Dr. Sue Johnson on Navigating Romantic Relationships

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr Sue Johnson, an

internationally recognized leader in the field of couple interventions. She's known for her breakthrough clinical research on using emotions and therapy and shaping secure, lasting bonds that create resilience. Her new book is Hold Me Tight. Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Hi, Sue, Welcome to the show. Hey, happy to be here. I'm really happy to have you on.

Your book is called Hold Me Tight. Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, and we'll get into it in a second here, but we're going to start like we always do. At the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves side of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, looks up at her grandfather. She says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yes, well, it's a really

interesting parable. I liked it a lot, and I have worked over the last thirty years with mostly with distressed couples, and I got hung up on the word feed because what the parable suggests is that you decide whether you're going to feed love or whether you're going to feed, for example, fear, you decide. And what I see in the relationships that me and all my thousands of therapists all over the world treat all the time, is that it is true that we have ways of feeding our fear,

feeding our anger. Perhaps I put anger in instead of hatred, it is it is true that we have ways of feeding that we we We're vigilant, we remind ourselves to be careful, we tell ourselves other people will hurt us, to the point where we only look at and see the negative things that people are doing, and we we wipe out the good things. So fear, for example, does have kind of its own self fulfilling momentum to it. But what I see is that also it has a

lot to do with your relationships. And you know, I write about relationships, I write about bonding and attachment. I do studies on relationships, And what I see is that people can be really stuck in fear and anger and wanting to get things for themselves because they think if they don't do that, somehow they'll end up empty. They can be real stuck in that and when their relationship opens up and they start to feel connected with someone else. It kind of has them flower, and you know that

they feel safe and connected. They can talk about their fears and get comfort. They can understand their vulnerability behind their anger. They don't feel the need to grab everything and grab everything for themselves. They actually believe that other people will take care of them. So I had a ton of thought they weren't currently simple. Um, But that's kind of what came up for me. I teach therapists to be a third wolf. I teach therapists to be

the wolf in the middle. That's says, oh, yes, of course you are all caught up in your fear right now. Oh yes, of course you are all caught up in your anger right now, and it's consuming you, and it's taking you down this path where you don't feel connected

with anyone and you're always trying to protect yourself. And the therapist job is really to be the third wolf in the middle and say I'm going to make it safe here, and you can learn to look at your fear and look at your anger, and you can learn to understand them, and you can reach underneath them and talk about those fears and connect with people in a way that brings up kindness and the ability to risk and love for you. So we're all about creating love relationships.

So so I have these rather complicated thoughts on your very simple parable, Eric. That's great, So shifting gears a little bit into the book itself. Hold me tight. One of your main premises, really, the premise that underlies the whole book, is that romantic love is all about attachment and emotional bonding, and that all the other things that we see go wrong in relationships are really a consequence. They become fights over emotional disconnection. So share a little

bit more about that with this. Well, I think what we've understood from all the studies we've done of couples, We've got about, oh, I don't know how many now thirty studies of couples help showing we can help distress couples, and follow up studies showing that our results lost, and studies about how people change, so many studies. Um, what we see all the time is that we focus on in relationships on things that like conflict and how painful

conflict is. But if you really really look at what's happening in a distressed relationship, the conflict is the inflammation, the virus. The thing that gets everything going, the underlying music to the dance that starts to go wrong in

a relationship is emotional disconnection. It's that somebody in the relationship starts to feel that the other person is unavailable, unresponsive, not engaged, and that triggers a whole reaction in ours as human beings were bonding mammals, and it triggers a whole reaction in us where if I rely on someone and I my whole world is kind of structured around them being there for me. That's a safety queue for

my nervous system. And if suddenly I find that the other person seems indifferent or they won't really engage with me, or I can't reach them, or I feel abandoned by them, rejected by them, that is a real existential threat. It impacts our nervous system. It's basically a danger cue. It's a danger cue like stepping on a nail. I'll give you a good example. A lady called Nancy Eisenberger in California puts people in brain scan machines and watches how

their brain responds to certain stresses. And what she found was that if you give people while they're lying in the brain scan rejection cues from others, not even into my partners, where the rejection cues are even more important. But if you give people rejection cues, those cues are processed in exactly the same way and in the same

part of the brain as physical pain. Physical pain is a danger cue telling you that you're in danger, you have to do something, And the feeling of rejection and exclusion by someone that matters to you, or even just by other human beings is also a danger cue. This is kind of really looking at attachment science and understanding who we are as human beings and how much we need connection with other people. It's not icing on the cake.

