Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 785: The Meaning of Adult Attachment with Dr. Sue Johnson
Transcript
- 0:10Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gamiferson. My
- 0:14mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to be human,
- 0:19to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in who
- 0:23we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating authenticity,
- 0:28genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more about
- 0:33my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com. That's
- 0:38the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started, all right, Sue,
- 0:44here we go, so five four, three, two and one,
- 0:49our folks, welcome back to the podcast. I am thrilled to have my
- 0:52guest today, doctor Sue Johnson. Sue, welcome to the podcast. I'm
- 0:57so happy to be here. Thank you. Shu Johnson is a leading innovator
- 1:00in the field of couple therapy and adult attachment. She's a primary developer of
- 1:07emotionally focused Couples and Family Therapy or EFT, which is demonstrated its effectiveness in
- 1:12over thirty years of peer reviewed clinical research. She's the author of numerous books,
- 1:18including Hold Me Tight, The Hold Me Tight Workbook, and Love Sense,
- 1:23who's received numerous awards acknowledging her development of EFT, including the Apes Family
- 1:29Psychologists of the Year in twenty sixteen and the Order of Canada in twenty seventeen.
- 1:34All Right, Sue, welcome. Great to have you here. My
- 1:38gosh, obviously you're someone I've been wanting to have on this podcast forever,
- 1:44so it's really a thriller and an honor to have you joining me today.
- 1:48Hey, I'm delighted to be here. So before we get going, share
- 1:53with the listeners where you're from originally and where you are currently? You mean,
- 1:59now I am. I'm on the West coast of Canada in Victoria.
- 2:04It's raining and it will probably be raining for the next six months, but
- 2:09it's the most beautiful place to live in the world. And I'm Canadian.
- 2:15But our work is really international. We're teach in forty countries. It's gone
- 2:23all over the world. We have centers all over the world. We have
- 2:25ninety centers. Teach My Stuff and Hold Me Tight, which is the book
- 2:32for the public. I just can't believe it. It's just done it again.
- 2:37It's translated everywhere, and it seems to be helping couples around the world
- 2:45to create good relationships basically, I think because it actually gives a picture of
- 2:50what a good relationship looks like and how to actually get there, which in
- 2:54all our nonsense about relationships our present world, I think people are very hungry
- 3:00for that. So I'm all over the place, but I live here in
- 3:05the beautiful forests and the mountains and the sea in Victoria. Awesome. I'm
- 3:13really excited to get to talking about that. Amy said something that really struck
- 3:17me, you know, talking about relationships and how to get there. Well,
- 3:21we will get to that, But first, Sue, how did this
- 3:25start for you? How did this? That's obviously a passion I wanted.
- 3:30I really I want to hear how things started for you. Oh? Well,
- 3:36you know, I was doing my doctorate and I had very clear ideas.
- 3:40I knew, for example, that most of from my point of view,
- 3:44most of psychotherapy didn't use the most powerful thing in the room, which
- 3:50is emotion. Emotion is the core organizing feature that organizes puts together, structures
- 3:58your inner experience and the way you dance with others. And really, I
- 4:02think psychotherapy has been quite ambivalent about emotion. Most psychotherapy is about coping with
- 4:11it and seeing it as an enemy, and I was always very clear that
- 4:15it was powerful, that it was the heart of everything, and that the
- 4:20only way to get real change, not just a few symptoms here and there,
- 4:26real change, was to go into this emotion, understand it, and
- 4:29work with it. So I had biases, you know, I was Rogerian.
- 4:33I believed in non pathologizing and listening to people. I believe that people
- 4:39had very good reasons for what they did. I just had to find the
- 4:41logic and the order in that. So I had some biases. But basically
- 4:46I'd done almost every other kind of therapy, and I started working with couples
- 4:54and I found that I was completely ineffective, and so I thought, oh,
- 5:00oh, oh, oh, wait a minute. Then ah, right,
- 5:05So you know, you know, when you're a graduate student, you
- 5:08think everything is in the library if you can just find it. Well I
- 5:11went. I went all over the library and I read everything a love marriage
- 5:16and it was all rubbish. Okay, it didn't help me at all.
