The One You Feed - Dr. Sue Johnson on Navigating Romantic Relationships

Starting point is 00:00:00 People can be really stuck in fear and anger and wanting to get things for themselves because they think if they don't do that somehow they'll end up empty. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit but it's not just about thinking our actions matter it takes conscious

Starting point is 00:00:53 consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living this podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction how they feed their good wolf I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the really no really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor. What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really dot com and register to win five hundred dollars. A guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:01:47 Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Sue Johnson, an internationally recognized leader in the field of couple interventions. She's known for her breakthrough clinical research on using emotions in therapy and shaping secure, lasting bonds that create resilience. Her new book is Hold Me Tight, Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Hi, Sue. Welcome to the show. Hey, happy to be here. I'm really happy to have you on. Your book is called Hold Me Tight, Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. And we'll get into it in a second here, but we're going to start like we always do at The Parable.

Starting point is 00:02:25 There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and looks up at her grandfather. She says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yes. Well, it's a really interesting

Starting point is 00:03:01 parable. I liked it a lot. And I have worked over the last 30 years with mostly with distressed couples. And I got hung up on the word feed. Because what the parable suggests is that you decide whether you're going to feed love or whether you're going to feed, for example, fear, you decide. And what I see in the relationships that me and all my thousands of therapists all over the world treat all the time is that it is true that we have ways of feeding our fear, feeding our anger. Perhaps I put anger in instead of hatred. It is true that we have ways of feeding that. We're vigilant. We remind ourselves to be careful. We tell ourselves other people will hurt us to the point where we only look at and see the negative things that people are doing and we wipe out the good things. So fear, for example, does have kind of its own self-fulfilling momentum to it. But what I see is that also it has a lot to do with your relationships. And, you know, I write about relationships.

Starting point is 00:04:20 I write about bonding and attachment. I do studies on relationships. I write about bonding and attachment. I do studies on relationships. And what I see is that people can be really stuck in fear and anger and wanting to get things for themselves because they think if they don't do that, somehow they'll end up empty. They can be real stuck in that. And when their relationship opens up and they start to feel connected with someone else, it kind of has them flower. And, you know, they feel safe and connected. They can talk about their fears, get comfort. They can understand their vulnerability behind their anger. They don't feel the need to grab everything

Starting point is 00:05:06 and grab everything for themselves. They actually believe that other people will take care of them. So I had a ton of thoughts. They weren't terribly simple. But that's kind of what came up for me. I teach therapists to be a third wolf. I teach therapists to be the wolf in the middle that says, oh, yes, of course, you are all caught up in your fear right now. Oh, yes, of course, you are all caught up in your anger right now, and it's consuming you and it's taking you down this path where you don't feel connected with anyone and you're always trying to protect yourself. And the therapist's job is really to be the third wolf in the middle and say, I'm going

Starting point is 00:05:59 to make it safe here. And you can learn to look at your fear and look at your anger and you can learn to understand them and you can reach underneath them and talk about those fears and connect with people in a way that brings up kindness and the ability to risk and love for you so in we're all about creating love relationships so so I have these rather complicated thoughts on your very simple parable, Eric. That's great. So shifting gears a little bit into the book itself, Hold Me Tight. Yeah. One of your main premises, really the premise that underlies the whole book, is that romantic love is all about

Starting point is 00:06:46 attachment and emotional bonding. And that all the other things that we see go wrong in relationships are really a consequence. They become fights over emotional disconnection. So share a little bit more about that with us. Well, I think what we've understood from all the studies we've done of couples, we've got about, oh, I don't know how many now, 30 studies of couples showing we can help distress couples and follow-up studies showing that our results last and studies about how people change so many studies um what we see all the time is that we focus on in relationships on things that like conflict and how painful conflict is but if you really really look at what's happening in a distressed relationship, the conflict is the inflammation, the virus, the thing that gets everything going, the underlying music to the dance that starts

