The Tim Ferriss Show - #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson

Starting point is 00:00:00 Okay, this is going to be part confessional. As some of you know, I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess, as many of you probably know. I've tried all the dating apps, and while there are some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League. I've been using it for a few months now, and I found some great matches. I'm going to use this ad, this sponsor read, to selfishly share my own profile with the ladies listening to this podcast. My handle is TimTim. That's at TimTim or just TimTim. I think you can search by person and just put in TimTim, and you'll find me. And then you can match with me.

Starting point is 00:00:44 I'll tell you more about what I'm looking for in a bit. But before that, why did I end up using the League? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck. On the League, you're starting with a baseline of smart people and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to. It's much easier. It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go up and speak with. So more than half of the league users went to top 40 colleges and you can make your filters really selective. So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work. And that is one of the reasons that I use it.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Second, people verify using LinkedIn. So you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months. It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations. I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this. So for instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding, have those as interests as I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains. I'm a rivers and mountains guy. The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities.

Starting point is 00:02:02 So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out, features available on the league include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from co-workers, bosses, family, etc. That's very easy to do. You can search by interest, you can get profile stats, and there is a personal concierge in the app. So there's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for? I am looking for a woman who is well-educated and who loves skiing or snowboarding or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important. So just I'll leave it at that for now. Someone who's default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half full type of person who would ideally like to have

Starting point is 00:02:46 kids in the next few years. Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful, and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle. I like strong women, not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea. It could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle, loves to read, and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag date Tim, so hashtag date Tim, in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up. Again, you can also find my profile under the handle Tim Tim. That's all one word, T-I-M, T-I-M. So these are all reasons why I was excited when the league reached out to sponsor the podcast, not the least of which is that I get to pitch my dating profile on the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three three-minute dates with

Starting point is 00:03:31 people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch. So check it out. Download The League today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating. You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So download the league today on iOS or Android and check it out. Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the wait list and have your profile reviewed first. So check it out, The League, on iOS or Android. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that

Starting point is 00:04:14 supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply

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Starting point is 00:05:36 to help manage stress. Now, I do my best always to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances.

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Starting point is 00:07:09 living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th

Starting point is 00:07:41 year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust

Starting point is 00:08:22 me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, speaker, and author of 21 international bestsellers, including Purple Cow, Linchpin, The Dip, This Is Marketing, and his new book, The Song of Significance, A New Manifesto for Teams. You can find Seth at sethE-T-H-S dot blog. I've been very impressed in some of our conversations by the rules that you've established for yourself for saying yes or no to certain things. And perhaps we could start, if you're willing to talk about it, with speaking engagements. Speaking engagements, as you've experienced, if you have a successful book, I went from kind of zero to 60 very quickly,

Starting point is 00:09:31 unexpectedly, and said yes to everything. And it just turned into a parody of up in the air. I mean, I felt like a traveling salesman or Jack Lemmon and Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. It was horrible. What are your rules for, for instance, speaking engagements, to whatever extent you're comfortable talking about them? Oh, I'd be happy to. And then I'll scroll back a little bit and tell you why I have to have rules for things like that. For speaking engagements, I don't want to do more than 30 a year because they are, at least for me, not additive to the joy of my day,

Starting point is 00:10:01 except for the hour I'm on stage. So I am prepared to do an unlimited number of speaking engagements in zip code 10706. Monday, I'm going to Carnegie Hall to talk for free to 25 music students who have devoted their lives to doing what they do. And it's a privilege to do something like that. If I have to get on an airplane, it's a whole other project. So I think really hard about what impact am I trying to make? And will this help me move things forward, which is where this nests into. My mentor and late friend Zig Ziglar used to talk about the idea.

Starting point is 00:10:43 He used to say, I've never changed anyone's life with a speaking gig. But sometimes I do a speaking gig and they buy my cassettes. And if they buy my cassettes, I got a shot at changing their life. And for me, my mission, and has been for a long time, is to make a certain kind of change happen. I want to help people see the world differently. And if they choose to, make a different choice after they see the world differently. I want to choose to, make a different choice after they see the world differently. I want to help people connect to each other and to use that connection to make things better. And I don't want to be a TV personality, so the question is, how do I bring that teaching to people? And what I found is it's a very unique situation when you have 500 or 5,000

Starting point is 00:11:27 high-powered people in a room who didn't expect that you were going to be there, but now that you're there are eager to hear what you have to say. And they set aside their Twitter account, and they set aside their preconceptions. And for 45 minutes or an hour, you have a screen that's 30 feet by 20 feet and you have a microphone that's amplified. And maybe, just maybe, you can get under their skin. And if you do, maybe, just maybe, they go back to their office and get 10 copies of your turn and hand them out to their team. And then I can do that practice that I seek, which is to change the conversation. So that's why I do it at all. And the further away it is, the less likely.

Starting point is 00:12:13 Is that fair to say? Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. What I did was, having studied a little bit of economics, is I changed the price. Los Angeles costs three times as much as New York. And if you don't think that's fair, then don't make me go to Los Angeles. You said you were going to elaborate on why you need rules. And maybe you just did. Maybe that was the answer. Well, because the phone rings, right? And lots of people want a thing.

Starting point is 00:12:38 And if it doesn't align with the thing that is your mission and you say yes, then now it's their mission. And there's nothing wrong with being a wandering generality instead of a meaningful specific, but don't expect to make the change you seek to make if that's what you do. The thing is, and Derek, I thought your interview with Derek was one of the best ones you've ever done. Oh, thanks. Derek makes it quite easy. Derek Sivers is amazing. I adore him. And he talked about offense versus defense. And if you think hard about one's life, most people spend most of their time on defense in reactive mode, in playing with the cards they

Starting point is 00:13:21 got instead of moving to a different table with different cards. Instead of seeking to change other people, they are willing to be changed. And part of the arc of what I'm trying to teach is everyone who can hear this has more power than they think they do. And the question is, what are you going to do with that power? Because it comes with responsibility right out of Spider-Man. But that responsibility is, you're going to make change happen, or you're going to ignore it. And if you make change happen, that's on you. place in culture, feeling like I'm in a transition point. You've been so consistent and so present for so many people for so long, your readers, et cetera. How do you navigate big transitions in your own life? And that's a very general question. But for instance, I find the reason the podcast started is because I was burned out on books. It was after The 4-Hour Chef, 670 some odd pages. I just felt so battle weary and run down by publishing that I wanted to take a break. And the podcast was a side project that then became

Starting point is 00:14:31 its own entire thing altogether. But when you find yourself wondering maybe what to do next, I mean, how do you navigate some of those larger transitions? And I mean, if you have any examples that come to mind? All right, well, the good news is you did exactly the right thing. And I applaud it. It's not easy to do that. Because it means going from a place where by outside measures, you are about to succeed again, to a place where by outside measures, you might not. Hence the motto, this might not work. And so on a good day, my story to myself is this might not work. That's my job, to do something that might not work. And the number of projects I've done, big and small, exceeds most people's.

