106: Sue Johnson on Emotionally Focused Therapy

Welcome to episode 106 of the Couples Therapist couch. Welcome to the Couples Therapist couch. The podcast for Couples Therapists, Marriage Counselors and Relationship Coaches to explore the practice of Couples Therapy. And now, your host, Shane Berkel. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Couples Therapist couch. This is Shane Berkel and this is the podcast that's all about the practice of Couples Therapy. This podcast was started in order to provide education and support to Couples Therapists, to give them a little bit of a foundation of training as they explore different topics and different models of therapy, different authors and leaders in the field. And I'm really excited about sharing with you the episode today. I had the chance to speak with Dr. Sue Johnson, who has written many, many books, but the last few are Hold Me Tight, Love Sense and Attachment Theory in Practice. And you may have heard of her as the founder or creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy, one of the most well-renowned models of Couples Therapy that we used today. And I would highly recommend getting training in EFT. And but you'll hear more about it as you listen to the episode and learn more. But without further introduction, I'm really excited to share with you this episode with Dr. Sue Johnson. This is Shane Berkel. And today I'm very honored to be speaking with Dr. Sue Johnson, author, speaker, and the creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy. Hi Sue, welcome to the show. - Hey, hey, nice to be here. - Yeah, I'm so excited to talk to you about everything EFT. But you know, I really think it'd be nice for people to hear, if they haven't already, about your work as a Couples Therapist when you were just starting off and what you were finding limiting about the models that were out there. And what sort of inspired you to start practicing in a different way? - Okay, well, I think the bottom line is that, if I'm really honest, you know, I've done every other kind of therapy. I've done a group and family and individual from a Rogerian point of view. And I worked with a lot of different populations, violent men and really emotionally disturbed our lessons in care, families. I mean, you know, and I thought, you know, I was doing my, my doctorate and I was sort of high, you know, I was high on the whole field. And I thought, I thought I was pretty hot as a therapist, okay, I was pretty confident. And the bottom line is that I as my last sort of place that I went to to do my clinical work. And I had had a lot of experience, you know, compared to some of the other folks in the program. But the last place I went, the people said, well, some theoretically, you only have to see three clients over a period of months to fulfill your requirements. But actually, we've had a lot of terrible things that happened in the clinic and we're really strapped. And we would appreciate if you could see couples on the hour, every hour for three days. And it was something like that, anyway, something pretty outrageous. And of course, I was in love with the field and I was completely insane in those days. I was just, I don't know what was wrong with me when I looked back at it. I was, to say that I was on fire. I was, I just was hurling myself at everything at 50 miles an hour. And you know, of course, I said, oh, sure, sure. And I got, well, no problem. And then I started seeing these couples, my God. The bottom line is I felt completely incompetent. You know, I, first of all, there were two people in the room and they forced all the time. In a different way than I'd experienced with families. And, you know, it was, I didn't know what the hell to do. But all my nice Rogerian approaches, they worked for a little bit. But basically, I felt incompetent. So I went, I was a graduate student, you know, so this is what graduate students believe that every secret in the universe is in the library. All they have to do is find it right. But you needed that illusion when you're, you're going to graduate school. So I went to the library and I found all this analytic stuff on collusion and, you know, project of identification and insight. And it didn't help me at all. And then I went and I found the most popular thing that was around, which was behavioral couple therapy, I'll allow Neil Jacobson, who was just down. From me, I was in Vancouver. He was down in Seattle. And I read all his books and I asked him if I could go and sit in the back of his supervision. He said, no, go away. And so I, you know, I read all his books and he taught me to teach communication skills and do negotiations. And that didn't work with hell either. And so I thought, well, OK, then from my point of view, nobody knows what all this drama was about and nobody knows how to do it. So what the hell am I going to do? I think, well, I'm an experiential therapist. So I'm going to take my clients. I'm going to watch them again and again and again and again to understand what the hell's going on. And I'm so glad I made that decision. And it's quite interesting because John Bolby, the father of attachment theory, mean he made the same decision. He said, with Mary Ainsworth, his researcher, he said, well, if we really want to understand the ideas that I have, let's look at them in practice. Let's look at models and infants. And let's look at how they dance together. And we'll watch it and we'll see patterns. And I did the same thing. I said, I'm going to look up couples until I see what's going on. And I would watch tapes, you know, 10, 12 times. I'd watch it from their female clients point of view. I'd watch the male client I'd watch because I only got here for sexual couples in those days. OK, the gay folks weren't coming in, right? So, you know, I'd watch each client I'd watch their reaction to me. I'd watch what I did. I'd watch what happened between them. I'd watch it and watch it and watch it. And of course, as I did that, I started to see patterns. And I started to see what I totally believe now, which is emotion organizes your inner world. And it organizes the way you dance with others, your emotional signals. So, you know, I'm a rather intense person. So, my natural thing is to grab the most powerful thing that I can see and go with it. So, you know, I used to ride bloody, great horses, right? Who really I should have died on some of those horses. So, you know, that's kind of my personality. So, I started listening to people's emotions and helping them change the signals they sent to each other. And something started to happen. And I just got so, I don't know what the word is really. I was just on fire. I was so fascinated and enthralled. And to the point where, when my advisor, who'd given me, who was Les Greenberg, who had given me a nice little manageable thesis, you know, looking at tapes, I said to him, I don't want to do it. He said, "What do you want to do?" And I said, "Well, I