- 5:21And people said, oh, you teach your couple's communication skills. Well,
- 5:27the trouble with that is you can only use them when you're not all hot
- 5:29under the collar and freaked out of your mind, right, so it doesn't
- 5:31really work. So I just got desperate and decided to tape all my sessions.
- 5:40My sweet couples allowed me to, and I became this maniac. I
- 5:46was. I was a maniac graduate student. Okay, I was. I
- 5:48was gone. Okay, I was. I became this maniac graduate student watching
- 5:56tapes again and again and again, and it was az like it. It
- 6:01became very clear to me that, of course there's a structure to relationships.
- 6:05Of course there's a structure to our emotions and how we communicate. And look,
- 6:11you can see these patterns, and you can see that some patterns lead
- 6:15people into desperation and loneliness and isolation and anger and shut down. And there
- 6:23are other patterns that lead people out into more openness, more balance, more
- 6:29connection. And I started working with these patterns. Okay, let me pleasure
- 6:35it there. So get specific. What do you mean patterns of emotion that
- 6:40lead people out? Give me an example. Well, for example, if
- 6:44you look at most distressed couples in North America, particularly couples that are working
- 6:48with trauma, and we see over the years, I've seen many, many,
- 6:51many couples working with trauma. Okay, if you look at them,
- 6:56in North America. Mostly what they're caught in is what we call blame withdraw.
- 7:01One person is getting angry and saying, you don't talk to me,
- 7:05where are you? What's wrong with you? How come you don't do this?
- 7:09The other person is defending and shutting down. The more they shut down,
- 7:13the angrier the other person gets. I mean, that's a very simple
- 7:15way to describe it. But if you look, you can look at that
- 7:19a thousand ways communication skills. I wouldn't do that. I'm an attachment theorist.
- 7:26I believe in attachment science, which is in the last twenty years has
- 7:30basically told us who we are very clearly, and I think you need that
- 7:33as a guide to any kind of good therapy. And what attachment says is
- 7:39yes, on one level, this is about your irritation and shut down,
- 7:46but actually, if you really listen, if you really listen, there's desperate
- 7:51emotional priorities going on there where one person is really saying. If you really
- 7:57understand attachment, one person is saying, where are are you? Where are
- 8:00you? Are you? Where are you? I'll force you to respond to
- 8:03me where are you? Where are you? Because if you don't respond,
- 8:07I don't matter. I'm alone and we don't have a relationship, and I'm
- 8:11massively unsafe because I'm a bonding, social human being and I need to know
- 8:18you respond to me. That's my main survival que in the world. And
- 8:22so I'm screaming, where are you? But it doesn't sound like that.
- 8:24It sounds like you never right, And the other person is saying, I'm
- 8:31rejected, I'm not wanted, I'm a failure. I can't do this.
- 8:33I'm overwhelmed. I don't know what to do. I'll just hunker down.
- 8:37I'll hunker down. I'll hunker down and wait for it to stop. I'll
- 8:41shut her out. I'll shut down. And of course, the more that
- 8:43person shuts down, the more alone and desperate the other person feels. If
- 8:48you are dealing with trauma at the same time, I invite you to think
- 8:54about the fact that what attachment science says is that emotional isolation is iatrogenic for
- 9:01human beings. We're not wired for it. We can't do it. Basically,
- 9:05we're lousy at it. But if you add a few demons in there
- 9:11emotional isolation and you feel helpless, your main survival code is to call for
- 9:18others and have them come and no one's coming. You're all alone. If
- 9:22you also have some demons in the room that are hijacking your brain, that
- 9:26are telling you the whole world is dangerous, that are telling you that there's
- 9:30no solution to this vulnerability, well then you're in a total existential pickle and
- 9:39you do really desperate things like as I told the Canadian Army, and they
- 9:46basically believe me, which was great. As I told the Canadian Army,
- 9:52they said, well, we don't want to as we want you to help
- 9:54us with our families, because we don't our soldiers to commit suicide. I
- 9:58said, do you understand that, I think in those days, I don't
- 10:03know what it is now, eighty percent of our soldiers commit suicide in the
- 10:07two weeks after their partner has left them. And do you understand that you
- 10:11set up their partner leaving them. And of course these guys looked at me
- 10:18like I was a lemon. Okay, I said, you don't help them.