Starting point is 00:07:53 to go wrong in a relationship is emotional disconnection. It's that somebody in the relationship starts to feel that the other person is unavailable, unresponsive, not engaged. And that triggers a whole reaction in us as human beings. We're bonding mammals. And it triggers a whole reaction in us where if I rely on someone and my whole world is kind of structured around them being there for me, that's a safety cue for my nervous system. And if suddenly I find that the other person seems indifferent or they won't really engage with me or I can't reach them or I feel abandoned by them, rejected by them, that is a real existential threat. It impacts our nervous system. It's basically a danger cue. It's a danger cue like stepping on a

Starting point is 00:08:56 nail. I'll give you a good example. A lady called Nancy Eisenberger in California puts people in brain scan machines and watches how their brain responds to certain stressors. And what she found was that if you give people, while they're lying in the brain scan, rejection cues from others, not even intimate partners where the rejection cues are even more important. But if you give people rejection cues, those cues are processed in exactly the same way and in the same part of the brain as physical pain. Physical pain is a danger cue telling you that you're in danger, you have to do something. And the feeling of rejection and exclusion by someone that matters to you or even just by other human beings is also a danger cue this is kind of um really looking at attachment science and

Starting point is 00:09:53 understanding who we are as human beings and how much we need connection with other people it's not icing on the cake it's oxygen it's like oxygen we need connection with other people it's our environment just like water is the environment of a fish um close connection with others is the environment that human beings are designed for and when we don't have it everything starts to go wrong and this is a pretty well-known finding when we look at childhood, right? Yeah. A lot of the original studies are about between a mother and a child. But you've gone on to say, no, this is this is what's happening at the heart of romantic love also. And originally, when you started talking about this, a lot of people did not agree with you. They said, right, you know, they said that

Starting point is 00:10:43 emotion was something that adults should control, that too much emotion was the problem, that it should be overcome. And mostly they said healthy adults are self-sufficient. And so tell me, has that thinking changed since when you first started publishing your views? Yeah, it has. And I'm really glad it's changed because I used to get attacked all over the place at conferences. And it has, you know, the attachment science has changed how we see children and changed how we parent children in the last 50 years. We now understand that you don't go and drop your kid off at the hospital for an operation and pick your kid up five days later. People forget that's what we used to do even into the 70s.

Starting point is 00:11:31 Right. That you understand that that would traumatize the kid all to hell and it would impact how the kid would deal with being in the hospital, how the kid might even heal. You know, it would impact all kinds of things. So we've known that for years. It took years for people to accept that. Way back, people believed the best thing to do with a kid was when the kid was upset, you take the kid to their room and you tell them to calm themselves down and you leave them alone in their room so that they learn to be independent. This was the way we used to think about parenting. And now the same thing's happening with adult relationships. You know, round about the turn of the century, really about the late 1990s, there was sort of

Starting point is 00:12:18 an upswelling of research into adult bonding. And the social psychologists and the developmental psychologists and a few clinicians like me who were watching couples all the time interact in their offices basically realize that we're different than kids but we're not a lot of the same patterns the same emotions the same responses the same vulnerabilities the same needs, the same emotions, the same responses, the same vulnerabilities, the same needs. They're there in adult relationships. And, you know, it took a while for that to get going and for people to sort of move away from this idea that is, you know, well, if you're a functioning adult, you've got to be self-sufficient. What I say is the only self-sufficient human beings are dead human beings. We're not wired for

Starting point is 00:13:09 self-sufficiency. Your brain is a bonding brain. Your nervous system, when your nervous system and your brain were getting formed, you know, you were young, you were a child, and our children in our species are more vulnerable and more vulnerable for longer than any other species on earth. And when your brain was being formed, you knew, like you knew to take your next breath, that if you called and no one came, you were in danger. If you called and no one came came in the end, you died. So connection has always been wired into us. And this has become clearer and clearer and clearer over the years. What's interesting is a lot of the beginning researchers in adult attachment didn't start off by studying bonding. They started off by studying pain. Why did loneliness hurt?

