An Interview with Sue Johnson, EdD心理学空间

Bowlby basically said for a child to really become independent, he has to be dependent first.

Bowlby basically said for a child to really become independent, he has to be dependent first. He has to be able to turn to other people and reach for them, and know how to connect with others in order to build this sense of self and in order to deal with how your self evolves and how big the world is. In other words, Bowlby basically said we're mammals. We need other people. A strong sense of self and the ability to be separate are tied to how connected you feel. They're not opposites—they're both the two sides of the same coin. We made a mistake in that.

In psychology and in therapy, we often see a little piece of the picture, and we go with that because that's all we can see. Then when the whole picture suddenly evolves, we can put things together in a different way.VY:So you don't like the ideas of co-dependency or enmeshment?SJ:Well, enmeshment confuses anxiety about closeness and coercion, for one thing. It's a very vague concept, and a lot of it came out of watching families where adolescents were in deep trouble and the therapist was trying to help the adolescents assert themselves with the parents. There's nothing wrong with the word "enmeshment" if you put it in a very particular context.

Co-dependency came out of the addiction literature, and we used it as a global blame for people without understanding that we have amazingly powerful emotional links with the people we love. To say you shouldn't have those links is craziness. Those links are wired into our brains by millions of years of evolution. Bowlby says if you're a mammal, there's no such thing as real self-sufficiency. And there's no such thing as real over-dependency. But there are massively anxious behaviors around dependency.

What healthy people have is effective dependency, which means—and there's lots of research behind this now—the more you know how to turn to other people, the more you can trust other people, the more you can go inside of yourself and access, for example, your loved one's face when you're feeling upset or distressed, the stronger you are as a person, the better you feel about yourself and the more able you are to take autonomous decisions.

The more you know how to turn to other people, the better you feel about yourself and the more able you are to make autonomous decisions.

And I'm not making this up. I can quote you study after study, and you see it in therapy.VY:I know that you can. And I know you can talk passionately and animatedly about the attachment literature for hours—SJ:Yes, I can. It's the best thing to ever hit psychology and therapy in the last hundred years, so there you go.VY:Yes, you're not one shy of opinions!SJ:No. Life's too short to not put out what you think. And if someone can show you you're wrong, that's good.

EFT TechniquesVY:How did it change your thinking and the technique of EFT when you had that "aha!" moment and started to understand the significance of attachment in adult couples?SJ:I think it helped me understand, on a deeper level, how powerful these emotions were that I was seeing in the couple. It helped me understand the power of fear in a couple—fear of abandonment, fear of rejection. It helped me understand the logic behind some of the apparently self-destructive positions people take in relationships.VY:Can you give an example of the fear or the self-destructive positions?SJ:For example, one of the classic ones in relationships is, "I feel lonely. I feel unsure that you care about me. I don't even know quite how to put that into words because I'm an adult—I'm not supposed to feel that way. But I somehow feel like I'm starving emotionally. And I decide that what I'm going to do is I'm going to make you respond. Ironically, I'm feeling all these feelings inside of abandonment and loneliness and fear, and what I say to you is, 'You never talk to me.'"VY:What you're describing is what's underneath, unconscious, as it were—not what the person's actually saying, but what you posit is driving their behavior.SJ:You don't have to posit it if you slow people down, and you say, "In the second before you get angry and tell your husband that he's ridiculous because he can't talk to anyone—in the second before you attack him to get his attention and to make him listen to you—what's happening to you?" If you just slow people down, there are enormously powerful universal patterns that you can see, and they fit very well with what John Bowlby saw in situations between mothers and infants.

There are only so many ways we have of dealing with our emotions. If I'm in a relationship with somebody and I want them to respond to me, and suddenly I'm not getting responsiveness and connection, I've got to reach for them and say, "Where are you? I need you." If somehow I'm afraid to do that or that doesn't work too well, then there are really only two alternatives. I get angry and shriek—children shriek or they get mad or they get aggressive with the mother, and so do we. We say, "Why don't you ever talk to me?" Unfortunately, if that gets to be a habitual pattern, I end up pushing you away. And in classic marital distress, the other person hears, "I'm being rejected. I'm disappointing. I'm messing up. I'm not pleasing this person. I don't know how to please this person. This hurts like hell. I want this fight to stop. I'm just going to stop talking."