- 10:24You don't even help the partners understand that the man who goes away on
- 10:30deployment is not necessarily the man who comes back. You don't help the partner
- 10:35know how to respond. You know, the partner just says, who are
- 10:39you? This nice guy went on deployment and now you're like freaked out,
- 10:48you know, a hyper hyper sensitive, angry or numb. Who the hell
- 10:52are you? You know? And of course nobody helps. So the best
- 10:58predictor of recovery from trauma by far, and this is a lot of what
- 11:03I say sounds like opinion, Please believe me, it's not. Its research.
- 11:09The best predictor of recovery from trauma is a secure connection with another person
- 11:13that you can turn to that gives you a safe haven, secure base.
- 11:18And we knew that with couples. We work with trauma couples for years.
- 11:26Recently, I've gone into the field of individual therapy. We do e FIT
- 11:31emostly focused individual therapy. A primer came out last year, the primer in
- 11:35e FIT, and we focus a lot, a lot on trauma because even
- 11:41though I've been known as a couple's therapist, I and my colleagues have always
- 11:46seen traumatized individuals. For me, particularly war vets, but also particularly complex
- 11:54PTSD, where people have been so abused in their childhood good that it isn't
- 12:01just a wound, you know, trauma comes from the Latin word to wound.
- 12:05It isn't just a wound. It's a wound that has interfered with their
- 12:11basic ability to develop any kind of balanced sense of self, any kind of
- 12:16competent sense of self, any ability to regulate their emotions. It's interfered with
- 12:20those developmental processes. So as they go through life, they're caught, and
- 12:26we call it the trauma trap. They're caught in not knowing how to regulate
- 12:35their overwhelming emotion because PTSD is basically an emotional disorder. That's what it is.
- 12:41Not knowing how to regulate their overwhelming emotions and doing it in dysfunctional ways
- 12:48that then make everything worse and feedback into the trauma. You know, addiction
- 12:52is one of them. But you know this is a trap. The way
- 12:58you protect yourself because you've never really had any balanced, safe place to learn
- 13:05about who you are and to learn how to befriend your emotions and deal with
- 13:09them and order them and use them as a compass. The way you protect
- 13:15yourself becomes a prison which feeds right back into your trauma. And you know
- 13:20that's what happens with distressed couples, the way they protect themselves. You know,
- 13:24getting angry. Shutting down feeds right back into how alone they both feel
- 13:28and how desperate they both feel, and their negative behaviors. Right, So
- 13:33let me see jump in here for a second. So you know you were
- 13:37talking about you provide an example of the couple in the room and them kind
- 13:43of talking and kind of getting angry and maybe yelling, going back and forth,
- 13:50and you said something, you said, you know, some people this
- 13:52could be viewed many ways. One could view it as an imperfect communication and
- 14:00we need to adjust how they're communicating. And I thought that was really interesting.
- 14:05And then you you looked at it through the ef T lens. But
- 14:09when you're working with a couple and you're looking at them with this ef T
- 14:15lens, I'm curious, was you know what attracted them in the first place.