want to write an ill manual for this, and then we'll see if it works." And he said, "You want to do a psychotherapy outcome study for your dissertation?" I said, "Sure. Why not?" He said, "That is insane." And he was right. He was right. So, I did that. And when I look back on it now, you know, we did a, what was for the field, a very rigorous, very, quite substantial outcome study with Neil Jacobson, who thought the whole thing was a joke, he thought I was a joke, and who helped me, actually, because he just thought it was so funny that I would even try and do this. And with some therapists for the clinical site department doing behavioral approaches, teaching people and negotiation skills and communication skills, me doing this weird thing that I got from nine sheets of paper called, I don't know, let's call it EFT, you know, and then a wait list. So, it was very good, and I was very idealistic, and so I went to all the research books, and I made this thing as rigorous, rigorous as I could. And then we got these amazing results, and I was blown away. I ran them three times, because I thought, no, this is impossible. And indeed, we always get great results, but we've never got results like that. I think it was, I don't know what it was, everybody was on fire doing it. So, you know, I couldn't believe these results. And neither could Neil Jacobson, by the way, he nearly died. I'm sure, I'm sure. And he wasn't terribly pleased, actually. But, you know, and then I was totally hooked, but what I realized, and I always say this is, I knew I had something, I was on to something. I knew I started to understand relationships and this dance between people and how emotion was the thing that was organizing the dance. But I did not understand, really, why we were getting those results. And it was a little while after I'd already got the job in Ottawa. I think I'd already sent the article off. And I just had this moment when I realized that we were creating bonding conversations. And that's why, and bonding conversations, your mammalian brain is wired to be totally lit up by bonding conversations. They're full of survival significance. Your brain is just wired to go, oh, wow, and to feel joy and to hold onto that experience. I mean, it's the epitomizes what we call the corrective emotion experience is to have a bonding experience with someone who's important to you in a session. And I realized that was what was happening. And that's why we were getting these results. And by the way, I still believe that that's why EFT is the only approach to couples therapy that gets the kind of results we do and that gets results that last over time. Our, the follow ups that we've done. Admittedly, they're only about three years long because it's very hard to get people to feeling question is after three years, they just won't do it. Okay, it's not relevant to them anymore. But, you know, over three year follow up in the chaos of relationships and way things change. We're the only approach I think that gets the kind of follow up results. We, people even continue to improve after therapies ended. And don't forget what we did there was a very short therapy because we didn't know what we were doing. So it was a short therapy. Now we do longer approaches, longer. But we now do therapy with, you know, we have people we've done studies with depressed folks and folks that have got all kinds of problems besides relationship distress. So we learned a lot and I was hooked for life. And I got a, um, um, uh, profess, you know, I got a job on that. And then I got all these wonderful people called graduate students, um, who come and give you their time and their energy and their enthusiasm and, um, and it sort of took off. But in the last 20 years, two decades, it's taken off in a different way because adult attachment went from being something that everybody laughed at. To something that people are starting to recognize as, um, amazingly important and as attachment is simply the best, most rigorous, broadest, most significant or developmental theory of personality that we have ever developed in psychology. And the point is it's our relational theory. It's not a theory about what happens inside your brain or your head or by yourself. It's a theory that puts the fish in the water. We are like fish and the water we swim in is our relationships, especially with significant others. When you don't pay attention to that, you're looking at a fish out of water. If you take a fish out of water, the fish looks weird. You're right, often think a lot of our, all our labels and the DSM. I mean, they're all, they're all focused on what, what is going on inside somebody's head. They all take the fish out of the water, right? And what attachment does is it puts the fish back in the water and looks at people in context, the context of their most intimate relationship. So that's taken off in the last 20 years. And as far as I'm concerned, it offers this amazing map that can integrate the whole field of psychotherapy, not just couples. It offers us an amazing map to people's inner world, their misery, their motivation. And to people's relationships and how those two things come, you know, attachment is about biology in the end. But it's about how social interaction is a biological variable. It impacts your biology, your relationships are not the icing on the cake. I'm watching the queen on Netflix, which is silly because I'm actually violently anti-monarchy. But I still find it intriguing as a story. And, you know, the whole thing that I'm picking up from Royal Family is how distant they were. My God, you know, they're also, you know, they speak in this incredibly correct English. And, you know, they're all incredibly correct. And they all, you get this feeling of distance. And what I see is a whole bunch of people trying to survive alone. My goodness, that's hard. Yeah. Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, thank you. I'm wondering, I'm curious. You were talking about the change that happens when you work with someone in EFT. Yes, and how that's much more lasting. And I'm curious if you could say more about what happens or why that is. Well, one of the most referred to theories of change in therapy has been the whole idea of a corrective emotional experience. But, and that came out of psychodynamic. And, you know, you could see if T is a version of, you know, experiential humanistic therapy is certainly closer to psychodynamic than it is to traditional analytic or behavioral approaches. And, you know, and, and, but then the tricky part is what exactly is a corrective emotional experience. Well, what we found in EFT is. What you having couples therapy is an amazing arena for change when you change a relationship in very significant ways. In ways that impact your nervous system and great and when you change a relationship. The partners start to change each other because they start to create a safe connection and that's the natural place people