Cracking the Code on Relationships with Dr Sue Johnson

0:00 Just a heads up that my guest this week, who is a therapist, briefly makes reference to a client she worked with who had experienced childhood sexual abuse. So if that is a topic that's triggering for you, you might want to skip this one. If it's helpful to hear what her experience was and how Sue worked with her, then listening. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Cas Dunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Doctor Sue Johnson is a clinical psychologist, best selling author, distinguished research professor, and most importantly, she is the creator of emotionally focused Therapy, which is widely acknowledged as the gold standard in tested and proven couple's therapy. Sue's work was groundbreaking when she first made the link in her early career between attachment theory and adult relationships, and yet, as you will hear her explain, she was professionally ridiculed when she shared that idea with colleagues.

1:26 Of course she was. She's a woman, what could she possibly know. Well, she now has decades of experience and research and treatment outcomes to prove that Yep, she was right all along. I have personally been a fan of Sue's work for decades. I have all of her books, I. Have taken her training. I couldn't be more excited to introduce you to the incredible doctor Sue Johnson. So, Sue Johnson, it is such a pleasure to have you on the Crappy to Happy Podcast. Thank you for being here today. You're most most welcome. I love your type, and I think actually talking about turning a distressed relationship to into a less distressed one is a very good way to go from crappy to happy.

2:09 Actually, so I would agree, and very appropriate. So I am a psychologist myself, and the things that I'm most interested in as a psychologist are mindfulness and attachment. So one of the very first professional development trainings that I did when I first registered as a psychologist was your EFT for couples, because it seemed so perfect to me, so just profound that we should bring this idea of attachment into adult relationships. But I wanted to say to you, by the way full disclosure turned out, I'm not I don't really want to do couple's therapy, but I still think it's profound and everybody should have an understanding of this. I think for me, by the time I came through, it seemed kind of obvious that attachment would inform couple relationships and adult relationships. But was that the case when you kind of stumbledon this or was it a new idea?

3:03 Oh, adult attachment absolutely was not. You know, I mean you look, I look at it, and I say, it's obvious. Everything in life is obvious once you've discovered it. You know, it's in hindsight. Yes, it's obvious. You know, we talk about atoms. It's obvious that they're they're there somewhere. You know, I can't see them, but I believe they're there. Well, you know, if you'd spoken about it three hundred years ago, people would probably burned you as a witch and said, you know you're you're crazy. So it is obvious. But you know, when I first started talking about it with couples, it was absolutely one of the most unpopular things that I could have come out. In fact, I said to my husband, it seems that I always discover truths for me.

3:48 They're truths that really tick other people off, and that don't you know, other people don't like. So adult attachment was one of those. The idea was attachment was all about my child. It wasn't even about father and child. It was all about mother and child. And of course John Balby only had one lifetime and he had only had time to look at all these incredible interactions between mother and child and see the patterns in them and see the effect of those patterns. And you could say, that's what science is. It's finding a pattern, looking for a pattern, finding a pattern, and then coming up with an explanation of a pattern. And you know, he saw these patterns with his colleague Mary Ainsworth in this dance between a mother and child, and he started to talk about the impact of these patterns, which was, I mean, I'm not that old. And even when I was a child, good parenting was about, you know, making sure your kid had something to eat, and you know, giving them a bath at night and putting them to bed and not smacking them too hard when they were naughty and that was good parenting. And you know, the whole idea that kids needed to be held and talked to and feel special, know they could count on you was sort of what.

5:04 You know. It's like life was about survival and who had time for that? And even the upper classes didn't have time for it. They had nannies. So it was all about mothers and children, and it was pretty minimal recognition at that But then really it didn't hit till the beginning of this century that people started talking about adult attachment. But I was talking about it a good twelve years before that and getting my articles rejected, and not just rejected, but pages of is that right? Oh yeah? Pages of This woman is crazy. If you cast your mind back, you look at some of that old literature, it's all about differentiation, individuation. If you were too close to anybody, including your kid, it was codependency, which was a word taken from addiction literature. You know, it was bad.