Starting point is 00:14:08 Why did loneliness seem to be associated with depression and people falling apart and suicide? And, you know, why did grief hurt so much? You know, what happened to people when they felt rejected? I mean, it started with this and it developed into an understanding that we grow up. Yes, we grow up, but our attachment needs and vulnerabilities go from the cradle to the grave. We don't, you know, our nervous system grows, but it's the same nervous system as we had when we knew that if we cried and no one came, we were going to die. But that's one of the things that happens in love relationships. People use images of life and death, you know, and people say, you're killing me. Or, you know, if you leave me, I'll die. And

Starting point is 00:14:59 I used to think, oh, this is just sentimental, you know, nonsense from romance novels. And now what I understand is, no, very well-functioning, very resilient people use these images because that's how our brain codes love relationships. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

Starting point is 00:16:43 The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Starting point is 00:16:59 Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Starting point is 00:17:14 Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that you talk about is that these emotional needs are neglected. This starts to become a problem and out of it stem three things, you call them demon dialogues. They're conversations that people get into.

Starting point is 00:17:47 And there's three of them that you talk about. One is the find the bad guy, the protest polka, and the freeze and flee. So let's maybe spend a minute or so on each of them. Okay. So, again, this comes from watching thousands of couples interact. And also it comes from all the research on marital distress, which has also got going in the last few years. You know, we know that when a relationship goes into distress, people get stuck in certain predictable dances with each other. And there's a predictable emotional music playing.

Starting point is 00:18:29 The emotional music organizes the dance. It's the structure of the dance. And people get stuck. And the most popular place people get stuck, all over the world. And we teach therapists all over the world and do educational programs all over the world. So it's fascinating to me how this goes across cultures and religions and countries. But, you know, the one that really seems to dominate is that one person feels disconnected and starts to feel alarmed and starts pushing for connection, doesn't get much of a response and starts pushing aggressively and demanding and criticizing. Why don't you talk to me? Why don't you come home earlier? We never talk anymore. You didn't do this chore for me, even though I said it mattered to me.

Starting point is 00:19:20 You're not listening. And the other person feels attacked and rejected. And so they defend themselves and they shut down more. The more they shut down, the more unconnected the first person feels, the more that person bangs on the door to get attention, to get a response. And the more they bang on the door, the more the other person moves away and shuts down. And you can see how this just keeps going. It sort of rolls. It's got its own momentum. Couples can get stuck in it for years and not ever sort of step back and see the dance. The dance just does them after a while and they don't ever step back and look at the dance and say,

Starting point is 00:20:02 oh, we're caught in this dreadful circle, this dreadful spin, this dreadful people give it names, you know, this dreadful tornado. We're caught in this, you know, dreadful. They don't do that. They they're just all caught up in the dance. So that's protest polka. the dance. So that's protest polka. And we see it, it's demand-withdrawal. But we see it that one person is protesting the distance and trying to get the other person to respond. They're not trying to be mean, you know, or, you know, they're desperately saying, where are you? Where are you? Where are you? Right? And they're not getting a response.

Starting point is 00:20:42 When that goes on for a long time, eventually, usually what happens is that the protesting partner starts to burn out. And then they start to shut down. And you get what we call withdraw, withdraw. Freeze and flee. Yeah, you get two people putting up walls and nobody's out on the dance floor. And that also destroys a relationship because everyone's giving up.

Starting point is 00:21:11 And usually when people come to see me with that pattern, it's because somebody's basically said, I'm going to leave, I'm done. And then the other person goes into alarm. But they may have shut each other out for years. They literally don't know who the other person is anymore. And they're trying to protect themselves to the point where there's no energy going towards the other partner. It's all going into this protection. And after a while, the protection becomes a prison right and the third one is find the bad guy all couples do these at various times but the question is whether you get stuck in them and whether they define the whole relationship but find the bad guy is usually when a couple are

Starting point is 00:21:57 fighting and they can't get anywhere they can't get the other person to respond. It feels really bad. The criticism starts to go through the roof. And it's almost like they choose the booby prize called, we can't resolve this. We can't connect. We can't find safe connection. So I'll go for the booby prize, which is, it's not me that's the problem here. It's you. And that looks like attack, attack.