It's oxygen. It's like oxygen. We need connection with other people. It's our environment, just like water is the environment of a fish. Um close connection with others is the environment that human beings are designed for, and when we don't have it, everything starts to go wrong. And this is a pretty well known finding when we look at childhood, right, yeah, a lot of the original studies are about between a

mother and a child. But you've gone on this, say no, this is this is what's happening at the heart of romantic love also, and originally when you started talking about this, a lot of people did not agree with you. They said that, you know, they said that emotion was something that adults should control, that too much emotion was the problem, that it should be overcome. And mostly they said, healthy adults are self sufficient. And so tell me, has that

thinking changed since when you first started publishing your views. Yeah, it has, and I'm I'm really glad it's changed, um because I used to get attacked all over the place at conferences, and um, it has. You know, the attachment science has changed how we see children and changed how we parent children. In the last fifty years. We now understand that you don't go and drop your kid off at the hospital for an operation and pick your kid up five days later. People forget that's what we used

to do, even into the seventies. Um, that you understand that that would traumatize the kid all too hell, and it would impact how the kid would deal with being in the hospital, how the kid might even heal, you know, it would impact all kinds of things. So we've known

that for years. It took years for people to accept that, you know, way back, people believe the best thing to do with the kid was when the kid was upset, you take the kid to their room, and you tell them to calm themselves down, and you leave them alone in their rooms so that they learned to be independent. This was the way we used to think about parenting,

and now the same things happening with adult relationships. You know, round about the turn of the century, really about the latees, there was sort of an upswelling of research into adult bonding. And there's social psychologists and the developmental psychologists and a flew a few clinicians like me who were watching couples all the time interact in their offices basically realize that we're different than kids, but we're not a lot of the same patterns, the same emotions, the same responses, the

same vulnerabilities, the same needs. M they're they're in adult relationships. And you know, it took a while for that to get going and for people to sort of move away from this idea that is, you know, well, if you're a functioning adult, you've got to be self sufficient. Well, I say, is the only self sufficient human beings a dead human being? There, We're not wired for self sufficiency.

Your brain is a bonding brain, your nervous system. When your nervous system and your brain were getting formed, um, you know, you were young, You were a child, and our children in our species are more vulnerable and more vulnerable for longer than any others species on earth. And when your brain was being formed, you knew, like you knew to take your next breath, that if you called and no one came, you were in danger. If you called and no one came, in the end, you died.

So connection has always been wired into us, and this has become clearer and clearer and clearer over the years. What's interesting is a lot of the beginning researchers in adult attachment didn't start off by studying bonding. They started off by studying pain. Why did loneliness hurt? Why we did loneliness seem to be associated with depression and people falling apart and suicide? And you know why did grief hurt so much? You know what happened to people when

they felt rejected? I mean it started with this and it developed into and understanding that we grow up, Yes, we grow up, but our attachment needs and vulnerabilities go from the cradle to the grave. We don't, you know, our nervous system grows, but it's the same nervous system as we had when we knew that if we cried and no one came, we were going to die. And that's one of the things that happens in love relationships.

People use images of life and death, you know, and people say you're killing me, or you know, if you leave me, I'll die. And I used to think, oh, this is just sentimental, you know, nonsense from romance novels. And now what I understand is no very well functioning, very resilient people use these images because that's how our brain codes love relationships. One of the things that you talk about is that these emotional needs are neglected. This starts to become a problem and out of its stem

three thing you call them demon dialogues. There conversations that people get into and there's three of them that you talk about. One is the find the bad guy, the protest poker, and the freeze and flee. So let's maybe just spend a minute or so on each of them. Okay, So again this comes from watching thousands of couples interact, and also it comes from all the research on marital distress, which has also got going in the last few years.

You know, we we know that when a relationship goes into distress, people get stuck in certain predictable dances with each other, and there's a predictable muse emotional music playing. The emotional music organizes the dance. It's it's the structure of the dance, and people get stuck. And the most popular place people get stuck all over the world. And we teach therapists all over the world and do educational programs all over the world. So it's fascinating to me

how this goes across cultures and religions and countries. But you know, the one that really seems to dominate is that one person feels disconnected and starts to feel alarmed and starts pushing for connection, doesn't get much of a response, and starts pushing aggressively and demanding and criticizing, why don't you talk to me, why don't you come home earlier? We never talk anymore. You know, you didn't do this chore for me, even though I said it mattered to me.

