losing a part of myself I mean it's it's buil in it's so you know it it it starts here and it continues all the way it's like so you I mean it's like it's a sequence of things you break apart in 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 and to the other person who is um when you're afraid sorry of losing the other and when you're afraid of of of losing yourself like where's your rigidity where is your kind of totalistic thinking where is this unle lack of flexibility 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 anod you know I don't go to those kind of restaurants you know why should 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 we're talking about going out supposedly supposed meant to be fun now you start rewinding you know what is this statement go connected to that we are going to have Co you know so now you have conflict meeting identity meeting connection to another person this is when the the and and it is sleuth work it's fantastically engaging and exciting it's like when you do scientific research it's that sluth work that you say this thing doesn't fit at all you know why do you want me to wear blue shoes 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 how the preservation of the self now involves not where in blue shoes I mean you get what I I I do and and I I my mind um keeps flitting back to this parallel construction of these circuits were built in infancy and childhood and Adolescence and I'm uh what kind of flashed to mind is when we are adolescence and teenagers there's this fundamental question that we ask that rarely do we ask again later in life I mean maybe people do but the question is kind of who am I you know teenagers try on a lot of different identities often and how they dress you know is one of the ways in which they self-identify 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 it has an emotional weight that music that we arrive to later doesn't unless it resonates with that early music or um recapitulates that rather so in my mind I'm thinking I wonder if these circuits that are struggling with uh holding on to self versus a kind of a playful curious exploration of new things novelty which is so fundamental to relationship and they're not they they're as we say it's neurobiologists are are really antagonistic that they're really in a push pull I mean there's so many things that we're discussing today that really feel as if these are um like circuits that can't be coactive easily that they they're like that we're in this internal grappling match and what keeps coming to mind but they also need each other right they're right they're they're like the um right it's like the front axle and the back axle of a a vehicle like you can't exist without both you just made me think of something because you asked before that the thing about the sexuality and and and I like the concept of erotic blueprints which I work with a lot and um and I try to really kind of distill it in in in this desire bundle course that I'm I'm releasing that it cuz I thought how can people ask themselves a set of questions like a lot of my work is about finding the good questions that will you know a good question this like a portal right and the the the 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 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 on to oneself connecting with the other 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 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 connect to me and then to you without this polarities experience that in Sex and then you ask a set of questions how did you learn to love and with whom were you protected by those people but 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 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 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 and their emotional challenges but then comes the next level and if you then study their fantasy lives then you'll understand the depth of their emotional needs which are brought into their sexuality fascinating you get it I get it I get it and it um makes me think that this earlier discussion we were having you know is sex a microcosm for the larger relationship it sounds to me like the answer is yes but especially the relationship to self and especially the like there's a lot of information in one's uh desire template or blueprint about how one was cared for or not cared for 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 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 don't 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 right I couldn't agree more and I think that there also seems to be this attempt to directly translate from well if somebody had issues with their mother 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 that's confirmation B right but in reality it's the algorithm it's the algorithm um it's that these um algorithms that are laid down in our neural circuitry earlier they don't care about U male femaleness I mean it doesn't change whether or not people are heterosexual or homosexual that's it ain't to them I I believe I think these are frankly biologically driven but the idea is that our ways of being um don't translate directly that way that these are deeper processes so if one had issues for instance with their who's male and heterosexual but they had issues with their father they could have the same issues with women as an adult right that it could translate that it's not always mapping uh male to male female to female I have a a a segment of my podcast where should we begins that opens the tour where basically they talk about how they met and then they are they fight about everything all the time and they think that they're fighting this is the line of the show 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 he instantly thinks of his dad who was this military guy who told him you know and he is basically in a fight saying to her you ain't telling me what to do you the boss of me 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 etc etc 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 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 this is beautiful example beautiful example 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 it's a little bit more subtle and complicated Nuance than that I think the Frameworks are useful but they Frameworks and the they're models that help us to think and make sense of things but it's a little bit like in science you know the truth of today is the joke of tomorrow I had heard that but but uh uh that one's going up on X um repair work is something that is so fundamental to healthy relationship it connects to our what we discussed about apology what is your uh recommendation for how couples think about repair work let's assume that they're still together and um there's some at least uh hint of a hope to recover the relationship should repair work be framed as um in a particular way to facilitate it um you know how does one begin I mean I I can sort of been uh we've been doing a lot of Threes today so I can imagine mistakes misunderstandings and betrayals right there are mistakes like I accidentally step on somebody's toes there's uh misunderstandings to people thought the same thing and then they're outright betrayals and my understanding from your work is that 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 there's a sequence to this and it's to in Intimate Relationships it's to in friendships I'm very interested in friendships these days and in in Friendship therapy I do co-founders work I mean there's other diets that I'm very interested in beyond the the Romantic unit but you said something before that I 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 mhm 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 seem to have really upset your partner do you care