Esther Perel: Why Connection and Relationships Are Essential to Healing
I still remember watching Esther Perel’s TED Talk in 2013. I was spellbound. She seemed to understand human nature and relationships in a way that felt both profound and obvious, like she was naming truths I had always felt but never quite had the language for. At the time, I did not realize that moment was planting a seed. It was the beginning of an interest in psychology that I would not pursue until years later.
Fast forward. I had burned out in my corporate career and started asking myself some hard questions. Who are my heroes? Who do I admire and why? What really matters to me? In that season of curiosity, I had just left my job without a plan. So I took a leap of faith and wrote Esther an email. I told her, “I’ve followed your work closely over the last few years and look up to you as a model of a successful woman that I’d like to learn from…”
And somehow, she responded.
That one message turned into 2.5 years of collaborating on her marketing work. To be clear, I had no training as a therapist at the time. But, what a start to my psychology education!! Before grad school and before my own clinical practice, I had the rare gift of learning directly from someone I had deeply admired.
Why Esther’s Work Stands Out
A big part of what I love about Esther’s work is rooted in her history. Her parents were Holocaust survivors, and out of that lineage of devastation she created a career focused on joy, vitality, and connection. She is relentlessly committed to the idea that pleasure, intimacy, and community are not luxuries. They are survival strategies. They are what make life worth living.
Unlike many self-help frameworks, Esther does not believe you have to “fix yourself first” before you deserve relationships. She pushes back against the hyper-individualism of Western culture that tells us self-care is only a solo activity. For her, healing happens in relationship. We grow not in isolation, but together, in messy, real, and sometimes chaotic connection.
As she writes in Mating in Captivity:
“The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.”
That is her philosophy in a nutshell.
How She Brings This to Life
You can hear Esther’s approach in her podcast Where Should We Begin?. Each episode is essentially a masterclass in listening, empathy, and relational repair. Couples walk in stuck, defensive, and hurting. What you hear through her voice is a rare mix of directness and compassion. She challenges people, but she also reminds them of their humanity and their desire for joy.
You can feel the same energy in her writing. Books like Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs are not manuals for “fixing” relationships. They are invitations to see intimacy and desire as living, breathing parts of us, things that need curiosity, play, and courage to thrive.
What I Carry From Her Into My Own Work
I am honored to have spent time with Esther, and I feel proud of the way her influence shows up in the therapy work I do now. From her, I learned that connection is not an optional extra. It is central to how we heal.
She reminds me that shame shrinks in the presence of another person who sees us fully. That joy is not frivolous but necessary. That coming together, even imperfectly, is how we stitch ourselves back to life.
Final Thought
Esther Perel’s work is not just about couples therapy. It is about re-humanizing the ways we relate, the ways we love, and the ways we dare to seek pleasure in a complicated world.
And for me, she will always be the spark, the first person who made me think: “this is the kind of work I want to do. This is the kind of wisdom I want to embody.”