You're not listening. And the other person feels attacked and rejected, and so they defend themselves, and they shut down more. And the more they shut down, the more unconnected the first person feels. The more that person bangs on the door to get attention, to get a response, and the more they bang on the door, the more the other person moves away and shuts down. And you can see how this just keeps going. It's sort of rolls. It's

got its own momentum. Couples get stuck in it for years and not ever sort of step back and see the dance that the dance just does them after a while, and they don't ever step back and look at the dance and say, oh, we're caught in this dreadful circle, this dreadful spin, this dreadful people give it names, you know, this dreadful tornado. We're caught in this, you know, dreadful. They don't do that. They're just all caught up in the dance. So that's protests Parker, and we see it.

It's demand withdraw. But we see it that one person is protesting the distance and trying to get the other person to respond. They're not trying to be mean, you know, or you know, they're desperately saying, where are you? Where are you, where are you right? And they're not getting

a response. When that goes on for a long time, eventually, usually what happens is that the protesting partner starts to burn out and then they started to shut down, and you get what we call withdraw withdraw or yeah, you get. You get two people putting up walls and nobody's out on the dance floor. And that's that also destroys a

relationship because everyone's giving up. And usually when people come to see me with that pattern, um, it's because somebody's basically said I'm going to leave, I'm done, and then the other person goes into alarm. And but they may have shut each other out for years. They literally don't know who the other person is anymore, you know, and they're trying to protect themselves to the point where they

no energy going towards the other partner. It's all going into this protection and after a while the protection becomes a prison. And the third one is find the bad guy. All couples do these at various times, but the question is whether you get stuck in them and whether they define the whole relationship. But find the bad guy is usually when a couple are fighting and they can't get anywhere, they can't get the other person to respond. It feels

really bad. The criticism starts to go through the roof, and it's almost like they choose the booby prize called we can't resolve this, we can't connect, we can't find safe connection, So I'll go for the booby prize, which is it's not me that's the problem here, it's you. And that looks like attack attack. Most folks can't keep

that up for long. It's too exhausting. So usually you see a distress couple going into attack attack for short periods, then going back to some sort of demand, withdraw, protest, polka, where the real question is somebody's yelling where are you? But they're yelling so loud that the other partner moves away. And then sometimes you get people in freeze and flee because they they're just done, they're overwhelmed, they numb out, they don't know what to do, but they still somehow

know they want the relationship, but they're stuck right. And what we do is we help people see these dances they're caught in and blame the dance rather than each other, and we normalize it. We say, oh, yeah, you know, you're stuck here in this dance, and yeah, that's really hurts, and that's really confusing and difficult. And look at how you trigger each other into the dance, you know, and people don't understand the impact they having on each other.

You know, with drawers, for example, really don't get that when they sat down to protect themselves, reach out the other personnel, and that chambers the other person into alarm and anger. And I've never met a withdrawer in a relationship, in a distressed relationship, who really gets that that you're so caught up in in shutting down, you don't get the way it's impacting the person you know, standing five

feet away from you. Just don't get it. So once you start to get that, and you start to get that your partner's frantically trying to reach you and not trying to hurt you, actually things start to shift, you know, perceptions start to change, and people have room to talk about more than their numbing or their anger, and we help them talk about the softer feelings they have for each other, the fact that both of them are scared. For example, in a distressed relationship, both people are scared.

They just don't know how to talk about it and help each other with it. I have unfortunately lived all three of these demon dialogues, and it was very painful to sort of read. You know, looking back on a on a previous marriage, I can see all of it. And you know, being on the withdrawal side of things, you know, I I understand exactly what you're saying, because it's really easy to point at the person who's attacking as the problem. Well you're attacking. I'm just sitting here.

