An Interview with Sue Johnson, EdD心理学空间

I think our profession has developed a profound distrust of dependency, and we don't understand it.

I think our profession has developed a profound distrust of dependency, and we don't understand it. We still are hung up on, "We have to teach people to regulate their own emotions, be independent and separate, and define themselves." I think that's one thing. We don't really understand people's deepest needs.VY:So just conceptually having a shift in this idea of dependency, autonomy—that gets in the way.SJ:Yes. You've got to be able to accept that we're interdependent and we need each other. Otherwise, you're going to have a hard time with EFT. You're not going to be able to listen to and validate people's needs. You're going to blame them for their needs. But the second one is you have to get used to staying with emotion and deepening it. There's a beautiful quote by Jack Kornfield. He writes about Buddhism and he says something about, "I can let myself be borne along by the river of emotion because I know how to swim."

I think therapists have been traditionally quite scared of strong emotion because we haven't really known what to do with it. And at this point in psychotherapy in general, and in EFT, I think, there's been a big revolution understanding emotion and human attachment. And we do know what to do with it. There's nothing illogical about emotion. And, actually, there's not very much unpredictable about emotion if you really know how to listen in to it. But many of us have not been trained in how to really stay emotionally present with somebody and track emotion, how to deepen emotion and use it. I think that's the biggest one that people struggle with in EFT.VY:So it's just being more comfortable with emotion and trusting yourself to stay with it.SJ:That's a big part of it.VY:That's in terms of the comfort of the therapist. In terms of the techniques to help people work with it, what are the hardest things for therapists to learn?SJ:I don't think the techniques are hard per se. They're a combination of Rogerian empathic reflection, validating, asking process-oriented questions like, "What's happening for you right now? How do you feel when this person says this? How do you feel in your body? What do you tell yourself in your mind? Do you tell yourself this means this person doesn't love you?"VY:What I see is the skill that refer to as "slicing very thin"—tracking emotions on a very minute, moment-to-moment level. Not just asking someone how they feel, because many people, as you know, can't articulate that.SJ:No.VY:So you go at it from many angles.SJ:Well, we know what the elements of emotion are. The elements of emotion are initial perception, body response, a set of thoughts, and then an action tendency.VY:Now you're sounding like a behaviorist.SJ:No, I'm not. That comes from the emotion literature. A good EFT therapist will go and ask simple questions about the basic elements of emotion. Somebody will say, "I don't know how I feel right now." And the EFT therapist will say, "How's your body feel?" The person will say, "I feel tense." And the EFT therapist will say, "What do you want to do?"—because there's an action tendency in emotion. The person says, "I want this to stop. I want to get out of here." So you know what's happening—there's some version of fear going on. So the therapist will ask simple questions, and constantly empathically reflect to help people hold onto their emotional experience and continue to work with it.

Sometimes a therapist will interpret—add a piece. "This is very difficult for you. Could it be a little scary?" And then the therapist will help somebody hold their emotion, distill it. And then will create an enactment: "Could you turn and tell your partner, 'When we start to talk about this some part of me just wants to run away'?" You make the implicit explicit. You make the vague concrete. You make the vague vivid.

It's much better, from a relationship point of view, for me to turn and say to you, "Victor, I don't know what to do with what you've just said, but there's something a bit scary about it and I just want to run away." That's much better than for me to just feel that and not be able to talk about it, and turn and leave the room. If I turn and leave the room and you are a mammal and you're in a relationship with me, your brain says that's a danger cue. "This person who I depend on can walk away from me any time." And you start to get really upset—whereas if I turn and say to you, "I don't know what's happening with me. This is a bit scary. I just want to leave," you're probably going to feel compassion towards me.

It's all about helping people learn how to hold on to that emotional connection. Our mammalian brains experience emotional connection as a safety cue. There's lots of neuroscience behind this now, by the way. This emotional attachment stuff is creating a revolution in our field.

The New Science of LoveVY:I just heard David Brooks speak. He's done a great job with his book, The Social Animal, summarizing a lot of the attachment research, but he also warned of the danger of over-reading brain science. He said something to the effect that brain science is in such a state of infancy that to draw any definitive conclusions from it can be riding the next wave of popularity, but to make precise conclusions from it is overreaching.SJ:I agree with David Brooks that you can't draw conclusions. Sometimes when I listen to people and they say, "Oh, we change the brain in psychotherapy," I don't know. I just feel like saying, "Well, you know, eating an ice cream changes your brain."

On the other hand, when you look at research like my colleague, Jim Coan, has done, that if you lie alone in a computer in an MRI machine or you hold a stranger's hand, your brain goes berserk when you see a sign that you're going to be shocked on your feet. And when your partner, who you feel safe and connected with, holds your hand and you can see that signal that tells you you're going to be shocked on your feet, because you're holding your partner's hand and you feel connected to them your brain does not go berserk, and the way you experience the shock is much less painful.

Now, David Brooks is right. We're not quite sure what it all means. But it's fascinating stuff, and it's taking us into new territory. And, just by itself, that one study supports all the hundreds of studies that have been done on adult attachment and infant and mother and father attachment that says that we have connections with very special others, and that it's basically all about safety and danger. We use that connection as a safety cue. And what I just said has huge implications for couple therapy, psychotherapy in general, education for society. So, yes, David Brooks is right and we are in the middle of a revolution.VY:Speaking of that, I hear you're writing a new book on the science of love.SJ:Yes, because we really do have a science of love. It's in its infancy, but it's a strong, bawling little infant. It's not a fragile child.