grow. And so, I think in EFT, what we do is we create corrective emotional experiences where people can deal with their emotions in a different way, get their emotional balance. And then, dance with their partner in a different way, a more open, responsive way, we know from attachment theory what defines the quality of a bond. You know, what I just said, I mean, that's light years away from even, you know, what couples therapists were talking about 20 years ago, that's light years. I say to you, I know the basic variables that define the quality of any attachment bond. And I can create them in therapy. I mean, what I just said to you is, well, I wouldn't have been able to say that, I certainly would have never say that to you when I was a graduate student, it was like a UK. And it's emotional accessibility and responsiveness. And we add an E on their engagement, you know, the big question in relationships is, are you there for me, you know, and are you there for me? Are you accessible, responsive and engaged? And that is what's the basic drama that's going on, somebody asked that question. And the answer is yes, or is no or maybe, and that doesn't work. And what we do in therapy is create a corrective emotional experience where the answer is yes. Or not always, of course, even if the answer is no, it's better for people to understand that and grieve the relationship and come into some sort of balance, right. And when, but what we see is that what a attachment theory says is that when people feel securely connected to a significant other, their sense of self expands their behavioral repertoire expands. Just like, you know, you take an animal and you give it safety, it starts to explore, it starts to play. It starts to open up, it starts to open up to its own inner experience, it starts to open up to its experience with others, right, it's, you know, I dance tango. And Argentine tango and it's all about attunement, okay, people don't, not the silly stuff on the stage, that's just below me, that's just theater, okay. But the real tango is all about attunement and, you know, I'm a totally different dancer when I dance with somebody who I feel safe with. And I can pick up that safety in five seconds, that's why people who dance tango stand in front of each other and look at each other and tune into each other, right. And I know in the first few steps, if I'm safe with this person, if I can play with this person, if I can explore, if I should, if I should be careful about making mistakes with this person, or if I, if it doesn't matter, if we're just doing this amazing thing to music. And I dance, if you saw me, you'd say, oh, you know, that's weird, she dances totally different, yes, I dance totally differently and I have a totally different sense of myself as a dancer, you know, when I'm dancing, I was thinking one person I danced with last night. You know, he just plays and I can play and we tune into each other and when I dance with him, I know that I'm a, I'm a pretty good tango dancer, but if you saw me on Friday night, when I was dancing with a few folks that I didn't feel that with, you would have said, oh, she's kind of, you know, she's all right, but she's sort of just a boring conventional, you know, uptight dancer. So this is fascinating. So we create a corrective emotion experience of accessible to your responsiveness, where people can talk about their basic fears and get support from the other person and their basic needs, you know, and, and of course, you can do this in what we call, if it now, emotionally focused individual therapy, which is in my book that I'm out in January, you can drove in an individual as well. I'm working with an older, rather depressed Christian lady at the moment. Yesterday, she was telling me all all the things that were wrong with her and all the reasons why she didn't really deserve what she wanted was she came to therapy to become more fully alive, which is not, not something that I think not a problem that you can do. Little coping techniques with on little behavioral approaches, right, she wants to be fully alive, but she doesn't feel entitled to be fully alive, right, and so she was telling me all the things reasons why she she can't take in something good when I give it to her, and I said, well, let's close your eyes. And let's have a conversation with Jesus about that. Why don't you, can you see him, you do say you talked to him every morning, can you see him. Tell me what he looks like, what's his expression on his face, and I create a conversational dialogue the same as I do in couples therapy, I create an individual therapy, and you see him and tell him, tell him, I don't, maybe I don't deserve it, maybe there's something wrong with me, maybe, no, I can't listen to Sue when she tells me I'm brave, and, you know, and what does Jesus say? See, this is so powerful. It's more powerful than me telling her, you know, that she's brave or, and of course, she tells me what Jesus says, her version of Jesus, and she weeps. Because, of course, Jesus says what he says in lots of the gospels, you know, he says, you're Jesus, by the way, I am not a practised in Christian, but it is fascinating to me that if you actually look at what happens in the Bible, not the rules or the church stuff, Jesus is ARE, he's accessible, responsive and engaged with everybody, and that's very interesting, you know, and so is the Dalai Lama, actually, the Dalai, if you listen to the Dalai, these big spiritual figures, you know, they come across as open and accessible and engaged with people, you know, Dalai Lama is always giggling, and he says things like, well, somebody said, well, what do you do when you're afraid? I knocked his answer, he said, didn't say, I go and, you know, meditation said, oh, I feel my mother's love. I feel my mother's love, because she loved me, you see, and I still feel that, and I tell my monks when you are afraid or angry, yell mother. And I thought, hey, man, you know all about EFT and attachment. Yeah, so wait, so you can create an attachment bond, even if you don't have a partner, or, you know, draw. You can have, you can have this conversation, like Irving Yellow, who's one of my favourite psychotherapists says, a good therapist gets to know the cost of characters inside their individual client's head, because we're always having these conversations with people that were bonded with or attachment figures. And they're a huge, they're a drama that's going on inside our head all the time, and they're where we decide who we are, and how to deal with our emotions, how to deal with our vulnerabilities. A lot of EFT goes to an existential level where you're really working at the basic question of how do you as a human being deal with your vulnerabilities. And the essential issue with an attachment orientated therapist is that we believe the most functional way to deal with your vulnerabilities is to take it to another safe person and share the load and get the support