You You wrote somewhere in the book that the old axiom, when in doubt, say or do nothing is terrible advice and love relationships. That was certainly my strategy a lot of the time. I'll be the calm one, I'll be the I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take de bait. I'm not gonna. But I saw it. Didn't take me reading your book to see it, but your book showed it to me so much more clearly, the role that the withdrawer plays in that also, and you you talk about that one of the things that you help people

do is see the dance itself. You actually say, look at the circle of criticism that spins both of you around. There's no true start to a circle, right, And that's a really useful way, and it is it becomes its own thing, that's right. And you know, when you think about it, I mean, you can think about your relationships, you know, any relationship that's got stuck, you know. I mean, it's fascinating to me. I would be working with couples and be writing about this and studying it and doing

research on it. And then my mother would would visit from England, you know, and within seconds of her arriving, you know, it would it would start with about five minutes of pleasant conversation and then she would turn and say something, you know, no big deal really if it didn't have a history behind it, like good lord, why do you wear that color? And my god, that hairstyle doesn't suit you? And you we'd be off. We'd be off,

and we'd be stuck. And I basically flipped between smacking her you attacking back, and then we do find the bad guy for a while. You know, you're impossible, No, you're impossible. You know you're dominating. Now you're you're a bad child, and you know, we flip, We do that for a bit and then we'd flip into withdraw, we

draw for a bit um. But you know, it was so difficult to see the the dance and to be able to say to my mom, Hey mom, have you ever noticed that we get stuck in this this silly thing where you turn and say something and I get upset, and so I turn and basically tell you I don't to hear any of your opinions, and then you don't talk to me for an hour and then we start all over again. Have you ever noticed that? And you know,

she said, do we dear? I said, yep, And we've been doing it for you know, since I was about twelve. It helped, It helped me not to demonize her, to see that we were stuck in that. You know that that dialogue it's a difficult one. I mean, it's you can see them, but it's even when you see them, stepping out of them and keeping your emotional balance enough

to step out of them. You know, it's tricky, which is why people I want people to read my book and do our educational programs, because there's now educational programs based on Holby tight as well. Um, you know, because it's it's a tricky. Most of the times we don't see the darts, and even when we see it, we're

not sure how to change it. The book is based on, like the title says, seven conversations for a lifetime of Love, And the first few of them are these demon dialogue, right, and then you go into uh, sort of the tipping point conversation, which is called hold me tight conversation. So tell me a little bit about what that is. What we noticed when we worked with distressed couples was that

we would help them see the cycle. We would give them safety and help them talk about some of the underlying music in that dance where you know, people who were withdrawers would usually talk about feeling rejected, like they could never do the right thing, they were always going to fail, so they stopped trying, and um more blaming folks would start talking about how lonely and abandoned they felt, and how they were never sure they were loved. And when they start to talk about that, they can kind

of create a safety a platform in the relationship. But that's kind of just taking control of the negative cycle that's bringing up onliness and disconnection and distress in the relationship all the time. Then we we learned that that's not enough to change a relationship. You have to also create a positive dance. And so what does that positive

dance look like? Well, you've got to have a an image of what are the key things that need to happen in a relationship, what are the key moments that need to happen to create a really positive dance a secure bond. And so it helped a lot to have all the science of attachment and bonding you know, behind

us and to understand what we were trying to create. Basically, the research says in a secure bond, the main variables that create the bond as secure and stable our emotional accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement. And that spells a r E accessibility response, ifness an engagement. And it's interesting because from my point of view, the main question in love relationships is are you there for me? Can I reach you when you come when I call? Can I rely on you? Do

I matter to you? Do you care about my pain? Will you be there? Will you accept my vulnerability? These are the things that that come up and people can't even put words to that lots of times. So what we started to realize was that when we help couples create these bonding conversations where they where they could talk about their fears. You know, people could start to say

things like I do shut you out. I shut you out because I'm so scared that all I'm going to hear from you is that I'm a big disappointment and I was a big disappointment in my family. And I can't bear it if when I see that look on your face and I'm getting the message that I'm a big disappointment from you, so I turn away and shut you out. I do because I'm scared. So there's somebody talking about their fear instead of acting on it and shutting their partner out. There letting their partner in and

they're taking a risk. But of course what that does is it evokes compassion and caring from the partner. The partner sees their vulnerability, and then we help that person talk about their needs and what I need. What I need from you is to feel accepted and to know that I can make mistakes and that I don't have to be perfect, and even if I don't know what to do sometimes or I do things wrong, that I'm your special one. I need that reassurance because I do want to be close to you. I do want to

dance with you. I just get scared that you're standing back and keeping score and then I freeze up. But I want to be close, but I need your reassurance. So when somebody does that, they pull their part towards them. That pulls. And I'm talking about an organic process here. I'm talking about the way our emotions are structured as social bonding animals. I'm not talking about you know, um, something you learned from a book. I'm talking about an

