Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Dr. Sue Johnson: Attunement, Attachment and the Development of Emotionally Focused Therapy

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

In today's episode of the podcast, I interview Dr. Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, an intervention for relationships aimed at resolving distress by helping clients become attuned within a secure attachment bond. She has also written countless books and articles, a personal favorite being Hold Me Tight. She was the first person to teach me about the still face experiment in 2013. I, myself, have had the personal benefit of being in EFT with my wife for the past year. I remember watching a video of Sue doing therapy, and I thought, there is some sort of symphony happening here, and I really want to learn how to play the notes. I wanted this session to pull out as many practical pearls as possible from Dr. Johnson, more of the "how" of the process of helping people reconnect. By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.5 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.  

Welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. I'm your host, David Puter. This is your gateway to the intriguing world of mental health. As one listener put it, this is the podcast that your psychiatrist listens to. And we're incredibly proud of that endorsement. Whether you're a loyal, active listener who's been kind enough to reach out, maybe send an email at DM or put in a review, or you're new to this community. We have an exceptional opportunity for you, not only to learn, but to also, earn continued medical education credits with each episode. Our credits are meticulously designed to empower you in your field, demystify complex mental health topics, and transform your learning journey into a truly rewarding experience. To access this and more, just visit Psychiatrypodcast.com. We're grateful to our valued subscribers who are already reaping the benefits of these credits. Your support is instrumental in allowing us to devote time each week to curate. this podcast, sharing cutting-edge insights, featuring top professionals, and exploring the latest

research. Whether you're here to learn, earn credits, or both, we're thrilled to have you with us. Get ready to deepen your understanding of psychiatry and psychotherapy, one enlightening episode at a time. Okay, today on the podcast, I have Dr. Sue Johnson, the founder of emotionally focused therapy, an intervention for relationships aimed at resolving distress by helping clients become attuned within a secure attachment bond. She has also written countless books and articles, maybe my favorite being Hold Me Tight. She was the first person to teach me about the Stillface experiment in 2013. I remember watching a video of Sue Do Therapy, and I thought to myself at the time, this is like a symphony going on, and I am like just needing to learn how to play

the notes here. That was a while back, and I really want this session to pull. pull out from Sue Johnson, the practical pearls. I want to get away from my own intellectualization and really think about the process of how she helps people reconnect. So I'm going to be trying to do that. And Sue, thanks for coming on. I was... You're most welcome. I was thinking you've been doing EFT formally for about 38 years. But I feel like you were you came to a very intuitive from watching your parents interact at this pub. Can you tell me a little bit about that and then how you got to start EFT? Sure. Well, I had a very strange childhood when you really look at it. I was born in an English working class pub and in those days, nobody knew

anything about that you were supposed to protect children and keep them apart. So I spent my childhood on a little stool behind the bar drying glasses. And of course, if you do that, you watch human beings. You watch them. You watch them fight, flirt, I disagree, talk about their lives. You watch them. I watched my father, who I think was a brilliant man. He'd never, you had never, never had any education in mental health. He was a sailor and a publican, right? But from my point of view, he was an amazing therapist. You had to calm people down, how to, you know,

get people to change the subject. But I spent my childhood watching these dramas unfold. And I think it had a huge, you know, you just drink it in like you drink in oxygen. had a huge set of wisdom given to me by that experience. Then the rest of the time, this is very bizarre, we weren't going to why this happened, I went to a very conservative, uptight,

religious, Catholic convent where I was not a Catholic, not, I was the only working class kid. My accent was wrong. And the nuns, in the middle of me watching all these dramas, the nuns would teach me about, you know, purgatory and limbo and all these things. So I think I learned very young that there was more than one reality, because these realities were pretty different.

But mostly watching the people in the pub, I learned, I mean, I couldn't have told you this, but I learned that emotion was the music that, um, defines and colors and gives meaning to our inner world and also the world we have with others, because we send emotional signals all the time, even if we're not actually saying anything, we send emotional signals which pull for certain responses from other people, and then create our social world, and then our social world helps create our inner world. And for me, it was always obvious that emotion was kind of the main show in town, Okay. And for a start, then it was always obvious that people needed each other because the pub I grew up in, the elderly ladies would come in and have one sherry.

You're all night. And everyone would say, how are you, Mabel? How are you doing Mabel? Oh, you look so lovely tonight. You know, and she'd laugh. And, you know, it would be people say the same things all the time. Doesn't matter. It was about. connection, it was about community. I also got used to a wide range of emotion so that it doesn't freak me out. You know, Friday nights, people would get paid and people would get drunk. And I would still be there, dry glasses behind the, totally safe, you know, behind the bar. And somebody would get very upset. And my father would stroll out into the melee, you know, and from my point of view as a kid, he had huge. huge hands. His hands would come down from the ceiling, onto the most aggressive person.

You know, and he'd start with, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Now, Jim, we've been here before. Let's calm down. He'd start with that right. This is the music. This is the music he'd start with. And then if that didn't work, it would be like, da-da, dada.

Jim, no, no, Jim. we're not going there. And then if that didn't work, he'd look at Jim very lovingly, hold him by the shoulder and pop him. Okay? And Jim would go, wee, bang. As a kid, I used to go, wee, bang.

And there was nothing upsetting about it. For me, I was watching. But I got used to a range of emotion. I got used to seeing people in that pub had PTSD from the war. All right? They were mostly sailors. They'd often been together in terrible situations. So when they saw each other, they were English people, English men.

They couldn't hug and cry. So they'd smack each other. They'd smack each other on the shoulder and say things like, God, you're ugly, you're even uglier than the last time I saw you. And I knew, I learned to look past the content cues and listen to the emotion and listen to the relational message, which is, I love you, man. I love you. It's so good to see you, but they can't say that.

So I learned to look past the cues, and I learned not to freak out with extreme emotion. I watched adults, I guess most kids don't have this experience. I watched adults cry. I watched adults put their head down on the bar, and the gentleman who'd lost his wife used to. to come in at six every night before anyone else. He'd say, and the interesting thing is, he'd say the same things to my father,

the exact same things. My father would say the exact same things back. And my father would always end up putting his huge hand on this man's hand. And then the man would put his head down on the bar and cry. And I saw these things. and for me, I guess they lost their, I wasn't frightened of emotion. I didn't see it as something terrifying or negative. I was used to seeing a huge range.

I was used to listening to the music more than the content. So all these things, when I went to, started working as a therapist, which was with emotionally disturbed kids, adolescents, okay? So if you're terrified of emotion, you don't want to be. work with emotionally disturbed kids because they're there all over the place emotion. So I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot from being assigned to a kid who wouldn't talk at all. He wouldn't talk at all.