because your nervous system is not wired to deal with your vulnerability or by yourself. You can do it, but it costs you and it's difficult, and, you know, this is, if you want to know someone who I did a brain scan study with Jim Cohn, who's my wonderful colleague from the University of Virginia, and he talks about this all the time, he says, we believe in our society that the most functional way to deal with your emotions is to self-soothe, be able to take care of the by yourself. He says, that's nonsense. We're social bonding beings. We're not, we can do that. And in fact, the irony is if we, if we know how to turn to other people and make, and use that to make coherent sense of what's happening with us and deal with our vulnerabilities, we're better than dealing with it by ourselves where we have to. But that's not the theory we've had all these years. We still have a society that actually believes that you're supposed to be self-sufficient and you're supposed to look even feminism, you know, which is all I understand is about women standing strong. But they have all these things about like you're supposed to look in the mirror every day and tell yourself, you're fantastic, you're great, you, you're worth it. Well, this is nonsense. The only people that do this are psychopaths. Right. So, so, you know, we look into other people's eyes. And, and of course, if you're a feminist, you're allergic to the idea that women are supposed to look into men's eyes and find their own worth there. And I understand that. But there is a basic human truth that we defy, we aren't define ourselves all through our lives in this intimate, in these intimate relationships. Right. It would otherwise we cut off from context. So, what do we do? Yeah, maybe this would be, I'm sorry. But you aren't, didn't you ask me, no, you said, how do you understand it or something? I mean, what we do is we create these corrective emotion experiences by in a very specific way. It's not, the irony is we're flexible, attuned, experiential therapists who are also directive on target, focused and scientific. That's great. Well, we go in and we assemble emotion, people's emotion in a very particular way. We deepen it in a very particular way. And we shift them into their vulnerabilities in a safe environment. And then we help them take those vulnerabilities into their personal dramas with me with the therapist. So, I'll say to an individual, you're talking about this right now, you're ashamed. Could you look at me? What do you see in my face? And the person says, I don't know. I want you to look again. And the person says, you look sad. Say yes. I feel so sad for you that you feel this pain. It's not fair. Is it that you feel this pain? I feel so sad and it makes so much sense to me in the person weeks that I'm creating a dialogue, an interpersonal drama, right, that starts to shift their reality. And then I do it with people in their lives. So, we're always, what am I talking to about? You're creating a new way of dealing with your emotions and your vulnerability. And then you're taking that out into the dramas that people live in in their heads and in their lives. And you're creating new, more positive dramas. And that, for me, is the definition of a corrective emotional experience. And it's one that your nervous system is wired to zing to hold on to. Neil Jacobson always used to say, the change happens when people do homework and the trouble is people won't do it. And by the time I was sitting in the back of his supervision, because eventually he let me into a supervision. And he'd say, you don't believe that. Do you sue silly little student from Canada? Who sort of intrigues me? And I would say, no, you're wrong. The change doesn't happen in the stuff we do in plum work. And we don't have to make people do their homework. Change happens in session in new emotional experiences. And those experiences are so powerful. They don't have to practice them. They take them home. They do them. They hold on to them. Like you hold on to oxygen. When you get a hit of oxygen, your body goes, yeah, that'll take me home. Yeah, I can breathe. So when people start doing these hold me tight conversations, as we call them in our couples therapy, they keep doing them. They don't. It's like they found the way home. They found the way to go through the inevitable miscommunication and missing each other and disconnection that you come into with a bond. They found a way to reconnect, come back together and create that synchrony that all bonding mammals are drawn to and long for and want whether you're a swan. I mean, why, if you look at birds, you can see that you're even look at people or babies. You look at birds. Birds do these amazing mating dances. I show it and I four day externship, which is all over the world now. I always show this little clip of grieves doing this mating dance. And you watch it. Blows your mind. They do what we do in tango. They go into synchrony. They look at each other. They tune into each other. They start moving in synchrony. They start doing all these. But what are they doing? Why bother. They're saying, are you there? Will you respond? Are you predictable? Am I safe with you? Will you come with me? Will you dance with me? Are you there? And then when the answer is yes, they stand up on the water, these birds, these grieves. Where are they? They're in Oregon on these lakes. They stand up and they literally move across the water together, beating the water together. And if you think this is nature saying, can you guys real young vulnerable young? Can you guys share intentions and pick up on each other's communications? Can you, are you guys going to be a team to connect and real vulnerable young together? Will you, will one of you come to the defense of the other? Will one of you feed the other on the nest? If not, it doesn't work. And so this is nature's way of this bonding dances or nature's way of saying, are you going to, are you good at this survival game? Yeah, you're going to manage this. But of course, in adults, one of the main ways people going to synchrony is sex. But that's a big topic. We can have another discussion about that if you like. Yeah, yeah, but that's fantastic. I love, you're such a great speaker as you describe this. I'm wondering if you could give an example of, you know, a couple who's sitting in front of us in the office taking some of these concepts that you're talking about. And how are we, and obviously you can probably talk for hours about this too, but the 10 minute version of how, how are you guiding them into that synchronicity? Okay, I'm trying to be, I like to talk about a difficult couple, or should I talk about? Right. I'll talk about simple couple because, because we want to get the simple, and this is on a tape. This is on a training tape. We've got lots of training tapes on the ISF site, right, www.icft.com. And we've got lots of little videos on my site too, but it's mostly me talking