5:55 In other words, too much closeness was bad. You couldn't figure out who you were other people were too close and you had to be separate and independent. And adolescence was all about becoming independent, you know, And this was this separateness was the name of the game, the name of the developmental game. So for Bolby to come along and say no, if you look at the way we develop as human beings, we're connected. Our main instinct isn't aggression or aggression or sex. Basically, it's the need for connection with other people, a few special lovers who will come when we call, because life is huge and dangerous and difficult for all of us, and being alone in and of itself is terrifying. I mean, people just said, you're just talking about mental illness. You're just talking about you know, if adults feel this, then they're mentally ill.

6:51 They're not. You're because you're supposed to be separate. I've had I had people in the beginning walk out of my classes and my lectures saying that I was creating codependency, fusion symbiosis, you know, And the research is very clear belonging leads to becoming. So actually, you have a stronger sense of self, you have a stronger ability to be independent and separate if you have a secure sense of connection with other people. You know, it's obvious, really, if I know that, if I'm in real trouble, if I call and I say, cass come if I know that you'll come. You know, it's like I can tolerate stress that I can't use to tolerate. I can look out into the world and it's not quite so scary. I can.

7:44 But if I believe that I'll call and no one will come. But we love the Rambo movie idea, you know, we love, you know, even now with women heroes. We love Superwoman, we love the the you know, the person who is invulnerable, Well, we love that and it's a wonderful fantasy. But of course it's important to remember that it's complete rock and that, you know, the bottom line is we need other people and the connection with others is our main survival code as human beings. To know you matter to another human being is the best antidepression, anti anxiety pill I've ever come across, you know. So we noticed that when we started working with distressed couples and changing their relationship, not only did the relationship change, not only did the dance change, but the dancers changed.

8:34 The people grew as individuals, they grew. So, yeah, attachment was adult attachment was very unpopular. Indeed, except for the last twenty five or so years and it's still I think, you know, I feel like it should be all over the New York Times. It should be Well, we've cracked the code of love. We know, we understand what loves about. We understand what children need, we understand what adults need to be strong. We understand that a loneeness is the best recipe for misery, depression, anxiety and despair. You know, And we're twigging in this in this world gradually that isolation is a killer for people. We're twigging. England's got a Minister of isolation or is it called that Minister of loneliness Minister of imagine having a Minister of loneliness.

9:31 But you know, we're getting there gradually, but still for lots of people, the idea that we really need others, and we need one or two others that we know will come when we call is still a kind of idea that it's hard for them to wrap their heads around. You were into control and power and the independence. How this idea first kind of come to you in your work with couples too, so we bob become along with attachment, and like you said, it was very much around mothers and children and that was groundbreaking at the time, obviously, but then when was there a moment when you kind of thought, this is the key when you're working with couples.

10:14 And I talk about this in my work and I always feel a bit foolish when I talk about it, actually, because I'd done this study, which for a graduate student thesis was a totally ridiculous study. Okay, it was so ambitious. It was I don't know where I was when I was a graduate student. I was on fire. I was insane. We'd written up this little manual. I decide to do an outcome study. Any graduate student who all by themselves decides to do a treatment outcome study should be locked up. You know, it's crazy. But anyway, I did it, and the results blew my mind. But what I say is I didn't really know why I was getting these incredible results, because results in couple's therapy at the time were pretty meager and pretty you know, they weren't Couples therapy was not showing itself to be an effective intervention. And you know, people would teach negotiation skills, well, they work until you're really upset, and then they don't work at all. And you know, people would teach insight into your past and that you were projecting onto your spouse. Well, INSIGHT's okay, But again, when you're standing on the edge of a cliff, you know it's it's not it doesn't really cut it.