- 14:22Was it their kind of need for each other's the way they dealt with
- 14:31their own emotions, you know, like they needed that other person. But
- 14:35now here they are, maybe several years down the road, and it's that
- 14:39exactly that's causing them to have this kind of difficulty and so forth. Now,
- 14:46I don't think of it like that. I think of it that we
- 14:50all have the same attachment tells us. We all have the same basic needs
- 14:54and fears as human beings. We all need to connect. We all need
- 15:00to know that if we call, someone will come, someone who sees us,
- 15:03who cares about us, who were important to We all need to know.
- 15:07So falling in love is kind of a you know, sexual attractions very
- 15:13useful, but falling in love is sort of a universal thing that we all
- 15:18do seeking this emotional connection with another human being. And then I think you're
- 15:24in a dance and you're playing emotional music, and maybe you've never even seen
- 15:33what a good relationship looks like. You don't even know what a good relationship
- 15:37looks like. You're just you're just playing the emotional music, you know,
- 15:41and you hurt each other and you alienate each other, and things go wrong
- 15:46and you get stuck, and we all get stuck. We all get stuck
- 15:50in relationships, we all get stuck in life, in dealing with our basic
- 15:58overwhelming vulnerability. You know, we don't We have brains that don't like uncertainty
- 16:04and unpredictability and no solution vulnerability. So we're always seeking ways out of that.
- 16:14So I think it's just kind of a natural thing. I think that
- 16:17the thing that distresses me a bit is that even though hold Me Tight is
- 16:21so successful and we have hold Me Tight, we have the hold Me Tight
- 16:25online program ww dot hold Me Tight Online that you can do in your own
- 16:30home with your partner, and it's used all over the world. Even so,
- 16:34I think people are starving for connection. In our world. We're lonelier
- 16:40and lonelier and more and more depressed. And really, as far as I'm
- 16:45concerned, we should be teaching attachment in school. We should be looking at
- 16:51building, teaching kids in school how to build communities, how to reach for
- 16:56each other, how to support each other, and we should be showing pictures
- 17:00of what a good relationship looks like. And if you look at our world,
- 17:04my goodness, me, most eleven year old kids get exposed to pawn
- 17:11Mike, are you kidding? And this is when they're impressionable as hell.
- 17:17You know, it's not about misinformation. It's about, from my point of
- 17:21view as a relationship orientated therapists, it's about toxic lies. And people are
- 17:27saying, tell me what a good relationship looks like, tell me how to
- 17:32get there, and instead we give them oh things like well, you can't
- 17:38have good sex if you're very familiar with somebody. This is nonsense, This
- 17:42is a lie. The research says the opposite. But the people who have
- 17:45the best sex of the people who are happy in long term relationships. So
- 17:49you know, there's so much rubbish out there. We just get confused and
- 17:53lost, and then we talk about that. What does a good work I
- 17:56mean, obviously there are many examples, but what does a good relationship look
- 18:03like? What does a healthy relationship look like? It's a secure bond,
- 18:07a secure bond, which and all the research says, if you have a
- 18:12secure bond, even with just one person, you are more resilient to trauma,
- 18:18you are more resilient to stress, You are healthier, you feel better
- 18:22about yourself, you have a more competent sense of who you are you.
- 18:26I mean, it goes on and on and on. It's associated with every
- 18:30mental health, good, good thing that you can imagine. Okay, but
- 18:36what it basically looks like? And we do it in our therapy. We
- 18:41create these what we call hold me tight conversations. We help people show how
- 18:47they freak each other out and how they get stuck in these negative patterns,
- 18:51and then we blame the pattern, not them. We say, oh,
- 18:55you're both caught up in this dance, and for very good reasons. And
- 18:59then they start to see the pattern and they start to not demonize each other.
