Healing Attachment Wounds Triggered by Sexual Behaviors: Insights from Dr. Sue Johnson (Episode #12)

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Something about you that I can't help.

But smile when you smile and laugh when you laugh.

Something's around welcome to the Human intimacy podcast. I'm Dr. Kevin Skinner. If you're joining us for the first time, I'm glad you're with us. If you've been with me in previous podcasts, you know that we have the opportunity to interact with any experts from throughout the world who specialize in helping us create better relationships. I can't be more excited today to share with you the podcast that I did in the year 2016 with renowned therapist Dr. Sue Johnson. She is a pioneer. She created emotionally focused therapy that has been taught to individuals throughout the world and has helped couples rebuild their relationship after difficult emotional experiences in their lives. Dr. Johnson she is kind and she is caring and recently with her passing, I wanted to share with you the podcast that we did together in 2016. In this podcast you're going to hear Dr. Johnson share some of her insights about how pornography and sexual behaviors have been hurting society, hurting relationships and creating attachment wounds. And then she will offer solutions for individuals and couples seeking to find answers for to difficult questions in their relationship. As you listen to her voice, as you hear her wisdom, you will gain a better understanding of the importance of human attachment. As the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, she has trained therapists all over the world who are using this research based approach to help couples heal from difficult relationship issues. So Dr. Sue Johnson, thank you for your knowledge, thank you for your kindness and thank you for your willingness to give of your time in educating and serving our society so therapists like myself can help others. Now, without further ado, here is the interview that I had with Dr. Sue Johnson from 2016. Dr. Johnson Glad to have you with us.

Lovely to meet you.

I just want to begin. Thank you for taking the time today. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and been practicing for about 20 years. And your work has been very influential. I love your books. I read them. I've actually read them a couple times, just trying to figure out how to apply it best in my clinical work. And I specialize in pornography and sexual addiction. And our company, Bloom, we have so many suffering women who they just. Honestly, their depression and anxiety is off the charts and their PTSD symptoms. I mean, I'm sure you see that in your clinic and what you're doing.

Yes, we do. And, in fact, it's one of the things that's really hit me about it is how much that has become a factor in the last five, six years. I remember my sex therapist, the person who specializes in sex interventions in my institute, her and me talking and having a talk years and years ago and saying, well, you know, is this. Yes, this happens, but is it really such a big issue? And way back then we said, well, it happens, but it's not as big as they're making it out to be. That is no longer true. It is now huge. It is huge.

And I think the problem is we have a group of people who are saying that it's not that big of a deal. It's just pornography. And my research, about 10 years ago, I wrote a trauma assessment based upon discovering their partner's involvement in pornography or other sexual behaviors. And it paralleled the PTSD symptoms in the DSM 4. And what I've found, based upon now I have about 3,000 women who've taken the assessment, and they're showing so many of the PTSD symptoms that we can't ignore what their story is. And that's really what Bloom up for women is all about. It's helping them have a voice and an understanding. In fact, one of the things that I did, I reached out to our forum. We have a group of about 400, 450 women in bloom for women, and they support each other, and then they can ask a professional therapist questions, and then they can get educational videos. And so what we are doing is trying to inform them on the symptoms and help them go through it and navigate through that. So I posed a question, and I said, how many of you in your therapy or in your work have read Dr. Johnson's work, have done emotionally focused therapy? And I just want to read one of those statements. I thought it was fascinating. One of the women, she said, And I think this is a credit to the work that you're doing. She said it was incredibly helpful. It's one of the things that helped our marriage get to the roots of the real problems and the real emotions. So, anyway, she was an advocate saying to the other women, you really, if you aren't familiar with eft, you probably ought to get familiar with it.

Yeah.

The challenge that I think a lot of people have, and this is something that I think you talked about in your book, is when they're involved with sexual addiction, how do we then put EFT into that work and integrate those two together? I'd like your thoughts on that.

I think if you look at the bigger picture, there's a lovely book by a man called Flores. I always forget his first name. And he writes it's a book on addiction and attachment. And what he basically says is that one way of understanding addiction as a general phenomena, no matter what it is, whether it's gambling, whether it's cocaine, whether it's any exercise, whether it's pornography, is that it's really about regulating your emotions when you cannot use the most functional way of regulating your emotions, which is the connection with another person. So what he's talking about is really addiction, in the end, is what you do to try and deal with your emotions and your needs when you cannot. You don't have enough trust. You don't have enough safety. You. You just don't have the strategies in place to turn to another person and find comfort and caring and support and just that kind of emotional balance that comes with knowing that you're not alone and that somebody's there for you when you need them. If you don't have that, what Flores says is that really there's not that many ways of dealing with the enormity of life and your own anxiety and your own sense of aloneness. There aren't that many ways. And in our culture, we have basically said that all the other ways they're okay because they're just pleasurable and it's no big deal. But I think the no big deal argument is very problematic. And in sex addiction, what it doesn't take into account is that if somebody becomes obsessed, and that is really what addiction is about. It's about obsession. If somebody becomes obsessed with the next time they're going to look at the Internet, the images on the Internet, thinking about the images on the Internet, waiting to get home in order to look at the Internet, so they can masturbate, waiting till their partner goes to bed so they can go back on the Internet. This takes them away from their whole life, but it certainly takes them away from their partner and the opportunity cost. I don't like using that word because it minimizes it. Just the word minimizes it. But we look at addiction, we say it's a problem. We don't look at the fact that it makes the rest of functional life and relationships impossible. What you don't have then is, is the possibility of secure connection with your partner. And we know that secure connection with your partner is associated with every indices of mental health and happiness and well being that you can find that psychologists have ever looked at. We know that. So this is a big deal. You know, it's a dead end where people get addicted to the escape or to the high of, you know, seeking out that high, that cocaine, that alcohol, that sexual stimulus. And that takes over their whole life and it crowds out everything else. And of course, for the partner, it is traumatic because I think society says, well, you know, why are you making a fuss? You know, men have more sort of sexuality and they just, they're just looking at pictures. I read somewhere where a woman said to her husband, this is really a betrayal. And he said, what are you talking about? All I'm doing is typing.