11:35 So you know, we were creating these We were helping people deal with their emotions differently and have changed the emotional music and talk to each other in a way that pulled the other person closer and it was working. It was like it had this incredible effect. But you know, apart from saying, well, I know how powerful emotion is, and that's what Rogers talked about, by the way, we did too. That's what Rogers talked about. And you know, a good experiential therapist goes for emotion, listens to emotion, tracks, emotion, uses emotion, believes that change is all about a corrective emotional experience, you know, And the research on psychotherapy outcome, by the way, says that a thousand times that it doesn't matter what model you're using. If you look at the people who change versus the people who don't, other people who change, and the people who get really emotionally involved in the therapy, it starts to really mean something to them, their emotions change, So we knew that these emotions were changing. We knew that people were having these incredible, you know, emotional interactions which they couldn't have at all at the beginning. But that was sort of it. And then I went to a conference and I talk about this in my work quite a few times because it was so it was sort of the classic epiphany, right, That's why it's so corny. That's why I feel so foolish when I talk about it. But you know, I'm I'm in a bar, of all places, I grew up in a pub, right, so it's it's significant that I'm sitting in a bar. And I've been listening to Neil Jacobson,

13:09 who was the big star of Couple's Therapy back then, and he'd been saying that an adult relationship is a deal. It's a contract. It's a deal, and you can make a deal for anything. You can negotiate to have affairs and not tell your partner you can negotiate for anything at all. Right, it's a deal, and what you have to do to have a happy relationship is teach people how to negotiate. Well, I knew this was rot right, okay, I said, love is all about the things you can't negotiate for, Like, you know, I'll give you three hugs if you give me. You know, it doesn't work. Okay. So I was sitting there and my colleague said to me, well, if a relationship isn't a bargain, if it's not a bargain and a deal, what is it? And I said, don't be ridiculous. It's a bond. It's an emotional bond.

14:05 And as I said that, just that word, the whole of John Balby and all the books i'd read that i'd only related to mother an infant came literally like tickety tickety tickety to I said, Oh my god, we're taking people into bonding conversations. That's why we're having these huge effects, and that's why people respond to them the way they do. And then the next thought, which was even more outrageous, Oh my god, this is what romantic love is all about. John Balby said, attachment goes from the cradle to the grave, and a romantic love is another form of love, and it's all about bonding. And that's a lot about what sex is all about too.

14:54 In our society, we talk about sex as recreation, stimulation, all things, and you've got to have novelty and you know, and if you're close to somebody, you're going to be bored and all this nonsense, and we hardly ever talk about the fact that it's a supreme bonding device. There's a reason why when you have an orgasm, you're flooded with oxytocin, which is a bonding hormone. I mean nature, Do you think nature just does that for fun? So that was the big insight, and then I just got kind a sort of passionate kind of person. So I just got obsessed with adult attachment and started writing all kinds of articles that were soundly rejected. And it's basically told, oh, all kinds of interesting things like I was a naive, a naive little Canadian. Little notice I'm female, so naive little Canadian professor who didn't understand individuation, separation. Bobby understood it very well. You basically said, the more connected you are, the more separate can be. He understood it very well.

16:02 And attachment is the best developmental theory of personality and relationships that we've ever come up with as human beings. It tells us who we are so to use it in therapy for me is obvious. It gives us a map. So then I started actively trying to use attachment, and gradually the social psychologist like Phil Shaverer at Davis in California, they started writing about ad our attachment, and gradually, gradually people started asking curious questions instead of standing up and telling me that I was creating fusion and symbiosis. And so it's true though what you said about how at the time, and I think even recently. I mean, like I said, I'm not a couple's therapist necessarily, but a lot of couple's therapy doesn't work. So do you think that is because a lot of couple's therapy that doesn't work is focusing on on this negotiation and communication?

16:59 And can you blame for the listeners who might not be familiar with EFT, Like, how is the EFT approach, the emotionally focused therapy for couples which you created, How is that approach different for couples who might be in distress and at their wits end? About how do I resolve this? Well? After our thirty five or so research studies, you EFT is massively researched. We have. You don't have to believe me when I tell you it works. I mean, it's it's very very clear to us. We have a clear way of understanding the patterns, the cycles that of distress that we all get caught in at times, but that distressed couples are completely stuck in, and we have a very clear idea of the impact of those cycles, how to help people out of them, and then how to create positive cycles of interaction, how to create a new dance. And it's not about teaching skills per se or negotiating or making a deal. You know, I'll do the washing up if you you know, put the kids to bed. I mean, you can do those things. They're easy when you feel safe and connected with each other.