Starting point is 00:15:20 And the number of failures I have dramatically exceeds most people's. And I'm super proud of that. More proud of the failures than the successes because it's about this mantra of, is this generous? Is this going to connect? Is this going to change people for the better? Is it worth trying? If it meets those criteria and I can cajole myself into doing it than I ought to, right? And the transitions aren't easy. I regularly spend months telling people that I'm unemployed and in between projects. How did you decide, or what is the thinking behind daily blog versus, say, a longer blog post once a week or at some other frequency? So the daily blog evolved, and it's one of the top five career decisions I've ever made

Starting point is 00:16:12 in terms of having a practice that resonates with the people who I need to resonate with, that I can do forever and have been doing for more than eight years now. And that leaves the trail behind. I don't need anyone's permission. I don't need to go out and promote it. I don't use any analytics. I don't have comments. It's just, this is what I noticed today. And I thought I'd share it with you. And for a while, it was an intermittent blog. And then it was a five times a day blog. I do write five posts a day. I just don't publish five posts a day. But it became clear that I could get the appropriate amount of mind space. Do you draft by hand in Word in a particular program?

Starting point is 00:16:59 I type right into TypePad. So I learned this from Chip Conley. Have you had Chip on the show? I haven't, but I love Chip. He's a great guy. Great guy. So Chip and I went to business school together, and he was the third youngest person in the class, and I was the second youngest person in the class. So he got five of us together, and every Tuesday night, we met in the anthropology department for four hours, and we brainstormed more than 5,000 business ideas over the course of the first year of business school. It was magnificent. It wasn't official. It wasn't sanctioned. It was just Chip said, let's do this. And we did. And he picked the anthropology

Starting point is 00:17:37 department because he knew someone there and could get the conference room. And he said, this is the only place we will ever do this. And the reason is when you walk into this room, you will associate this room with what we do here. That's all. And I feel the same way about my blog. If I am in the type pad editor, I know exactly what my brain needs to feel like. And then the writing happens. What does your writing warmup look like? And when do you typically write? One of my fans said that you'd at some point, this could be a misquote, but said that you had an elaborate or extreme sort of mental warmup for writing. Do you write in the mornings or what time do you typically write? Okay. So now I need to tell you about Stephen

Starting point is 00:18:22 King's pencil. Yes, please. Because I feel very strongly about this. Stephen King often goes to writers' conferences, and there'll be this question and that question and the next question, and inevitably someone raises their hand and says, Stephen King, you're one of the most successful, revered writers of your generation. What kind of pencil do you use? I won't go there. It doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:18:46 It's a way to hide. It's not interesting to me to talk about how I do it because there's no correlation that I have ever encountered between how writers write and how good their work is. So we should just move on because it doesn't matter. All right. I'll make a confession then, which is when I feel blocked, which does happen with writing, I take a long time to get to the point where I feel like I have the balls in the air well enough to put pieces together. It just takes me a long time

Starting point is 00:19:17 to synthesize, but not unlike some coders, I guess. But the point I was going to make is that I went to a conversation between Poe Bronson, a writer and another gent, I'm blanking on his name. And I asked Poe during a Q&A what he did when he felt blocked or couldn't figure out what to do next in writing. And he said, write what makes you angry. Write about what makes you angry. And I found that very helpful. It was a very helpful way to at least get the hand or the brain moving to break the ice. I totally agree. That's not the question. If you said to Poe Bronson, how do you write these books that are remarkable and thoughtful and generous?

Starting point is 00:19:56 I don't think his answer is every morning I get as angry as I can and then I type. Agreed. Agreed. Right? Agreed. So you and I could list 25 tricks that help us get past the resistance and start the flow of writing, but that's different than saying, I need to do it like those other people do it. Agreed. I guess in the buffet of things that have been helpful along those lines, if for whatever reason, didn't get a good night's sleep, feeling off, you sit down to write. Right. This is easy. All right. The answer to this

Starting point is 00:20:30 question is write. Write poorly. Continue writing poorly. Write poorly until it's not bad anymore, and then you'll have something you can use. People who have trouble coming up with good ideas, if they're telling you the truth, will tell you they don't have very many bad ideas. But people who have plenty of good ideas, if they're telling you the truth, will say they have even more bad ideas. So the goal isn't to get good ideas. The goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up. What are some of the top business decisions that you've made? We'll go way back. And I would say the first one, which is useful to everybody,

Starting point is 00:21:17 is sell something that people want to buy. My friend Lynn is a brilliant, brilliant thinker and designer. And for years, she was in the business of designing toys and soft goods for moms with toddlers. And every toy company in America was mean to her, rejected her, had nothing to do with her. And I said, Lynn, it's simple. Toy companies don't like toy designers. They're not organized to do business with toy designers. They're not hoping toy designers will come to them. I said, come with me into the book business. Because every day, there are underpaid, really smart people in the book business who wake up waiting for the next great idea to come across their desk. They are eager to buy what you have to sell. And within two months, she did the decks of cards, the 52 decks, and sold more than 5 million decks of cards.

Starting point is 00:22:06 And that's because they appreciated her. So if you think about how hard it is to push a business uphill, particularly when you're just getting started, one answer is to say, why don't you just start a different business, a business you can push downhill. This is a good lesson. Yeah. Sometimes there's a fetishizing of the sort of rolling of the stone like Sisyphus. And in Silicon Valley, there's just like fetishizing of it, of the pain. And I'm like, maybe your model's just too difficult. Maybe you should choose a different business.

Starting point is 00:22:43 Okay. That is a good lesson. Any other? Well, so then the other lesson, it happens all the time, which is knowing when I'm wrong is a useful skill. And lots of people who do good work have trouble knowing when they haven't done good work and they think they should stick with it. Other people have done good work have trouble knowing when they haven't done good work and they think they should stick with it. Other people have done good work, don't think they have, and they pivot too soon. So figuring that moment out. 1994, I'm running one of the first internet companies. We invented

Starting point is 00:23:18 commercial email. And Mark Hurst shows me this thing called the World Wide Web. And I say, that's stupid. It's just like Prodigy, except it's slower and there's nobody to pay us money. And for six months, I persisted in pointing out that the World Wide Web made no sense whatsoever. And then one day, just woke up and I said, wait a minute, let me look at that again. And we completely changed how we decided we were going to do our business. then one day just woke up and said, wait a minute, let me look at that again. And we completely changed how we decided we were going to do our business. The same thing is true with the cover of All Marketers Are Liars, because the cover and the title were super clever and wrong.

Starting point is 00:23:58 It was not a matter of me persisting and persuading people that they needed to get the joke. It was merely a matter of persuading the publisher, we should make the paperback have a different cover and a different title. That if you're going to try a lot of things, you're going to fail a lot. And figuring out the difference between the failures of your judgment versus the failures of not persisting long enough is a useful skill. And I'm still not great at it, but I'm better at it than I was. You've interacted with many more entrepreneurs than I have, I would say at this point. One of the questions that I get constantly that you might have a better answer for, because I don't have a great answer for it right now, is how do I discern

Starting point is 00:24:40 between an idea that I should keep persisting with despite many, many, many, many rejections versus a bad idea that I should abandon that is getting the same type of rejection that I'm equally enthusiastic about? And that's a very wordy way to put it, but I get some version of that question all the time. How would you answer that? Well, first we have to scroll back. There's a difference between freelancers and entrepreneurs.