Typing.

I would.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

So this is, you can sort of see it this way, but it's a craziness because what it does is it absorbs the person's energy, longing, it becomes what they turn to, not their partner. It excludes the partner, it makes the partner almost irrelevant. And what we know from research is that this is huge for human beings. We're bonding animals. And we know, for example, that for you to just get rejection cues from someone that you're with and that you care about, those cues are coded in the same way and in the same part of the brain as physical cues of danger, physical pain. So you're a bonding animal that knows you need other people and you have special, special bonds with just a few others. And the way I understand it, and what science talks about now, is that when those bonds are threatened, when you cannot make contact with that person, when they don't tune into you, they don't give you affection and caring. When you get messages that you are irrelevant, that you're not important, that you're not the person that is wanted, or you're not special to this person, your brain doesn't really distinguish for you. For your mammalian brain, that's just like stepping on a nail. It's exactly the same experience and it's danger cue, it's a threat, and it pushes people into complete despair, anxiety, panic. And the trouble is, you're right, I think we, you know, we don't recognize the pain this is causing. We don't recognize how it's damaging our families. And by the way, that's one of the reasons I'm doing this webinar. Because I was so impressed by your website and I was so impressed by your mission.

Well, thank you. And again, I'm very grateful for that. In fact, I often use one of your terms as it relates to this, and it's that statement, are you there for me? You've used that word in your books, and it resonated with me significantly. Because when they're involved in pornography or sexually acting out, the result is you can't be there for me.

That's right. And I think we haven't understood bonding, and so we haven't understood what you just said, which is that, you know, if someone is obsessed with getting the next fix, whatever that next fix is, you know, it's not. They're not just addicted when they're actually trying to get the fix, and when they're actually getting the fix and for a few minutes afterwards, they are obsessed with that fix. It is their one way of managing their emotions. They are obsessed with it. And what that means is they are absolutely not accessible, responsive, and engaged with their partner. So the answer to the key question, in love, are you there for me, for the partner of an addict? Right. Is no, this person is not able to be there for you. They are in love with their addiction. They are in. One of the ways we explain it to people is we say it's like you're having an affair with the images on the screen. You're having an affair with alcohol, you're having an affair with cocaine. Because you give it all your attention. You think about it, you're waiting for the next time you can tune into this stimulus or you're regretting that it's over. And this is usually the way we feel about a partner. So your partner is into total deprivation. And also, you're not there for your partner. Your partner is lonely. Your partner is panicked. Because all the evidence is that our mammalian brain goes into panic. And that is not too strong a word, goes into panic when the people we depend on just aren't there for us. And, you know, basically the other person's experience is they've lost their partner. They've lost their partner to this weird ambivalent cue. This weird ambivalent activity that the rest of society says is no big deal, and the partner says is no big deal. So people start to feel crazy. They start to feel, this isn't just sex addiction, by the way. It happens a lot in all addictions. I remember working with a couple where the man was addicted to gambling, and he said, well, it's not a problem. And the fact that I play poker every minute, I get the fact that I'm going to be sued for malpractice as a doctor because I'm letting my patients down because I play poker all night on the Internet. The fact that, you know, it doesn't matter because I'm not an addict, because I win, right?

I win.

And so he minimized the whole thing. And it took his wife saying, well, however you talk about it, you say it's just cards. And you say that, you know, you asked me to prove to you that there's really something wrong with this and that it's an addiction. But I'm just going to tell you that you're not with me anymore. And from my point of view, you are completely caught up in playing poker, and it's the only thing that matters to you. And I'm dying here. I've lost my husband, you know, and.

