Esther Perel on how the pandemic affected relationships and her own mental health: 'I began to feel very unmoored'

Psychotherapist Esther Perel has spent a career studying human relationships, exploring topics like the desire to the balance between freedom and security. Since the pandemic, however, complicated these topics got complicated even further. The coronavirus pandemic pushed people further apart — physically speaking, at least — than ever before, and forced us to reevaluate how to live, and connect with others, safely.

For the Where Should We Begin? podcast host, who was born in Belgium but is now accustomed to traveling all over the world for work, staying in one place took the biggest toll on her own personal mental health and self-care.

“In the beginning, the focus was on creating a smaller world, staying put, feeling safe and finding ways to stay connected to people after all, but the world was very reduced,” she explains to Yahoo Life. “I have traveled my whole life between a number of different places that I call home. And I have more than one home; I have more than one place where I feel local. And after a while, I began to feel very unmoored because I find my stability from the dynamic inter-dependence of those various homes. And when I have to just be in one place, I start to feel very restless and out of balance.”

Video Transcript

ESTHER PEREL: In order to say, I want, we need to feel deserving of our wanting. We need to feel a sense of self-worth that I deserve to want and that, if I want, somebody on the other side will want me in return.

I have definitely nurtured both practices of self-care that involves primarily myself and practices of self-care that are social and interpersonal in nature. As a therapist today, it actually is very difficult to leave the patient's problems at the office. We have not been in our offices since March of last year.

We often end up working in our kitchens and in our bedrooms, which means that the same room that accumulates hours of stories of pain have to then revert back into being our own intimate spaces. It's been very challenging. It really has strengthened the need for collegial support, which are the only people to whom we actually can talk about what we do.

Resilience is collective. It's the ability to tap into the resources of other people and to amplify the social capacities, so that we can meet the adversity. And we can face it.

Wellness is our ability to reconcile two fundamental human needs, the need for stability, and dependability, and the need for adventure, risk, and change. When we can feel that we can experience commitment, but maintain a sense of autonomy, and that we can focus on what we have and what we want, that dance between these two fundamental sets of human needs is where in wellness resides. What surprises me in the study of relationships, I focused during the pandemic very much around how crises and disasters operate as relationship accelerators.

When life is fragile, when death is possible, what does that do to our sense of priorities to what we are willing to wait for and to what we're no longer willing to wait for? It confirmed it for me, how important it was to stay connected to the experience of playfulness to our imagination, to our curiosity as a way to stave off the experience of trauma, of loss, and of grief. If we continue to stir that pot in that direction, we may do a very important corrective in this culture.