- 19:03Then when there's a certain sense of safety and balance, we go in
- 19:07and we help them take risks. And what it basically means hold me tight
- 19:11conversation is that you feel safe enough with another person that you can go in
- 19:18and touch your emotions, your vulnerability, and you can go in and make
- 19:26sense of it, and you can share that you can reach to the other
- 19:32person in a way that pulls that person close to you. All right,
- 19:37let's just pause here for a second to thank our sponsors. All Right,
- 19:42we are back. So, you know, the woman who's screaming and yelling
- 19:48at her partner, and he's got PTSD, so when she screams and yells
- 19:53at him, he's absolutely on the ceiling. She's screaming and yelling at her
- 19:59partner. She's able, in our therapy and in the hobby type conversations to
- 20:06turn and say to him, well, I do scream at you. I
- 20:11do. I get so desperate. I'm so desperate. I feel so alone
- 20:18here. I feel like I've lost you already, that you don't need me,
- 20:22and you don't see me, and I get so scared. I don't
- 20:26know what to do, so I scream and yell at you and get mad
- 20:30and I don't know what to do. I'm just so scared. And her
- 20:34partner, who's never heard this. Sometimes the partner needs help to like what
- 20:41why? Who? Are you right? Right? But the partner is like,
- 20:47if we've done a job right? The partner is moved open and says,
- 20:52I don't want you to be scared. I didn't know you felt that
- 20:56way. I don't want you to be scared. What do you need?
- 21:00And you know we're basic as human beings. The woman bursts into tears and
- 21:03says, I need to know I matter to you, And he weeps,
- 21:11and he says, the reason I shut down so quickly is because you're the
- 21:15most important thing in the world to me, and you matter so much.
- 21:18If you translate this into individual therapy for trauma, often what you will find
- 21:26us doing in therapy, and I've talked about this in the primer for if
- 21:32It, you will see us going in and helping the adult competent person who's
- 21:41in the session with you, who the therapist has resourced and helped to feel
- 21:45strong, going in and talking to the traumatized child, you know, and
- 21:52doing the same thing like my latest warvet, I remember saying to him,
- 21:57So all this terrible shaming, terrible things you say to yourself really started at
- 22:04twelve. At eleven, can you see an little eleven year old towel?
- 22:10And first of all, he's in his head. He doesn't want to go
- 22:11there, he says. No, therapists are stupid. They're always persuading me
- 22:15to think something else when what I think is true. Okay, I understand,
- 22:19can you see an little eleven yeold? Nevertheless, can you see a
- 22:22little eleven year old towel? I want him on an emotional level because there
- 22:26I can move him. And he says, no, I can't see him.
- 22:30No I don't I don't see his face. He's a ghost. No,
- 22:33I can't see him. Will we move and walk and walk around so
- 22:36you can't see him? Oh? I think I can see him. It
- 22:41seems to me he's you know, so gradually, gradually I say can you
- 22:45see an little eleven year old time he says yes, I can see him.
- 22:48I say, okay, so here he is. He's he's scared and
- 22:53he's and he's trying so hard to please his father and his brother and his
- 23:00mother, and they all want different things. And he's lost, and he's
- 23:03scared, and he doesn't fit in, and he's lost, and he's telling
- 23:08himself what these dreadful things? He's a traitor and he's disgusting. Right,
- 23:15What doesn't a little eleven year old tell feel? And this great big guy
- 23:22who's resisted me for ten sessions and told you have to work to resist me
- 23:26for ten sessions, believe me. So, and this great big guy who's
- 23:30resisted me for ten sessions stops, Thank goodness, he doesn't say, I'm
- 23:37in a deep existential crisis. You don't seem to understand. Yes, I
- 23:40understand. Let's go and look at a little eleven year old tel Finally he
- 23:44stops, and he says he feels sad. I say, yes, he
- 23:51feels sad. And we stay there and we walk around in that, and
- 23:56I say, what would you like to do to help him? So I
- 24:00don't know nobody ever helped him. I don't because self compassion for this man
- 24:07is like foreign. He doesn't even know what it looks like. Okay,
- 24:11so he beats himself up all the time. Finally he says what people always
- 24:15say, we're so, we're a human family. Okay, there's a map
- 24:21to human beings. It's called attachment. And in all our research we've had,
- 24:25we've done so much research over the last thirty years, I've got a
- 24:29map when I'm in therapy, so i know where I'm going. I say,
- 24:32what would he like to do? And this man is great, big,
- 24:37self denigrating, tough man says, he holds him. So yes,
- 24:45and you go in and hold him, and can he tell you it feels
- 24:49good to be held? This is like the couple's process. It's the same,
- 24:52but it's with parts of self, right with the most vulnerable part of
- 24:57self and the self that can have the resources to comfort and hold an order.