18:04 The irony is when you feel safe and connected and you're you're clear that you're important to this person, negotiation becomes easy. Pasy right, Try it. When you think you're talking to the enemy, it's a different bag. But so we show people that mostly in distressed relationships, overwhelmingly we're caught in certain patterns. The favorite one in North America is that one person is starts to feel disconnected. You see that the issue is not conflict and disagreement. The issue is emotional disconnection, and people aren't used to tuning into that, so people start to feel disconnected from the other person, which is kind of like where are you?

18:45 Where are you? Are you there for me? Is the million dollar question in relationships? Do I matter to you? Do you want to spend time with me? You spend all your time on your zoom, with your colleagues or on your phone. Where do I come in? I feel alone here? You know, as adults, we don't know how to talk about these things, so we'll say something like, you know, you got up in the middle of that conversation and went somewhere else, like I don't matter at all. You know, that's incredibly rude. So what I do is I put anger out. And what I'm really saying is are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Do I matter? Do I matter? Do I matter? But that's not what comes across. What comes across is you're blowing it, buddy.

19:27 I'm mad at you. You're failing. You're not pleasing me, you're disappointing me. And we've taught people, especially men, we've taught people in relationships to be massively sensitive to the message you're not pleasing me. You're not who I want right now, You're not enough. So the other person feels rejected and defends themselves like crazy, or shuts down and shuts the other person out, both of which make the first person more alone and upset, so they get caught in this dreadful dance. You can call it pursue withdraw. You can call it demand withdraw. You can call it yell your head off shut down. People don't realize that when they shut down to deal with their emotions, they shut other people out. They don't think about that, and other people don't like being shut out. You see, this is the other thing. John Bobby said. Human beings can't bear not to be responded to, not for other people who matter to them to act like they don't exist.

20:32 Human beings can't bear it. It's painful, right, their nervous system goes crazy. So isolation is the best predictor of every mental health problem and every source of human misery. We're meant to be in relationship. We're bonding relational social beings. Relationships are the water we swim in. If you take a fish out of water, pluck it on the deck, it looks very weird indeed, so to disconnected people and they can't even relate to themselves. You know, we do individual eft these days a lot if it emostly focused individual therapy, and what we're doing there is creating a secure sense of connection with yourself, right wow. But we look at people in relationships and we realize that when we started to change help people change their relationships to a positive frame, they would change each other. They'd grow each other. People would stop being depressed, they'd stop being so anxious, you know, because they're not alone in the world.

21:36 They matter to somebody else. Someone will come and they call, it's are you there for me? Aar? Are you? Are you open and accessible? Responsive and engaged. So we show people that what's really going on is disconnection and it hurts. Rejection and abandonment hurts, and that this dance they're caught in is the problem. There's no bad guys, there's no awful husbands, there's no terrible wives, there's no eurotic, crazy borderline women. There's just people frantic to create this connection and feeling more and more disconnected. So they start to see the dance and they start to be able to do things like turn to each other and say, hey, we're caught in that thing that Sue talks about. And I encourage them to give it a name. They have all kinds of strange names. Right, you're the typhoon or the you know whatever. We're caught in the typhoon again.

22:35 And the other person can say, you're right, we are. This is looking back at the dance, not at you and what you just said to me, right, which you were deliberately trying to hurt me. Right, we're caught. And then the other person can say, and if we're caught in the dance, then you're feeling really small and put down right now? Is that right? And the other person can say, yes, that's right. And then the other person say, well, I didn't actually want you to feel small and put down. I was actually trying to get your attention. And then they laugh and they say, let's have a glass of wine. Like that's from a couple, a recent couple. Okay. So we help them see how they trigger each other, how they trigger each other's anxieties and feelings of aloneness and isolation, and how hard that is for them, and we validate that it's hard for them. It doesn't mean that they're weak human beings or not adults, or that there's something wrong with them. And we help them get their balance, their emotional balance in the relationship. And then we help them and it's a natural process. You don't have to teach it per se. You just have to guide people.