about things. Dr. Sue Johnson. But I'll talk about a South African couple that are one, one of our videos. I can't remember which one. I think it's called shaping secure connection, but I'm not sure. So this is a relatively simple couple. They come in. The therapist brings them in for a live because we always do lives in our externship, live sessions. The therapist comes in and says, I want you to see this couple because they're, they're a lovely couple. They love each other. It's obviously love each other. They're immigrants. They've gone through immigration, which is amazingly stressful. Okay. They've left all their families behind in another country. Right. They have to depend on each other in a whole new way. And when they immigrated, he had a lot of skills that were recognized. And I think Canadian, I can't remember what I think they were. And so he immediately gets a job. He immediately gets embraced by this society because he has skills that everyone wants. The qualifications are not accepted. And she cannot get a job. And then she falls and she, she, I think she broke her wrist or something. There's a reason why she's in a lot of chronic pain. She's in her apartment. She's away from all the people she lives. He's away creating a new job. She's in chronic pain. And, you know, she needs his support and he's preoccupied with creating their new life in Canada. And you can just see it as a recipe for everything going wrong. So she starts to get clinically depressed. As she gets depressed, she gets more and more sensitive to his cues. She feels more and more alone. The alone as she feels is key to the depression, as always. Okay, that's what happens to us. We get depressed when we're facing our vulnerability and learn and everything starts to go wrong. But there are soft couple. You know, she's not an aggressive. She's a pursuer. You know, she's demanding, but she's, she's a lovely lady. You know, but she's, she's saying and I'm getting angry and I don't want to be angry, but I am angry. You know, so she's a very soft. There are soft couple. And when she says I'm angry, he looks at me with these big eyes, like, help me, help me. So I said to the therapist, will the therapist have already seen them a few times? I don't know what to do with him because she's, I can see her. You know, she'll talk about her emotions and obviously she's missing him and she wants support. He has no idea how to give it. He's completely in his head. He's completely into his male sort of role of coping. And he wish when she tries to talk to him, he just gives her advice and coping tells her how to cope or totally shuts down and goes away. And she's getting angry and angry and I don't want to do with him. So she says, I want you to go in and work with him. When we do lives, externships, therapists bring a case in and they give us, they tell us what they want us to do. We try. So I go in and I work with them and I work and I see the cycle. I stay and I see the cycle. I check it out. The cycle is as the therapist described. The woman is agitated, upset, teary, telling him, you don't listen to me, you know, I feel like you're not with me. And maybe I'm maybe a sunny girl with me. I'm getting depressed. So she's kind of started to go down that rabbit hole and she's pushing on him. And indeed he sits and stays, gives her logic and tries to reason with her until she shouldn't be depressed and you know changes the subject and then goes silent and he, they do it right there. What is lovely about couples, therapists, you see the drama right in front of you. You have to hear it in a narrative in individual therapy. You have to let the client do it with you, but you, you see it. There's an all in front of you. So, and if you're confident, that's wonderful. If you've just started couples therapy, that's horrible because you say, oh my God, what am I going to do with this drama? But you know, you get used to it and then you know the way through. So I listen, look at this cycle. Yes, she's pushing and demanding. Yes, he's turning away. And as he turns away, she demands more and they're stuck in there. That's right. And can they repair this? No. What happens at home? They have these arguments now and he goes silent. And she gets more and more depressed and thinks she shouldn't have come to Canada and right. So all right. So then I work a little bit with her because the therapist has told me she's quite open and she's coming into stage one of VFT, which is, you know, she's starting to get her emotional balance. So talk about the emotions that are going on underneath her demand in behavior. Yeah, she's doing great. So therapist wants me to work with him. So I go in and work with him. And he isn't very emotional. I say, what's happening for you when your lady gets angry with you. And the only word he will come up with is unsettling. So I say, this is hard for you. No, no, it's, it's just a little bit unsettling. I say so. And then I try again. I said, and he says, yes, it's, as I said, it's unsettling. And then he'll change the subject to go off into his, his head. So what I do is classic EFT, I stay with him and I listen to him and I pick up a few emotional handles. I can't remember what they are now, but I think one was something like there's a moment of doom, right? The therapist has said he uses this, right? So I pick up what we call emotional handles and I start using them. And I say, so, but there's something in here where it's almost like there's some doom happening. He starts to look at me and his eyes get big and he says, well, it's unsettling. I say, and this, there's something here that's sort of dangerous and like doom. And I keep going. The point is a good EFT therapist knows where they're going. They've got a map. So they just stay on the path. And it's, they're almost irresistible. If you see a good EFT therapist working, they know where they're going. They know what's happening. And they, the client starts to come with them. So then I start saying, there's something in that's hard for you. And I go in and I assemble his emotion. I say, so when your lady turns to you and you see this, what is, what is the, what is difficult? This is what it's like look on her face. So when you see that look in your face, trigger. What happens for you? Well, it is something bad here. Yes, he says, yes, it's unsettling. There's something unsettling and bad here. Right. Yes, basic perception. What happens inside your body? And he comes, he says, oh, it's, it's, I get tight here. I said, oh, you can feel it in his body. We're getting somewhere. Oh, you get tight here. I get. So you get this tightness. And what do you say to yourself? He says, well, I don't know how this is going to work. Very vague, right? I say, aha, you say to yourself, something's going wrong here. And you don't know how to fix it. He says, yes, I don't know how to fix it. And I must fix it. And I don't know how to fix it. Oh, that's so difficult for you. And then what do you