Starting point is 00:25:08 Most people who are independent are freelancers. They get paid when they work. They do good work and get paid for it. A few people are entrepreneurs building a business bigger than themselves, a business that makes them money when they sleep, a business where they don't actually do the work that the customer is buying, and a business that they can sell one day. So we look at Larry Ellison.

Starting point is 00:25:31 Larry Ellison doesn't code at Oracle. Larry Ellison doesn't make most of the sales calls. What does Larry Ellison do, actually? His job is to think about something that needs to be done and hire someone else to do it over and over again, building something bigger than himself. So the first thing I would say to the person who's confused is, well, are you an entrepreneur or a freelancer? If you're an entrepreneur, then you have signed up for a series of choices and challenges.

Starting point is 00:26:01 And again, start with selling something people want to buy. There's no reason to try to invent a need when there are so many needs and wants that are unfilled. So people didn't wake up 10 years ago and say, I need an Uber. But they did wake up 10 years ago and say, I need an easy, inexpensive way to get from A to B. Correct. Once you could go to someone and say, I have that, people would say, I want that. But if you're just saying, I'm really clever, I know what you should want, and when you tell people what it is, they don't want it,

Starting point is 00:26:40 you're either talking to the wrong people or you made the wrong thing. The blog post I point people to the most is called First 10. And it is a simple theory of marketing that says, tell 10 people, show 10 people, share it with 10 people, 10 people who already trust you and already like you. If they don't tell anybody else, it's not that good and you should start over. And if they do tell other people, you're on your way. So the reason I don't use Twitter is I saw Twitter early, which is unusual for me,

Starting point is 00:27:11 and I said, wow, I could do this and have a lot of followers. And then I said, well, what would that mean? A, it would mean less time spent writing my blog. B, it would mean exposing myself to anonymous comments from people who want me to pay attention to them. Will either of those two things make me better at the things I want to be good at? No. Will it be a thrill in the sense that there'll be a little fearful edge to it every time I interact? Yes. But I have conservation of fear. And I have to be really careful because if I'm busy sorting through more stuff, the cognitive load goes up and I can't do what Neil Gaiman does. Like Neil famously has said that the way he writes a book is he makes himself extremely bored.

Starting point is 00:28:02 And if he's bored enough, a book's going to come out because he needs to entertain himself. Well, the problem most people don't understand about social media, social media wasn't invented to make you better. It was invented to make the company's money. And you are an employee of the company and you are the product that they sell. And they have put you in a little hamster wheel, and they throw little treats in now and then. But you got to decide what's the impact you're trying to make. And this still comes back to the fear thing. And one of the biggest misunderstandings of the people who are into that whole quantified self thing, is they are confusing quantifying the

Starting point is 00:28:48 self with dancing with the fear. And they're completely different things to do in a given day. That one is Taylorism. It's scientific management. It's productivity. We need to move these widgets from one place to another. What's the most efficient way? And I'm glad we got good at industry because it makes our lives way more rich, right? But our economy, our world, and our soul aren't fulfilled by that. They're fulfilled by people who do something that has never been done before. And if it's never been done before, you can't quantify it because it's never been done before. And so to be good at it doesn't mean you quantify your way to it. To be good at it means you clear the decks so that all

Starting point is 00:29:38 that's left is you and the muse, you and the fear, you and the change you want to make in the world. I can't think of something that's more productive for the kind of people who are lucky enough and blessed enough to be rich enough to be listening to this to focus their energy on. We don't need folks like that to go from 90 words per minute to 105 words per minute when they type. It's not a factor. What we need is for them to type something that's worth reading. What opportunities were you offered, doesn't have to be specific, that you're glad you turned down? Are there any particular examples that come to mind?

Starting point is 00:30:19 And if not, I can move on. But I'm just curious if there are any opportunities that you've turned down. For me, for instance, one of them would be every reality TV show invite I've ever had. I'm thrilled. And I was extremely tempted early on. But in retrospect, extremely happy I said no to all of that. Yes, there's a great point. TV runs deep in our culture. So they wanted me to be on that super famous one and then that other one. And I never hesitated in saying no because that's the moments when you decide who you want to be, right?

Starting point is 00:30:55 And so I paid extra careful attention to the question and extra careful attention to my answer. And it resonated. I would say the biggest shift, which is for Silicon Valley people, hard to get your arms around because there's a game being played there, and it's just a game I've opted out of, is when I was at Yahoo during the Renaissance in 1999, Bill Gross, who's a super nice guy, came to me and asked me to be head of marketing for the company he was building. It had Steven Spielberg on the board. It was teed up to be the seventh next IPO. And

Starting point is 00:31:33 there were a billion dollars in stock options on the table. And I said to myself, well, if I say yes to this, I've decided what I do for the rest of my life, which is say yes to the next one. Because I don't need to say yes to this to buy cilantro and vodka. Why would I say yes? It's because I like the game. And I didn't say yes. And even though the billion dollars in stock options never came around, I think I'd be even more proud of it if they had. Because money is a story. Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story.

Starting point is 00:32:11 And you can tell yourself any story you want about money. And it's better to tell yourself a story about money that you can happily live with. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? What is your story about money? Is it what you just said? Because this is a really important point. It's something I've been trying to mull over in the last year or so in particular. Well, let me start with the marketing story about money, which is take a $10 bill and go to the bus station and walk up to someone and say, I'll sell you this $10 bill for a dollar.

Starting point is 00:32:45 And you should actually do this. No one will buy it from you. And there are a few reasons for this. The first reason is no one goes to the bus station hoping to do a financial transaction. The second one is only an insane person would try to sell you a real $10 bill for a dollar. And dealing with insane people is tricky. So it must not be a real $10 bill. a dollar and dealing with insane people is tricky. So it must not be a real $10 bill. You should just walk away. Now, let's try a different thing. Put a $10 bill in your neighbor's mailbox when he's not home and run away.

Starting point is 00:33:17 Do it the next day. Do it the third day. On the fourth day, ring your neighbor's doorbell and say, I'm the guy who left three $10 bills in your mailbox. Here's another one. You want to buy it for a dollar? You'll sell it because your neighbor knows you're crazy, but you're crazy in a very particular way. And you've earned the trust that it's a real $10 bill, right? So we assume that $10 bills are worth $10, but no, it's a mutual belief. And if the belief isn't present, they're worth nothing. Now we get to our internal narrative about money.

