An Interview with Sue Johnson, EdD心理学空间

Foundations of EFTVY:Sue, it's great to be with you today. We might as well start with the basics. Can you just say a bit about what is emotionally focused therapy or EFT?Sue Johnson:EFT is an approach that was developed in the '80s to work with couples, that now has a very strong empirical base. It's been tested. There's lots of outcome data. We know that we get results with lots of different kinds of couples. We know how we get results. As its name suggests, it's an approach that focuses very much on how people deal with their emotions and how they send emotional signals to their spouse, and then how this emotion becomes the music of their interactional dance.

It's an attachment-oriented approach. Attachment is a broad theory of personality and human development that focuses, also, very much on emotion. It's an attachment approach, so it assumes that we all have very deep needs for safe connection and emotional contact, and that when we don't get those needs, we get stuck in very negative interactional patterns; the dance music gets very complicated.
VY:Of course, humans are complex creatures. Emotions are an essential component, but we also have cognitions. Why do you focus on emotions?SJ:We focused on emotion, in some ways, because they were pretty much left out of interventions, particularly systemic interventions—interventions that looked at relationships. Emotions were really considered the enemy. They were the things that people had difficulty with. Particularly, anger and conflict were considered the enemy. So there was a lot of focus on just teaching people skills to control emotion—to be nicer to each other.

And what we tried to do is say, "No, focusing on emotion and helping people send key emotional messages to each other that help the other person feel safe is the most important part of a relationship. It's the key part of the attachment bond. And we really need to teach people how to do that." So that's why we focused on emotion.VY:And how did attachment theory become such a central component?SJ:Really, couples taught us how to do EFT. We started looking at how couples got caught in being overwhelmed by their emotions, or numbing out their emotions, or putting very negative emotions out to each other, and getting caught in really negative cycles. But we didn't understand why these cycles were so powerful, took over the whole relationship and induced such distress in people. We knew there was something powerful here. And we learned how to help people get out of these negative dances and move into positive, trusting, more open dances with each other.

So we discovered how to do that, but we didn't really understand why this dance was so incredibly powerful, why it had the effect it did untilVY:And when you refer to the dance, you're referring to the patterns that couples get into.SJ:Yes, I think of the patterns of interaction in a relationship as a dance. And I like to think of emotion as the music of the dance. I think that is a shorthand way of talking about how powerful emotions are. It's very difficult to learn skills and do a new dance that's about tango when there's waltz music playing. You end up going on with the music in the end. That's what happens in relationships with emotion.VY:What do you mean?SJ:If I'm really hurting and really upset with you, and I'm vigilantly watching everything you do, waiting for some sign that I don't really matter to you and you are about to turn away from me, I discount the positive things you say, for a start. I wait for you to raise your left eyebrow and say something negative. And when you say that, I'm ready—I have all these catastrophic ideas and feelings in my body, and this felt sense of falling through space and insecurity. And I react like crazy. And you turn to me and you say, "But I was so sweet to you yesterday. Doesn't that count?" And if I'm honest, I would say no. So our emotional realities are very powerful.VY:The kind of situation you just described is something that therapists often get tripped up on. When we're in the room with a couple, things happen so quickly, even before we understand what's happening and they're off to the races.SJ:That's right.VY:So how does the theory help us? How do you understand that?SJ: