Esther Perel – Modern Love: Rethinking Intimacy and Sexuality in Couples Therapy

Traditional approaches to couples therapy are built on the assumptions that if you help a couple clear up the emotional issues in their relationship, sex will automatically get better.

But it doesn’t work that way.

While couples in therapy do learn to strengthen their emotional bond, communicate more clearly, and resolve conflicts with less uproar, the sexual dimension of their relationship often remains unchanged. That’s because sexual issues are seldom a direct consequence of anything else—not emotional disconnect, poor communication, or stress in the relationship.

Hailed by The New York Times as The Sexual Healer, international couples therapy expert Esther Perel will address how modern love has transformed. She will teach you how sexuality and eroticism explicitly and directly are the best ways to help couples break out of stale sexual routines, reignite desire, and reclaim a vibrant erotic life.

Esther’s tools and strategies are guaranteed to increase your confidence and make conversations about sex less awkward and uncomfortable. Don’t miss this once in a lifetime opportunity to get the new secrets of modern love so you can help your clients build long term intimate partnerships that combine commitment and safety with sexual vitality and erotic exploration.

Objectives of Modern Love

• Describe the tension between two fundamental human needs of security and adventure.
• Define how cross cultural issues present in couples therapy and how to adapt your practice.
• Summarize how you must invert the traditional therapeutic priorities.
• Demonstrate how allowing the sexual relationship serves as a lens into the couple’s interpersonal dynamics.
• List techniques that allow couples to draw pleasure from the hidden and the mysterious while respecting their needs for safety and stability.
• Explain methods that facilitate clients voicing their erotic longings.
• Utilize experiential exercises to help couples confront their emotional blocks and their sexual inhibitions thereby open up communication of their erotic strivings to each other.

Outline of Modern Love

Fundamental Human Needs & Our Clients

• Security and adventure
• Invert your traditional therapeutic priorities
• The sexual relationship as a lens into the couple’s interpersonal dynamics
• The body & its profound capacity for communicating in its own language

The Pitfalls of Modern Intimacy

• Redefine the modern marriage
• Manage love, sex and commitment
• More intimacy, less sex
• The erotic and the domestic
• Recognize couples’ vicious cycles and the underlying trauma that fuels them
• Talk is not the only avenue to closeness

New Approaches to Couples Therapy in Practice

• Adapt this knowledge to your clinical couples practice
• Cross cultural perspective
• Techniques to help couples confront their emotional blocks
• Get couples overcome their sexual inhibitions
• Move beyond familiar comfort zones
• Develop expansive, fully charged sexuality
• Fantasy as a healthy and enriching imaginative tool
• Experiential exercises for couples

Addressing the Awkward in the Therapy Room

• When puritanism and hedonism collide
• Democracy verses “hot sex”: desire and egalitarianism
• Erotic Blueprints: How our attachment style influences our eroticism
• Parenthood: Unblock sexual blocks after kids
• Porn, kink and other atypical sexual behaviors
• Work with secrets, confidentiality, transparency and truth telling
• Rethink fidelity

About Esther Perel

Esther Perel, MA, LMFT, is recognized as one of the most insightful and provocative voices on personal and professional relationships and the complex science behind human interaction. She is the best-selling author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (translated into 25 languages) and producer of the online training continuation, Rekindling Desire.

Fluent in nine languages, the Belgian native is a practicing psychotherapist, celebrated speaker and organization consultant to Fortune 500 companies. The New York Times, in a cover story, named her the most important game changer on sexuality and relationships since Dr. Ruth.

Her critically acclaimed viral TED Talks (The secret to desire in a Long-term Relationship, February 2013 and Rethinking Infidelity .. a Talk for Anyone Who has ever Loved, May 2015) have collectively reached over 14 million viewers.

Known for her keen cross-cultural pulse, Esther shifts the paradigm of our approach to modern relationships. She is regularly sought around the world for her expertise in relational health and communication, team building, erotic intelligence, couples and family identity, work-life balance, and corporate relationships. Her clients and platforms include companies such as Nike, Johnson & Johnson, the Open Society Institute, Tony Robbins Productions, Brighthouse Consulting, Summit Series, Founder’s Forum, PopTech, Young Presidents Organization, Entrepreneur Organization, and the Bronfman Foundation.

Esther’s innovative models for building strong and lasting relationships have been widely featured in the media across 5 continents spanning The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Le Monde, Ha’Aretz and The Guardian, The New Yorker, Fast Company, and Vogue. She is a frequent guest on radio and television shows including NPR’s “Brian Lehrer show”, “Oprah”, “The Today Show”, “Dr. OZ” and “The Colbert Report”.

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