So I would sit in the garden with him for weeks, you know, saying things like, ah, you know, it's a beautiful day. Maybe you're feeling this. I'm liking being here with you. I'd be doing all the conversational work, but gradually, gradually, gradually, he opened up, right? I remember him well. But it taught me how to wait for somebody,

how to respect where they are now and that they have good reasons for where they are now. There is a logic in what we call our client's dysfunctional behavior. and if we don't see that logic, we dismiss them. And if I start dismissing somebody, they don't trust me, they don't open up. So, you know, I learned so much there. But then I went to grad school and I was sitting in these lectures where people were saying, teaching me CBT, for example, and saying things like basically emotions the enemy,

you've got to control it. I remember listening to a lecture on emotion, this big ex-exam. but from England. And I was a strange graduate student. We have to establish that for a start, okay? I was the pain in the butt graduate student at the back of the room who asked six very difficult questions. Okay, that was me, all right?

So this man, and I disagree with absolutely everything he said, just instinctively, you know, he'd say, you know, well, emotion is just tied onto thought. You know, the main thing is thought, you know, it's cognition and emotion just sort of comes long afterwards and I said I was a very outspoken graduate student so I say something like oh I don't think so so so then everyone looks at me and then I'm on the spot oh good Lord I've got to now justify that but you know um I just I just knew these things and I knew that the relationship

relationship was everything that if you didn't create a, we go on in psychotherapy about a safe relationship. It's like a cliche. It's like, but really it's like talking about corrective emotional experiences. That's a cliche too. Doesn't help at all unless you tell me what exactly does that look like and how do you create it. Otherwise, because a safe relationship, the way we teach it in EFT in emotionally focused therapy is not the same as a safe relationship that might be taught to a different kind of therapist. We have very specific. A safe relationship means that I can meet you where you are and I can talk to you in a way that sings to your amygdala and moves you to a safe place and keeps you there. So a safe relationship, I see. A safe relationship,

I say to my therapists, you have to watch your tapes. Nobody wants to watch their tapes. Nobody in the world wants to watch their tapes of therapy. For the same reason that I, when I used to dance Argentine Tango, and my instructor would say, stop and look in the mirror. I didn't want to. Because in my head, I knew that I was gliding across the floor, as elegant as anything.

And if I look in the mirror, I see that I look like a wounded duck with my eyes. with my foot in the air, I don't want to see that. Watch your tapes. Because if you don't watch your tapes, you don't see the different levels, the information level, the relational level, the emotional level. You don't learn to tune in, tune into the subtleties of your client. You don't see the relationship you set up.

So, you know, lots of people say very loving, kind, brilliant things. In the voice that I'm using right now to you, which is really, this is about information, podcast and I'm using this voice and this voice is talking to your prefrontal cortex and I can say the most amazing things to you that have emotional import and you can say yes I guess that's right and nothing's happened but if I'm going to create safety and reach your emotions and help you feel safe enough to explore and go to the dark places that you spend your whole life avoiding I have to drop my voice I have to drop my voice and go slow and low and get very specific.

I have to say, yes, yes, Alison, I understand. Right now, you're so sad. Everything is sadness, yeah. This is what you call your depression, isn't it? Yes. This is what the doctors are giving you all these diagnostic categories for, this feeling that you have in your chest, this feeling where you say these things to yourself,

this feeling where you go and lock yourself in your room for a day, this is the feeling, isn't it? And it's sadness. And we stay there and I walk around in it, and I walk around, singing to her and make to the other way, a mother sings to a child who's anxious. And finally she touches it more,

and I say, what's happening for you right now? And she starts to cry. This lady told me, this is session six, this lady told me at the beginning of therapy, I don't want to feel, I'm not going to feel, and I can't live the rest of my life none. She's between a rock and a hard place. So we stay there with her sadness,

and she finally starts to cry, which is so not her thing. You know, it's so, and she says, I'm heartbroken. I say yes. That's right. That captures your whole life, doesn't it? That captures your PTSD, your complex PTSD, your depression, your anger, you're right, underneath it all, your heartbroken. And why is she heartbroken? Because, and this is from attachment science, EFT is based on all the thousands of studies from developmental psychology, from attachment science. It gives us a map to people's inner world and to their relationships.

You know, she's heartbroken. Yes, she was abused by her brothers all through her childhood. She's mostly heartbroken because she was never seen. Her pain never mattered to anybody. a family wanted to ignore it, dismiss it. She was never seen. She grew up alone. Alone, yeah.

And now you're with her. Sorry? Oh, yeah. And now you're like with her. You're participating. You are re-experiencing that pain, but you are with her. And that's powerful. That's right.

That's right, David. And you just said something lovely. You said with her, you know, in EFT, the alliance with the therapist is a, it's a real invitation to a real authentic connection. It's not a role or a role that the therapist takes on in the therapy room. It's meeting another human being where they're at as a human being. That was rather a long answer. Sorry, I'll try to keep my answers shorter. It's good. It's good. I was thinking about how.

you witnessed your dad as a therapist almost, you know, because he was with them, with the sadness, with that man who lost his wife, for example, just how he, like, just, you know, present with him and how beautiful that was. And it's like you got to witness that. But also with frame, right? He understood boundaries. He understood like, okay, we can get emotional, but we can't fight each other type of thing. Yes. Yes, he showed me a lot of

emotional regulation techniques, but I don't use the pop. I don't use the pop in therapy. Very good, very good. I was, okay, so let's say, I just want to, like, jump into, like, a diet,

like lovers. Yeah. And let's say a more vocal pursuer, maybe the one that's more frustrated, angry, that partner is talking about the story, talking about their feeling a lack of pursuit

in the relationship. Maybe they say something like this. I'm constantly feeling isolated, neglected, lonely. It appears he's only interested in me for physical intimacy. My anger builds, yes, I raise my voice, but how can I stay silent like he does? he claims I don't respect him like his colleagues do, like people at work do. But he barely communicates and puts in any effort.

Right. Okay. So that's classic. That's a classic. The classic pattern in distress relationships is one person is pursuing saying, where are you, where are you, where are you, where are you? Which is the $1,000 question in all relationships. Are you there for me?

Can I connect with you? Will you respond to me? where are you, where are you? But they're doing it in an angry way because they're getting frustrated and they're protesting. It becomes, where are you? And then the other partner hears that as an attack

and withdrawers. And the more they withdraw, the more neglected and alone, the first partner feels. And this pattern takes over relationships very regularly and destroys trust and caring. And, you know,

I mean, this is, demon that destroys relationships. I shouldn't talk about all cultures, but in North America, this is the demon that destroys relationships. So this person, I mean, we would start with them, and we would validate them. First of all, without blaming the other partner, like we start from a position of you're caught in a dance, you're caught in this dreadful dance. Let's show you the dance. The problem is the dance. Not that you don't love each other, you're not wonderful people. There's nothing so wrong with either of you. You're caught in this dance, right? And the dance is

the problem and we're going to look at it and we're going to find ways out of it. So that's sort of the beginning stance that you take and you show them the dance again and again and again. So you start with validation. You'd say, yes, I'm hearing you. I'm hearing you. I'm hearing you. you, Mary, I'm hearing that your partner, David, sees your anger, you know, and maybe that's difficult for him. David hasn't said anything, but I'm just going to assume if it's a human being, it's difficult for him. And maybe that's difficult for him. And what we often do when the person we love gets mad at us is we don't know what to do, so we sort of shut down. I'm just playing, but I'm talking about him, okay, but I'm playing. But, you know, let's stay with you.