about that or you want to just kind of stand so I think the first piece in in repair work and 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 the you know the erotic recovery erotic in my sense of the in my definition of the word so that's what when I say it's not enough to survive it's I I I I'm 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 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 so every trauma process the say the you know of Nations or of individuals demands the acknowledgment of what happened 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 the consequences of the act on the other person person is where the guilt and the remorse must take place without that there is very little option for repair if I if I don't feel that you even know what you did to me my you my dad you my boss you my political enemy I mean that it's it's really at the root so after you do the remorse and the and the guilt the next part is to be really careful that you don't sink into the 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 now that's narcissism that's the 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 the of the your own wound it's really a process of Reckoning with the other person and it's slow challenging for some and it's immediate for others and then I think the next piece in a relationship is not just to apologize and to to to show your remorse but it's actually to show that you value the other person because hurting a person and especially when it's betrayal and careless is a devaluation of the other person you didn't matter what that me mattered more than you for whatever the reasons it was still selfish and I devalued you 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 is there anything you want to talk about you still think about it you know this is going to 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 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 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 it's the it's the Regeneration or the generation of new cells in in you know it's 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 it's here 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 rumin but when I touch it it's tender it's wounded it's it's a place that I need to make sure not to hit again and don't hurt me again and don't do this to me again I I can't recover from that twice it's very it's that vulnerable and then it says let's go do new things you know erotic recovery is not about comfortable and familiar and the return to the status quo erotic recovery is about new risky curious play unknown imagination outside of the comfort zone so that we can see ourselves a new as who we are and how and who we are together and I think that's where the Revival takes place it's hopeful it's possibility it's adventure it's got that energy beautiful aspirational and realistic too this uh notion of not notion forgive me this act of truly getting outside of oneself to be present to the way the other person feels irrespective of who was right or who is wrong if it was a misunderstanding betrayal but especially in cases of betrayal the exiting of as you said um either a stance of not wanting to look at it for oneself or of self- flatulation both are self-centered yeah so really getting into real genuine care for if not car taking or the offer of care for the other person I hurt you that bad you know one of the big things is people are often shocked at the hurt of the I thought you wouldn't care what I thought I or I I didn't think about it I just didn't because there is a dissociation that takes place when you when you take off and so the when people are faced with the the raw hurt wound suffering collapse fracture of the other person they find it very hard to tolerate and this has to happen you have to be able to to know the consequences of your action if you want to you know freedom in the existentialist San terms involved the ability to take responsibility for the cons the consequence of your actions this is it I'll help you face that that doesn't mean that you become the worst creature on the planet but you are you have to face that and that is something very hard for us because sometimes we meant it sometimes we thought we deserve it and sometimes we didn't that we didn't think that that was going to be the case and so it's sometimes easier to stand in front of someone else's anger than someone else's hurt 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 um modes of apology that don't show us that the person is 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 no no there's a beautiful book by harat learner about apology that I often recommend in these situations because she really analyzes if you ever do apology you know she she this concept of sincerity of 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 you know the the the the Maneuvers that are about self-preservation versus the Maneuvers that are really about restorative justice 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 what sorts of um things should we all be doing 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 great question um my answer is far too long to give here uh everyone will be relieved that's that's that will give you some of the material about you know who nobody's ready as in I'm prepared I'm I'm I'm perfect I'm I'm I'm fully baked I I say to every person everyone has relationship issues they're going to have to address at some point in their life 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 and many relationship problems are not problems that you solve they're paradoxes that you have to learn to manage well I want to make clear that um before what I say next um that if I had my way uh we would continue this conversation for uh many hours if not days perhaps There's an opportunity for that in the future but uh I was told um and not surprisingly that you're in a 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 um sounds like an incredible experience indeed I know some people have spoken directly to them uh who attended one of your lives recently and they sound like a a completely immersive and um experience like no other so I'm very excited about that um my only regret about your tour is that uh we have to Halt this conversation um in the next couple of minutes and I and there are a couple things I I just want to reflect back to you um that are all from a place of real deep appreciation uh first of all for bringing forward what you've brought today um 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 sentiment I mean uh just in today's conversation you've uh transformed the way that I think about relationship self identity neurobiology uh love sex uh so many um key topics and in a much larger way um 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 they are not just fundamental for us to resolve in couples or whatever relationship configuration people happen to be in they're societal they're societal that we can look at anything uh an election uh two countries battling one another political groups whatever at every level this is this is what it it means to be human built up from the same fundamental circuit same fundamental Dynamics 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 and and some of that might be true I don't know I'm not qualified to know 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 so you know there really aren't words to express um 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 the Deep heartfelt thanks and I know I speak for many many people thank you so much thank you for joining me for today's discussion about romantic relationships with Esther Perell 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 if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the huberman Lab 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