Starting point is 00:22:29 Most folks can't keep that up for long. It's too exhausting. So usually you see a distressed couple going into attack, attack for short periods, then going back to some sort of demand, withdraw, protest, polka, where the real question is somebody's yelling, where are you? But they're yelling so loud that the other partner moves away. And then sometimes you get people in freeze and flee because they're just done. They're overwhelmed. They numb out. They don't know what to do, but they still somehow know they want the relationship but they're stuck right and what we do is we help people see these dances they're caught in and

Starting point is 00:23:13 blame the dance rather than each other and we normalize it we say oh yeah you know you're stuck here in this dance and yeah that really. And that's really confusing and difficult. And look at how you trigger each other into the dance, you know, and people don't understand the impact they're having on each other. You know, withdrawers, for example, really don't get that when they shut down to protect themselves, they shut the other person out. And that triggers the other person into alarm and anger. And I've never met a withdrawer in a distressed relationship who really gets that.

Starting point is 00:23:59 You're so caught up in shutting down, you don't get the way it's impacting the person you're standing five feet away from you just don't get it so once you start to get that and you start to get that your partner's frantically trying to reach you they're not trying to hurt you actually things start to shift the you know perception starts to change and people have room to talk about more than their numbing or their anger. And we help them talk about the softer feelings they have for each other. The fact that both of them are scared, for example, in a distressed relationship, both people are scared. They just don't know how to talk about it and help each other with it. I have unfortunately lived all three of these demon dialogues, and it

Starting point is 00:24:45 was very painful to sort of read, you know, looking back on a previous marriage. I can see all of it. And, you know, being on the withdrawal side of things, you know, I understand exactly what you're saying, because it's really easy to point at the person who's attacking as the problem. Well, you're attacking. I'm just sitting here. You wrote somewhere in the book that the old axiom, when in doubt, say or do nothing, is terrible advice in love relationships. That's right. That was certainly my strategy a lot of the time. I'll be the calm one. I'm not going to take the bait. But I saw it didn't take me reading your book to see it, but your book showed it to me so much more clearly, the role that the withdrawer plays in that also. And you

Starting point is 00:25:34 talk about that one of the things that you help people do is see the dance itself. You actually say, look at the circle of criticism that spins both of you around. There's no true start to a circle, right? And that's a really useful way. And it is, it becomes its own thing. That's right. And, you know, when you think about it, I mean, you can think about your relationships, you know, any relationship that's got stuck, you know any relationship that's got stuck you know i mean i it's fascinating to me i would be working with couples and be writing about this and studying it and doing research on it and then my mother would would visit from england you know and within a seconds of her arriving you know know, it would start with about five minutes of pleasant

Starting point is 00:26:27 conversation. And then she would turn and say something, you know, no big deal, really, if it didn't have a history behind it. Like, good Lord, why do you wear that color? And my God, doesn't suit you and you we'd be off yeah we'd be off and we'd be stuck and i basically um flip between um smacking her you know attacking back and then we do um find the bad guy for a while you know you're impossible no you're impossible you know you're impossible. No, you're impossible. You know, you're dominating. No, you're, you're a bad child. And, you know, we'd flip, we'd do that for a bit. And then we'd flip into withdraw, withdraw for a bit. But, you know, it was so difficult to see the, the dance and to be able to say to my mom, hey, mom, have you ever noticed that we get stuck in this silly thing where you turn and say something and I get upset? And so I turn and basically tell you I don't want to hear any of your opinions. And then you don't talk to me for an hour.

