Last month the universe gave me a gift. I’d planned a trip to New York City in 2024 to run a half marathon in Brooklyn in April 2025. Raceday happened to fall on the same weekend as Sessions Live 2025.
Sessions is Esther Perel’s brand for her professional training programs. I went to Sessions Live in 2018 and 2019; they were great. Sessions Live went dormant along with everything else for the world’s intermission in 2020. Sessions Live returned in 2025.
600 therapists, coaches, Esther fans, and a dentist joined hundreds more online to talk about “Mating in the Meta Crisis” at Sessions Live this year. I was one of them. We heard from CEOs, professors, social workers, therapists, and more on a variety of topics. One in particular illustrated how the amalgamation of algorithms, one-button shares, and likes drove us all “to the bottom of the brain stem” via social media. It’s the phone or “the fetish” as Esther aptly called them that are the gateway to our most basic and reactive selves.
What can I do to stem the tide of societal polarization that is monetizing our reptilian brains? Thinking Like a Therapist.
Psychotherapists are trained to work with as many people as we can. We’re trained to listen. We’re trained to suspend the self and only to inject it when it’s helpful for the person in front of us. We hold difficult emotions. We discern the difference between our feelings and yours. These skills and more are an antidote to the polarization that plagues us all in 2025.
I’ll be focusing my business efforts on Thinking Like a Therapist as well as two other themes this year, I’ll also be working with Creative Relationships for Straight People and Models of Masculinity. This’ll be fun.
Love y’all,
-C
