Rethinking Couples Therapy:
A Radical Approach to Sex, Love, and Infidelity

Couples therapy has traditionally focused on two partners occupying a shared space with a neutral third party, striving toward greater honesty and transparency. Couples are engaged as a unit, and therapists are discouraged from seeing partners separately lest power balances or allegiances be disturbed. What is lost in this approach to couples therapy?

To effectively engage such issues as intimacy, sexuality, and infidelity, therapists must create separate spaces where each partner can safely explore his/her feelings and experiences along with larger relationship dynamics. Couples therapy can best succeed in combinations of one and two.

In this workshop, we will explore: how to navigate secrets in couples work; clinical dilemmas and interventions around sex, love, and power; infidelity and how to move beyond it; and balancing the hidden dimension of sexual desire with the need for transparency and security.

Combining formal teaching, clinical case examples, and video vignettes, Esther Perel will probe the bonds and conflicts between love and desire through a multi-cultural lens. The workshop draws on attachment and psychoanalytic theory, family systems, and body-oriented approaches.

You will learn —

• How to create a safe and non-judgemental therapeutic environment to work with secrets, privacy, transparency, and truth-telling
• A more nuanced therapeutic approach for working with extra-marital relations — past and present, fantasized or real, disclosed or withheld
• Strategies to help couples unlock sexual blocks and take emotional risks
• Ways for couples to rebuild trust and intimacy and to promote erotic recovery following an affair

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Books by Esther Perel:

	Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence by Esther Perel
Why does great sex so often fade for couples who claim to love each other as much as ever? Can we want what we already have? Why does the transition to parenthood so often spell erotic disaster? Does good intimacy always make for good sex? Ether Perel takes on these tough questions, grappling with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of passion. She invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home. In her twenty years of clinical experience, Perel has treated hundreds of couples whose home lives are empty of passion. They describe relationships that are open and loving, yet sexually dull. What is going on? In this explosively original book, Perel explains that our cultural penchant for equality, togetherness, and absolute candor is antithetical to erotic desire for both men and women. Sexual excitement doesn't always play by the rules of good citizenship. It is politically incorrect. It thrives on power plays, unfair advantages, and the space between self and other. More exciting, playful, even poetic sex is possible, but first we must kick egalitarian ideals and emotional housekeeping out of our bedrooms. While Mating in Captivity shows why the domestic realm can feel like a cage, Perel's take on bedroom dynamics promises to liberate, enchant, and provoke. Flinging the doors open on erotic life and domesticity, she invites us to put the "X" back in sex.
Click here to purchase online at Caversham Booksellers (Opens in a new window)

	Mating in Captivity (audiobook) by Esther Perel
Audiobook on CD
Click here to purchase online at Caversham Booksellers (Opens in a new window)

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