Am I Being Gaslit? Follow Up

Note from Jesse Baker, executive producer of Where Should We Begin?

One of the things that makes an Esther Calling different from a Where Should We Begin? session is that each conversation begins with a single question. Or at least that is the hope.

Before we record anything, we spend time with each caller trying to distill what they’re really wrestling with into a question that can be explored in a single conversation. The calls themselves are often much longer than what you eventually hear, sometimes close to ninety minutes. Instead of trying to untangle an entire relationship, Esther follows one thread, trusting that if you stay with it long enough, it often leads somewhere much deeper.

(If you are a close listener, you already know I have a favorite part of this process. We spend all this time helping shape the question, and then Esther has an uncanny ability to reveal that the session isn’t actually about that question at all. Somewhere along the way, she uncovers the one that was hiding underneath. That’s the magic of Esther Perel, I think.)

I’ve often thought that’s what makes these sessions so extraordinary.

People rarely leave with the same question they walked in with.

The real transformation isn’t that they finally get an answer. It’s that they begin asking a different question altogether.

That’s one of the reasons I think Esther’s work is so powerful to listen to. Change is usually something we recognize in hindsight. We hear someone say, “I’m different now,” months or years after the fact. But every so often, Esther creates the conditions where you can actually hear someone changing in real time. You can almost pinpoint the moment when they begin to see themselves—and their life—a little differently.

This episode has always felt like one of the clearest examples of that.

When this caller reaches Esther, she’s asking whether she’s being gaslit or whether she’s simply too sensitive. She isn’t looking for permission to leave. If anything, she’s trying to convince herself that she can stay. She loves him. She believes he’s a good person. She keeps searching for a way to make the relationship make sense.

Esther never tells her to leave. Instead, she helps her trust something she’d slowly stopped trusting: her own experience.

Six months later, we reached back out to the caller. What strikes me isn’t only that she ended the relationship. It’s the sound of her voice. She speaks with an ease and confidence that wasn’t there before. She can remember what was beautiful about the relationship without questioning the decision she made to leave it. The woman who once doubted, now describes opening the door, feeling the air hit her face, and knowing she’d made the right decision.

That’s what makes this follow-up so moving for me. It’s not just the story of someone leaving. It’s the story of finding ourselves again.

Over the coming weeks on Where Should We Begin?, we’ll be asking some of the biggest questions people bring into therapy. And don’t be surprised if you find yourself leaving those sessions with very different questions than you started with.

Always,

JB