Why I write about intimacy . . .

Looking back, I can see that I have always written about relationships. In fact, I see the world in terms of how one thing relates to another. I decided to become a relationship therapist, specializing in couples. Those intimate relationships can both inflict our deepest pain and provide our most profound healing.

 
 

So I love intimacy! Except, of course, when I don’t.

What a dilemma —We long to be close, to be known and accepted by someone, and then when it happens we run, terrified, to hide. Who needs that kind of exposure? Evidently, most of us need to feel that deep connection with someone. It drives us, scares us, baffles us, and feeds us.

And that’s why I had to write about it. Not in some theoretical, professorial way, but in the way that I knew best—from my own experience in my own marriage to another couples therapist. The result? Invitation to Intimacy:  What the Marriage of Two Couples Therapists Reveals About Risk, Transformation, and the Astonishing Healing Power of Intimacy, available now from Et Alia Press.

Encounter the power of intimacy—thrilling, grueling, and profound—through the innermost workings of the 35-year relationship between two marriage therapists.

Much more than “just sex,” true intimacy flows from often-inadvertent invitations to be deeply known to another and whether to accept the invitations we’re offered. One of our strongest emotional desires is to feel understood, received, and loved in our closest relationships. Yet, to be known and to know another deeply, especially in the context of committed partnerships, we risk pain, loneliness, and betrayal. Is intimacy worth the risk? 

This candid memoir begins with a husband’s dramatic diagnosis and weaves marital flashbacks and counseling sessions into the progression of his disease. Despite their degrees, licenses, and the specialized knowledge they shared daily with their own clients, they faced the same challenges as everyone in a lasting relationship. What would sustain them through the darkest nights of their marriage? 

Through the everyday decisions and extraordinary movements that compose one marriage between two therapists, we see what is possible for every couple—the exhilarating, frightening, and ultimately healing power of accepting invitations to intimacy in our lives.

 

  • 2022 Nautilus Book Awards Winner/ Relationships & Communication

  • 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Silver Winner Relationships/ Sexuality

  • 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist Relationships

Praise for Invitation to Intimacy

  • “The drive for intimacy is real; it evolved. And this page-turner shows how a partnership can grow, indeed thrive, under extreme circumstances. It’s a powerful read—vivid, humane and tragic, yet charming. Tiesel-Jensen is a savvy therapist. I got wise tips for my own partnership!”

    —Helen Fisher, Ph.D., The Anatomy of Love, TED All-Star, Match.com Senior Scientific Advisor, Senior Research Fellow, Kinsey Institute

  • “An instantly engaging, deeply appealing, honest, and highly readable look at how we conduct ourselves in our most important intimate relationships. Judy Tiesel-Jensen moves seamlessly from personal self-disclosure to professional lessons learned. The result is a memoir that reads like a novel, with a psychologist’s discernment at its core.”

    —Judith Warner, New York Times bestselling author and Domestic Disturbances columnist, author of And Then They Stopped Talking To Me: Making Sense of Middle School

  • “Tiesel-Jensen effectively weaves lessons from her practice as a marriage counselor into her personal remembrance, which she conveys with thoughtfulness and delicacy. . . . [T]he author wears her professional learning lightly; this isn’t an academic study weighed down by technical jargon, but a self-analysis that’s written in a lucid, accessible style. An astute, forthcoming account of the heights and depths of emotional closeness.”

    —Kirkus Reviews

  • “Invitation to Intimacy is luminous. It is an emotion-laden, practical, yet profound exploration of trust, intimacy, love, sexuality, and commitment, even in the face of death, from the vantage point of a devoted and ever-questioning partner in a long-term marriage (in which she and her partner just happened to be couples therapists). Within each chapter, Tiesel-Jensen seamlessly time-travels through her husband’s midlife battles with Stage IV cancer, provides essential lessons via marital-therapy vignettes from their careers, and conveys impactful insights about the history of their courtship and marriage. This wondrous journey gifts readers with a marvelous sense of the potential for deeper intimacy in core relationships at any stage of their development. Top recommendation; five stars!”