organic human response. When people show their vulnerability like that and ask for their needs to be met, it really really pulls for the other person to respond. And if the other person can't respond, we help them with that. We we help them with what's blocking them and what's

getting in the way. But what we saw was when people would be able to talk about their fears and needs like that, incredible bonding situations happened where people would just come together, they would share their fears and needs, they would trust would open up, connection would open up. Um, we just respond to those moments with joy. You know there what Hallmark cards is all about? There? What all

the love stories are all about? Right? This moments of connection with other people, their emotional connection where we can read their intentions, where we tune into their emotions, where you know, people even mimic the way each other moves. You know, birds do it in mating rituals. Actually, you know, you watch a couple in a hold me tight conversation, helding forward, she leans forward, he reaches out his hand, she reaches out her hand. That the tune their nervous

system to tune into each other. And this naturally, and this it's joy in people, just like a beautiful sunset or a beautiful piece of music. Our nervous systems are just wired for it. What we found was that when people had these conversations we call them hold me tight conversations um, at the end of therapy they were out of distress. And three years later when we checked on them, all the results were stable and they told us they

had felt more secure in their bonds. They weren't just out of distress, they were more intimate, Their sex life was better, They felt more secure in their bond um, you know, and it was like, oh wow, what my god, of what wait in a minute, what's happening here? You know that the first study I ever did. On the f T. I got these enormous results, and I thought, wait a minute, what hell could what? I didn't believe them. I ran the data three times and then I thought,

I don't really understand why we got these results. But a few years later, looking at more and more tapes, you know, and and reading about adult attachment, which had just started to really get going, then I got it. I got wait a minute, is a bonding moments? These are the mo moments that we are just wired to take as life giving and crucial and important, and these are survival moments. Our nervous system just sings in these moments. This is what falling in loves about. This is what

staying in love is about. These amazingly emotional moments when you feel connected with somebody, and you can't have them all the time. It's just not possible. But when people had these, um basically everything improved, and I mean everything. It was quite mind boggling to us. Not just the relationships, but if one partner was distressed, they became less depressed. They become less depressed. If one partner was anxious, they

became less anxious. If one partner had post traumatic stress, disorder. They were able to turn to their partner when they got flashbacks and seek comfort and acceptance. PTSD symptoms went down. It still fascinates me after thirty years, how powerful these hold me tight conversations can be. And you know, we we help people do them now in our hold me Tight educational programs, and you see the same thing. You know.

I was in San Francisco. I did a hold me Tight weekend for a hundred couples, which means there's two hundred people in the room. And some of the people said, oh, we don't really need this, we're happy, but you know, we just thought we'd come along and see. And then they come up at the end of me and they say things like I never knew I could feel this close to him, and I've never felt this close to him, and I didn't know you could feel this, and thank

you so much. And even distress couples, you know, it's just an education relationship education weekend. Distress couples will come up and say, we get it now and we want to be closed and we're going to go work on our relationship. So there's a power here. We plug into it with our therapy and our teaching. But the power is there. It's about who we are and how much we are. As I say in the book, we are homo vincolum. We are not just social animals. We are

the one who bonds. And that's our ecological niche if you like, that's that's water and where the fish. That's what we need to thrive. And when we get it, When we get that kind of connection, it's a source of joy, it's a source of strength, you know. Um, it changes everything. I mean, we've even done a brain scan study where when you have that connection with your partner, um,

you don't respond. Your brain doesn't respond the same way if I tell you I'm going to shock you on your feet, as if you're when you're alone in the machine or when you don't feel connected with your part or in your potent holds your hand, Um, we cannot. We've actually shown that this sense of emotional, sense of connection changes how your brain deals with threat. You know.

It's it's pretty fascinating stuff. Right, Well, that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up, Sue on a really positive note about about how strong relationships can be when we get this bonding piece. Right, So thank you so much. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post show conversation. I want to talk about conversations that heal injury that happened in

the relationship, begin forgiveness conversations. You and I will do that. Listeners, you can get access to the post show conversations exclusive many episodes, add free episodes, all that stuff at one you Feed dot net slash Support. So thank you so much, Sue. I really appreciate your time coming on the show, and I found the book a real revelation. You're most welcome. Bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.

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