Starting point is 00:33:52 Is money, that number, it's not even pieces of paper anymore, it's a number on a screen. Is that a reflection of your worth as a human? One of the things that Derek said on your podcast that I sort of disagree with is that being rich is a symbol that you've created a lot of value for a lot of people. I think lots of times that's just actually not true. And there are lots of ways to create value for people, and most of them do not involve money. So what we have to decide once we're okay, once we're not living on $3 a day, once we have a roof, once we have healthcare, is we have to decide how much more money and what am I going to trade for it? Because we always trade something for it, unless we're fortunate

Starting point is 00:34:39 enough that the very thing we want to do is the thing that also gives us our maximum income. And I don't think that merely because some blog decides that people with big valuations are doing better, that doesn't mean you should listen to them. A lot of the questions from my fans on Twitter and Facebook were related to education. And they generally came in the form of, in a number of themes. One was, could you have him elaborate on his education manifesto? The other was, hey, I have a kid who's in fourth grade. I have a kid who's just going to be entering school. What would Seth do in my shoes? And you don't have to tackle those right off the bat, but as that is context, could you

Starting point is 00:35:23 tell us more about what you're up to? This is a rant and it's not about what I'm up to. It's about what I was up to. And the rant is this. Sooner or later, parents have to take responsibility for putting their kids into a system that is indebting them and teaching them to be cogs in an economy that doesn't want cogs anymore. And parents get to decide. I'm a huge fan of public school. Send my kids to public school. I think everyone should go to public school because it's a great mix master of our world. But from three o'clock to 10 o'clock, those kids are getting homeschooled. And they're either getting homeschooled and watching the

Starting point is 00:36:01 Flintstones, or they're getting homeschooled in learning something useful. And I think we need to teach kids two things. One, how to lead and two, how to solve interesting problems. Because the fact is there are plenty of countries on earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people, I don't care what country they live in, in Wyoming or across the world, who want whatever is scarce. The way you teach your kids to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve. And then don't criticize them when they fail. Because kids aren't stupid. If they get in trouble every time they try to solve an interesting problem, they'll just go back to

Starting point is 00:36:58 getting an A by memorizing what's in the textbook. It's so important here. And I spend an enormous amount of time with kids. I produced The Wizard of Oz, the musical in fourth grade. I used to help run a summer camp. I think that it's a privilege to be able to look a trusting, energetic, smart 11-year-old in the eye and tell them the truth. And what we can say to that 11-year-old is, I really don't care how you did on your vocabulary test. I care about whether you have something to say. And we can teach our kids from a young age to be the kind of people we want them to be. And anything that's worth memorizing is worth looking up now. So we don't need to have them spend a lot of time getting good grades so they can go

Starting point is 00:37:48 into a famous college because famous colleges don't work anymore. Famous college isn't the point anymore. The point is, is there an entity that will have trouble living without you when you seek to earn a living? Because if there is, you'll be able to make a living. If on the other hand, you're waiting in the placement office for someone to pick you, you will be persistently undervalued. You talked earlier about writing daily as a practice, listening to the audiobooks as a practice. Are there any practices that you would suggest to

Starting point is 00:38:20 the kind of overwhelmed, busy parent who wants to start to be more proactive in this department? They have an 11-year-old. Are there any practices or exercises that you would suggest? Well, you know super well that busy is a trap and that busy is a myth. So what could possibly be more important than your kid? Please don't play the busy card. If you spend two hours a day

Starting point is 00:38:47 without an electronic device, looking your kid in the eye, talking to them, and solving interesting problems, you will raise a different kid than someone who doesn't do that. And that's one of the reasons why I cook dinner every night, because what a wonderful semi-distracted environment for the kid to tell you the truth, for you to have low stakes but super important conversations with someone who's important to you, right? That this idea, get home from work, put on your sneakers, and go for a walk with your kid. My friend Brian walks his daughter to school every day. That's priceless. How can you be too busy to do that?

Starting point is 00:39:35 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as soon as possible. That's why you have to check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals for your team faster and for free. LinkedIn isn't just a job board. LinkedIn helps you hire professionals you can't find anywhere else, even those who aren't actively searching for a new job, but who might be open to the perfect role. In any given month, more than 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other job sites. So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, if you're

Starting point is 00:40:14 not using LinkedIn, you are in the wrong place. More than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring, with 86% getting a qualified candidate within 24 hours. LinkedIn knows that small business owners, leaders, execs are wearing so many hats, they're stretched thin. They might not have the time or resources to hire in any drawn-out way. So LinkedIn is constantly finding ways to make the process easier. In fact, they just launched a feature that helps you write job descriptions, making the entire thing A to Z faster and much simpler. So hire professionals like a professional on LinkedIn. And now you can post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Tim. That's linkedin.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And now, Dr. Sue Johnson, who was a leading innovator in the fields of couples therapy

Starting point is 00:41:09 and adult attachment, and the primary developer of Emotionally Focused Couples and Family Therapy, or EFT. Sadly, Dr. Johnson passed away in April of this year. Her impact on the field of family therapy will be felt for generations. To learn more about how her work can improve your relationships, check out her best-selling book, Hold Me Tight, and visit drsuejohnson.com. Dr. Johnson, welcome to the show. Oh, hey. I'm delighted to be with you, Tim. Thank you for inviting me. I am also thrilled to have you, and we have an abundance of questions in front of me. We may cover some of them. I don't get too attached to trying to cover them all because we'll run out of time. But I thought we would start with something that was mentioned in the intro and that I know will interest my audience.

Starting point is 00:42:07 And that is the peer-reviewed clinical research or research, depending on where you happen to be in the world. Could you speak to the actual science and research related to your work? There's now over 20 outcome studies. Outcome studies in psychotherapy are very hard to do. And there's a lot of noise in the system. There's lots of things going on in people's lives. Life gets in the way. So you have to work very hard to get results. And follow-up is the real thing that matters. And we are the only couple intervention, as far as I know, that has the size of results we get,

Starting point is 00:42:47 that impacts people the way we do, that knows why we get these results. I can tell you exactly what needs to happen in therapy to get the results. And that gets fantastic follow-up. We can work with a couple for 14 to 20 sessions. We can look at them at the end of therapy. We can see that they're happier, more secure, more securely bonded. Their sex life is better. They feel less depressed as individuals. And we follow them up three years later and the results hold, which is, just so everyone knows, astounding. The latest one we're doing is, we've got a great big one with the Heart Institute in Ottawa because the cardiologists have realized that actually if their patients have good relationships with their partners, they're

Starting point is 00:43:41 much less likely to have another heart attack. They take their meds. They go to the gym. So then they said, well, could you do something? And we said, okay, are you kidding? We'll design a 16-hour program for you and we'll research it. So we're doing that. But to be honest, I do the research because we learn and because it's our way of testing what we think we know.