Starting point is 00:27:40 And then we start all over again. Have you ever noticed that? And, you know, she she said do we dear i said yep and we've been doing it for you know since i was about 12 right and um it helped it helped me not to demonize her to see that we were stuck in that, you know, that dialogue. It's a difficult one. You can see them, but it's even when you see them, stepping out of them and keeping your emotional balance enough to step out of them. keeping your emotional balance enough to step out of them you know it's tricky which is why people I want people to read my book and do our educational programs because there's now educational programs based on hold me tight as well um you know because it's it's a tricky

Starting point is 00:28:38 most of the times we don't see the dance and even when we see it we're not sure how to change it I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

Starting point is 00:29:45 We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Starting point is 00:30:02 Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

Starting point is 00:30:14 Yeah, really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHe it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The book is based on like the title says seven conversations for a lifetime of love. And the first few of them are these demon dialogues, right? And then you go into sort of the tipping point conversation, which is called a hold me tight conversation.

Starting point is 00:30:48 So tell me a little bit about what that is. What we noticed when we worked with distressed couples was that we would help them see the cycle. We would give them safety and help them talk about some of the underlying music in that dance, where people who were withdrawers would usually talk about feeling rejected, like they could never do the right thing, they were always going to fail. So they stopped trying. And more blaming folks would start talking about how lonely and abandoned they felt and how they were never sure they were loved. And when they start to talk about that, they can kind of create a safety, a platform in the relationship.

Starting point is 00:31:33 But that's kind of just taking control of the negative cycle that's bringing up loneliness and disconnection and distress in the relationship all the time. loneliness and disconnection and distress in the relationship all the time, then we learn that that's not enough to change a relationship. You have to also create a positive dance. And so what does that positive dance look like? Well, you've got to have an image of what are the key things that need to happen in a relationship? What are the key moments that need to happen to create a really positive dance, a secure bond? And so it helped a lot to have all the science of attachment and bonding, you know, behind us and to understand what we were trying to create. Basically, the research says in a secure bond, the main variables that create the bond as secure and stable are emotional accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement. And that spells A-R-E, accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement.

Starting point is 00:32:41 And it's interesting because from my point of view, the main question in love relationships is, are you there for me? Can I reach you? Will you come when I call? Can I rely on you? Do I matter to you? Do you care about my pain? Will you be there? Will you accept my vulnerability? These are the things that come up and people can't even put words to that lots of times. So what we started to realize was that when we help couples create these bonding conversations where they could talk about their fears, you know, people could start to say things like, I do shut you out. I shut you out because I'm so scared that all I'm going to hear from you is that I'm a big disappointment. And I was a big disappointment in my family. And I can't bear it if when I see that look on your face and I'm getting the message that I'm

Starting point is 00:33:37 a big disappointment from you. So I turn away and shut you out. I do because I'm scared. So there's somebody talking about their fear instead of acting on it and shutting their partner out. They're letting their partner in, and they're taking a risk. But, of course, what that does is it evokes compassion and caring from the partner. The partner sees their vulnerability. And then we help that person talk about their needs.

Starting point is 00:34:06 And what I need, what I need from you is to feel accepted and to know that I can make mistakes and that I don't have to be perfect. And even if I don't know what to do sometimes, or I do things wrong, that I'm your special one. I need that reassurance because I do want to be close to you. I do want to dance with you. I just get scared that you're standing back and keeping score and then I freeze up. But I want to be close, but I need your reassurance. So when somebody does that, they pull their partner towards them. That pulls, and I'm talking about an organic process here. I'm talking about the way our emotions are structured as social bonding animals. I'm not talking about, you know, something you learn from a book. I'm talking about an organic human response. When people

Starting point is 00:35:01 show their vulnerability like that and ask for their needs to be met, it really, really pulls for the other person to respond. And if the other person can't respond, we help them with that. We help them with what's blocking them and what's getting in the way. But what we saw was when people would be able to talk about their fears and needs like that, incredible bonding situations happened where people would just come together. They would share their fears and needs. They would, trust would open up, connection would open up. We just respond to those moments with joy. You know, they're what Hallmark cards is all about. They're what all the love stories

