Two Conversations Esther Wants You To Hear From Sessions Live

0:00This whole summer we have been talking about friendship. Friendship in its many, many stages. But this one is different. Because this is when you work with friends. When you manage to collaborate with them, to co-create with them. When you kind of expand the relationship from friendship into artistic or psychotherapeutic, I would even say, collaboration. and that's when I thought of inviting my friend Paul Brody who is a psychiatrist originally from South Africa with whom I have collaborated in conducting relationship retreats with couples and individuals and I love working with him but there is something very special when you work with someone who is also a friend it's like playing different kinds of music together at the same time So I invited Paul Brody, who usually practices in New York City, to be a presenter at my annual clinical conference, Sessions Live, to speak about the healing power of pleasure and to tell his story.

1:07And I won't say a word about it because it was so gripping that I just really thought you all should discover it as well. So I invite you to listen to Dr. Paul Brody.

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2:37Hi everybody. So I wanted to say, first of all, thank you. And I'm talking to you. And I don't mean the people next to you. I mean you. Thank you for listening. Because if you didn't listen, my voice and my words are completely meaningless. And that's for all of you at home as well. Thank you. When I was four years old, I was playing with a kid on the beach, and my mother turned to my father, apparently, so she told me, and said, he's going to be gay one day. And my father said, oh, don't be ridiculous, how can you tell? And she said, I just think he is. Mothers know. I only wish she had told me.

3:34If she had told me, it would have saved me years of not knowing, worrying that there was something wrong with my body because it didn't do the things that I thought it was supposed to. I grew up in a house where we talked about everything. Politics, religion, cancer, death, the brutality of the government, but never about sex. And that omission communicated volumes. I was raised in South Africa, where the apartheid system enforced the binary, black and white, heterosexual and deviant, moral and immoral. My father was a human rights lawyer, and my mother an oncologist, and the bookshelves in their study were filled with law reports and with medical textbooks.

4:29And I was drawn to them. Afternoons, I would sneak into the study with my heart racing, afraid someone was watching. And beneath the cover of a green book, which was called Ionizing Radiation in the Treatment of Cancer, was really a book about the history of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, the ANC. And just seeing those three letters, ANC, made my stomach clench. That book was banned, and the possession of it was punishable. Belonging to the ANC meant prison, like it did for Nelson Mandela. And in prison, some people were tortured, and some were killed by the police. Another book on the shelf was called Good Times, Bad Times.

5:24It was a novel by James Kirkwood, and it held the only description of gay sex I had ever encountered. and I returned to it repeatedly. Terrified and transfixed, I wasn't yet ready to confront what it revealed in me. When I was 18, my parents hosted a lunch, and one of the guests was a friend of theirs who was a South African lawyer who had moved to the U.S. She was now a judge, and I heard her speaking about her city in America. I love my city, she said. We have neighbors from around the world. Everyone speaks a different language. There are gay people. Gay people. I heard it, and I stopped listening.

6:12I now knew that if I wanted to meet a gay man, there was only one place I had to go. Boston.

6:29So, I went to Boston, and I confirmed my mother's prediction from the beach all those years earlier. When I was 25, I'd finished medical school, and I was doing an internship in internal medicine at Baraguanath Hospital in Soweto. when I found a lump in my left armpit. I was sent for a biopsy, and two weeks later the surgeon called me and said, I want to talk to you, and I went to meet with him. And he said, Paul, my boy, I know you're gay, and I know that you've just returned from the United States. So when you were under anesthetic, I decided to test you for HTLV3. And I'm sorry to tell you, but the results have come back positive.

7:19HTLV3 would later be renamed HIV. At that time, there was no AIDS in South Africa, and I knew how many young men were dying in America. The doctor, in giving me that diagnosis, had given me a death sentence, and I was plunged into the fear of dying and a fight for survival. The philosopher Martin Buber speaks of two ways of being for the human being. The first he calls the I-it relationship with life, in which we view others as objects and life feels ordinary and routine. We go through the motions as we do most of the time every day. And then he talks about the I-thou relationship. and that is where we view the world with awe, where we are fully present to the connection that we have with others, where we're in touch with the miraculous and the mysterious of life.