Starting point is 00:44:06 But it's not what really turns me on in the end. What turns me on is watching these couples, learning from them, and watching them make these huge changes in their lives. I've been doing it for 35 years, and it turns me on like... I dance Argentine tango. It turns me on like the best milonga ever and dancing with the best partner ever. Okay. So I have many follow-ups, of course, as questions, just as a side note, I lived in Argentina from 2004 to 2005 and went to milonga probably five or six times a week and did a lot of tango. So we have that in common. And if we focus just for a few more minutes on the research, because this will be a way of backing into defining EFT for folks, I think. So I've read that EFT has something like a 73 to 86% success rate in studies with distressed couples. And I would love to know what or how

Starting point is 00:45:09 success is defined in these studies. I think that'd be helpful for people listening. And then later we'll return to the durability of effect because that's incredible that you're doing follow-ups three years later and seeing that persistence of effect is really incredible. But how do you define success with distressed couples? That's a good question. And it depends on the study. But in general, we define it with a measure of, it's called marital adjustment. And it basically looks at the couple's take perception of their marital satisfaction. It's a bit more than satisfaction because it has different elements to it. So we use a scale that's been used in all kinds of research

Starting point is 00:45:52 that's got all kinds of validity, but we've also used all kinds of measures. The one that I think is the most interesting is that we did a big study a few years ago looking not just at whether we can help you change your marital satisfaction, your adjustment, the way you see your partner. We can help you change the security of your bond with your partner, which for me is much more significant than satisfaction or saying, yes, we have an adjusted marriage, we have a good marriage, I trust this person in this marriage. To be able to say, we have a more secure bond and we know how to create that bond ongoingly in the future, that still amazes me that we know that

Starting point is 00:46:41 because we've talked in our society forever about how romantic love is this great mystery. And it just sort of comes and hits you in the head. You fall in, you fall out. There's nothing much you can do about it. Well, actually that's rot now. And personally, I think it should be all over the front of the New York Times. We've cracked the code of love, but the New York Times doesn't agree with me. So I think that's real big news for people. When we can show in our study, which we did, that we can take people, very distressed people who don't trust each other, who can't talk to each other, who aren't intimate, and we can, in 20 sessions, create a bond where they can turn and be vulnerable with each other

Starting point is 00:47:24 and they can say, I trust this person, I'm close to this person, I can be open to this person, this person's my special one, I trust this relationship. And they can do the things, we can see it on tape, they can do the things that securely attached people do in loving, lasting relationships. That's very significant. We also find things like depression goes down when people are more securely connected with each other. Anxiety goes down.

Starting point is 00:47:53 People deal with trauma better. We see a lot of folks with PTSD. When you face dragons, to recover from that experience, you need to find comfort in the arms of another. And that's just the way we're wired. And if you cannot find comfort in the arms of another, you are hard pressed from my point of view, no matter how many times you meditate, no matter how many tips you've learned, no matter how much insight you have, if you can't find comfort in the arms of another to heal from trauma,

Starting point is 00:48:33 it's bad news. So we have a lot of different results, but they're all on measures that are accepted by the field as valid. They've all been in peer-reviewed journals, and believe me, reviewers are brutal to psychologists. They're brutal. Let me ask a few questions if I may jump in, then we're going to continue, of course, on the path to defining what characterizes or describing what characterizes EFT. What scale do you use or scales do you use when assessing marital satisfaction and bond? And just for those people listening who may not know what we're talking about, there are different questionnaires and scales for different types of conditions. For instance, you might have the HAMD for depression, you might have CAP5 or CAP5 for PTSD. I'm sure some people will be curious if there are any

Starting point is 00:49:22 particular scales they could find themselves just to look at their own. I believe I put some of those scales in my book, Love Sense, actually. We use the dyadic adjustment scale, which has been used in marital research for decades for adjustment. We use various things for things like depression, like the Beck Depression Scale. For attachment, we use something called the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale, which is used in adult. Adult attachment research has only been going for the last 20 years, so it's young. Attachment research was really confined to mothers and children for decades. And the belief was that once you hit 12, you were supposed to become self-sufficient. So attachment didn't matter very much. That's changed. So now we have a whole field called

Starting point is 00:50:12 attachment research. And the experiences in close relationship scale is the measure we use. However, we have also used observational measures like coding couples' interactions as they talk. And we can talk about that. We talk about something called a hold-me-tight conversation. We can code the behaviors are totally different when they come into therapy and when they're finished. And my favorite one, which I can't resist talking about, is that we did a brain scan study with a wonderful colleague of mine

Starting point is 00:50:46 from the University of Virginia called Jim Cohn, neuroscientist, where we put the women, we hadn't got enough money to do both partners. So we had to choose. So yes, I know. So we put the women in an MRI machine at the beginning when they were distressed and insecurely attached and didn't believe that their partners loved them or cared for them. We put the women in an MRI machine at the beginning of therapy and then at the end of therapy when they had these hold me tight conversations. And we were a bit brutal when I think about it. We put them in the MRI machine

Starting point is 00:51:23 and we said, when you see an X in front of your face, there's a good chance you're going to be shocked on your ankles and it's going to hurt. And it did hurt because we tried it on my research assistant and she told us very clearly that it hurt. Okay. So we turned the machine down a bit, But what was interesting is at the beginning, before therapy, before EFT, we showed these women this X and their brains went into immediate alarm on the MRI, high, high alarm state because they're expecting the shock. And once we delivered the shock, we asked if it hurt and they said it was painful or extremely painful. This is in a journal called Plus One. And after sessions of therapy, after EFT, when they'd had these bonding conversations,

Starting point is 00:52:13 by the way, we put them in and we, since you're interested in research, I'll tell you a bit of detail. Basically, they saw the ex when they were alone in the machine, when they held their partner's hand when they were in the machine, and when a stranger held their hand. And before therapy, in all three conditions, their brains went berserk and they said that the shock was extremely painful. After therapy, we put them in the machine again, did the same thing. They saw the ex when the stranger held their, or when they were alone in the machine, same thing as before. Their brain went berserk, and they said it was extremely painful.

Starting point is 00:52:51 This time, after EFT and the bonding conversations, when their partner held their hand, reached into the machine and held their hand, their brain stayed completely calm. It looked like a resting brain. It looked like they were just resting there. Their brain stayed completely calm. It looked like a resting brain. It looked like they were just resting there. Their brain stayed completely calm. And if you ask them if the shock hurt, they said it was uncomfortable. And so I'm not a neuroscientist. So I saw these brain scans and there was some blue lighting up after therapy.

Starting point is 00:53:22 And I said to my colleague, Jim, what does the blue mean? I can't see any red for alarm anymore, but what does the blue mean? And he said, it means they're not dead, Sue. Oh, okay. So he said, that's just resting brain. Oh, okay. Jolly good. So that spoke to me amazingly because psychology is often dismissed as a sort of soft science and you know indeed we deal with many intangibles but for me that was incredibly neat because you could see it and you could see that we're talking about biology here but we're talking about the biology of a social being, a being whose brain is wired for connection with other people and who needs this connection with other people to thrive and survive. Love is an ancient wired-in survival code. We have all these silly misinformation in our society, silly what we call love stories.

Starting point is 00:54:24 They're still out there. Psychology puts out a lot of misinformation about love is some strange mixture of sex and sentiment. No, romantic love is about bonding, and it's an ancient, wired-in survival code, and you could sure see it in these MRIs. These women's brains, when they had this secure connection with their partner, these women's brains were completely different than in the beginning when they felt no safe connection with their partner. So it was very, very interesting. I would love to dig into what sounds like the glue involved in some of the bond enhancement as demonstrated in the follow-up fMRI.

Starting point is 00:55:07 And that is the hold me tight conversation. Maybe this is a way also of coming in sideways to basically demonstrate what EFT is, or at least a component of it. Could you walk us through what a hold me tight conversation is? A hold bit tight conversation, very briefly, is a bonding conversation. The tricky part is that as adults, some of us have never seen this conversation. So it's a dance that is foreign to us. We've never had it with our own parents. We've never had it with siblings. We've never had it with previous lovers. We get married or we get committed to a partner. And it's reasonable that we don't know how to go there because many of us, it's just not a drama that we've ever seen enacted.