That question, I'm dying here. It leads me into, you know, we talk about the beginning phase where, you know, they've just discovered that their partner's. Whether it's gambling or sexual addiction. And then as couples start to work through some of those things, I found a lot of these women and a lot of our. The women who are on our Bloom forum, one of the things that they say to me is, I can't get these thoughts out of my mind. And it reminds me a little bit of those demon dialogues that you talk about, this story that's brought into the room here. And they're feeling a lot of shame because they're feeling this anger and this animosity towards their spouse. That fright, that fear that comes with not being safe. I'd love you to address that concept of, here they are. They're trying to work through their own emotions, but they're having this internal dialogue of what's wrong with me? Because I feel so angry.

I hear you. What I would say to those women is, are you joking? The main survival strategy of our species, the reason we've made it this far, strange little clawless animals that we are, little fragile animals that we are, you know, the main survival strategy of our species is to turn. To know that we can turn to another person and when we call, they will come. That is the main survival strategy. So of course, if you lose your partner to an incredible obsession that takes them away from you and also you've got this horrible ambiguity where they're there but they're not there. You know, that's the other thing that women find difficult. You better believe that you're going to have all the things that we know happen from the cradle to the grave in separation distress, in a bonding animal. You're going to be panicked, you're going to be enraged. Your instinct is to scream and cry and protest, to get through to this person and get them back to you to deal with your loss, to re engage with them. When you can't get them to re engage with you, you'll try to turn away and numb out. And often that means you go into depression and despair, right? And numbing. I mean, it can be functional in some ways for a short time, but it's very problematic if you're trying to live your life numbed out just to keep your family together. You know, it. So I would say to those women, yes, you're going to be angry, you're going to be dreadfully hurt. You're going to be totally confused because there's such denial going on in our society and because the addict will use denial, right? They're not really aware of what this thing is costing them. Most of the time they don't understand it. Right? So yes, you're going to be enraged and you're going to be terrified and you're going to be hurt and you're going to feel lost and alone. Actually, it would be good for the women. You can look at a little YouTube by Edtronic. Ed and I have just made another one together and we're going to put it on YouTube, but it's called still face.

Oh, I've seen it.

I don't know if you've seen it, but he shows what happens to a baby when the mother simply stops responding. Well, that's the baby. You know, you're looking at a bonding animal whose nervous system and whose brain is built for connection and who suddenly finds that connection missing, suddenly finds that the baby cannot connect. That is the same thing that spouses feel. The baby gets enraged, the baby gets frantic, the baby shrieks. Some babies actually throw toys at the mother. It's like, where are you? Where are you? Listen to me. Don't I matter to you? Then if the mother still sits still and silent and doesn't respond, the baby will turn Right around in the chair and try and numb out, try to shut it out. Then if still nothing happens, the baby turns around and goes into meltdown. And from my point of view, having seen thousands and thousands of couples in the last 30 years and done all these 17 studies, that is exactly what happens to adults.

I agree with you. That's been my experience. 20 years of doing therapy. I believe that we, as a group, we don't leave that childhood, we don't leave that. We use the same strategies to cope as adults and in our relationships, when we get into committed relationships. So I absolutely. That's been my experience.

And the other issue that happens is that I think sometimes the addict will say things like, well, you know, I've stopped, or I don't do it so much. So get over it. And I think if we really understand what bonding is and how important bonding is to us as human beings and how much we depend on. On bonding strategies just to keep our emotional balance in life, we need to acknowledge that you don't just get over it. There's no way. You don't just get over it. For one thing, it's triggered again and again. It's triggered every time you're driving home and you think to yourself, oh, my goodness, I'm going to get home and I'm early and I'm going to find him on the computer. It's triggered every time he makes an ambiguous comment that implies that maybe it wasn't a big deal and he might go back to it. It's triggered whenever his friend makes a joke about how, hey, all us boys like looking at porn. There's porn. There's really nothing wrong with it, but the girls don't like it. So it's triggered again and again. And with these kinds of things, I do see them as relational traumas. We call them attachment injuries. And what we understand, and from the study we did, is you have to actively heal them with the partner, otherwise they are not going to go away. They will trigger anxiety, depression, things that look like flashbacks, you know, almost sort of a mild form of ptsd. They will. And huge sense of loss. And they will. And unless you can get the spouses to work through what we call the attachment injury process, I don't see how that's going to go away. I really don't.

And that's been my experience that attachment injury that you talk about is really a delicate dance between these two people who have the attachment injury occurs, and now how do we respond to it? And based upon her past and his Past and then their willingness to come together. Unfortunately, a lot of these women that we work with, they kind of bury it. They're afraid to talk about it, to admit my spouse has a sexual addiction, as if that somehow reflects upon them. And so a lot of them bury their pain or ignore it. Any advice that you have to individuals who've maybe over the years been afraid or ashamed to go talk about it with somebody who could be a support. Any thoughts for them?

