Towards the tip of her life, America’s best-known intercourse therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer stopped speaking a lot about sexual dysfunction and began speaking about one other matter typically shrouded in disgrace: loneliness.
She had, she believed, the right credentials to tackle our ongoing loneliness epidemic. A German Jewish refugee whose mother and father died through the Holocaust, she had been divorced twice, after which widowed. Dr. Ruth understood loneliness.
However she additionally believed her coaching as a intercourse therapist helped her deal with the humiliation that loneliness may cause.
“No person is happy to confess they’re having problem within the bed room,” Dr. Ruth wrote in “The Joy of Connections,” her remaining ebook, which is able to publish on Sept. 3 — lower than two months after her death at 96. “No person is thrilled to admit they’ve too few dependable pals. Disgrace is the thread that connects them each, and disgrace is what I’ve all the time tried to assist individuals overcome.”
“The Joy of Connections” is, basically, an inventory of 100 methods for constructing stronger bonds, all formed by Dr. Ruth’s perception that loneliness is nothing to be ashamed of, and by her intolerance for wallowing.
“You may,” she insisted, “make the choice that being lonely is now not an possibility.”
“She’s all about company,” mentioned Allison Gilbert, one in all two authors with whom Dr. Ruth wrote her new ebook. “She’s all about taking steps to get to the place you wish to go, and never ready.”
