On the first season of her eponymous podcast How’s Work? With Esther Perel, the renowned relationship therapist mused that “We take home to work, and we take work home.”

That was 2019. Two years and one global pandemic later, and those already fuzzy boundaries have blurred even further. “People who work remotely, they're not working from home,” Perel told Vanity Fair. “They are literally working with home. There is an immediate collapse of all their roles.”

As Perel explained, America’s work culture had already shifted to an “identity economy” pre-COVID. We’d come to view our work not only as a means of income, she said, but also a source of fulfillment, purpose, and community. Which made it all the more devastating when the workplace ceased to exist as we knew it, and all the more important to understand and cultivate the new ways we relate to one another.

The second season of How’s Work?, which premieres April 6 exclusively on Spotify, will explore the specific tensions, conversations, and challenges that arose between coworkers in 2020. As with the first season, each episode features a real therapy session between Perel and two anonymous individuals. But while the new season might have been recorded against the backdrop of the pandemic, Perel found that her patients didn’t necessarily want to discuss the health crisis directly. Rather, it acted as an almost invisible force, catalyzing other difficult conversations that had been bubbling under the surface and were suddenly exacerbated: about racism, inequality, money, gender, burnout, and more.

“They were often quite brave,” Perel said of her patients, who included co-founders, direct reports and managers, and same-level colleagues. “It's easier when you bring your spouse or your boyfriend or your girlfriend, your partner in life. Then you have a kind of intrinsic motivation. But to bring your manager to have a difficult conversation about money, about gender, about race, about jealousy in the workplace, about why promotions sometimes trump friendships? These kinds of conversations in the context of everything that was going on was very, very powerful.”

Perel herself has felt a major shift in the way she practices therapy and the way she relates to her patients. Couples answer Zoom calls from bed; she’ll sometimes go on long walks while conducting a session. For the first time in her life, she doesn’t have an office, an experience she likens to being “a painter without a brush.” Said Perel, “I am myself in lockdown and I too experienced the isolation of being in a small room where I'm trying to have an opening to the world, through a conversation, right?”

Both of Perel’s podcasts—How’s Work? and Where Should We Begin?, which focuses on romantic couples—create that opening for listeners, inviting them to become a fly on the wall in her sessions and to take on the role of empathetic voyeurs to strangers’ problems. In the upcoming season, Perel speaks to a doctor on the brink of walking away from his profession, who is also struggling with the opacity of his wife’s mysterious government job. Then there’s the pair of lobbyists whose fight for racial equality ended up dividing them. And in what Perel describes as one of the season’s most important episodes, a newsroom of 75 journalists deals with unionization, a new editor-in-chief, and the stress of managing a breaking news cycle—all while working from home.

Listen to the exclusive trailer for season two of How’s Work? below.

The dynamics and topics discussed in each episode feel distinctive to each pair or group, but they always involve perennial themes. And considering that 31 percent of Americans have said their mental health has worsened during the pandemic, this opportunity for listeners to potentially hear similar dilemmas to their own play out in the lives of others—and hopefully gain a sense of clarity, solidarity, or empathy from that experience—feels more valuable than ever.

Perel is heartened that during a time of physical disconnect, she’s still been able to expand her reach and extend the benefits of her expertise to those who may not otherwise have access to mental health resources. “The podcast allows me to reach people all over the world, to democratize therapy to make it completely affordable. It's totally free, to make it accessible, to make it inclusive,” said Perel. “In that sense, virtual therapy really becomes ... a public health campaign, and the podcast a relational health campaign.”

As Americans prepare to transition into a vaccinated world, Perel finds that the idea of returning to the workplace has become a particular locus of stress and anxiety. However, she’s optimistic that a healthier, more supportive working environment might blossom sooner than we think, especially as conversations about mental health between colleagues are slowly being destigmatized. “My public speaking has so increased this year, by being asked by all kinds of companies to come and speak about mental and relational health in the workplace,” Perel said. “People turned to their employers, especially at a time when sometimes they didn't feel like they could trust government or medical institutions. The person they relied on was their employer. And those employers who understood that trust and empathy are key components at this moment of their leadership created a very different morale in their company.”

She also stresses that one of the keys to healing will require a cultural shift from an individualistic perspective to ”mass mutual reliance,” in which we become, as a society, more comfortable relying on one another and asking for help.

“When you face collective trauma, you respond with collective resilience, not individual resilience,” she said. “You need to rely on others and you need others who can rely on you. And [I’m] bringing in that notion of interdependence and mass mutual reliance as a major feature of mental health. It is the most important social connection. It is the most important factor to counter mental health issues. So that's not the only one, but it is the one that I know to promote.”

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