Starting point is 00:55:56 A hold-me-tight conversation is where one person is able to open up and reach for the other person and share vulnerabilities, talk about their needs and fears in a way that pulls the other person close. It helps the other person reach back and respond. Could you give any examples of phrasing or questions or guidelines you provide? That would be, I know I would love to know and I suspect others would too. Well, when you don't trust and you don't feel safe and you've never seen a hold me tight conversation, the way it usually goes just naturally as human beings,

Starting point is 00:56:32 I catch myself doing this with my husband. If I'm upset about something, like he's been going to bed very early, but that means that we don't have our snuggle time. We don't have our little chat time. It doesn't seem to bother him at all. We don't have our little chat time. Okay. And it doesn't seem to bother him at all. It doesn't seem to bother him.

Starting point is 00:56:48 This isn't happening. So this will go on for a couple of weeks. And even though I'm doing this work, there's a certain point where I start to get self-protective and I start to blame him in my head. And I say, he's always too busy. He's got his lists. He's got lists. That's what he, and he's a man and he's got lists. And all he cares about is his list of tasks. And he's just into problem solving. And he doesn't

Starting point is 00:57:11 think about me at all. And this dialogue will go in my head. So I turned to him and I say, you're going to bed very early these days. Listen to my voice. It's the emotional music. He says, no, I'm not. Because he hears the threat in my tone. I say, yeah, sure. And you've been going to bed for weeks. And I guess it doesn't matter to you that we're not having those close moments. And listen to me. I mean, I'm on the attack. And we are acutely sensitive as human beings to signs of rejection or abandonment by the people we love.

Starting point is 00:57:49 Acutely sensitive. That's how we're wired. So he hears that he's blown it. He hears it that I'm rejecting him. I'm telling him he's done something wrong. So he says, I don't want to talk about this right now. I say, oh, let me guess. You have to go to bed because you're so tired.

Starting point is 00:58:06 So we're off, right? Okay, that is the typical demand-withdraw, demand-defend dialogue that you'll see in a distressed couple. And it's totally predictable. You can also have it with your kids. I can remember a glorious argument I had in Starbucks with my adolescent son that was just a perfect example of the way distressed couples talk to each other. So I'm blaming and pointing fingers and he's rolling his eyeballs and basically telling me what a dreadful mother I am. So you can have it with anyone, but with partners, it's very predictable and it has everyone feeling completely threatened and unsafe and unable to dance together. If you shift that into a hold-me-tight conversation, the way it would go is that I would be more able to tune into my own needs, more aware of my own needs, accepting of my own needs, and I would realize,

Starting point is 00:59:03 oh, I'm really missing those conversations with John. We've been married for 32 years. We're both very strong people, so it's been quite an adventure. So I think, oh, I'm missing those relationships with John, and maybe he doesn't miss them. And oh, that makes me feel really somehow anxious and uncomfortable if he doesn't miss them. Because the big question in love relationships is, are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Can I count on you? Maybe those conversations don't matter to him, but they really matter to me. So I am aware on a different level of me and I'm specifying that scares me a bit that maybe these conversations don't matter to him. I can tune into my own emotions. Then I take the risk and reach for him and say to him, I'm open. know what? We haven't been having our usual talks late at night and somehow it doesn't look like you miss them. And somehow that makes me feel kind of really sort of uncomfortable. It almost feels

Starting point is 01:00:15 like I'm not sure that that closeness matters to you. And so I could get angry about it, but actually what's happening is it sort of scares me a bit because I need those conversations. Now, I've talked about my fears and my needs. I can only do that if I have some sort of model that it's okay to do that, that that doesn't mean I'm a wimp or mentally ill or weak or pathetic. From my point of view, it's strength to do that. And that's what we teach., it's strength to do that. And that's what we teach,

Starting point is 01:00:46 and it's strength to do that. And that's what securely attached people can do. They can reach from a position of vulnerability. So I say that to him. I really like those. I do want those conversations. I've just been so exhausted and I've been doing this and I haven't wanted to tell you how stressed out I am. So then it becomes reciprocal. I say, oh, I didn't know that you were so stressed out about this decision we've made and that it's taking up all your energy and you're worried about it. So then we start to have an open, responsive, engaged conversation where we can share vulnerabilities, comfort each other, and you're literally better at tuning in to each other.

Starting point is 01:01:42 And I think that's because when I feel safe, I can tune into you. When I think about the people I can dance with in tango really well, it's the people I feel emotionally safe with. And I know that there's no mistakes because mistakes don't matter. We're just playing. Then I relax. I'm in my body. I tune into their cues and we move together naturally. So that's kind of what happens. And it's a hold me tight conversation and it's sort of cascades. Each time you have this conversation, it's your nervous system goes, oh, this is comfort. This is home, this is safety, this is what I need. And you see your partner as a resource. You see your partner as somebody who can provide this safety, comfort, caring, reassurance, social support, if you want to use a psychological formal term for it. You see your

Starting point is 01:02:42 partner as this person and your partner connects and you know how to do this dance. This dance is innately rewarding. It creates joy in people. You don't have to persuade people to keep doing it like going to the gym or meditation or their communication skills. People will do this. Once they know how to do it, they'll keep doing it. And that's why I think we get good follow-up results, because once you start having these conversations, and it's very moving sometimes to see people's response, like people will start to cry and say things like, when they discover these hold me tight conversations, people will say, thinking of one man who said, I never knew that you could talk to somebody like

Starting point is 01:03:34 this. I never knew that you could ask for these things and that she wants me to be vulnerable to her. I never knew that. I never saw that growing up. I didn't know people did that. And then he wept and he turned to the therapist and said, I've been alone all my life, haven't I? And that, what attachment science tells us is that emotional isolation is toxic for human beings. I mean, we found out that in the pandemic, but we still don't get it. I wish we would get it on a different level. It's toxic for human beings.

Starting point is 01:04:15 It's not who we are. And when people start to have these hold me tight conversations, all kinds of amazing things happen. They don't just understand how relationships can be and how you can shape relationships. You don't have to just have them happen to you. You can shape love. They understand something very deep about themselves. Couples grow each other in safe relationships. Couples grow each other. I watch severely traumatized people learn to trust another human being by having these hold-me-tight conversations with their partner, and it

Starting point is 01:04:51 changes everything because they have a secure place in life for the first time. They feel seen, they feel accepted, they feel held. And once you feel seen, accepted and held, there's a natural human growth process that happens. Attachment with science is all about development of the personality. There's a natural growth process. So we tune into that natural process in the hold me tight conversation and those conversations predict over study after study after study after study. Those conversations predict success in EFT. They predict more secure bonding. They predict better sex, more sexual satisfaction in couples.