- 25:03And so he goes in and he holds him, and you know that
- 25:07man moved. Oh he moved from constant rage to being hijacked all the time,
- 25:15to not being able to relate to his family, to depression. I
- 25:19mean depression goes hand in hand with with PTSD. We know that he moved
- 25:26into balance and into self compassion. If you know how to work with emotion,
- 25:34if you have a map, this is the essence of eft where you're
- 25:37working with couples or individuals, especially in trauma. If you know how to
- 25:41work with emotion and you have a map to where you're going, it is
- 25:47so powerful. Our research says you can create so much profound change in such
- 25:52a short time. I mean, we have thirty years of research. If
- 25:59I made Sue, it feels listening to you talk, it feels like you're
- 26:03describing bringing the person back to true north in a sense. Yes, that's
- 26:07a nice image. That's a nice that's a lovely image. Yeah, it
- 26:11feels like you're kind of realigning their soul the organism. Why do we stray
- 26:18from you know, why are we shooting this bickering and fighting and below that
- 26:26is the longing for attachment, the lost attachment, the unattachment. Why are
- 26:33we straying from that? Why do we not want to or are we hiding
- 26:37that? In a sense, Well, we're complicated human beings and our society
- 26:42hasn't exactly validated. Our society still says a strong adult is independent, able
- 26:57to be separate, uh, you know, making choices on their own and
- 27:03you know, able to put their emotions aside. This is horseshit. Okay,
- 27:07that's not a strong adult. That's somebody waiting to be knocked off their
- 27:11perch. A strong adult from an attachment point of view, because attachment is
- 27:15a developmental theory of personality that is also totally useful for the therapist from an
- 27:23attachment point of view, A whole secure person who has a secure relationship with
- 27:30themselves and with others and so can keep their balance in the world and deal
- 27:37with whatever's happening. A whole secure person knows they're vulnerable, knows what that
- 27:42vulnerability looks like, accepts it. That's why I'm a human being. Your
- 27:48human beings do not do well alone. They're not wide for it. Your
- 27:52nervous system isn't wide for it. It's not because you're weak or strong,
- 27:56you're just not wide for it. You're a social bonding animal. Okay,
- 28:00So, really strong human beings who are resilient trauma, and the research on
- 28:07this is huge, knows their vulnerabilities, can accept them and cope with them,
- 28:17and can tune into their own emotions, trust their emotions as a compass,
- 28:22befriend them, listen to them, order them, and can tune into
- 28:30other people and turn to other people as a resource. They can reach for
- 28:33other people. They can reach you. No towel now can reach when he
- 28:38starts to blame himself, he can find that secure adult part of him that
- 28:47he found in therapy with me, and he can turn and comfort that little
- 28:49eleven year old boy instead of saying, Oh, that little eleven year old
- 28:53boy. You know, I can't see him. He doesn't exist. He's
- 28:56a ghost. He's a ghost. He doesn't matter. He's he's he was
- 29:00the traitor. He was a no no, no, no, no,
- 29:04middle eleven year old boy. Is is a valuable part of you. It's
- 29:10a sad part of you. It's the part of you that never got seen.
- 29:14So of course you can't see you. Why would you be able to
- 29:18see you? Nobody ever saw you? Did they tell nobody ever saw you.