8:26And in the moment of the diagnosis, I was thrust into an I-thou relationship with my own life. It wasn't the detached, objectifying I-it, but the fully present sacred encounter with my life. And life was asking me a question. Do you want to live? And my answer in every cell of my body was yes. So as a very young doctor, I pursued my lifelong dream. I gave up being a doctor and I went to drama school in London. I thought if I was going to die, I'd rather die an actor than a doctor.

9:11Drama school was a huge experience of aliveness. Singing, acting, stage combat. But I kept my diagnosis a secret. It was too frightening and too shameful to speak. After some years, I found my way back to a residency in psychiatry. I gave up acting. And my first placement was in an AIDS unit. And I heard other doctors speak about AIDS patients, saying things like, oh, I'd never share a glass with one of them. They say you can't catch it that way, but I never would. Or HIV. He's a goner. And then I heard an American physician presenting a patient with AIDS using an American medical term that I had never heard in South Africa.

10:00This is a 28-year-old SHPOZ. SHPOZ, S-H-P-O-S. it stood for sub-human piece of shit.

10:15Amazing the power of story. That was like 30 years ago and it's right here. The doctors had no idea that I was the them they were referring to. I was the spaz. As a trainee in psychotherapy, I saw a young man who worked in a different hospital from mine, but he'd come across my records, and he found out that I was HIV positive, and he used this information to threaten me. Each week, he would ask me how it would feel if he told my supervisors. For some reason, he needed to be sadistic with me, but I couldn't tell anyone. I couldn't tell my supervisors because it was a secret, and I couldn't stop seeing him because he might then tell someone.

11:04By 1994, my T-cells were dangerously low and I wondered whether the secrecy was beginning to cause me as much illness as the HIV itself could. Thinking back on that now, Maya Angelou's words really resonate. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. And it began to dawn on me that living in secrecy kept me alone and in survival mode. And healing doesn't come from trying to survive. It comes from being in connection. So in 1994, I gave a talk at the American Psychiatric Association Conference on being an HIV-positive psychiatrist. I came out as HIV-positive. and it felt urgent for me that other doctors knew that there were those of us doctors living with HIV and that we were not subhuman and that we had loving partners and that we were part of communities and that while I might be dying, I was very much alive.

12:12And this talk, thank you, freed me from the tyranny of secrecy. It allowed me to get the supervision I needed as well and to deal with the sadism of that young patient. And in active pursuit of aliveness, I took many workshops and experiences. I did the EST training, the advocate experience. I went to healing circles with Marianne Williamson. I did energy work and rolfing. I learned Buddhist meditation and hypnotherapy. I spent time alone in a canyon in Utah having interactions with the non-human world. and I also took medications that began to save my life. And then in 1995, I attended a weekend workshop at the Body Electric School founded by sexologist Joseph Kramer in the early 80s.

13:08And Kramer had had a, he'd seen, he'd had a vision of what was coming and he developed a school of massage and he knew that gay men were going to need to learn how to have pleasure and how to have sex that was connected but that wasn't going to kill each other. And the workshop he designed was called Celebrating the Body Erotic. And the weekend started with a group of men standing in a circle, first invited to breathe together and then to speak to one another in a set of structured exercises and to look into one another's eyes. and after several hours, erotic touch was layered into the workshop.

13:52And the whole point of the workshop was learning how to harness sexual energy as a source of healing energy for the whole body. And in the Body Electric course, erotic aliveness was taught as a portal to pleasure and a portal to connection and a portal to spiritual transcendence. Every body, no matter how stigmatized, is capable of pleasure. We are wired for it. Don Shuey, who's a therapist here in New York, has written a book called Daddy Lover God. He described the body electric weekend. And I quote, In the body electric circle, I felt like a newborn infant, parting my eyelids for the first time.

14:42I felt vulnerable, defensive, curious, nervous, giggly, judged, and unexpectedly compassionate. To put my hand on another man's chest and feel his heartbeat while I looked into his eyes, I had to be awake and alert. To allow someone to see me and touch me, I had to trust. I had to open the door and invite someone in. The Body Electric workshop culminated with an extended communal ritual of erotic massage, ending with what the Taoist master Mantak Chia calls the Big Draw, in which everyone on cue took a deep breath together and exhaled. Three deep breaths, and then on the final one, clenching every muscle in the body tight, the butt, the belly, the hands, the feet, before letting go.