do? Action tendency says, well, I just go quiet. I go quiet because nothing else works. I said, aha. And then of course you go quiet and then she can't find you and she feels even more alone and she gets more upset with you. And I put it into the cycle and I blame the cycle as we do any of this and they're caught in this dance. And you're both alone in this dance. This is so hard for you. Basically, I work into I keep doing this and I work into him being able to say that there's something here unsettling is there's something here that's almost scary. And he looks to me and he looks at me and he says, yes. Finally, yeah. So you have to move. You have to tune into people and allow them to take the steps, the size they want. Right. And and he says it's scary. And then he changes it and says something like, it's, I can't fix it. I can't fix it. And it's terrifying. And then it's terrifying. So then we get his emotional experience tangible in the room. He's in it. He's feeling it. He's not talking about it. He's in it. He's feeling it. Right. And I say, good. So I summarize it for him. I distill it. And I say, would you try and tell your lady, please. If you try and tell your lady, I do shut down. I didn't know I was shutting you out, but I do shut down because I don't know how to fix it. And that's scary. And I don't know what to do with that. And he tell and he looks at me and he looks at me and then he turns and he tells her. And you know. And it's it fascinating. You see the whole thing shift. It's like watching a building shift on its access into a new shape. She comes towards him. Her eyes bill with tears. She says, I didn't know that. That helps me. It helps me so much to know that you're afraid that you're not just turning away from me because you think that I'm a bad wife or that I'm, you know, there's something wrong with me or you don't want to be with me. I have so much to know you're a thank you for doing that. And he looks at me and he goes. Yeah, because basically he's getting more of what he wants. He finds a new way to fix it. The way to fix it is to become more emotionally accessible and engaged. That's the way to fix it. The way to fix it is to change how you dance with your partner, but people get hang up on. You know, I love don't got one. He's wonderful. And we argue when we get together and he says, you know, people fight about parenting sex and finances. I say, no, they don't. That's just the content. That's just the first level of communication. If you listen, people always fight and only fight about disconnection. The others are just slight disagreements or a little chronic differences. You know, my husband wants me to go hiking up mountains. I've been married to 31 years. I don't want to hike up mountains. It hurts my legs. I don't like it. But that's a difference. We dealt with that a thousand times and it'll always be there. He always says things like, well, of course, if you would come, I said, well, if you would go for so long, he said, well, if you would come. It's not a big deal. But a real fight is always about disconnection. It's about where are you? Where are you? So this is what I say to John, unless it's heart, we have great, when we talk together, we have great dialogues. So from our point of view, the issue is always disconnection and distance and the lack of this attunement and the solution is always about bringing people together. We're stronger together. Once people come together and can support each other and live on mobility, then the world changes. They change the problem changes. Apparently insolvable problems become solvable because you're not facing them alone. Yeah, I love that. And I think people use those things like parenting, money, sex, to distract themselves from the vulnerability of what would happen if they thrust themselves into that emotional conversation. The fear that you got that guy to talk about is terrifying for some people to put themselves out there like that, I think. Yeah, and I, you know, we have lots of from my point of view, pathologizing labels to put on that sort of thing. But the way I see it is, for many people, that is just foreign territory. They've never seen it. They don't even know it's possible. They see sort of versions of it on Hollywood movies, but it's all sort of tinged with whatever Hollywood, you know, the message from Hollywood, it's also superficial. They've never seen their parents or they've never done it with their parents. Their parents never did it with them. They're in a culture where you just don't do that. You know, we've always worked with lots of military folks, for example. You know, they've never seen this conversation. How would they move into it? Their nervous system isn't even wired to be open to it. And then they start doing it. And their nervous system goes, "Ah!" You know, this is a bonding mammal making connection. My God, this feels good. And everything shifts. It's, you know, it still fascinates me after all these years. I mean, I'm still practicing, you know, right now I'm doing e-fit emotionally individual therapy because we're doing a big study on it. Because we haven't paid enough attention to doing EFT with individuals, right? So we're doing a big, the first big study right now. But the whole thing still fascinates me. I mean, I'm no less fascinated than I was 30 years ago, because it seems to me that attachment science and the stuff that EFTs contributed and all the research now on emotion. And, you know, I have 70 trainers who go all over the world and take this stuff into Egypt, Iran, Finland, the slums of South Africa. You know, we have educational programs based on this for people who can't make somebody wear a couple, one person's had a hard attack. I mean, this keeps growing. And I think it's because it's the first time that any approach to couples has been based on a real science of understanding romantic love. And it's bloody exciting. Yeah, I agree. And all of the skills that a behavioral therapist might want to teach a couple. I imagine when you, the way you describe working with that couple, when you start working with people in that way, and they have those aha moments in the session and their emotional connection, that they're going to start using those skills without needing to be taught them from the top down. Yeah, all the research says that teaching people communication skills doesn't work. Right. I think it's the wrong level. The point is they can practice them in your office, but they're not going to do them when the bell rings in their relationship. And they suddenly hear that there's something going wrong. The whole nervous system ramps up, you know, and they're looking to how to fix it a way out of this. You know, they do not go to their prefrontal cortex and access all these nice clear communications because they don't so the only people that use those communication sequences are the security attached people who probably don't need them do them anyway. So it doesn't