DESCRIPTION:

In this session, meet a husband and wife who met while deeply committed to the evangelical faith. They did not kiss until they were engaged and waited until after their marriage to have sex. They have been married for 16 years and finding that they sexually incompatible. Discover how Esther’s approach helps them leave the session understanding that’s not at all true and knowing how to call each other back to a new place of erotic intimacy
 

OUTLINE:

What to listen for in this session. Note how Perel moves very quickly at the beginning. She knows that this couple is so discouraged from being stuck and talking about the sex they don’t have, that it’s important to do something different. Perel explains in the analysis that when she was in training, someone told her not to ask what’s wrong. Instead, ask how it would look—who they would be if this were the last day of therapy. Perel says, this is what she does. Perel says.

She also thought about play and how it’s healing. So she took the risk and suggested some things they could try and each of them takes the risk too. She explains:

The first thing I think about when I see stuckness is where do I introduce something completely new—a new experience? Since she always sees him in a certain way, what if I close her eyes? She'll see something else. In fact, she'll have to listen more. She'll have to sense more. She'll have to experience touch more, so that was really that. I had her close her eyes, cover them and she had the scarf on almost till the end. 

The husband embraces another of the other ideas Perel tossed out—assuming a character. In fact he already has one—Jean-Claude, who only speaks French which his wife does not understand. Perel says that’s not a problem; she’ll translate. And she goes on to say:

She doesn't need the words…By not understanding you, she will actually
see you differently. She will feel you differently, and all of that is equivalent to communication. Bonjour, Jean-Claude!

Already now, the couple and she are joined therapeutically, Perel says. They’re laughing and there is an implicit contract about how to move forward. She observes that work like this is always a co-creation between the partners and the therapist and cautions that it can fall apart at any moment along the way.

In the analysis, Perel explains, that during most of her training, diagnosis was made by gathering info and then thinking through what the problem could be. Influenced by Minuchin, she prefers to rely on a systemic diagnosis which begins with an intervention. Then the way the system—in this case, the couple—responds to it provides the diagnosis. That is what is happening happens in this session. 

In the second segment, we see Perel moving back and forth between the partners, feeling her way into their senses of safety and excitement as well as the differences between Scott and Jean-Claude—both for the husband and for the wife.

Esther invites him to explain who “put him the basement” who locked him up. He says it was his mother and father. Perel uses her “say more” strategy to get at the intimate details of Scott’s story and he explains the whole family dysfunction concluding:

So I shamed myself whenever I felt sexual and tried to be only intellectual. In fact, I shut down all of my emotions.

In the analysis, Perel says she was, at that point, thinking about these two characters as “parts” and wanting to learn more about them when the wife says that holding Scott’s hand felt very different than holding Jean-Claude’s. That is important information for Perel to know.

What we have here, she says is the classic split between safe, good and not sexual versus bad and sexy. The work will be integrating safety and sexuality and it turns out this is the work for both of them.

She also discusses how issues can actually be embodied and believes that is what is happening when the wife experiences such a big difference between holding Scott’s hand and Jean-Claude’s hand.

In the third segment, Perel begins by challenging the split—Scott, good; Jean-Claude bad. Moving back and forth between them, she explores this split.

Then she asks the wife to tell Jean-Claude in her own words why she loves him and Perel begins to learn more about the wife’s script from childhood that says she is “too much”—a message that she now carries as “she is too much sexually for Scott.”

Throughout this segment, Perel uses her strategy of throwing out a storyline, asking the partner to make it their own by repeating it in his or her own words. Also throughout this segment and those following, Perel talks about sexuality using the language of pleasure—something she is known for doing effortlessly.

In the fourth segment, Perel talks about the power of role-play—especially when a couple has been stuck as these partners were. It allows them to escape the narrowness of their perspective and to ask for what they want from the other.

Perel also uses a touching exercise to help them experience not only healing the split between safety and sexuality but to get a taste of the joy, the openness, the play, the freedom, the pleasure of being sexual. This, says Perel, is the work of healing sexual trauma in couples.

At the end of this segment, Perel validates their new experience and verbally reinforces their new behavior:

I saw the way you stroked her as Jean-Claude. It's all inside of you. You are not incompatible, mismatched…I don't know where you got that story but it's not ... (To the wife) You don't know what stuff goes into this guy's head but it may not be nearly that different from yours.

In the analysis, Perel talks about the “bad boy” as a sexual fantasy which she sees as a code language through which a therapist can learn a lot. Sexual fantasy is

• a door to a person’s deepest sexual resources
• an expression of need
• the statement of a problem and a solution

In the wife’s sexual fantasy of the bad boy, this holds true. The wife sees her own problem as being “too much,” so her solution is someone who is big and tough and can take care of himself. She is expressing her need to be met by someone for whom she is not only NOT “too much” but exactly what he’s looking for.

In preparation for more integration, Perel challenges the notion that she is “too much.”

            Maybe your parents were wrong.

The fifth segment opens as the wife’s fear floods her. She talks about swinging between wanting closeness to avoidance—Get away from me. Then she starts talking about being independent and not wanting to need. Perel cuts her off, telling her to stop speaking while her husband kisses her.

When Jean-Claude is kissing her, the wife breaks off to complain to him that this is what she wanted all along. Perel cuts her off again: You can’t do that. Then Perel instructs the husband to say to his wife when she does complain: You’re not welcome here. This is the first installment in equipping them to help each other stay in the new place of erotic experience that is an integration of safety and sexuality.

In the next segment, Perel helps them dig into another way than the either safety OR sexuality understanding has kept them stuck for so long. She helps them unpack their experience of the “icky” sex that felt incestuous so they can understand it. That understanding is the first step in behavior change, says Perel.

Perel then turns to the husband to again challenge the notion that Jean-Claude is bad and moves them back into the touching and the experience of the fullness that’s possible when they connect with safe and sexy integrated.

These last two segments are a great illustration of the 3-step process of learning a new behavior that Perel models and then coaches all three couples in. The steps are

• Imitating
• Identifying
• Internalizing

And in the final piece of work, Perel coaches them as they experience this new reality fully. This is the experience that Perel wants for couples—a taste of what’s possible, the hope-filled beginning of the new story that she wants them to carry out of the session.

And because this is a new behavior that will need to be reinforced, she shows them how they can call each other back to this experience.

To the husband: Tell her, go put on some lipstick.

To the wife: Ask him to help you stay, to help you be in the present….

            And when the wires get crossed, you say ‘Speak to me in French.’

OBJECTIVES:

Articulate the purpose of four strategies or interventions that Esther Perel regularly uses in her sessions.

Analyze difference between a fantasy and a fetish and how to work with each clinically.