- 29:23For the first twenty years of your life. You spent your whole life
- 29:27desperately trying to carve yourself into the image of what your family wanted. They
- 29:33all wanted different things, of course, which is that's crazy making, right,
- 29:37that's complex PTSD. Right. You know his brother wanted him to be
- 29:42the national hero in the army. You know his father wanted him to be
- 29:48shut down and compliant and never know, never asked for anything. His mother
- 29:53wanted him to be a child constantly dependent on her, never never, never,
- 29:59never leaving her, hanging on to her. Well, you know,
- 30:03this young boy just most of the time, if you listened to him,
- 30:07he was alone. He spent his whole childhood playing video games to get out
- 30:12of all this. But he can't in the beginning, he can't even formulate
- 30:18these things, right. We so many of us walk around really not knowing
- 30:22who we are on an emotional level until something traumatic happens to us that knocks
- 30:26us off. So our society doesn't give us a healthy view of what human
- 30:33beings are. It doesn't give us a healthy view of relationships, and we
- 30:37get lost and stuck. You know, relationships are complicated, Your emotions are
- 30:41complicate. Life's complicated. It takes over us all and we all get stuck.
- 30:45We all get stuck. Therapist gets stuck, you know. I mean,
- 30:49here, I am talking to you, and I can tell you,
- 30:53you know, an incident. I use it when I teach where you know,
- 30:57I had the most enormous, terrible, embarrassing fight with my seven year
- 31:02old son on a Saturday morning in Starbucks in my local community where everybody knew
- 31:06who I was. Well, you have to say, well, so you
- 31:10know better than that? No, actually I don't, because because I got
- 31:14real upset and I lost it and I attacked him and then the whole thing
- 31:21went to hell. And I'm just caught in the emotional dance because I'm a
- 31:26human being and my emotions. My emotions are the most powerful thing, right
- 31:32They color my world. They organize my thoughts, they organize my actions,
- 31:37and if I can't befriend them and make sense of them, I'm in trouble.
- 31:42So you know, me the therapist, you know, start screaming,
- 31:51screaming at my son in Starbucks on Saturday morning because I'm a human being,
- 31:55and but I have to tell you. We resolved it, which is wonderful.
- 32:00Who resolved it? My son? Who? Bless him? Bless him?
- 32:04My son turned around after the fight and said to me, hey,
- 32:08Mom, that conversation didn't go too well, did it. And then I
- 32:15started in a different place. I started with the desperation and the vulnerability instead
- 32:22of the why are you? I started with I'm terrified that you're failing your
- 32:30whole school. I'm terrified, and you won't talk to me about it,
- 32:32and I don't know what to do about it, and I feel helpless.
- 32:36I started there and we had a whole different kind of conversation because I'm what
- 32:42we call ar accessible, responsive, and engaged. That's what a good relationship
- 32:46looks like. I'm opening up to him and reaching for him. And he
- 32:52said, oh. He said, well, actually, I've already failed everything,
- 32:58so maybe I should have told you. And I'm scared to death too,
- 33:00so we're both scared. The interesting thing is when we're both scared and
- 33:06we know that by the time we'd walk six blocks to get home, we'd
- 33:13resolve the whole thing and made a plan for the future, Whereas for eighteen
- 33:15months before that, we can hardly talk to each other because I would always
- 33:20start with, excuse me, I don't think you've done your heart right,
- 33:24and he would roll his eyes and I would say, oh, you know,
- 33:29just roll your eyes. You know, I'm just your mother, you
- 33:30know, what do I matter? And we're off, right, we're off,
- 33:34but we're sensitive, and nobody really teaches us how to use our emotions
- 33:42or listen to them. Nobody really teaches us how to connect. I mean,
- 33:45right now, personally, I think We're in the most disastrous social experiment
- 33:50in human history. We're actually teaching kids not to look at faces, but
- 33:55to stare at screens. I do not know what we think is going to
- 34:00happen, but I think it's going to be a complete disaster. It's the
- 34:04opposite of what we should be doing. If we want healthy human beings who
- 34:09can deal with difficult traumatic experiences, this is not the way to go.