Starting point is 00:35:45 are all about, right? This moments of connection with other people, their emotional connection, where we can read their intentions, where we tune into their emotions, where, you know, people even mimic the way each other moves. You know, birds do it in mating rituals, actually. each other moves. Birds do it in mating rituals, actually. You watch a couple in a hold-me-tight conversation. He'll lean forward. She leans forward. He reaches out his hand. She reaches out her hand. Their nervous systems are tuned into each other. And this naturally elicits joy in people, just like a beautiful sunset or a beautiful piece of music. Our nervous systems are just wired for it. What we found was that when people had these conversations, we call them hold me tight conversations, at the end of therapy,

Starting point is 00:36:39 they were out of distress. And three years later later when we checked on them all the results were stable and they told us they they had felt more secure in their bonds they weren't just out of distress they were more intimate their sex life was better they felt more secure in their bond um you know and it was like oh wow what my god of what a minute, what's happening here? You know, the first study I ever did on EFT, I got these enormous results. And I thought, wait a minute, what? I didn't believe them. I ran the data three times.

Starting point is 00:37:19 And then I thought, I don't really understand why we got these results. But a few years later, looking at more and more tapes, you know, and reading about adult attachment, which had just started to really get going then, I got it. I got, wait a minute, these are bonding moments. These are the moments that we are just wired to take as life-giving and crucial and important. And these are survival moments. Our nervous system just sings in these moments.

Starting point is 00:37:56 This is what falling in love is about. This is what staying in love is about. These amazingly emotional moments when you feel connected with somebody, you know, you can't have them all the time. I mean, it's just not possible. But when people had these, basically everything improved. And I mean, everything, it was quite mind boggling to us, not just the relationships. But if one partner was distressed, they became less depressed,

Starting point is 00:38:25 they became less depressed. If one partner was anxious, they became less anxious. If one partner had post-traumatic stress disorder, they were able to turn to their partner when they got flashbacks and seek comfort and acceptance. PTSD symptoms went down. It still fascinates me after 30 years how powerful these hold me tight conversations can be. And, you know, we help people do them now in our hold me tight educational programs. And you see the same thing. You know, I was in San Francisco. I did a hold me tight weekend for 100 couples, which means there's 200 people in the room. And some of the people said, oh, we don't really need this. We're happy. But, you know, we just thought we'd come along and see.

Starting point is 00:39:12 And then they come up at the end to me and they say things like, I never knew I could feel this close to him. And I've never felt this close to him, and I didn't know you could feel this, and thank you so much. And even distressed couples, you know, it's just a relationship education weekend. Distressed couples will come up and say, we get it now, and we want to be close, and we're going to go work on our relationship. So there's a power here. We plug into it with our therapy and our teaching,

Starting point is 00:39:48 but the power is there. It's about who we are and how much we are. As I say in the book, we are homo vinculum. We are not just social animals. We're the one who bonds. And that's our ecological niche. If you that's that's water and we're the fish that's what we need to thrive and when we get it when we get that kind of connection it's a source of joy it's a source of strength you know um it changes everything i mean we've even done a brain scan study where when you have that connection with your partner, you don't respond,

Starting point is 00:40:30 your brain doesn't respond the same way if I tell you I'm going to shock you on your feet as if when you're alone in the machine or when you don't feel connected with your partner and your partner holds your hand. We've actually shown that this emotional sense of connection changes how your brain deals with threat. It's pretty fascinating stuff.

Starting point is 00:40:54 Right. Well, that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up, Sue, on a really positive note about how strong relationships can be when we get this bonding piece, right? So thank you so much. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation. I want to talk about, uh, conversations that heal injury that happened in the relationship, forgiveness conversations. You and I will do that listeners. You can get access to the post-show conversations, uh, exclusive mini episodes, ad-free episodes, all that stuff at oneufeed.net support. So thank you so much, Sue. I really appreciate your time coming on the show. And I found the book a real revelation.

Starting point is 00:41:36 You're most welcome. Bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know

Starting point is 00:42:28 really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

The One You Feed - Dr. Sue Johnson on Navigating Romantic Relationships

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