Mary, you know, what you're saying is underneath this anger that David sees, you're alone. Yeah? Yeah. And we're attachment theorists. So we prioritize this feeling of aloneness because you as a human being are not wired to feel real vulnerability and desperation and deal with it well. alone. You're not wired. You're just not wired for it. I don't care who you are. You're not wired for that. You're wired as a survival strategy to seek connection with other people, even if you just use them in your head as imaginary attachment figures. This is what you're wired for. So aloneness in

attachment terms is iatrogenic and paralyzes us all. So you stay with that. You're alone. You're in this relationship, you want to connect with this man, and you're alone, and he's silent. Yeah, he's silent. And you are desperate to hear from him, to know how he feels about you, what's happening with him. You desperately want to let him in. So you pound on the door. I use images a lot because they capture emotion brilliantly. right and people don't fight you with images okay you pound on the door but underneath all that

pounding and noise you're hurting and you're alone yeah please notice that i say it this way if i say and you're hurting and you're alone she says yes that's right nothing's happened second time something has she starts to move into that alone as i say and then cutting it short here we're talking in an interview. So I might say when we've walked around in that a little bit, I might say, could you ever imagine just telling him, I can't find you. I can't find you anywhere.

You're so silent. So I'm all alone here. Could you ever imagine telling him that? And the person will say, no. And you say, that would be hard. wouldn't it? You don't say do it anyway, which is like an external task-orientated view. Okay, you say that what would be hard about that?

You explore the block. She says, hey, he'd laugh at me. Or you wouldn't believe me. Or he'd, I say, I understand. So then it would be very difficult for you to turn. And I'll do it again. I'll model it to turn and say to him, I'm all alone, David. where are you? I can't find you. I'm all alone. That would be really hard. She says yes. I said, hmm, do you just take a tiny, tiny little bit of that, the bit you're comfortable with and tell him? She says yes. And then, of course, she tells it. And then you deal with the fact that David doesn't know how to show up. He doesn't know how to respond, at least most of the time. So then you have to go in and help him hear her message. So yeah, this is emotionally focused couples therapy, but you know, we do the same thing with individuals and families.

Right now we're doing a lot of eFIT, emotionally focused individual therapy for depression, PTSD and anxiety. But it's the same process. You go into the deeper emotion, go into the emotion that's underneath this surface emotion, which is often frustration and anger or just numbing. I don't feel anything. Well, yes, you do, you know, but you're tuning it out, you're shutting it out, shutting down. We shut ourselves down and we shut our partners out, right?

So, okay, when you're doing this, when you're attuning to like this pursuer, this more of the angry lover. Yeah. And let's say that the more avoidant lover, you start to look over and he's, he or she is feeling like, oh gosh, like invalidated. Like this person, you know, this therapist is like attuning to my partner, but not me. Like, so how do you, how do you help them kind of as you attuned to one partner at a time, you know? Yes.

Well, first of all, if you notice in my original formulation, even when I was talking to her, I was taking him into account. I was saying things like, it's hard for most of us to hear that our partner's disappointed in us and angry of us. And lots of times we don't know what to do, so we close up. Right. I've said that stuff without him, you know, because I have a map to relationships and a map to the relationship patterns and a map to people's inner emotions. which are given to me by my 35 years of working with distressed couples, but also given to me by attachment theory. So I'm already taking him into account, even as I'm talking to her, and he hears that.

All right. Nevertheless, if he says, well, all you do is shout at me all the time. You know, you don't tell me this at home about being lonely and everything, but you shout at me all the time. So I'll say something like, yes. Yes, I hear you, I hear you, David. And, you know, that's so hard for all of us, isn't it? Yes, I hear you.

You know, and it's so hard now for you to really tune into and actually hear your lady saying, I'm lonely, I'm lonely, I'm lonely, I'm trying to find you, David. And here I've sweetened the pot. I'm trying to find you, David, because you're so important to me. I'm banging on the door because you're so important to me. I'm struggling to come close, right? But I hear you, that's hard for you to hear because you experience it as you're being attacked.

Is that right? Help me understand. How do you experience it? Help me. I must say that to my clients. That's my particular style. You don't have to say that to do EFT, okay? Right, right, right.

There's thousands of people all over the world doing EFT that never say, help me to their clients. I do it all the time. I say, help me understand. Help me tune in. Help me. So I say, you help me. You're what happens to you when what do you see? She sees you go silent. What do you see? When you know she's going to get angry at you, what do you see? I want the cue. I want the trigger to his shutdown to his. Oh my God, she's coming for me now. He'll say, and people say, oh, I know she just gets mad. I say, yes. But what? You help me, what does that look like? What's the first thing you notice?

She says, does that look on her face? See, she's got that look on her face right now. See? See, that's look on her face. So I say, oh, I see. So you see that look on her face and what happens to you? I don't know. I don't know.

It's almost like you say, oh, my God, it's going to happen now. It's coming. So yes, yes, yes. I know that I'm in for it. I know that I'm going to hear what a disappointment I am. David, the big disappointment. Ah, he's just opened this enormous door for me to walk through. So I'll repeat.

We use a lot of reflection. You grab what's really emotionally significant. You grab it and you hold it and you repeat it so that your client stays there and explores that with you. So I'll say, David, what did you say? the big disappointment oh a big disappointment

wow that's a hard that's a hard one wow what happens to you when you say that I'll say stay there with that and his face will start to crumble and he'll say

well all I have all I ever hear you know, all I ever hear is that I'm, yeah, that's right. That's right. I'm, and you'd be amazed if you stay with people, they'll naturally, our brain is wired that when somebody starts to respond to you, you start to open up like the sun and a flower. You naturally do it. So he'll say, yes. And then he'll maybe tear and say, I'm not what she wants.

You're not what she wants. Oh. Now, I'm not implying that every withdrawer comes along at this speedy rate, okay? But I'm just giving you an example. Yeah. What happens? Perfect. But some fight you, okay.

But it doesn't matter. You just keep doing EFT. They come along. And that's where you, if you have a model and a map that you can really trust, every session is a safe adventure. It's not, you don't feel particularly stuck. You just know you just keep doing it. and then the person will start to open up.

But yeah, so you stay with that. She's not what you want. You're not what she wants. You're not what she wants. That is so hard, David. I start with hard. You know, I don't say that's deeply wounding. And, you know, I start with hard, right?

And he says, yes. Are you feeling that right now? Yes. And then we might do, we do a macro. intervention called the EFT Tango, which is a way of watching how an EFT therapist puts all the interventions together and sort of moves through them in a slightly different way that encourages the client or clients to move into different emotional spaces. So I might do what we call affect assembly here where I'll go in and say, look at the elements of emotion, look at the trigger.

So help me. I'll stay in the emotional territory because that's the real show. Everything else is. Teaching people, these people communication skills is a waste of time because they can only use them when they don't need them, when the emotion isn't up and runny.