    —Stephen Hinshaw, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley; Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UC San Francisco; and award-winning author of the memoir Another Kind of Madness: A Journey through the Stigma and Hope of Mental Illness

“This is the bravest book on marriage that you will ever read from a therapist. It’s the story of the author’s own marriage, with high peaks and low valleys, intermingled with the stories of her clients. You will not think of intimacy in the same way after reading this remarkable book.”

—William J. Doherty, Ph.D., Professor of Family Social Science, University of Minnesota, author of Take Back Your Marriage: Sticking Together in a World That Pulls Us Apart

“If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in the minds and hearts—and kitchens and bedrooms—of therapists, especially those married to each other, read Judy Tiesel-Jensen’s Invitation To Intimacy. Even more than that, it’s about people reaching within to bring out the best in themselves and how intimate relationships can facilitate that. We’ve been co-therapists, and she believed for our clients that intimacy heals.”

—Resmaa Menakem, LICSW, founder of Somatic Abolitionism and author of Rock the Boat, My Grandmother’s Hands, and Monsters in Love

“We don’t often get a private glimpse into the intimate life of a marriage and family therapist. In this beautifully written and deeply touching memoir we are given that chance. Dr. Tiesel-Jensen takes us into the hearts, souls, and struggles of a long-term marriage and the kinds of challenges and rewards that two people face as they answer the invitation into a deepening intimacy. With a writing style that captures and compels, this book will inspire readers to garner the courage to face the personal and interpersonal challenges that will open the door to a wondrous depth of love. There are many inspiring lessons to be gleaned in this revelatory memoir and I highly recommend it.”

—Chelsea Wakefield, Ph.D., LCSW, couples therapist and author of The Labyrinth of Love: The Path to a Soulful Relationship

“Dr. Tiesel-Jensen’s book is an extraordinary triple threat: a wildly engaging memoir, a graduate-level course in interpersonal relationships for lay people, and an incredibly helpful text for couples’ therapists. The fact that she made the book compelling reading for all three is a testament to her writing skills and her extraordinary life-experience. As one member of a long-standing intimate relationship between two mental health professionals, I can tell you that if you are interested in couples, you need to read this book!”

—G. Richard Smith, M.D., Distinguished Professor Emeritus Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

“This book will take your breath away with its honesty, passion, spirituality, and disarming intimacy and deliver you into the heart of an amazing long-term marriage. The two lovers believed that ‘relationships are life’: Their journey impels us as readers to pursue deeper intimacy and provides the hope that this pursuit will open our own marriages to much more love.”

—Susan Sims Smith, M.Div., LCSW, Jungian psychotherapist and Episcopal priest

“Get ready for an intriguing structure that makes this book unlike any other on this topic: a very personal couples memoir intimately written with exquisite vulnerability and unprecedented honesty; a scholarly graduate marriage and family therapy teaching book; and a powerful integration of the two that brings the personal and professional together, making the complexity of couple dynamics understandable.”

—Noel Larson, Ph.D., psychologist at Meta Resources and coauthor of Incestuous Families: An Ecological Approach to Understanding and Treatment

“Judy Tiesel-Jensen brings the laser-pointer empathy she demonstrates in person to this memoir of marriage and loss, revealing how much she understands about how we all sometimes suffer. From a cliff-hanger opening to the final tender scenes, Invitation to Intimacy is a relatable book that the reader will not soon forget. It is a book for couples, for other marriage and family therapists, and for anyone who feels the urge to write her own story. Why, after all, do any of us write memoirs? To preserve those feelings? To ask the universe for forgiveness? To be remembered when no one who knew us is still alive? For all of those reasons, Judy Tiesel-Jensen has shown us that love doesn’t die.”

—Elizabeth Findley Shores, author of Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger and other biographies

“This book has both the clarity and the inspiration to transform the lives of every couple wanting greater intimacy. There are many books on this subject, but Tiesel-Jensen’s powerful story provides by far the simplest and deepest ‘change tools’ for close relationships.”

—Wynford Dore, researcher and author of Stop Struggling in School

Press and Publications

 

Dr. Judy Tisel-Jensen shares 30+ years of couples relationship advice as a YourTango expert through regular article contributions on YourTango.com. READ NOW.

“Couple’s Therapist Dr. Judy Tiesel-Jensen celebrates love, trust, commitment” by Susan Peterson. February 2022 issue of 501 Life Magazine.