15:37And with carefully chosen music, that exhale led to huge emotional releases for the participants. Sobbing, wailing, expressions of pure joy. Don Shuey writes, I felt like I was experiencing my own death. I began to cry, grieving over my lack of generosity to myself. and that inevitably connected with a seemingly bottomless pool of grief over friends who have died of AIDS. Surprisingly, opening one's body to feel full pleasure also opened up one's access to grief. And each of these experiences that I had during those difficult times have accompanied me through my work ever since and my life. So while I don't work physically or erotically with people, I do work to remind people of their aliveness.

16:34And that their relationships with me, with themselves, with one another, are not a problem to be solved. A relationship is an adventure to be lived. And I want to offer you one practical tool that I found useful to give clients to take home with them. And you can take it home with you. And it's called the three-minute game, designed by Body Electric teacher and sexological body worker Betty Martin. It's very simple. Two people take turns in asking one another two questions. First question, for your pleasure, what would you like me to do to you for three minutes? Second question, for your pleasure, what would you like to do to me for three minutes?

17:23Each answers and then they get to give each other what they've asked for. Nothing too elaborate can be done in three minutes. So requests are something like, for my pleasure for three minutes, would you please massage my feet? And then, for my pleasure for three minutes, could I caress your ears? The content is not the point. It's the asking that matters. The three-minute game teaches players to ask how to give, how to receive, how to say yes and no, how to clarify their desires, how to practice consent, how to differentiate between what is uncomfortable and what is truly unsafe, and to move from shame and isolation into connection.

18:13And between strangers, this exercise opens a door to authentic intimacy. But for couples who've lost sexual connection, this is an invitation for one another to join them in the erotic once again. It's not about performance, it's about presence and vulnerability and play and aliveness. And whether it's alone or with others, erotic pleasure can transition people from disconnection to connection. So what our world today has in common with the time of the AIDS epidemic is that people are terrified. Bodies are being vilified and stigmatized. Trans people's bodies are being treated with contempt. Immigrant bodies, women's bodies are being ascribed lesser value.

19:04People are afraid to tell their stories and to say what they're thinking and feeling. and as a result, people are going to die. Those of us who live through AIDS, whether in our bodies or not, have much to teach those living through this crisis that we find ourselves living in today. The AIDS epidemic taught us a few things. It taught us that stigma kills, not just metaphorically, but literally. Silence, secrecy, and shame isolate people from the care and love that they need. It taught us the power of community. When the world turned its back, queer people turned towards one another. We created networks of care.

19:48We learned to fight and to love at the same time. And while people were dying, we could be angry and joyful at the same time. It taught us that truth-telling matters, that naming what is happening clearly and boldly is a part of healing. and it taught us about embodiment, that even in the face of death, we can resist the pressure to collapse into despair. We can choose touch, connection, and pleasure. And that when we treat our bodies with reverence, when we honor sensation and touch and desire, we begin to heal. We reclaim what has been hidden. We soften survival patterns and we come into presence.

20:35and I want to leave you with a few suggestions. Breathe into your body and follow the aliveness and thank your body. Seek pleasure rather than abandon it. Practice the erotic as a way of knowing, not escaping your body. Gather and touch each other in loving ways while staying emotionally connected. consider that as a therapist or a coach, you are a leader, even if only for one person at a time. Lead your life with pleasure. Nobody can have access to your inner world if you don't give it to them. They cannot take our inner world away from us. Pleasure is not a luxury. It is our birthright, and it is medicine.

21:30And before ending, I want to say to you that I want to be really clear to be grateful for the ability to tell my story to you. The story I've told to you today could not be told by everyone. Everyone no longer has the right to tell their story. It's dangerous for some people. And in some places in the world, my story would be a reason that people would be killed. So I want to end with one last piece, which is that when I felt stigmatized and alone, I was surrounded one day at a workshop by a group of hospice workers, and they sang this song to me. How could anybody ever tell you you were anything less than beautiful?

22:17How could anyone ever tell you you were less than whole? How could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a miracle and how deeply you're connected to my soul. Thank you.