So you know, so you stay there with him and you say, so let, am I getting this right? Do you help me? You see this. look on her face, you pointed just now, and actually she sees silence, like nothing's happening. But in fact, there's so much happening with you. You go into all these places, these sounds so painful of, I'm a big disappointment, she's not what I want. Like, and when you actually talk about

that you actually look very sad and you start to let yourself cry. Is that right? He says, yes. How are you feeling in your body right now as you talk about this? I go trigger body response. These are the elements of emotion. I'm helping him put it all together. Okay, okay. Let's let me just interject here. He says, okay, well, I think that if I show any weakness, she's going to go away. She's going to run away from me. I've seen this on some like YouTube's recently. In the new

man culture, it's like if you show any weakness to a woman, right? Your spouse, they will completely abandon you. Goodness me. What an awful lie that is. It's crazy. That's beyond misinformation. That's a toxic, naughty,

naughty toxic baloney. I could use more strong words. So pretend you just heard that in session. Go. Yes. So, so, I just say, I understand. Understand that some part of you has been taught that what women want is a sort of strong,

totally strong, unfeeling, always strong, always together, the silent man. I understand. So it's strange for you. it's strange for you to think about the idea and this is revolutionary for a man like this what I'm just about to say so I'm going to have to say it about 32 times during therapy it's strange for you to imagine

that what your wife is trying to find is that soft part of you that she can connect with and that is she's desperate to be close to that women aren't all caught up with being married to Rambo because he's so uninteresting. You're so one-dimensional. But, you know, you go in and you validate his fear

and the fact that he's been taught this, and you externalize something he's been taught, right? Okay. This is something he's been taught. But the important thing is, He's afraid. He's afraid. So what he's telling you is, I can't imagine, he doesn't know how, actually, I can't imagine being able to show her my softer, more vulnerable side. I can't imagine that she'd be interested in that. Why would anyone be interested in that? I'm a man. I'm supposed to be this way. I can't imagine. So it's, you know, it's, I feel like I do have to shut down and hide. So I say, yes, of course, of course. And you validate when people are now.

They have good reasons for doing what they're doing. They're protecting themselves. The tricky part is the protection becomes a prison. That's the whole of mental health, if you like. We have what John Balby, the father of attachment theory, says, is frightening, alien and unacceptable emotions, the overwhelm us. frightening alien unacceptable emotions, the overwhelm us. And then if we're secure and have good relationships, we can start to deal with them and explore them and integrate them.

If we're not, if we are in a place of threat, which is good in the moment. You know, all protection strategies have a usefulness. You know, they're designed to save our lives. lives. So we protect us. Tricky part is if the protection strategy becomes generalized and almost like a trait, we do it all the time. It takes over and it inevitably becomes a prison and that it feeds the inability to deal with the emotion, the inability to integrate it, the inability to process it, to trust your own experience, to communicate with others.

So he's protecting himself. So you have to validate. Yes, I understand. And if you know anything about his history, you might use a piece of his history. That's what you saw with your brothers and your father, right? Everyone, all the men were silent. That was the way it was supposed to be.

Yeah, yeah, I understand, yeah. And, you know, our society does teach. teach that. But right here right now, what you're telling your wife is. That it seems terribly, terribly risky for you to ever allow her to see that, in fact, could you help me? That you shut down and you look like nothing is half with you. You go still and silent. But in fact, all kinds of things are happening when she says these things to you. You're, this is really hard for you. And what happens in your body is, he says, I start to shake.

You shake. And what do you say to yourself? I'm putting emotion to get in. And as I do that, I take the sting out of it. Okay, and I know it. And, you know, and he says, and you tell yourself, a failure. She doesn't want me. This is the message. And then what do you do, David? You say, I have to leave. You shut down and you shut yourself and you shut her out. Yeah? And I've got the whole

emotional dance with her in my hand. And he says, yes, that's right. Uh-huh. What happens to you is about this? I'm an experienced therapist. I focus on how people construct their emotional. emotional relational experience in the present me, and then we reconstruct it. So how does he construct his emotional experience? We've just laid out some of it. And then I'll stay with one part of it, the deeper part of it.

You know, what happens to you when you say this, David? And say he comes with, he says, well, it's big, isn't it? It's big. and you trust for him. It's kind of overwhelming, is it? Yes, yes, yes. It's overwhelming, it's overwhelming, yes.

And it's sad because, you know, we used to, we used to be able to talk, you know, we used to, when we first got together, it was amazing and it's sad, isn't it? But we don't need to talk about that. You know, and so then I'll stay and I'll put that. together with him. When I do it, it's safe because I've learned how to tune in. I have a map to people's emotions and the messages they send to others.

It's safe, it's specific. It's not overwhelming because I'm saying in a clear way, I'm evoking the emotion and all at the same time. Okay, okay. So that's what we do. That's what my father does. My father used to say, now, now, Frank, we're getting way too angry here. Aren't we?

We were angry, Frank. This is one of these times, Frank. When Frank gets angry and we all know what happened, Frank gets angry, my father's not really evoking. He's trying to calm him down, but you get the feeling. He's going into the emotion, and then he's containing it. Now, Frank, we're going to calm, okay? We're going to calm down, Frank.

And you and me are going to walk over there to that corner. And so I learned to watch people, you know, staying with emotion, letting emotion come and flower, staying there with people, some evoking emotion. I'd watch people flirt, you know, and then I'd watch containment, you know. And of course, the women in the pub were the most often the containers. my favorite, I learned when I was about 18 that my favorite, favorite, auntie, because all the people in the pub were my uncles and aunties, all of them, I had about 150 of them.

My favorite auntie, it was because she wore bright red lipstick and bright red high-heeled shoes. And what I learned when I was about 18 was that she was the late of the night in the pub. Oh. Okay. She was the prostitute. She was the, the, yeah. right she was the

she was beautiful right she used to dress these black dresses with the she was beautiful and she was kind and she was having and she knew how to contain emotion some guy would sit down next and in two minutes you know she'd be having him order

a scotch chatting to her by his day and then you know probably talking to her about other things but you know it's So we evoke emotions, stay with emotion, contain emotion, order it, order it. When you order something, you can explore it, make sense of it, take it in, move into it, and out the other side. This is when I teach how to work with post-traumatic stress disorder, either in couples or in individuals. This is crucial.

