This week, I want to bring something different to you.

We talk about grief in the sessions with couples.

We talk about grief and aliveness in the sessions with the individuals in the Esther callings.

But I wanted to actually have a conversation about grief itself,

about this most complex emotion that can regulate an entire relationship,

especially when it is acute or completely repressed.

And I thought about it because I was hosting a clinical conference actually called Sessions Live on mating in the Metacrisis.

So in this conference, I wanted to go back to the origins of my thinking about the erotic.

And something that is not always so obvious is that so much of my work on

eroticism actually mines itself in my work on grief and loss and trauma. And to have even a more

developed thinking and approach to the subject of grief, I wanted to invite one of the people that I've learned from the most in this area, and that's Julia Samuel, who is a British psychologist who has written a seminal work, actually, called Grief Works, in which she really developed an entire approach of dealing with grief, acknowledging the grief, expressing the grief,

putting the grief aside, if possible at all, to re-engage with life, to experience this yin-yang

between loss and new birth or new experiences. So you'll hear me present some of the origins of my thinking in this conference.

And then I invite Julia Samuel to really bring in that complementary piece.

It's wanting to know that we need to be able to reconnect with creativity,

with playfulness, with imagination,

the essential ingredients of the erotic that help us stay connected to life.

But what Julia is highlighting is that if you don't grief,

you actually cut the lifeline to anything that will then enable you to feel alive again.

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