22:47Thank you.

22:53If you are new here or haven't been here in a bit, welcome to my office. For the whole month of July, I am offering you 20 % off for the annual and monthly subscriptions on Apple Podcasts. By joining my office hour subscription on Apple Podcasts, you'll get an ad-free version of these episodes. Plus, you will have access to my Apple channel. That includes the earliest seasons of the podcast, plus a clinical library of conversations with colleagues, coaches, and other therapists as well. We offer follow-ups with couples as well if knowing more about their stories is something that interests you and that you're curious about.

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23:49Support for Where Should We Begin comes from Quince. Hate to break it to you, but now that it's August, that means summer is almost over. For some of you, that might be a relief. Autumn means cooler weather, which also means it might be time to find some cozy cold weather staples. Enter Quince. Quince specializes in effortless, high-quality essentials, like ultra-soft organic cotton and premium Mongolian cashmere sweaters. They're beautifully tailored, built to last, and transition seamlessly from morning meetings to a nice dinner out. This summer, I've been wearing quite a bit of Quince linen.

24:27I love the European linen tank because it's light, comfortable, and goes with just about everything. And when the weather cools down, I'm looking forward to pulling my cashmere sweaters back out. They're the pieces I reach for year after year. Upgrade your everyday. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash begin. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash begin.

25:26e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Ball is here, and that means the pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. It's the one we've been waiting for. So whether you're a fan of the original pumpkin spice latte, or ready to mix it up with an iced pumpkin cream chai, the new iced pumpkin cream matcha, or the new iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso. You can find your favorite taste of fall only at Starbucks.

26:11I met psychotherapist and author Nedra Tawab at a recent gathering, an informal conference, so to speak. And I knew her work on boundaries, but I hadn't heard her present it in person. And when I heard her, I thought I would love to invite her to come and speak at Sessions Live, my own clinical conference that we held in New York just recently. Because what I really appreciated is that Nedra's work about boundaries is basically saying boundaries are not walls that you have to create. Boundaries are ways to be open without leaking. that boundaries is not about breaking up. Boundaries is about finding more suitable, appropriate ways to stay connected.

26:59And that redefinition has been so highly needed because, you know, words in the field of relationships come, they rise, they become enshrined, they become distorted, they change their meaning, they lose their essence. And then somebody comes along that kind of rehabilitates them with more nuance and more sophistication. And this is what Nedata Wab did in this very brief and very pointed talk about boundaries. Hello. Hi, everyone. So in 2020, just before Set Boundaries, Find Peace came out, my boundaries were tested, of course, right? I had a situation with a family member where I had to set a really hard boundary.

27:52After I set that boundary, they text me, have a nice life. I was like, ouch. I just, I wanted you to sleep somewhere else when you came to my house, maybe get a hotel. I didn't know that would end our relationship. And it did. When we talked about that again, they said, well, the reaction was because you set the boundary. And I thought, gosh, I wish they had my book so they can understand that the purpose of the boundary is to stay connected. It's not to end the relationship. It's so we can be in a relationship in a healthy way. Eventually we got there, but the initial reaction to hearing something that they did not like was, I'm out of here.

28:51Have any of you ever lost an important relationship because of a miscommunication about a boundary or even someone threatening to leave the relationship. I see one hand. Anyone else? Now, I'm going to ask you something very personal, and you can be honest if you want to. Have you ever felt the need to leave a relationship because someone set a boundary with you? Yeah, yeah. So, it happens on both sides. But here's the thing. Healthy boundaries are a way for us to connect. Who determines what a healthy boundary is. Sometimes it's like, you know, maybe you do, and sometimes it's talking to other people, it's figuring out, is this a rule that is punitive?

29:44Is this something that could further our relationship? In my situation, what I noticed was we argue a lot when we stay in the same space. So I think what could be healthier is maybe if we don't stay in the same space, we'll enjoy each other. So sometimes that explanation of why we have the boundary can be helpful. But many of us may decide, I don't want to accept your boundary. I will cut you off instead. And when we cut people off, we're saying we're ending a relationship because the rules of engagement should not apply to me. Boundaries do not have to mean endings. They are a continuation in a relationship.