You know, you, in trauma, trauma is an emotional disorder. It's all about aggravation. So not to go there. You have to go there carefully. You have to pace yourself and the client, but you have to go if you, you have to be in the emotion to learn how to regulate it. And the therapist goes there with you

and helps you tolerate it, see it, make it specific. The way a mother does with a child, just the way the mother does with a child. Some of us have not had the experience of good mothering. And so we don't know what that looks like. And we're talking about here, notice Bobi says, all emotional disorders,

organizational borders are about priding, alien, and unacceptable experience. Alien. Like, you know, when you work with couples and they've never had a good relationship, they've never had what I would call a secure attachment. They literally don't know what it looks like. They've never seen it in childhood. They don't know what it looks. I remember watching my wonderful colleague that I work with all the time, Leanne. actually suggest to this man who's done everything but this his whole life. Addictions, everything but this, okay? Suggests man

that he's totally in his emotion, he can feel it, he can regulate it, suggests that he turned and actually share a little bit of it with his wife. And his whole face changing and he looks at her and he says

do people do that? Do people do that? And my wonderful colleague says, yes, but for you, that's strange, isn't it? It's strange. You can't imagine that. You've never seen it. You wouldn't know how that goes

when somebody turns and she'll run the movie for him so that he can see it so it's not so strange. And then he does it with his wife for the first time ever as a human being on this planet at 60 years old, he opens up and shares himself with another human being. He risks that and he reaches. And his wife responds, can you see how absolutely life-changing,

self-changing relationship changing that moment is for him? It changes everything when he realizes that's possible. And this is what we do in EFT. We know how to create these, whatever you want to call them, emotional epiphanies, corrective emotional experiences. We have nine studies on how to, we don't just have outcome studies and follow-up studies, positive follow-up studies. We have studies of how exactly does this change, these key change events happen,

the success at the end of therapy and follow-up. How do they happen? You can capture them on tape, we can show them to you, we can code them, we can tell you what the therapist does to create them, we can tell you what's happening to the clients when they're doing it, whether they're in couple therapy or individual therapy. You're in individual therapy, you're contacting, most often you're contacting the most vulnerable part of yourself. You're speaking to the nittle part of Allison that used to go and hide under the bed and pray

that her brothers wouldn't have to rape her that night. You're speaking to that. You get Alison, the adult Alison, the Allison who's with you in the room, who's resourced by you, to turn and talk to and comfort that little Allison under the bed. And when she does that, she accepts her ability,

she takes it in as a solution to it. She orders it. It's no longer so overwhelmed. everything starts to change. So identity, these dramas we do with other people, these dramas we do with our emotions, this is where we decide who we are. So as we do create these corrective emotion experiences

in couples and in individuals, people's sense of self-changes. Bulby talks about this in attachment, model of self-and-other. Where do those things come? up. Where are they formed? Where are they played out? Where do they change? In relationships with other people, but also in relationships to inside, to you and how you deal with the vulnerable self that we all have inside them. Sorry, David. Did I take you off on a tangent there? I did. I'm sorry.

Your tangents are good. Your tangents are good. But let me ask you like, kind of like with couples, You have, let's say, a difficulty with them expressing clear emotional signals with each other. Oh, yes, you will. They can't in the beginning, yeah. And so how do you start to help them speak in attachment language with each other in those clear emotional signals? Well, you go into the emotion. you go into the emotion and you use the client's words

like with Alan I'm doing individual therapy so I use the word heartbroken once she gives it to me I use it again and again and again with the guy David that we're talking about you know I would use

she doesn't want me right everything I do is wrong so I'll go back there and once he can feel that and accept it in himself, then I start to help him gradually, gradually

share with his partner. And if he can't share with his partner, we talk about that. We talk about the block. What's going to happen if you share with her? Oh, she's going to think I'm weak. I understand. So you gradually, gradually, gradually

move people into more familiarity and comfort with their, you help them befriend their own emotions, accept their own emotions and their vulnerability, which, by the way, our society isn't into at all. So why would people, why would people know about this, unless they have great detachment parenting?

People get lots of other messages that are really toxic. You know, you help people gradually, gradually go into this emotional territory and then gradually, gradually, share it. and if people refuse if you stay with process and processing how people construct their experience

there really aren't any dead ends like if somebody okay I'm thinking of a lady she was very aggressive pursuer she made lots of demands her husband was withdraw in the process of EFT her husband came out

you know and he came out and he was present and vulnerable and loving and she would not respond. This doesn't happen very often, but it does sometimes. She would not. And she, she would, he would give her exactly what she's been asking for, right? Closeless intimacy and all that. And she would basically say, no.

And then she'd bring up something he did last week. She'd bring up some reason why what he was doing was wrong. And you watch this pattern. Then you reflect the pattern. Have you noticed that he is your man and he's doing this and this, isn't he? Yes. He's telling you these things that you've longed for and longed to hear, yeah? Yeah.

And when he does that, you turn and you say, and you say, and you do this three times. And then you say, what's happening for you? and people will tell you and they can be at different levels of resistance people will say, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I don't trust it, I don't trust it, I don't trust it.

Uh-huh. And what's going to happen if you really start to trust it? He'll let me down. He'll let me down. And then it'll be even worse. It'll be even worse. And I'll be vulnerable and I'll stop to risk and it'll be even worse and you won't be there.

You say, yes, I understand. Then you talk about that. But this lady was even more resistant. This lady said, I won't do it. I say, oh, okay. Can you help me? You won't.

It's almost like these are the things you long to hear, you want to hear. He sends these messages that some part of you, because she's a human being, this has to be true. some part of you longs to hear, but somehow you put up a wall and it sort of balances off images again.

It balances off, yeah? She's, yes, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. It is nice to hear these things. It is nice to hear these things. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. This is too dangerous territory.

And I told you before, I wasn't going to talk about my PTSD. I wasn't going to talk about my PTSD here, okay? I'm here for couples therapy. So I'm going to do this. Okay. then that's not a dead end. You say, I hear you.

Can you tell him? I can't let you in. I can't. I'm realizing now, I want you to knock on the door. I want you to want me. But actually, I can't let you in. It's too much.

I don't say it's too scary because she's going to say, it's not scary. Okay, I'm going to say, it's too much. And she says, yes. Yes, I guess that's right.

And then I say, good, can you tell him, please? I'm not going to let you in. I can't. It's too hard. No matter what you say, I'm realizing it's too hard for me to risk. I'm not going to let you in.

She says, do I have to say that? No, of course you don't. It's totally up to you. But is that true? He says, yes. So she picks, She says, I don't want to. I don't want to.

I don't want this thing, this intimacy thing. I don't want this. And I say, and then you just keep going. Because it goes somewhere, okay. It goes somewhere. The human drama keeps going. I say, what happens to you, David, when you hear that? And this man blew my mind.

He blew my mind, okay? He said, I think he blew her mind too. He said, oh. yes, he didn't go into his shutdown thing. He said, right, I sort of get that. He said, yeah, I get that. But it would be hard for you to believe me and trust that. And yeah, I get you got lots of reasons to doubt that and to be careful and to protect yourself.

Yeah, I get that. So you know what I've learned in this therapy? What I've learned in this therapy is I really love you. and I want to be with you and that we've been caught in this done and I'm going to be with you, you know, and I'm going to make it really hard for you to keep saying no.

And maybe I, maybe I can't do this forever because it's sort of painful, but I'm going to make it really hard for you to keep saying no. And she burst into tears. And then she refuses to have any more sessions from the message.

I took from that. Well, never mind. It's all right. I've started a process. And you start the attachment process happening in human beings. You start that dance. It's almost irresistible. I mean, we got it wrong. We said love was irresistible and we thought it's all about sexual infatuation. It's not about sexual infatuation. It can start that way, but love isn't about infatuation. it's about this deep, deep logging for connection that is part of human beings. So if that man is able to keep inviting, she's going to have to have some cast iron defenses. And if she does, there's good reasons for them. And the reason is always PTSD, right?