work, you know, but what does work is for people to have this prototype in their head or this blueprint of this powerful emotional conversation that makes them feel better and connects them. And so they'll move, they'll move into that. They'll say, I'm getting scared right now. We're getting as people do. They tell you, you know, I didn't go away from her and turn away and slam the door. I turned around and I said, we're doing that thing again. That thing we talked about in Sue's office. I'm getting scared. I don't know how to connect with you. I'm going to lose you. And his wife is blown away and says, right, right. We are. We are doing that thing. And this is where I start to feel like you don't care and I'm all alone. And then he says, can we not do this? And she says, I don't know. What do you think? He says, well, I love you. Let's go and have coffee. She says, all right. So, you know, this is an emotional learning. This is put down into your nervous system and your brain says, this is survival level stuff. This is oxygen stuff. And once you have this experience, you don't forget it. Just like a, you know, I was working with an individual lady and I was saying to her, you've gone through so much trauma in your life. I don't understand how you can be so strong. You've got a loving man at home. You're bringing up your children in a way that you were never bought up. I don't understand how you've done it. And I know in my head, I say, where did you feel seen and held? And she said, oh, my, you know, I know, where did you feel seen and held shit? Oh, well, I haven't told you about my grandmother. She's, oh, yeah, oh, and then she tells me that in summers, she'd leave her a polingly traumatic home life. And she'd be shipped off to her grandmother. And she'd stay with her grandmother all summer. And her grandmother held comforted her and held her and gave her safety. Well, that grandmother is still alive, right? And what we do is we access the grandmother and she's got the grandmother and she tunes into that. That's a natural thing for us to do as human beings. And when couples can do that, can they tune into each other and know that the other person's there when they're needed. The relationship just starts to bloom. And the wonderful thing is so do the people. So do a good couple's therapist changes individuals, couple relationships and families. A good couple's therapist changes the whole caboodle because they change the emotional music, the emotional music that's defining the drama on all those three levels. Once you start to change that, everything's in play. People, me Roger said, if you give people safety, they'll grow. That's right. You know, and we've pathologized the hell out of people put labels on them in psychotherapy and in mental health. We don't look at them in their context, you know, what and a both Rogers and Bobby basically said. I can only remember the Sue Johnson version, but basically in mental health, what you have to do certain things to get you through the night when that connection with other people isn't possible. And often what happens is this, those things are perfectly rational, shutting down and numbing out can save your life as a child in a dangerous environment. It's perfectly rational. It makes sense. There's nothing wrong with it. You shouldn't label it. It's an adaptive response. Trouble is people get stuck in it and the protection that they create for themselves becomes a prison and they get stuck in this one way of dealing with their vulnerability, one way of dealing with their emotion. And then as adults, it doesn't work. It cuts them off from it constrains their world. It doesn't protect them. It becomes a prison and then they they fall in love and they don't know how to connect and they don't even believe in connection. And it's the minute everything starts to go wrong. They numb out. Well, this saved their life in another context, but now it's the fact. So why do we label them? What's the point of labeling? You have to look at this drama. You have to look at the context. You have to look at the fish in the water. And to say to the guys got, you know, bipolar, because occasionally he gets agitated and then he numbs out. I said, well, whatever. You know, never mind the label. You know, that doesn't help me much. Let's look at the process. How's this guy danced with his own emotions and with his lady? Oh, how he dances with is he numbs out. What's that about? Oh, where do you learn that? He learned that in his terrible childhood. And he needed it. And I'm not going to apologize. I'm going to say, yes, you numbed out. That's brilliant. That's good. And now it cuts you away from your late. It shuts your lady out. So you leave him with his way of dealing with that, but you add to it, right? And you help him learn to do something new. And then, yeah, occasionally he gets agitated when he thinks he's going to lose her. That's right. The label bipolar is like, you know, all it tells me is, well, I turn it into process in my head. I say, show me. Right. People say, I can't dance. I can't dance. I can't dance. Tango. Show me. Well, no, you can't because you're holding yourself completely rigid on the top of your body. And when your partner sends you a cue, you go rigid. And you don't bend your body into your partners. Oh, so, you know, that's a process way of doing things instead of staying in labels and content. You know, the FT people change through new emotional experiences, not through new explanations or cognitive labels. You can reframe things for sure, but it has to have emotional impact. The reframes that matter to you have the emotional impact. So they're done in an emotional context. Well, I'm just so grateful for your voice and all this too. I agree with what you're saying before. I think this is just such an exciting time. And that we're moving forward in a way that, like you were saying, we wouldn't have been able to have some of these conversations 20 years ago even. Well, I just am so appreciative of how much of a trailblazer that you have been in bringing these things to the forefront. And I agree. I see it with my own couples about it being life changing, not just for their relationship, but for them as individuals, for their families. And I'm interested in this eFIT. I also think it was Gail Palmer I talked about talked to about EFFT, emotional focus family therapy, another thing. It's exciting to hear all these things branching out, but tell us more, you mentioned the website. Tell us more about where we can find more information about all these things. In your new book, who would that be good for to read? Well, my new book was written for all psychotherapists who are interested in it. It's an attachment. I'm framing EFT as an experiential attachment orientated approach. It doesn't matter who you've got in the room with, you've got an individual, a couple of family. So my new book says EFT is an attached orientated approach and attachment science