23:50 Their emotions will take them there. You just have to help them resist the blocks and not get stark and not get scared. But we help them talk about their needs, their emotional needs and fears in a way that pulls the partner close that the partner can hear, and the partners start to naturally comfort and hold and respond to each other, and they start to have these incredible bonding conversations. We call them hold Me Tight. You know you can we Hold Me Tight online program you can do. It's getting a bit old now the couples don't dress in the latest fashion. But it was an awful lot of work.

24:32 So I don't want to have to go back just because the couples aren't fashionable. But it's it's helped a lot of people, especially in the US military, the Canadian military, abroad all over the world. It's been translated. The fascinating thing. It's translated into that program is used in Iran, in Egypt, in Finland, in Australia. There's something universal about this. We're all bonding human beings who are who do not do well with isolation and who are terrified of rejection and abandonment, and we don't ever talk about that really in our society.

25:23 So couples start to be able to reach for each other and share these needs and respond to each other. Once they do that, it's a natural process, it's the process of development. They start feeling better about themselves. They start being clear about who they are and what they need. They start having a more secure connection with themselves. They start feeling more confident and more competent. They start exploring with their partner more. You know, if you feel safe, you take risks in the dance. If you feel safe, you explore, you step out of the normal dance. If you don't feel safe, you don't. And then, of course the relationship does get boring, not because you're just familiar with each other, because you're familiar without real connection. Real connection is fun, interesting, incredible, absorbing, it's intoxicating. It's called being in love. And so you don't have to make people practice it or do it deliberately. Once they know how to have homey type conversation, they're not going to forget that. They don't forget it. It's what makes your nervous systems zing. And that's one of the reasons why we're the only couple's therapy. I think nobody else has.

26:40 Probably the behaviorists have as many studies as us. They don't get the same kind of results. But also we have incredible follow up. In other words, you can do eft with us, and three years later we'll come back and say, do you still have these conversations? Are you still happy with each other? Do you still have better sex? You still trust each other more? Are you still less depressed? When you get depressed? Can you go to him and talk to him? Are you still able to do that? And people say yes after three years, when you say to yourself, what on earth, how can this be true? We saw them, They've been distressed for ten fifteen years.

27:20 We saw them for eighteen sessions. How on earth can this be happening three years later? Well, it's because we didn't do it per se. We tuned into a natural organic biological system. Attachment is biology. It's the way your nervous system responds to connection and disconnection. So what you said before just going back to the conflict that couples have and this idea of getting underneath all of the you did this or you said that, and once that dynamic starts and it's really hard to get out of, and what you're essentially doing is getting underneath that with eft to the raw vulnerable emotion that is buried under there, which I think some people are even disconnected from themselves. You know, they're up in their head in their story and their anger, and so you're actually supporting them to go deeper than that and actually be vulnerable. And I found it interesting that you said you've got the online program, which I know that you do, and you've got the book Hold Me Tight as well.

28:23 Do you think that couples are able to do this themselves. It feels like something that would best be facilitated by somebody who's able to hold some space, because it's a scary thing to get vulnerable and get to those really vulnerable emotions with somebody who you are feeling is the enemy when you're at that point in a relationship where it's really tough and you're feeling like you're not safe emotionally. I imagine this is a process before you can actually get to that. And you know the second part of that is is it something that couples can do on their own or is it only if they're really not that far gone that they could potentially on their own, well. Not that far gone. It is an interesting phrase, I think, a good question you're asking. I think it depends on how much trust is left. Okay. I've seen people have the most terrible arguments and you think, oh my goodness, me.