Starting point is 01:05:37 They predict any sort of measure of good positive functioning you can imagine those bonding conversations predict all the good results we get in EFT and they predict results that follow up. So I would love to ask more about the hold me tight conversations and I'll share a bit of the sort of context from which I'm asking this. So I, we don't necessarily have to get into details we could, but I had quite a bit of a severe early childhood trauma, like two to four, and have not only felt largely alone my entire life, but have created isolation. It's been constant for me. And so what you're saying about these conversations helping to create the feeling of bondedness and sort of counterweight perhaps someone's historical tendency to isolate or feel isolated is really appealing. I would love to

Starting point is 01:06:42 hear if you're open to sharing and perhaps another hypothetical, hold me tight conversation or other phrases or questions that are helpful for people who want to get a better understanding of what this might look like in real life. Where we start with couples, many of whom have experienced being alone most of their lives, traumatized or not, where we start is we help couples see the dance they're caught in. Love is a dance. We help couples see the dance they're caught in. We help couples see the negative patterns. The most popular one of all is I become aware of the disconnection between the two of us. I get worried about it. It makes me anxious and I don't feel safe enough to turn and really share my vulnerability. So I demand, I blame, I tell you, where are you? What I'm really saying is,

Starting point is 01:07:37 where are you? Where are you? I can't find you. And that alarms me. But what I say is things like, you don't talk to me enough, or you never tell me how you feel. Or if you're a man, you'll say, you never tell me you want to make love. You don't ever show me you want me. What's wrong with you? So we turn to our partner and we say, what's wrong with you? So we help couples see how they scare the hell out of each other and create even more insecurity and stop each other from being able to be vulnerable and risk. When they start to see that it's the pattern that's the problem, the dance that's the problem, and the fact they don't know how to do a more positive dance, they start to blame the dance

Starting point is 01:08:20 rather than each other. And they start to be able to say, hey, we're stuck in that thing. We're stuck in that thing we do where I shut down and shut you out and you must be getting alarm right now. And the other person says, yes, I'm starting to freak out. And they say, oh, let's not do that. Let's try and help each other feel a bit more safe. So we create that platform first, but then you have to start where people are. And sometimes with a hold me tight conversation with somebody who's been very traumatized and has all the reasons in the world not to trust another human being with the softness of their heart, all the good reasons in the world, you have to start there. I've worked with lots of traumatized folks, and you have to start there. I've worked with lots of traumatized folks and you have to start

Starting point is 01:09:07 with somebody saying, well, I understand now the patterns and how we've been caught in this dance. I understand that you aren't always trying to hurt me or have me prove myself to you or prove me wrong, but I want to tell you the idea of really opening up to you and showing you who I am just feels impossible. I don't know how to do it. It's impossible. I don't think I can do it. So you start where people are. You don't get people to do it in spite of how they feel. You get them to trust their feelings. My experience is someone will say that, and I will say, could you turn and tell your partner, please? I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can risk letting you really see me. I'm so sure that you won't want me or that you'll find some way to hurt me. Then I don't know what would happen. I don't think I could tolerate it. I don't think I can do it. Could you turn and tell her?

Starting point is 01:10:11 What I do is I hold the person and I help them speak their emotions and say their emotions clearly. And I hold them in that. I support them in that. So Guy turns and tells his wife and his wife says, and this is the amazing thing about bonding, this is who we are. We are empathic creatures. That empathy is blocked by all kinds of other things, but we are empathic creatures. My experience is the partner will say, I never knew that. I just felt that you didn't want to share with me. I never knew it was so hard. I never knew that it was scary for you.

Starting point is 01:10:54 I never understood that. I can't believe. I understand. I understand that now you've helped me understand how scary that is. I can't believe that you're even here telling me this. And I love you for taking that risk. Thank you for taking that risk. And then the door opens wider. And then I say, usually I say, because we always have this catastrophe in our head when

Starting point is 01:11:20 we're afraid. We create catastrophes in our head to try and prepare for them, right? So I say, what is going to happen if you really show her who you are and you show her how scared you are to really open up and show your vulnerability what is going to happen? And he says, she'll tell me what I've always known. She'll tell me that I'm weak, there's something wrong with me, and the reason that I've been alone all my life is because there was something wrong with me, and the reason I was so hurt when I was little was because I wasn't a good enough kid, or a special enough kid, or I didn't do it right. One lady broke my heart. She said, I was so careful when I asked my mother

Starting point is 01:12:07 for attention. I was so, so careful. I'd plan it and plan it in the dark for hours. No matter how I did it, it never worked. It never worked. She was always angry at me. So I said to myself, it's me. It must be me. There's something wrong with me. I'm just not lovable. Then she weeps. When she does that, her partner reaches for her naturally. Her partner reaches for her and says, this vulnerability, when you really help people move into it with safety, evokes caring and compassion. It just does. So then the partner moves in and supports, and gradually, gradually, the other person's able to open up. It's not something that you do once. It's not something that you can do mechanically. You have to be involved in it. And for some of us, if we've been desperately hurt when we were niddle,

Starting point is 01:13:07 and we learned that that kind of openness was desperately dangerous, it's like jumping off a cliff. And you have to respect that. You have to respect. Emotions are in no way illogical. That's one of the big mistakes we've made in psychology. They're in no way illogical. They have their own logic. They're a

Starting point is 01:13:25 supreme information processing system that wires us to see the world in a particular way, to move in a particular way. And we haven't taught people how to understand them, how to listen to them, and how they make sense. They always make sense. If someone's terrified of that kind of openness, it's because they have very good reasons to be. And often they haven't told their partner. They haven't told their partner anything about it. So their partner has no idea. The partner says, you just don't want to be close to me. You just don't want me. No, I do desperately want you. I'm just terrified to let you see me. In psychology, we're very good at looking at the behavior and the problem.

Starting point is 01:14:13 And sometimes I feel like we're not so good at what we are supposed to be the experts in, which is looking underneath the behavior and the problem and seeing the emotional realities that push that problem forward and keep people stuck in that problem and seeing the emotional realities that push that problem forward and keep people stuck in that problem. I don't know if I answered you, Tim. There's so much to talk about here. I tried to answer you. I think you did. No, you did. And I mean, the examples are just heartbreaking. And I think they're heartbreaking. I mean, I was feeling myself getting really emotional is because they resonate, I think, with so many people. They resonate with me, I should say. But I suspect that these types of situations are really, really common. But when you're experiencing them, I think it's so easy to

Starting point is 01:14:56 view yourself as uniquely flawed in some way. But it's so common common it's so common it seems so common at least i mean you'd be more qualified to speak to it i think it is common and i think the power of attachment science is it tells us who we are it tells us that we are social beings wired for connection we need safe connection with others to survive and thrive. Dependency became a dirty word somewhere through our history. And we all fell in love with the image of the lone cowboy riding over the range. The Eagles song, Desperado, I love that song. It's my favorite song because it basically takes that image of the lone cowboy and basically says, buddy, you better find someone to love you because you're in deep trouble. So it takes this strong image and says, no, you're in trouble. And dependency became this

Starting point is 01:15:56 dirty word. And I think what attachment science says is we are interdependent human beings wired for connection with others from the cradle to the grave. And when you present that to people, not the way I just said it, which is abstract, when you move people into that reality and you accept it and say, of course, this is who we are as human beings and we all get stuck here and we all need this, people go, oh, oh, you mean I'm not crazy, bad, deficient, defective, unlovable? No, no, you're not. You're just a human being who needs that connection with another human being and who is terrified of rejection and abandonment. And the reason you're terrified of rejection and abandonment.