Well, I'm not sure what the stimulus is for them to bury their pain. I think in some ways we give women funny messages in society. We sort of say to women, it's almost like we say to women on some level, well, you have to allow and accept that men's sexuality is much more urgent than women's. And so you have to tolerate this kind of stuff. And really some people out there in society are saying, and if you have a problem with it, then you're somehow immature or you're not very together. You know, there's even stuff in the press about how women, if you're mature and together and really independent, then you really don't mind if your partner goes off and makes love with somebody else. From my point of view, this is kind of delusional. And what it speaks to me, it speaks to me of the fact that we absolutely have not understood love and bonding. We haven't understood ourselves as bonding animals. We are the one, we are the animals who bond. You know, we are homo vinculum just as much as we are homo sapiens. And if you understand that, then you start to understand the amazing pain that people go through. You start to understand why loneliness kills. You start to understand why the best predictor of long term health is actually the quality of your intimate relationships. You start to understand our brain scan research that we just did a couple of years ago, that's on my website where we found that once you help couples have these bonding conversations, if the man holds the woman's hand, she can be threatened with something like electric shock and her brain can stay completely calm because his connection is a safety cue. So we haven't understood bonding. So I think women, they don't feel entitled. They think, well, there must be something wrong with me that this hurts so much. There must be, you know, I should be able to deal with it or it's somehow shameful. No, it means that you are a bonding mammal that counts on your partner, that wants your partner to be there for you. And you're a bonding animal that needs intimate connection from your partner. And that's just the way we are. And, you know, men and women have kind of been. We haven't understood that, you know, and sometimes the sexes deal with their longings differently, but we haven't understood that. So I would try to tell women they're entitled to their pain.

And as you say that, it validates what a lot of the people that I'm working with say. I need someone to really understand this is normal. And that's what I try to tell people. If you don't feel safe going to Dr. Stephen Porges, work the polyvagal theory looking at that. If you don't feel safe, attachment and bonding is not a normal process. Unless you have a broken attachment bond, you have to feel safe. That's my premise in working with these women. If you don't feel safe, everything from fight or flight is what your normal natural response should be.

That's right.

Then the next part of that is as they start. And really, a lot of the women that we talk with are saying, now we're trying to reconnect. We're trying to do this dance. What advice would you give to these women who are trying to have one of those Hold Me Tight conversations? But they're still in that phase of. I don't know if I fully trust him, but I want to try to trust him. He's maybe going to groups, he's going to therapy, but I'm having a hard time because I'm not fully there yet. I want to talk with him, but I don't know how to.

Well, of course I'm going to say, because it's what I've done for the last 30 years. I'd advise them to read Hold Me Tight and look at the conversations in Hold Me Tight, Especially all the conversations, actually. And I'd advise them to go for therapy and to get the help of a therapist to talk about their vulnerability with the extra safety that a therapist provides. And then maybe read Hold Me Tight and try to do some of those conversations at home and to talk to their partner about how terrified they are to trust again, how terrified they are this is going to happen again, how wounded they are and what is it they need from their partner in order to start to heal. I mean, these are the kinds of conversations you have to start to have. Most people. We so do not educate people to understand their most important relationships, that most people feel lost in these conversations. They have no idea that they have a natural rhythm and a natural progress, if you like. They're a particular kind of Dance. But a good therapist can help you to see that dance. And you're right when you say that the first thing is to create safety. So when we get a couple coming in where there's been a huge attachment injury or relationship trauma, whether it's an active affair or whether it's pornography addiction, whatever it is, we don't start with talking about forgiveness and healing. We start with, let's look at the dance you're caught in most of the time. Let's look at the negative dance you're caught in and how neither of you feel really safe in this relationship. You know, who's pursuing, who's blaming, who's withdrawing, who's shutting the other person out. Let's look at how you dance together. And let's try to look at what we call your demon dialogues, the most popular of which is demand, withdraw. And let's see if you guys can help each other out of those to create a platform of safety. Then when you have a basic platform of safety and you can de escalate these patterns, then we encourage couples to start to take risks, to talk about their vulnerability and their fears and to go into talking about these injuries. But many couples need the help of a therapist there. The vulnerability here is huge.

Yeah. And I think what you're talking about there is, in my experience with most of the addicts, they have attachment injuries that go way, way back in time to childhood. And then when they get into a relationship not knowing, often their spouse doesn't know the depth of their sexual addiction. They come into this relationship wanting this intimacy, wanting that closeness. And then when it's not available, they revert back to these places of attachment wounds where, I don't know if I dare come close. I'm not safe enough with you. Now we've got a couple who's doing this very difficult dance of really hurting each other, because neither one of them are prepared for the relationship intimacy. Because they aren't really prepared for attachment relationships.

That's right. And I think we have to be realistic here. We have to. We really have not understood ourselves as bonding animals. And many, many of us grow up in families that are quite distant, that, you know, they're not completely uncaring. They do what they think is good parenting and good family life. They feed their kids. You know, they try to give their kid instrumental things, but there isn't any understanding of the emotional needs of kids. And so kids grow up basically feeling alone and numbed out and never having seen two adults resolve a conflict with loving connection, talk about emotional difficulties and support each other, come close and respond to each other, They've never seen that. So then they find a partner, they fall in love and they get married. And the first time that they get into conflict or distance that can't be bridged, they're completely lost. If you feel completely lost and you feel awful and alone and desperate, but you've got no way of understanding that and that it seems like an unsolvable problem, no way of solving it. I mean, our society is very good at giving you alternatives. Nom out, buy a bigger car, have another drink, get these drugs, they really don't hurt you. Here's some Internet. I mean, never before have we ever had so much sexual stimulation coming into people's homes. You don't have to go seek it out.

That's right.

I mean, I get regular emails from sites that are asking me if I want to look at pornography. You know, I don't think I'm a good candidate. I'm an older woman, for goodness. Say, what are they?

They don't care who their market is, do they?

Customers or something like, you know, it's everywhere. And the amazing irony of our times, for me, the terrible irony of our times is that at last, science is actually starting to give us a roadmap to how to fulfill these deep longings that we all have for loving connection. And just as this is happening, our society seems to be doing everything it can to minimize our need for each other, to distract us from learning how to be close and providing us with these terrible, destructive dead ends that actually make close relationships impossible. There is something very poignant and awful and sad. Just as we learn about connection, society's getting lonelier and lonelier and more and more people are into. Think about it. I mean, more and more people are into looking at formulaic flat screens of sexuality rather than turning and learning how to make love with the partner that's living in the house with them. This is not freedom sometimes.

So true.

Somebody on some media described me. People have very strange images of me because of the work I do. Somebody described me as some sort of conservative matron, which is very funny if you know me at all. I'm not very conservative and I'm not very matronly. But I thought, oh, how fascinating. And the argument was that I was somehow. My work was somehow implying that people shouldn't be free and, you know, follow their instincts for pleasure. And they imply that all this stuff is. If you look at the cost of this, you know, if you look at what's really going on in society and the cost to our families and our relationships that somehow that's just old fashioned and conservative. No, I'm afraid not. From my point of view, that's realistic, that's pragmatic. This sort of thing is destroying our.

Families and our whole society. I could not agree with you more. Our society is being literally inch by inch destroyed the fabric of it because we're taking away these bonds that are so essential and basically saying we're going to be independent, we don't really need each other as long as we've got something to connect to. And you're talking about a deeper intimate bond that unfortunately our society really is struggling with right now. So much loneliness. Dr. John Cacioppo's work, talking about loneliness.

Exactly.

And the research is clear. We are social beings, we need each other. And yet these conversations. And I want to go back to our listeners and I want to tell them, if you haven't read Hold Me Tight, I just strongly recommend, I couldn't recommend it more for couples who are at the point trying to work through their problems, trying to have these conversations that are really difficult. I can't think of a better book that would get them started in that. And so, you know, we're talking with Dr. Sue Johnson and to our listeners, please get out there, get them information so you can have these conversations. And then, you know, if you need to go to a therapist and have those conversations.

You know, I think the other thing about this, that my experience is that the people that are caught in addictions, you're the man who's upped up and upped his porn usage to the point where it has taken over his life. One of the things that keeps him stuck in it is that he has no idea how to repair the relationship with his wife. So that there is another more positive way to get soothing and pleasure and caring and connection than his ritual of going and getting this fantasy connection with these women that he sees on the Internet. He addicts don't understand that there is a way out and the way out is to reconnect with their partner. They really don't understand that. And that feeds them being caught in this dreadful place where the only way to feel good or the only relief from feeling bad is to keep on with this addiction.

And what you say there is, they have attachment fractures. They really never known how to attach in a meaningful way, whether that's from infancy into these current adult relationships. So if you were to give advice to that man, the template, so to speak, of Saying, here's how we could do that. You're talking about vulnerability. You're talking about learning how to be vulnerable in a relationship, some of those conversations. Is that right?

Yes. I think what we find on a very basic level is that one of the big blocks is what I was saying before, which is people have never seen it. They've never seen adults resolve this kind of thing. They don't even know it's possible. So what we've learned to do over the years and one of the ways that, you know, eft keeps emotionally focused therapy, the stuff that I do, keeps being refined and, you know, applied to new people and getting better. And certainly one of the things I've learned to do in the last few years is what we call seed attachment, where I will say to somebody, so could you help me? You telling me that you say to yourself, well, I must be a bad person, and I've hurt my wife dreadfully, but I can't fix it, and nobody can fix it, and nobody ever fixes these things, and my wife will never forgive me, and there's nothing I can do, so I might as well just keep looking at Paul.

Right?

And so you've never seen it. And the man will say, that's right. She's never going to forgive me. I'm never going to feel good about myself. And at least when I watch porn for a minute, I feel powerful and special. And I know it's an illusion, but, you know, I don't. There's no way out. And so I say so you could never, ever imagine. You could never imagine a relationship where you could turn and listen to your partner's pain and just hear her pain and that she's in so much pain because you so matter to her. Not because you're a bad man, but because you matter to her so much. And you can't even imagine that you would hear her pain and that deep inside you, just because you're a human being and empathy is wired into your brain, if it's not blocked off by all kinds of other things, you could never imagine that she'd be able to tell you her pain, how much you matter to her, and that you would be able to turn and find the words to comfort her and tell her, I don't want you to hurt. I hurt when you hurt. I don't want you to hurt. Let's learn to be together. I don't know how. Will you help me? You can't imagine anyone saying that. And my experience is that these men sit there and look at me, and their eyes get huge. And they say things like, do people do that? Does anyone do that? I don't think anyone does that. I never seen that. And then I do it again. They're in foreign territory, and I want them to stay there and explore and learn. Well, you don't do that in foreign territory. You look around for the danger cues, and you get the hell out as quickly as possible. So I go back there and I say, right. So you could never, ever imagine you're.

Teaching them a foreign language.

And I give them an image again. And that's one of the things that hold me tight. Does the book. Because it's full of examples of couples who are going through this. So in other words, it's like we're saying to somebody, we'll take you into this territory called knowing how to deal with this. The fact you've hurt your partner, the fact you don't feel good about you, the fact that you've got caught in this addiction, and that's the only way, you know, to get yourself out of loneliness and disconnection, and you struggle with that. Right. And you haven't known how to deal with this. But here's a picture of another way, and you can do it.

You know, and one of the things I do with individuals, I may not do it quite that way, but. But I say, is that what you. Would you like to have that? I'm trying to get them to their core part of who they really are. And they often will say, of course that's what I want, but that's not possible for me. I mean, did you not hear what I just told you about my past, about my parents, about my upbringing, about my wife and how angry she is at me?

Yes. And I say, yes, I hear you. And, you know, we have a study where we helped almost 70% of couples that are going through what you went through heal their relationships. And three years later, they were happy, they were stable, and forgiveness was no longer an issue. But I understand that for you it seems strange and foreign. So, you know, the real issue is, are you willing to stay here with me and explore it? Because we know how to take you through it. And I think one of the things that has really helped from all our 30 years of research is that when we say to a couple, well, a man said to me the other day, I don't even know why I feel the way I do. I don't know what to do here, and I don't even know why I feel the way I do. Do you know why I feel the way I do?

Uh huh.

I said respectfully, I think I do, yes, because, you know, on some level, we're all the same. And he said, and do you know how I could get out of this? And I said, yes, I do. We have a map. We've helped hundreds of thousands of couples get out of it. We know. I mean, of course it doesn't work for everybody all the time because people are different and people are willing. They're not. You know, sometimes people have a hard time really investing in the process. But you know, a huge number of couples go through eft and heal their relationship. So we say, yes, it's possible. Yes, we have a roadmap. Yes, it's hard work. Yes, you have to be willing to look at how you've hurt your partner. Yes, you have to be willing to look at your. How you got caught in dealing with your longing or your pain by going to something like porn. But if you're willing to do that, if you have the courage for that and you have a partner that's still here, still willing to risk to be with you, yeah, there's a roadmap for that. You know, there's hills and valleys in the process. It's not easy, but yeah, we have a roadmap. Now the point is, do you want to start, do you want to start right here, right now?

Yes.

And what you've just done is give them the hope. There is a roadmap. And that's what I want to say to all couples. If you're willing to put in the work. The roadmap has been created. And that's one of the things I love about your work, is those conversations, some of those conversations that you have in your book, those are real, raw conversations. I mean, those are real. You can tell that they were opening up. They were really starting to let out those core emotions. And when you do that, that vulnerability, you begin to see each other in a more authentic way.

That's right.

So along with that line, one of the things that I want to just go back to something you said earlier. Do you believe that most addiction is really attachment related?

I don't think that attachment is the only element in addiction. I think we have to be careful reducing any complex behavior like addiction to just one thing. You know, there's lots of reasons why people get addicted. But if you ask me, you know, do I believe that secure attachment is a protective factor against all kinds of impulsive and destructive behaviors, including all kinds of addictions, I'll tell You? Yes. And there's all kinds of research on it. And if you ask me, does lack of secure connection in childhood, lack of caring and nurturing in childhood set you up and set you at risk for finding addictive behaviors to soothe yourself in adulthood? I'll say yes. There's all kinds of research on that. So what I see is that it's the healthiest way for us as human beings to grow and thrive and deal with life is to do it together. You know, we're really lousy at being by ourselves. We're not built for it. Our nervous system isn't wired for it. And we're built to connect and to stay close and to do what the Irish call live in the shelter of each other. And when people can do that, then the likelihood that they're going to get caught in destructive behaviors, whatever they are, is so much smaller. You know, it's like maybe I just do an image. Somebody said, I was at a conference and somebody said, well, we are over sexed as a species where sex is the most powerful instinct of all. And so we'll. People have affairs even if they're happily married and this and that and something else. And you know, that's just the way it is. And I said, no, that's not the way it is at all. That's a complete distortion. In fact, the good evidence is that most people go through their whole lives, even if they don't know how to really be close to their partner, not having affairs. And it's not true. You're exaggerating. But also it's like you're just, you know, you're going overboard and you're just saying it's inevitable. When in fact, what we know is that secure attachment, you know, if you're dancing really close to another person and at least most of that time, that is nurturing for you. There is no room for another destructive behavior or another person to come in. It's not a moral issue. It's sort of a mechanics issue. It's how it works.

Why would I want anything else? If I have this, that closeness, why would I want anything else?

Exactly. Exactly. Some people talk about attachment in funny terms. They talk about, they say, well, you know, Darwin said that it was survival of the fittest, so we've all got to be separate and independent, you know, and that attachment theorists are naive, saying that people want to be there for each other. And Darwin never said that. That was actually one of Darwin's competitors who came up with the phrase survival of the fittest. Darwin's basically theory is about survival of the most nurtured. And what we know is that nurturing, that close connection bonds are incredibly nurturing, and that they make, you know, other addictions and negative behaviors irrelevant. This is the point if, when you have a great source of sustenance and nurturance, you don't need to go into these destructive behaviors.

So do you believe then that behind most of us, I mean, obviously there's people who have very traumatic experiences that make them not want a bond. The avoidant personality or the dismissive.

They're all those people.

But would you say, for the most part, most of us still long for that secure attachment, but we don't know how to get it?

Absolutely. I would say I know that's true because, for example, at one period in my career, I worked an awful lot with trauma survivors, incest survivors, and people who'd been dreadfully abused as children. And really, if you listen to their history, you would say this person has no reason on earth to ever trust another human being within 60ft of them for the rest of their lives. And yet my experience of those people was inevitably that if I gave them the chance, I gave them some safety, and I showed them a way forward, they'd get in touch with their longing and they'd start to risk. Now, sometimes those risks had to be very small to begin with, okay? But they start to risk. The longing is there. In fact, I'd say it even stronger than this. The longing is built into your bones. You have to work really hard and numb it out not to give into that longing. And some of us say, I will not feel that longing because I will be vulnerable, and I refuse to be vulnerable. And they still have to work hard at numbing out. I think one thing that I've really learned from my couples is, for example, when you see somebody shutting down in a relationship, and people say, well, I've fallen out of love, and I don't have any empathy, and I'm not empathic, and I don't want to be close. My response these days is, my goodness, that must take about 95% of the glucose going to your brain to block out all that natural empathy and longing and desire to be safe and connected with somebody. My goodness, that must take a lot of effort. How do you do that? Because I really believe that you have to actively block it out. And one ways we do that is to be drunk all the time, obsessed with sexual cues all the time, looking forward to the next orgasm, you know, looking forward to the next fix Looking forward to the next big deal that we pull off because then we're going to have more money than the other guy. You know, we have these sort of strategies to soothe ourselves that just end up being dead ends. But there I believe that you have to actively numb yourself out to go there. It's because this longing for connection is bred into your bones. It's interesting. I work sometimes with vets. If you talk to military chaplains about what happens, for example, in the foxholes in Iraq, when that war was going on, I was talking to military chaplains. It was very interesting because they said, oh, well, the men are very macho and they don't like to be vulnerable, you know, and they don't like to admit they need their partners. And you know, they're into, you know, who can do the most push ups and who can drink the most and, you know, who looks at porn. And then the chaplains would say, but once you're in a foxhole under fire, what they don't show you in any of the movies, I've never seen it, and they're right, I've never seen it, is that everybody's screaming and everyone is screaming for God, their mother or their partner. Everybody's screaming because then the numbness breaks down and you're faced with the basics of being a human being. And the basic thing of human beings is you have this incredible need for connection with another human being and to matter to that human being. So you have to actually work at it. I think this is a useful frame because when a man says to me, his wife says, well, I'm going to leave you because you're never going to give up this porn and this just, you know, I can't deal with it anymore. I'm just going to leave you. And I say, how do you feel when she says that? And he says, fine, fine, I feel fine. What I have learned over the years is, you know, if you don't know what you're doing, you might actually believe him. And the wife believes him and feels totally, totally dismissed and wounded. But what I've learned is, no, you have to work damned hard at blocking that out. All I have to do is present it to you four more times and you can't do it. So I'll just say again, so you're telling me that it's okay that you actively choose this screen and these images and these just these moments of thinking about orgasm that you can get from this screen. You actively choose that to be all alone in front of the screen and that you're not going to feel anything when your wife turns and says, I'm going to leave you alone. You're going to lose me? And he says, yes. And I say, so you're actually telling me that you're going to stay alone? And. And all I have to do is four times. And you can't keep it up because your human this leaks. You just can't keep your ability to numb it out and say, I'm fine, I'm fine. I'm fine by myself. All I need is a computer and a drink and I can numb myself out. This is very shallow. It only works, you know, it's like the macho guys in the military. It doesn't work once they're under fire. It's very shallow, right? And you push it and the longing comes up. And then the man says, well, I've disappointed her and I'm the big disappointment, and there's nothing I can do. She doesn't love me anyway. I said, oh, that's different. That's different from. So let's talk about that. You don't know how to have her love you. You despair of having anyone love you. You maybe feel you're not worth loving. Let's talk about that. Could you tell her about that? Of course. The minute he starts to do that, all this longing and pain comes up. And sometimes we don't even know what they. You know, men who've blocked their feelings out all their lives, you have to be careful because they can get overwhelmed because they haven't tuned into this channel, but the channel's there because they're bonding animals.

Yeah, that's a beautiful, beautiful way to look at this. That's who we are. I believe it's built into our DNA, you say into our bones, and I. I believe it's a DNA function for us to want to connect with human beings and have that bonding, you know, I want to be very respectful of your time. Is there any final remarks that you would have for our audience that these women are suffering? Any final thoughts or advice or suggestions you may want to give to them?

Well, I hope that in the talk, what they've heard is that I respect their suffering and that they have good reasons for their suffering and that it's legitimate and valid that they would suffer this way because they're faced with this terrible loss, this incredible. It's more than a frustration of having this person in front of you who is there but is caught up in this dreadful obsession and so is not available to you. Can't Respond to you. This is so painful. And I would hope they would hear their suffering is legitimate and understandable and that there are ways out of this that they can work on their relationship with their partner if their partner is willing, that we do know ways to help them that you can go through into forgiveness. You can. You can learn, as the old idea is that you have to have had bonding when you were a child in order to have bonds as an adult. That's so not true. All the new research is that we can learn as adults to bond. We can learn.

And thank goodness we can. Thank goodness we can.

Thank goodness we can. My God, thank goodness we can. And I guess I would. I think most of the women that I've worked with in this situation, I'm always blown away by their courage, that they are, for the most part, they are desperately trying to understand this. They're trying to deal with their own pain. They're trying to find a way to reach out for their partner. Their partner isn't always able to respond. I mean, this is an excruciatingly painful place to be. And I think it takes a lot of courage. And I think some of us, you know, if you talk to people at parties who aren't experiencing this, men and women say things, oh, well, if I was in that situation and my partner was looking a lot of porn or having an active affair, I'd just leave. We just do this silly macho thing. Men and women say, I'd be fine. I'd just leave. Which is nonsense, of course. It's absolute rubbish. That's right. When it happens to us, we're all completely caught off guard, totally wounded, totally dismayed. The ground's pulled out from under our feet. And then I think most of us start to listen to our feelings and understand that these bonds are precious. And we turn back into flames. We turn back and walk into the fire and say something like, how could you do this to me? To try and reach our partner. And then we try and struggle with it, you know, and that takes courage.

You know, it does take a lot to deal with this with courage. And one of the things I want to say to the women you've been listening to one of the best experts in the world on relationship attachment. I hope you can feel her love and her care for what you're going through. And I believe there is a roadmap and there are ways. And please seek out that support and help from someone who really gets it. Professionals. And again, I'm an advocate of emotionally focused therapy because it's research based. If you want to understand it, read her book, Hold Me Tight. And she has another wonderful book called Love Sense. Those are great starting points. As a therapist, I often give them to couples and say, read this so we can talk about really meaningful things in your lives. And there are specific examples in there. Go through and read those. Now, this may be a little bit later in your recovery. Initially, you're dealing with a lot of raw emotions that we may need to work through, work through that trauma. So maybe it's a little bit later in the relationship healing that we really utilize these resources, but they are there. There is a roadmap, and if you're stuck, reach out. And there is support. So I want to thank you, Dr. Johnson, for taking the time, taking the time to be with us and our listeners. It's been a great blessing to have you with us.

For all of you, lovely to meet.

You and thank you for all you do.

On a personal level, that was one of the most incredible interviews that I've had as a professional therapist, I'll tell you that. Dr. Sue Johnson, she has influenced therapists around the world who have blessed the lives of the couples that they have worked with. But not only that, Dr. Johnson is kind and tender hearted. When she heard what we were doing with Bloom for Women and we asked her if she would be willing to go through an interview and help us help others, she said, absolutely, absolutely. And so what a privilege it was for me to do this podcast and ask her questions. I can't believe it's been eight years, but in 2016, as I interviewed her, I just. The insight and the inspiration that she gave just helping me be a better therapist. Now with her passing in April of 2024, I'm just so grateful for the time that she spent. Listening to her again has reminded me of her brilliance. So now as you go through this, I invite you to to implement some of the core concepts that were discussed in this podcast. Again, if you want some free resources, we have them at Bloom for Women. Recently, we've been transitioning our content from Bloom for Women to the Human Intimacy website, where we have additional courses designed to help individuals and couples develop better, more intimate, close relationships. If you're dealing with unwanted sexual behaviors, if you're dealing with sexual betrayal, if you just want to learn how to communicate more effectively, we have tests that you can identify specific areas that you can improve on. We have educational videos, we have drop in groups, for example, we have a course, Healing from Unwanted Sexual Behaviors. And we have a course the Essentials to Healing from Sexual Betrayal. These are all designed with drop in support group to help you work through these difficult issues. In addition, we have a course on communication by Marianne Michaelis and a course by Dr. Dave Robinson called the Relationship Dilemma. This is for couples who are struggling trying to make a decision of whether they should stay or leave. Can they thrive or not? All of these resources can be found@human intimacy.com thank you again so much for taking the time to be with us today.

Surround you, it's like you're shining, you're staring.