29:16 You know, they pull out every nuclear weapon they can put their hands on, but somehow, in all of the stuff, they've still got some sense of trust. And you know, and sometimes you can't even figure out how this can be true, but it is, and they will risk. The other thing is that the relationship really matters to them a lot. It matters a lot and commitment they will risk. Okay, they will step off the cliff if they think there's a chance of connection, and that is something that we will risk for. Okay, But you're right, vulnerability is difficult. I mean. One of the things we do in the book, in the program and in therapy is we normalize it a lot. We talk about how this is just who we are, This is who we are as human beings.

30:07 You don't get to choose this one. There's a couple of ways of dealing with it. That's about it. You know, we're a wonderful, wonderful, incredible, intricate human beings, except that we're not. We're actually very simple, bonding animals. And you know, if you're not going to respond to me, and I really need you to respond to me, then I can scream my head off and make it almost impossible for you not to respond to me. Job with that one is, of course, my screaming is very aversive for you. I can scream my head off. In a good relationship, I scream my head off and you go, oh, what's wrong, and we have a conversation. Okay, But we're not talking about those couples. And you see that with kids and parents too. You see that some kids in an airport, the kid will scream its head off, and as a psychologist, I'm very clear the kid is scared. And some parents will turn and bend down and go face to face with the kid and hold the kid's shoulders and talk in a soft voice. You know, and the kid will calm you know. So the kid screamed his head off and the adult said, oh, okay, I see you, I see you. What's going on? And another time a kid will scream their head off and the parent get enraged and punitive, and the kid either keeps going right because this is important. Are you going to respond to me or not I'm going to make you respond to me, or the kid shuts down and shuts people out, and

31:37 then the parent says, good boy, well, good boy if it means that you've shut down and numbed out. Results in what my client said to me when she said, look, I can't feel. I'm not going to feel. I don't want to feel vulnerable, Okay, so I'm never going to feel vulnerable again. So I can't feel now, I don't know. I've put my feelings away somewhere, and I can't live the rest of my life totally numb. So then she's in a real bind. And that bind didn't start in her present relationship. It started when she was a young young child being sexually abused by her brothers every night and everyone making sure they didn't see it. They didn't see it, and it wasn't happening, right, So yeah, and the message there is you are invisible and you don't matter.

32:37 You just don't matter. And she's saying, Okay, I'm stuck. She came in because she said, my blood boils all the time. This was the symptom, right, So I'm stuck. I can't really feel. All I can feel is rage, So I can't feel these other feelings you're talking about. I can't feel, and I can't live without feeling. I can't live numb. So then what, so what's happening? Oh, I've got five diagnoses, you know, I'm depressed anxiety disorder OCD. Borderline. Borderline always comes in, you know, for us, borderline is mostly complex PTSD. You've been abused as a child and you're in this dreadful bind that emotion feeling hurts like hell, and not feeling feels terrible, feels like you're dead. So you just flip between the two. And you can't trust people, but you desperately need to trust people, so you flip between the two. But that's obvious, that's that because but we look at how EFT looks at how people put their experience of themselves and others and of their emotions and their body together in the moment, and says, could you help me? I notice that as you talk about your blood boiling, I notice that you're rubbing your chest.

33:59 And she said, oh, am I, oh yes, I said, what's happening as you rub your chest? I don't know. I don't know, I don't know. I feel shaky. Just what. I don't want to talk about that, right, So if you felt shaky at home, would you turn and tell your partner? No? No, I know, you know? So what do you do when you feel shaky? Am I going to a fog? Then she can't get out of the fog, you see. So she's talking about how she creates her emotional world, how that emotional world then creates her relationship, which makes her feel more alone, which makes her emotions more scary. John Boby said, it doesn't matter what label you give people, and boy are we good at giving people labels these days. It doesn't matter what labels you give people. Everyone comes to therapy for the same reason.

34:59 They come because of frightening, alien and unacceptable emotions, and when they come up with another person, they create relationship distress, which then feeds the frightening alien unacceptable emotions. You know, one of the unacceptable alien emotions, especially in warbits who we work with a lot, is I've failed. I wasn't the supreme soldier. I made a mistake in battle, my body got killed. I'm a bad soldier. I'm a bad person. I'm a failure. I'm defective. There's something wrong with me. So if they're something wrong with me, how on earth can I take the risk of turning and saying to you, I need to be held. I need to know that I'm still a human being on this planet, even if I miss the shot. I need. I need. I need to know that I'm not so despicable that when you look at me, you see me, not the man who missed the shot. I miss the shot. Okay, I missed the shot, and I can't forgive myself because my body died.

36:10 And look at how that messes up your sense of self, your sense of being able to reach for another person. So he doesn't reach for his wife. He starts drinking and shuts her out, and then she says, you've changed. I don't know who you are, and he says that you see I am defective. But we go in and we say, no, you're just a human being. And these are the feelings we all feel. There's only about six main emotions. It's not that complicated. We all get stuck in sadness and loss and shame, you're worried about if we're acceptable as human beings, and fear. We all get stuck there. Sometimes you're just human being and you need to be seen and held. Times sometimes people have never seen a good relationship, so they're actually trying to create something from their muscle memory and their evolutionary survival code.

37:13 But they've never even seen They're just hamming it up. They're just trying to you know, they've never seen a boat, but they're trying to smack it together with some nails. And of course they get it wrong. And we say, of course, of course you shut down. Of course you do. You had no alternative. It saved your life and that's all you saw around you. You never saw anyone risk, did you, and reach and say yes, I'm scared right now, right, And we model that. We model that, and we create. Because we're attachment theorists, we know how to create safety. It may sound strange for people.

37:54 But sounds very logical to me sounds very I think for people listening to this who are not familiar, I think it makes so much sense. I think the other thing you said, Sue, which I thought was really interesting, when you gave the example of the child screaming and the different way than the parent responds in that situation, says so much about the parent's ability to manage their own emotions. And so I think that's so interesting that you mentioned you do EFT for individuals as well, because that is so profoundly important as well. Isn't it, even outside of relationships, to be able to cultivate that sense of secure attachment within your self, emotional safety within yourself, so that you're not playing out these dynamics repeatedly. Yes with other people.

38:37 Yes. And sometimes you'll say to somebody, what did you need? What do you need in this relationship? You know? What do you need from me? Even and they'll stare on it. They'll say, I don't know need? Is that okay to need? Know? I'm an adult, you know I don't. You know, I don't. I'm fine, I don't need need. I don't know what I need. But then if you go into a moment of pain, you say, well, let's look at the last time your blood boiled, you know, and you felt that. Remember you said you felt this shaky in your chest right right? What what was the trigger? I don't know.

39:23 People don't know their own emotional landscape. And then we look at it and we stay there, and the trigger is that somebody was making a demand of her. Somebody was saying, now, look, heah, you know you, I want you to to Well, this young woman lived her whole life from the time she was eight years old being having sexual favors demanded of her every night by her three brothers until she was sixteen when the whole thing blew up and she told people, and then the family basically dismissed it and said it's not important, it doesn't matter. It was just childhood, childhood miss okay, childhood mistakes. So your pain, The message is your pain doesn't matter. It was all just all about childhood mistakes. So then you go to you don't matter. And then people go to, so if I'm in pain and it does matter to me, well, obviously there's something wrong with me. And it happened to me because there was something wrong with me. And so then trauma survivors get caught in shame. And this person, though, was very lucky she'd found a warm, supportive husband. But then even he can't really help her if she doesn't let him in. You see, I say, could you tell your partner? Could you close your eyes and just imagine telling your partner just the phrase you used here, which is, I'm not really angry, I'm heartbroken. Can you imagine telling