But she's got to have some cast iron defenses to keep to keep refusing him because human beings want the biggest longing. You know, Balby was hated in England when he put out attachment theory, and he was hated because basically said Freud is wrong. Sexual and aggression are not the most key things in human beings. The key motivating factor in human beings is the need to connect with another, the need to look into somebody else's eyes and see that you matter, you're important, you'll be responded to. The need basically to have somebody beside you to say, what's that huge thing over

there? I think it's of this. Do you agree with me? Can you help me process my reality as well as decide who I am? This is the need we have. It's wired in our young, are more vulnerable for longer than any other species on this planet. We know that if we cry and cry and know when comes, we die. And I don't think we ever lose that sense, no matter how rambush we get. You know, it's, we know this. So she's this wired in longing that's in all people for this connection. And if he keeps doing it, it's harder and harder for her to resist. Beautiful. I'm curious. Where do you think sex fits? into this in terms of like, I imagine, like, is sex?

We have another eight podcast to talk about that. Well, that's huge, David. So I'll give you the incredibly short answer. Sex, of course, can be many things at many times. It can be reckoned. It can be fun. It can be all kinds of things. But in general,

Actually when people have started a relationship, sex is a bonding activity. Okay, your biology doesn't lie. Attachment is about biology. Your biology doesn't lie. There's a reason why when you get very close to somebody, think of the person you love, are attached by them, an orgasm, you're flooded with a bonding hormone. You're flooded with a bonding hormone. Well, is nature, you know, just messing you about?

No, it's messing you about. This is a bonding activity, okay? And great sex, what we call synchrony sex in hold me time. I talk about sealed off sex, solace sex, and synchrony sex in hold me time. And great sex is tuning into somebody and feeling emotional and physical connection and moving together and being able to do erotic play and erotic exploration. And by the way, all the cliches our society puts out are so naughty. They're so wrong.

The research basically says, who does all this image? I always forget the name of the university in the US. I've done it again. It'll come up in a minute. basically all the research is that the people who have the best sex have it most often and enjoy it most and find it most thrilling are people in happy bonded relationships. So the whole idea that our society has that sex is about novelty. Sex is about you can't have a familiar relative. If you've just got familiarity, yeah, that's boring.

That's not what good bond is. It's moving connection. and it's dancing with somebody, it's intoxicating. And you've got it for 40 years, and it's still intoxicating. You know, it's synchrony sex is about this incredible connection. Well, I give an example. I used, before COVID, I haven't gone back. Before COVID, I used to dance Argentine tango.

People think Argentine tango is like doing with the stars. And that's what people think sex is. That's a cliche. It's a parody. It's phony. Tango isn't that. You can go anywhere in the world to a capital city. You can stand up.

I mind you have to know how to do tango to do this, but got to the point where I could stand up with a perfect stranger, never met before. The structure is the emotional music. We're tuning into the emotional music. It's giving us a structure. I stand in front of that person and I breathe with them.

I tune into them. And then we start to change weight just on our feet very, very gently. You wouldn't even be able to see it. And we tune in and we tune in. And then both of us know we're in sync. We move. And yes, we know the moves,

but that's not what happens after a while. It's all improvisation. It's all you turn to me slightly, you move your shoulder and you open up here. There's three things I can do with that. I turn and I pivot into you. It's call and response, call and response. And when you really come together

with this emotional music, it's bliss. Okay, for the sense that synchronous, emotional, and physical connection between human beings is bliss. That's why we parent these screaming little infants for years and years, and that's why we hold them on our chest, and that's why we hold our lovers. And that's why if we orgasm together, it feels like the whole world has changed. And that's why we look into our lover's eyes and see that they love us. and a whole nervous system moves on to another level. This is bliss. This is our birthright.

This is what our nervous system does if we just get out of the way. But in sex, we've gone nutty. We've decided it's all about novelty. And of course, if you're really shut down emotionally and physically, you do need a lot of novelty to sort of spark you somehow. It's almost like you're kind of numb and dead. So you need novelty. The tricky bit of the part about that is you need more novel.

Then you need more novelty and more novelty and more novelty. And, you know, I mean, we get into the porn is a huge issue here. It's a huge. It's acculturating our society to a alien in human. I can't tell you. it's got nothing to do with being sex positive or liberal. I'm a pretty liberal person. But we've allowed the porn industry to make money

by feeding us pure, toxic garbage. And we still think it's okay in the service of freedom or something. It's crazy. What will we do was he told us? What loves about. I'm curious what you think of the latest iteration of it where it's like only fans, right? So you have like basically porn, but it's a person and you're paying monthly for this person, access to this person. And often I have these patients who are DMing these people, but they're not really DMing the people because, you know, they're DMing like this person's hired some firm in India to like correspond with these people, you know, sometimes.

So it's like like. Yeah, and that's a sad comment on our society, isn't it? But people are so hungry for connection. You know, I saw some recording from the women in the Black District in Amsterdam, and I've read some other recordings too by sex workers. What fascinates me is there a testament to attachment. Oh, lots of times the guys come in here, they don't even want an orgasm.

They just want to talk to me. They just want to talk to me and have me listen. And it's a bit like the pub. I say the same thing every time. And they call me to listen and to talk to. It's about connection and it's about how deeply we are constructing a human environment that is totally strict to us and who we are as human beings. we deeply need connection and we are structuring isolation.

More people live alone. More people don't understand. We have a science of love now. That's what I've put out in Hold Me Tight. Most people don't know about it. And they believe the stuff on the internet, which is love is about sex and how hot you are. And of course, the tricky part about that is you can only be hot.

for about three weeks because then the heat disappears so love is unreliable and it's all garbage okay and and this is marketing you know this is what's marketed out there and the porn industry is part of that but this is about isolation people need connection so if the only way you know how to get connection is through sexuality you'll do it you'll do it if the only way you know how to get connection if you're young teenager, the only way you know, you've been talking to your family, you'll do it through sex, you'll do it, you'll go out and do what we, in England, you know, you became a tart, a tart, which was a real put down. What is a tart? A tart is somebody who's desperately trying to get information and attention and reassurance and they're using their body because they're

think that's all they have. And that's sad and desperate. And our whole society is like that. Anyway, we're getting awfully broad. Yes, you ask very interesting questions. What do you, okay, so this is another sort of modern thing that I hear from a lot of people, just being ghosted, right? So like a lot of guys that we talk into a girl online, that we're trying to start a connection, and then they'll just get ghosted. And so it's like, it seems like that's like, What does that mean? The person disappears? The person just disappears,

deletes their number, blocks them, just ghosts them, right? Yeah, because it's just a game. For that other person, it was just a game. And that's the trouble with online.

You are not interacting. I remember my daughter saying to me, I have all these friends, you know, on Facebook. I said, no, you don't have even one.

friend on Facebook, sweetie. What you have are messages crafted. You have not friends. Let's look at what a friend is. So I think people get good because somebody's playing. And who can say what their

motivation is? Is it power? I can bring you and then when I bring you in I can shut you out. You know, I can find a way to talk to you. But then that's enough because it's getting too close. Who knows? But yeah, people pull back and it's just a game.

And I think this is one reason why, you know, the internet can be a wonderful sense of connection. I can Facebook with my son, okay, in a different city. And it's wonderful, it's great. And I can Zoom. I can Zoom with you. Look, miles from me, right? That's wonderful.

But we've sold people a bill of goods, you know, where you've got 300 friends on Facebook. I had a lesson in particular, oh, this can be so intoxicating and you're obsessed with your messages. How many times you sit in a restaurant these days and cross from each other and they're not interacting,

they're both looking at their phones. And even when they're talking, half of their attention is on their phone, right? This is disastrous for human beings. This is disastrous, from my point of view, for human civilization, because we learn how to connect. Where do we turn and learn how to connect? You know, it's, yeah, so I think people do get ghosted, and that's because you can't read somebody's motivation.

You can't read who somebody is from messages on a screen. You just can't. So you don't know whether they're playing games. And often they are. You know, whereas if there's somebody in front of you in a room, there's a thousand nonverbal messages coming towards you, right, that give you a chance to figure out where that person is. Okay, so, yeah, I agree with you.

Social media, there's one study that it's only 5% social, 95% entertainment. So I think we should call it lack of social media. and you know people are people can say things that they would never say face to face with you on social media i posted yes i posted a video of me yeah it's like you know people send the most wild because i'm pretty i'm on social media they send wild messages you know or it's like okay uh really okay i tell very crazy things on social media like things like um At one point, did you know I'm a white supremacist racist?

That's very strange because I have two internationally adopted multiracial children. But nevertheless, apparently I'm a white supremacist racist. So, all right, then, you know, whatever, you know, I don't know. It's like, you know, some people don't like me because of my English accent. and other people love me because of our English accent. Who cares? Yes, but the trouble is we do care. These screen messages start to impact how we see the world and who we think we are.

And from a relationship view, it's a disaster. It's a huge universal disaster. We should be teaching. We now understand what love's about. We have a science of love. Oh, my God. You know, all these centuries we didn't have love with mystery. No, it's not.

It's all about attachment and bonding. And now, as typical human beings, we understand. We found it. We've got the Holy Grail. What do we do? We turn away and play golf. Or we turn away and look at something pretty and fuzzy. And that's human beings.

That's what we do. So now we understand so much about relationships and how much we need them. we become obsessed with a medium that is mostly used to sell us stuff as consumers, to entertain us at the most superficial level, to distract us from every really meaningful reality, and to con us into thinking that relationship is about typing a message. Oi! So we have an epidemic of anxiety.

and depression in our adolescence in North America. We should all be terribly alarmed about that. I don't know why so many people aren't, but it particularly is true of young girls. Young girls hit puberty, and suddenly they realize my peer group, oh my God, I've got to get acceptance from my peer group. Oh my God, they become highly socially orientated,

highly their identity is fluid a bit they they look to their peers to decide who they are massively vulnerable to this internet thing this whole the messages they get through they're massively vulnerable and what's happening you're all getting depressed and anxious that's thing and why i think we know on some level it's got something to do with the internet but we get all hung up on freedom and, you know, other concepts like that. And, you know, somehow we don't move. We don't do anything. There is a Republican senator.

I am a lefty if anybody wants to know. But there's a Republican senator in Louisiana who is a sex addiction therapist. And she's a senator. She's a congresswoman. And she found a way to limit porn in her state for young people. She said, if a porn company in my state, you have to prove that the people, the age of the people who are on your sites. You have to prove they're on some of these sites that are over 80. Well, she got this through.

And guess what? it's incredible for these porn sites to prove your age. So they've pulled out of Louisiana and then they're starting to pull out of other places. Personally, I feel yay lady, yay lady. She's trying to protect our kids under 18. You know, we don't let kids a 13 childs. We don't let kids do all kinds of things. They do watch all kinds of absolutely.

awful porn, we know that they do, mostly from the time they're about 11. This doesn't concern us. If we believe in relationships, we're therapists. We believe in the power of relationships to move people into a safer, more healthy place. This concerns us? This is crazy. If I had my life to live over again and all kinds of time and, well, I've got lots of energy, but all kinds of time, I think I would get into this issue because if you value relationships, there are certain places in our society that just dismiss them. You know, I was looking at the effects of the brain on porn,

and it's all negative, of course. It seems to do some damage and cause depression and stuff like that. I'm curious when you're doing couples therapy, like how does that play out or how you know you seem to have like a little bit of a pet peeve on this one like is it something that you feel like really gets in the way of connection in a couple oh yes of course there's all kinds of people in the states working with sex addiction and how sex addiction completely destroys your relationship then of course the more you don't have real relationships the more you turn to sex addiction you know and that's pretty clear okay

So yeah, people get caught in seeking this high. People get caught in anticipating the high. Isn't just the amount of time you spend looking at porn. It's that in your mind you are caught in that this is rewarding, this is anticipating that. You're looking forward to that. You're not looking forward to the hug your wife gives you when you walk into the house.

You're looking forward to when she goes to sleep so that you can go on this thing that you're willing. watching, right? And of course, all these things are, the whole internet is designed to get us hooked on it and keep us hooked. You know, so it fascinates me that all these things pop up on my screen. If I bought something from some store, they'll put five other things. I think, well, where did that come from? I didn't ask for that. It's intoxicating, isn't it? Because you've already bought one thing from them. So you find yourself looking at the other, you think, wait a minute, I didn't ask for this. I'm not interested in this, I was, I was reading this, you know, article. It's, it's insidious. So,

yes, it gets in the way of relationships. Of course it does. You start to choose. Your brain starts to obituate so the images of porn to the point where, for the first time in the last five or six years in our clinic in Ottawa, we would have young men coming in and saying they couldn't get erections with their girlfriend. You've talked to them. They've been watching really extreme poem from the time they were 11 years old. So their whole brain is focused on those kinds of images. And of course, their girlfriend doesn't look like that.

And she doesn't react in the same way. Right. So they're caught in this program and they can't get out of it. But if you take that out of the poem and help them really connect with their girlfriend, After about six months, the brain reprograms that they can get erections with a real woman, which of course is much more complicated and getting erections to image on a screen. Right? We've been going for a while. Yeah, we've been going for a while.

Let me maybe ask one kind of like, we talk about attachment a lot. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on like more of a disorganized attachment. attachment style, if that changes how you do EFT. And then we'll wrap it up after this question. Most of the time we're talking about complex PTSD. We're talking about a situation where a child grew up where other people solve and solution to fear at the same time. Think about that as a child.

The source of and solution to fear at the same time. That is crazy making. That is almost impossible. to orientate to, okay, let alone go with. So yes. So complex PTSD, disorganized attachment, people will say, here, come here, how can you leave me? How can you leave me? Come to how sensitive I am. I'm longing for connection. I'm dying. I'm starving. Come here, come here. And the person says, okay, here I am. Oh my God. Go away, go away. This is terrifying, scary, absolutely. And their brain switches into this as a threat.

you understand what I just said, if you really understand what I just said, these people are per workable, if you don't understand what I just said, you label them borderline and, you know, do all kinds of other things with them. We, I used to work at the hospital and psychiatry in Ottawa for many days. We would see these folks. They would have a diagnosis as long as your arm and they come to us because suddenly the relationship distress got to the point where somebody said they were going to commit suicide. So then we get all the cases that nobody wanted, right?

Which was challenging but great because we learned so much. And we get these people and we understood from an attachment point of view. This is complex PTSD, disorganized attachment, makes sense. There's nothing illogical about it. It's not crazy. Crazy means we just don't understand it, right? It's not crazy. So it makes perfect sense.

And so then you can work with it. You can say, of course. And it's terrifying to be alone. The world is terrifying to be close, because when you felt close, it was when you were most vulnerable and wounded. I understand. And you can work through it.

The point is with these, guys, you work through it slowly. You don't. You know, I'm a rather impatient person. I have my foot on the gas most of the time in my life and in therapy. I head and take a risk with a client. So I know I can always back up and create safety afterwards. But, you know, but with these folks, no.

With these folks, you wait and you expect relapses and you expect. No, no, no, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this. I don't want to, no, no, no. I don't want to come for the next session. I don't want to, I don't care if he says he's going to be there for me. I don't want to, you expect that. That's just the way it's going to be when their threat system takes over. But you know, if you're an attachment theorist, that these people have the same longing for connections every other human being in the world. And if you stay there, and you keep helping them feel that longing will come out and we'll come to the fore and that they will risk. But it takes time and you have to help the other partner. You have to support the hell out of the other partner to deal with the drama which they don't understand. But we've done it. We used to do it routinely in this hospital. setting. We've done it. We've done it in research projects. We've done it. If you have a map

to relationships and to people's inner emotional world, you can create change fast in lots of places where before you were just blocked. Beautiful. Yeah. Well, okay, so in summary, this is this is just a really nice beginning conversation i hope i have you back for many talks we need our nine nine part series on sex here right um oh all right then okay jolly good yeah no i'm joking uh but uh yeah it's been it's been a pleasure and um yeah is there any final sort of closing closing thoughts closing oh i don't know if i have closing thoughts Okay, that's okay. I'm pretty passionate about growing people.

You know, I'm a teacher, a therapist, a researcher. I'm just passionate about learning and growing people. And I think we have incredible new tools in psychotherapy, knowing how to work with emotion and use the power of emotion to create change. using the map attachment gives us, I just feel like if we really think psychotherapy can become, which is a standard resource for people that they can rely on and that directs them towards health.

I think most therapists I know are dedicated people trying to help. and often they feel frustrated because they don't have the perspective or the tools. So we try to give them that. We teach all over the world. We teach in Egypt, in Iran, in Australia, in Finland. We teach all over the world. And we try to give them that. We keep learning.

So I believe in the whole endeavor of psychotherapy. and the contribution it can make to something we call civilization, which we, I think, does that we have. You know, when Gandhi went to England, somebody asked him, what do you think of English civilization? And Gandhi said, I think it would be a really good idea. That's good. That's good. That's good.

So that's how I feel about civilization. We've never had it. We don't have it. But then I'm an idealist. There's so many distractions away from attachment. I feel like there's, it's like the more I think about it, the more I spend time ruminating, focused on it. It's like every conversation has attachment. like almost like an attachment translation right it's like porn has an attachment translation of i'm yearning for closeness with another individual and i don't know how to have it so i'm just going to take this very easy way to get it um ghosting has an a trans or an attachment translation of like i don't i'm scared of intimacy and i've been burned in the past and so i'm just going to push you away and

block everything out, right? And I think every sentence that I hear, it's like, it's beautiful that we can start to think of it in that terms. And I think what you said earlier, especially like you're learning to speak to the person's amygdala. And when you're having an attachment conversation yourself, you're revved up in a way where it's like if you just cognitively understand these things, you're not going to be able to do it, right?

And so. That's right. That's right, David, and I think that's very significant for therapy. You know, I read books by people I really respect researchers from other models. And I used to teach psychotherapy at the University of Ottawa for years, right? So I teach all kind of other models. And, you know, it would be like reading these interviews, these assessment interviews with students.

And from my interview, the assessment person can please the mark. because they're not, they're tuning information about this person and they're obsessed with certain information. They don't pick up on the emo messages the person's sending at all. They go past them. They don't pick up on what I consider gold

the pathway into this person's life. They don't even, they don't even, they just go past them. You know, the pub taught me that there are a different level of communication and experience. And you can see them and go into them

and learn to stay on the level of information. If you listen to some, well, we all have friends. I have friends when I go out for coffee and I realized that it wasn't that much fun. Why wasn't it? Because I'm fond of this person. And I realize what we do is we trade information. Oh, what's happening with your kids?

Or what's happening? Oh, yes, we have a joke. trade information. It's all right, but really on human emotional level, nothing happens. Nothing happens. Then you go out with another friend and you do a bit of that and then the friend says to you, I say, what's happening with your mom? And the friend goes to an emotional level and the friend says, oh, well, I don't think we, maybe we don't need to talk about that or, and I pick up on the emotion and I say, this is really hard for you. And they open up.

We have a whole different kind of interaction that is meaningful and deepens our relationship and helps us both tune into vulnerability in a positive way and leaves us feeling connected

and enriched. And then of course we can play and we can do all the information stuff, but being able to go to that emotional level and often in our therapy models, it feels to me like we've just decided to forget it. We'll just teach people coping skills. Coping skills, coping skills are great

on the few occasions you can use them. About the times when coping skills just are up here and you look down here. That's a whole different bag. I used coping with my aerobia for 10 years, they reduced my airplane phobia by about 15%. I went and saw, which is not very ethical, I did it.

I went and saw one of my friends who was trained in EFT for some therapy sections. I got rid of my airplane phobia. Wonderful. And if you had told me that at the beginning, yeah, I know. It's like, whoa, wait a minute, what happened there? Well, she's on a whole different level. You're on a whole different. And she did what I'm talking about here.

What's the trigger? Well, do you think the plane's going to fall out of the sky? And then as I go into the trigger, I realize, no, I don't. No, I don't. Well, what's the issue? What's the trigger? Oh, 10 years I've been looking at this. It's harder to look at your own stuff.

Turbulance. Oh, what's that about? And we go on an emotional journey, and I end up in a place that blows my mouth. Okay. So, yeah, it's about what level you're going to and stay at. I think we should stop. Yeah. Probably bored everybody to death.

I'd probably bored everybody to death by this point. But anyway. Well, we will, yeah, we'll stop here. And thank you so much for coming on, Dr. Johnson. it. On my website, I'm going to link all of your books and all of your articles. And I have a very nice, right now, it's at about 27-page summary of EFT, which will get people started with some knowledge, summarizing all of your interviews. And yeah, it's been a pleasure. And hopefully I'll have you back another time. Thank you very much. Lovely to talk to you. Lovely to talk to you,

too. Have a great day.