- 34:14But that's Hey, we're a capitalist society. This is the way to make
- 34:19money. This is the way we're going. So you know, let me
- 34:22ask you this too. As we kind of wind down here. You said
- 34:24so many things that I've got to have you back because there's so much to
- 34:29talk about. But is it is it possible for you know, thinking about
- 34:36our listeners here who are listening to this, and we're kind of talking about
- 34:38relationships here, is it possible for one person in the relationship to be accessible
- 34:46that you said that you use that our ar e. What is this going
- 34:50on here? All that are our acronym accessible, responsive, and engaged?
- 34:59Are you there for me? Are you there for me? Is the big
- 35:01question in all relationships. Are you there for me? If the answer is
- 35:06no, everything starts to go sideways. So that's the big question. So,
- 35:13yeah, AAR. Is it possible for one person to be AAR and
- 35:16the other person not what and to have a successful relationship? Well, no,
- 35:22I mean, at various times people will be more accessible and responsive than
- 35:27others. You know, I've been married to my partner for thirty six years.
- 35:31At various times I might be more open than him. However, and
- 35:37there's a certain point where if I'm really going to make a bid for his
- 35:43attention and caring, I need him to be able to respond. So I
- 35:47can't do a relationship on my own. It's a dance. It's a dance,
- 35:53and it's around dealing with your fears, vulnerabilities, and needs and longings
- 36:00in a way that pulls the other person closer rather than pushing them away,
- 36:04and that makes you stronger, of course, But no, people have to
- 36:08be able to at least join their partner in that dance to a certain extent.
- 36:14You know, people have different levels I need. I mean, you
- 36:20know, look at all my work. I need a more accessible, responsive,
- 36:23engaged man than many many many women do. I do. So it's
- 36:29johnny good that I married one. Although I don't think you mind me saying
- 36:35we both changed a lot and we've both grown each other up, and I'm
- 36:38not sure. I think the first couple of years we weren't that good at
- 36:43it. We didn't know each other very well. We got married very fast,
- 36:45and the first couple of years were rather rocky. But we've gone through
- 36:51a lot of trauma together and that in those traumatic, overwhelming experiences where we
- 37:01lose our balance, we've always been able to be there for each other and
- 37:07that builds in us, strength in each of us, and it builds a
- 37:12good relationship. So as we kind of close out here, what's the best
- 37:17way for people to learn more about your work? You can look at my
- 37:22website, Dr su Johnson dot com. You can look at the IFT website,
- 37:27which is I'm director of the International Center for Excellence and Emotionally Focused Therapy.
- 37:31That's www dot ic ee FT dot com. You can find all our
- 37:40research there. There's thirty years of research. We've researched everything you can imagine.
- 37:47We can show you what needs to happen in therapy, how you can
- 37:52do it as a therapist, and we can show you that these are the
- 37:55results and this is what it looks like three years later. So it's all
- 37:59this research and resources resources for therapists courses. We teach a lot with PESSI,
- 38:07but we also have all kinds of courses on the ISF site. You
- 38:12can look for my books. There's lots of little YouTube's out there. I'm
- 38:15always shocked some of them look kind of weird. I look like the Queen,
- 38:20which I don't like. I don't like that. But anyway, because
- 38:23I'm anti monarchy, I don't want to look like the Queen. K So,
- 38:28but you know, you can find a lot a lot of stuff on
- 38:31the internet. Okay, we'll have that linked up here at the show notes
- 38:35page. It's the Trauma Diapers podcast dot com. So still a thrilled to
- 38:39have you here. You are inspiring, I mean, and obviously so passionate
- 38:46about your work, and thank you so much for being here. We'll most
- 38:52most welcome. It was really fun, all right, take care, Okay.
- 39:01Pap in today acting to Roduilding