It really helps to understand that you're dealing with an attachment drama. You're dealing with dilemmas in human bonding.
It really helps to understand that you're dealing with an attachment drama. You're dealing with dilemmas in human bonding. So the emotions that you're dealing with are high-voltage emotions, because your mammalian brain sees these emotions—these situations—in terms of life and death: "Does this person care about me?" It looks like we're having a fight about parenting, but, in fact, if you tune into the emotions, oftentimes two minutes after the fight started—or two seconds after the fight started—the fight ends up being about attachment issues like, "Do you love me? Do I matter to you? If I hurt do you care? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me? Can I depend on you?"
I started to realize after we'd done the first outcome study that the logic behind these emotions was that they were all about attachment and bonding, and our deep human need for that secure bond.Back to Top
Johnson's Flash of InsightVY:How did that come to you?SJ:It was a flash of insight, I'm afraid. It sounds corny, but it was one of those traditional corny "Aha!" things that just hit you in the head.VY:How did that happen?SJ:Actually, I was at a conference. We'd done the first outcome study of EFT. It had worked amazingly well. I couldn't really understand how it had worked so well, and I was at a conference listening to Neil Jacobson talking. And Neil Jacobson, who was really the father of cognitive-behavioral marital therapy, was giving a talk and basically saying that relationships are rational bargains, so what you have to do is teach people to negotiate. His theory was that you can negotiate almost anything, including affairs. And this was the theory of relationship underneath the behavioral approaches: you teach people communication skills so that they can problem solve and bargain better.
Afterwards, I and my colleague Les Greenberg, who originally helped me put together EFT for couples, were sitting in a bar, and he said, "He's wrong." And I said, "Of course Neil's wrong." And he said, "Well, why is he wrong?" And I said, "Oh, he's wrong because an adult love relationship is an attachment bond, and you can't bargain for basic responsiveness and safety and love." And that was it. And then suddenly the whole of John Bowlby, who I'd read, but who I'd never made the links—it was like somebody hit me with a sledgehammer.
I went home and wrote an article called "Bonds or Bargains," which ended up being in theJournal of Marriage and Family Therapy, even though Alan Gurman sent it out for review four times, and each time he got two people who hated it and who said that adult relationships were not attachment bonds like the bonds between mothers and children. They were adult friendships, and they were rational, and dependency was a problem, and we got over it. And the other half of the people said, "Oh, this is really new and interesting." And Alan Gurman finally said, "I can never get people to agree. They either hate it or love it. So, Sue, I like it so I'm going to publish it"—for which I bless him forever.
That was the first article—it came out in '86. And in '87 Hazan and Shaver, who were social psychologists, bought out their first little study of adult attachment. Bowlby always said adults had attachment, but we'd never really done anything with his remarks.VY:So the interesting thing is you developed the theory and practice of EFT before you conceptualized the centrality of attachment in it, and it worked without that understanding.SJ:It worked because, I think, we were Rogerian, and we understood how to create new interactions from a systemic point of view. But we didn't really understand why these new interactions worked so well.
And don't forget, also, in those days not much was written about adult attachment. Since then there have been hundreds of studies. It's a very rich literature now—lots of studies on adult attachment linking adult attachment to better health, feeling better about yourself, better ability to deal with stress. But in those days—in the '80s—nobody was writing about adult attachment. So there wasn't a literature sitting there that I could go to and say, "Oh, this is it." I just understood suddenly what I was looking at between adult partners, and how this paralleled the between the bonds between mothers and children, which many people still find very difficult to accept. They say, "No, they're totally different."VY:It certainly goes against the strong sense of psychological independence that we cherish in the West and is so central to so many of our conceptions of psychological health.SJ:Yes. I think what we've done is we've pathologized dependency. If you really think about it, though, how on earth do we get to be independent anyway?
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