40:55 your partner this and close your eyes and just imagine saying to your partner, the only thing I feel safe telling you about is my anger. If I feel upset inside or I feel shaky here in my chest, I can't tell you about that. And then she closes her eyes and imagines doing that. That's progress. Okay. If I say to you I can't do it, I'm doing it right. So I Cass, I can't talk to you about you know, the fog. That's I'm talking about the fog by telling you that, right. So, we help people take small risks and we talk to them about their emotions in a way it makes them feel safe. So we have a map to your emotions, your needs, your longings, your fears, so we can listen to you, help you hold those feelings, help you understand those feelings, validate those feelings. And when I talk to you about the feelings, I do it in a low, slow voice, the way a mother talks to a child. I talk to Amigdaler. I don't talk to your prefrontal cortext. If I'm going to talk to your prefrontal cortext, I can say all kinds of things to you and they won't have hardly any impact at all.

42:14 I can say, you know, Cats, I think actually that doing these podcasts is very, very difficult for you. It must be very anxiety producing. You say, yes, so it is. I say, yes, nothing's happened. But if I knew that you were having a particularly hard time on a particular day, and I went in and said, you know, Gecass, you know, I look at your face and could you help me? It feels like somehow there's some real tension there. You know, I don't know quite what it is. It's almost like there's something difficult happening for you right now. But maybe I'm wrong. Is that? But listen to my voice. It's soft and slow. And one of the things that happens in couples is they changed their music. You'll hear a couple come in and it's like, no, no no, d na da dut dut dut dut du du. I'm not talking to you. Nobody can talk to you. You're impossible.

43:11 Oh yeah, well no no no no no no no no no, that's the music, right, And then you hear them, you know, ten sessions later when they're having hold me tight conversations and it's like, da da dada. This morning, I realized when I got mad at you, I was feeling really left out and really alone and like I didn't matter, and that's difficult for me. And the other person goes, oh, I didn't. I didn't know that. I thought you were just mad. But listen to that. Dida did did did did? Duh da da dada da da da da. If you watch a good mother and a child, it's a ar accessibility, responsive and engage. The good mother is there. The good mother doesn't solve every problem. The good mother doesn't render the whole world safe. You can't.

44:13 As a parent. One of the most distressing things I think about parenting is as parents, we want to create a wonderful, safe, totally calm, balanced environment for our kids, and then we find maybe I should speak for myself to my horror that they're out in the world and the world doesn't like my rules and it's not playing my game. And so as a parent, you can't create this amazing safety. All you can do is keep the safety with your child going. And you know that's the same with your lover and your partner. Sometimes you can't change the fact that your partner's business is suddenly under incredible stress and your partner is working thousand hours a day and losing it, and maybe you can't change that.

45:13 All you can do is to deal with your own feelings and try to be there for them and try to look at what's going on, and you can keep the relationship going. So, you know, couples, it's not just about their relationship. It's about the transitions they go through, the hard things they go through, and whether they can be there for each other in those hard things. You know, sometimes couples walk in with real injuries. You know, my father died. My father was the closest person to me in the world. He died, and you acted like it was an inconvenience in your schedule. You wouldn't. You didn't even come to the funeral with me. You didn't, and you know, the partner says, oh, well, that's sort of how we dealt with things in my family. I didn't even though it was important to you that I come.

46:07 And of course then the other person says, you didn't know that it was important, right? How can you, you know, be so stupid? But how they deal with that, that transition and that grief. If they can deal with it together, they'll get stronger. If they can't and they get caught in demand withdraw you know, how can you be so stupid? Well, you know you always calling me stupid. I can never make it with you. Well maybe you could make it with me if you try harder. We're after the races, right, you become the enemy. I feel that relationship has become a minefield. The point is for people to know understand love, understand their emotions and needs, and know that they can change that. If you understand love, you can actually make it. Now.

46:59 Don't you think that should be on the front of the New York Times? I think it should. You can find out more about Sue's training in emotionally focused therapy at ic E E f T dot com or take her Hold Me Tight online course at hold me tight dot com. Thank you so much for being here today. If you enjoyed the episode, please remember to share it with a friend. Here the plus button so that you never miss an episode. Leave us a five star rating and review. I cannot wait to catch you on the next episode of Crapy to Happy