is the way forward for psychotherapy period. It gives us some order and some way of integrating the field. And you can find all that on that book is with Gilford. It came out in January. It sold amazingly well. That's attachment theory in practice. Yes. Yes. EFT with individuals, couples and families. And we've done the first two training tapes of EFIT. We have one out and the other ones coming out in a couple of weeks. With me working with a client and with me and my wonderful colleague, Leanne Campbell working with clients individually to show people how we do individual EFT. And we're always putting out new couples, you know, training tapes and doing new courses. We do courses with Pessie. You can go on my website, which we're changing right now, but you could go on my website and look at me giving little talks. And you can find a hold me tight educational program in your community, probably, which is based on my book, hold me tight. If you have couples, if you have couples dealing with illness, there's a program now for couples where one person has had a heart attack, for example, healing hearts together. You can find all this stuff. Oh, and I always forget we have hold me tight. We translated it into an online program. WWW dot hold me tight online.com and people for I would try to keep it relatively cheap. I think it's like $299. You can do an online course with your partner. It's fun. It's interesting. It's got people like my son in law who used to be a radio announcer. Saying nice things on it and music and little quizzes and me. I look a bit like the queen on it. I'm kind of boring because we decided that I was supposed to look safe. So I look so safe. But anyway, you know, you can go and do that and you can recommend that to your clients to it would feed into your practice. It wouldn't compete with your practice. That could be a really helpful if someone's working with a couple to have them do that hold me tight video course and to enhance the work that they're doing. Yeah, and you know, we put a lot of energy into making it accessible and interesting. So there's all kinds of things happening. We're all over the world. So what's that website? We're all the externships are listed out. WWW dot I see eft.com international center for excellence. Pretty much the focus therapy. And you know, there's we've got about 70 affiliated centers all over the world now. So there's probably one in your community. If you're in a city, there's one in Boston. If you're if you're in a city in North America, or a capital in Europe, you know, there's an eft group there or a, you know, it's starting now in places like Egypt, which are blowing my mind, but you know, attachment is a biological approach to who we are as human beings and how we relate to others. And it is supposed to be universal. It is supposed to go across culture across religion across everything sexual orientation. We're all bonding mammals. No matter what our image of God is, or no matter what our culture is or our politics are we. We don't get to choose. We are bonding mammals. And our nervous system is why the same way and we need other people and we're stuck with that. So what attachment does is give you a map to all that. So you probably look around your community. If you haven't got a center yet, you've got a group of eft therapists somewhere who are all meeting and looking at tapes and we very much believe in community and team in eft. We're attachment people. So everywhere we go, we create teams, communities, local leaders, everywhere we go, we create this connection. Like we feel like, I mean, that's the only way for it to, if you're going to make a change in people's lives and in society in general, where the way is not gurus, the way is not fancy gurus who spend a lot of money on marketing and who spend most of their life in self promotion. North America is very good at that. And it's not about anything except making money in the end. And you know, that's not the way. So we do teams everywhere and we believe in people contributing, you know, which is why people can join ICEF as members as well. And so far it's really working. It's where we just seem to get more and more excited and more and more creative and more and more. In fact, you know, my staff say to me, I walk in and I say things like, I've got an idea. And whether I walk into my big office in Ottawa, whether I walk into the smaller one now with my wonderful colleagues in Victoria, everybody grows. But he says, oh, now, right, like plays like enough, you know, because they know this is going to turn it into a study or a big DVD or some sort of enormous about typing for them or, you know, some huge task for them. So they all look at me and go, right, yes, well, you know, they say things to me, like, are you going to retire, which is ridiculous. Happily retire from life. This is my life. I say, yeah, I'm going to retire the day before I die. How about that? Is that, you know, that will do? If actually you could look at them sometimes and then thinking like roll on, you know, because this is too much work. But we are still having fun. Yeah, well, I love that idea of you've created a community and it's the attachment there. It's the relationships, right, that it's not about, I like that, like being a guru or self promotion. It's about creating these relationships with so many different people and just continuing to have that spread throughout the world. It's wonderful. And it goes, it's right in line with all of the work that we do as couples therapists. But yeah, it's so good to talk to you too. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for you taking the time with this. I'll put all of this information and the show notes so people can easily find it. They can easily find the book, find the website. And yeah, I hope that we can catch up again at some point in the future. Thank you so much, Sue. What a fantastic episode. I'm just so grateful that you took the time here to be with us and to educate all of us therapists out here. And thank you so much to all you listeners out there. Definitely don't let me forget all of you listeners. Please keep reminding me that Sue promised to come back on and talk about sex. We can't let her forget about that. She's just such a wealth of knowledge. And I'm so, so grateful. So I do want to mention, definitely go check out her website, get her books if you haven't read them already. And you can find, I think we mentioned it during the interview, but you can find all of her, excuse me, all of the externships that are taught by numerous different certified EFT trainers. And they're offered all over the world. So go, there's a listing of them on the website. So definitely go check that out. But thank you again for tuning in. Make sure and join the couple's therapist couch Facebook group. And I'm always greatly appreciate reviews and ratings on iTunes. But I will be with you next week. And I look forward to connecting again. Take care. [Music]