Starting point is 01:16:47 And the reason you're terrified of rejection and abandonment is because those are pure danger cues to your mammalian brain. Danger cues. Our young are vulnerable for longer than any other species. And while our brain is developing, we know perfectly well, on a visceral level, that if we call and no one comes, we die. And that's the truth. And that reality of our long-term vulnerability has wired our nervous system in a particular

Starting point is 01:17:18 way and creates these social dramas, wired our social dramas. What the father of attachment science, John Bowlby, who was an English psychologist, really did, which is brilliant, is he linked biology and who we are and how our nervous system works to our social interaction patterns, to the way we dance with other human beings. He linked within and between. He linked those two together in an elegant, beautiful, testable way that gives us a map to love relationships, how to shape them, how to fix them, how to repair them, how to keep them, and to who we are as human beings. And this map is, the way human beings have survived through the centuries is through tuning into others, reading their cues, collaborating, cooperating, moving close,

Starting point is 01:18:11 supporting. That's the way we've survived. And if you look at the problems facing our world right now, we better be learning from this science because we better be able to do that or we're not going to survive. We've got to be able to do that or we're not going to survive. We've got to be able to come together. You mentioned the child crying, so I must ask you a question to scratch my own itch and satisfy my curiosity. But I may accidentally invite you into a religious war, not with me, but because I've seen very heated debates between, and we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but I would love to get your opinion on, and the backdrop of this is that I'm hoping to begin building a family in the near future. And I have two camps of friends. One camp is their devout attachment parenting, the devotees.

Starting point is 01:19:04 And then on the other hand you have sleep training and there are many different types of sleep training but do you have any do you have any do you have any thoughts on because the people so the people who are in the sleep training camp and there's their arguments make sense the arguments on both sides make a lot of sense in so much as what i hear is attachment parenting, the way they would position it is this constant contact and sleeping near or with the baby is most natural. It is in the baby's best interest. If you look at evolution, that is what's supported. The people in the sleep training camp would say, that's great, but if you're not sleeping and we're no longer

Starting point is 01:19:43 living in a village, we don't have the type of support that we had. If I don't get any sleep and my partner gets no sleep, we're going to be terrible parents. And ultimately that is going to be bad for the baby. So I don't know what to make of this and would love to get your perspective. Well, my perspective is that what attachment says is that emotional balance, when you're securely attached and you feel safe in the world and you know you can count on others for support, you have your emotional balance. And sometimes when we take on huge complex issues, we lose our emotional balance. I don't think to create secure attachment in your kids that you have to sleep with them. Okay, I don't think so. You can if you want. And I think you have to balance things like if you sleep with your kid in between you all the time for three or four years, what does that do to your couple relationship? And what your kid needs is a good couple relationship in the parents who can cooperate. Believe me, that's what your kid needs.

Starting point is 01:20:52 So that's an issue I think people sometimes go over the top. They take the good sense and the science of attachment and they turn it into rigid life rules, which I think you have to make your own rules there. I think being emotionally responsive to your kids is the key. And for them to know that you're there for them is the key. It doesn't mean you have to always show up in the same way and you have to be constantly available. For me, I don't think so. On the other hand, I do have a visceral reaction to sleep training. I would like to suggest that when you do sleep training, your child does not calm down and learn to rely on itself. What your child does is numb out. What your child learns is that no matter how I cry, nobody will come. From my point of view, that's a bloody disastrous lesson for any child to learn. So I have a huge bias against. Now again,

Starting point is 01:21:46 it depends on how it's done and it depends on what else is happening. So, let's not get too judgmental here, but why not? Let's get judgmental. I think it stings. So, if that's a religious war, I'm on the attachment side because it seems to me that the sleep training thing feeds into a myth that we have that is so dangerous. The myth is about self-sufficiency and regulating our own emotions. And the bottom line is the only self-sufficient human being is either numbed out on some drug or dead. We're not wired for self-sufficiency. And shutting down and numbing out is a fragile strategy. You can't keep it up for your whole life. It shatters under any kind of pressure. So I'm saying it glibly because this is an interview, but what I just said to you,

Starting point is 01:22:38 I can give you research studies to back that up, okay? I'm not just saying it. So no, I don't think sleep training… On the other hand, I can remember I adopted my son. He was a premature, and he came home. He was the tiniest little thing. He scared the hell out of me. He was so tiny. And he had something wrong with his digestive system, and for the first 18 months of his life, he would wake up every two hours at least, but maybe sometimes 90 minutes. And the only thing that would help is that one of us would go in and sing to him and talk to him and rock him for 10, 15 minutes and put him down. And we got into the habit of that and we did that and we

Starting point is 01:23:27 accommodated to that. We thought about having him sleep between us, but we usually slept at that point. We adopted him very soon after we got together, which we were incredibly lucky. So we adopted him about a year after we got together. And so we slept pretty entwined. So we didn't really think it was... And also he was so tiny at first, I didn't think putting him in the middle, I thought, God, I'm going to crush him if I turn it. So my husband's a big man. Oh, we're going to crush him, this little one. So we didn't do that. And then it changed and it was fine. My daughter was totally different. Very shortly after she was born, she went to sleep regularly, went to sleep at the same time at night, slept through after a few months. Providing you gave her all kinds of hugs in the morning, she was this happy little clam.

Starting point is 01:24:20 It was different. I understand that parenting can be hard. I think for me, it's the hardest thing I've ever done. For one thing, parenting is a moving target. You accommodate your child, then your child changes. You think, wait a minute, I just figured it out and now you're changing. Good Lord, you've become an adolescent. I don't know what to do with this. My son turned in from this wonderful, bubbly, charming, delightful little being into this stroppy, judgmental, moral person who was pointing out how wrong we were about everything. I thought, who is this person? Where did this guy come from? So parenting is hard. And if you take the social implications of attachment science, we should be supporting our parents like crazy.

Starting point is 01:25:12 We should be teaching people how to have good, secure relationships. We should be teaching them about relationships, educating them. We should be having more leave for parents. We should be supporting the basic unit of our society, which is our family. We don't seem to be that keen on that. We seem to be more keen on supporting economic security or corporations. So I don't think we support parents enough. And maybe that needs to change. Maybe our understanding of supporting human families needs to change. I mean, attachment has changed parenting.

Starting point is 01:25:52 It's changed the way we see our children. It's changed the way we see their emotional needs. We understand that to be emotionally alone traumatizes a child. We need to apply that to adults because in that sense, we never grow up. Attachment goes from the cradle to the grave. Just very basic things like I talk in one of my books somewhere about that I think it's Love Sense. There's a movement called Nobody Dies Alone where people get together in certain cities and their commitment is to go in with somebody who's dying and who has no human figure to be there with them and simply be with them at their most

Starting point is 01:26:34 vulnerable moments. And for me, that speaks to the fact that maybe one day we could have something called a civilized society. A civilized society would not let anyone die alone. A civilized society would support families and support parents, help us learn how to parent. So I don't think it's just the couple who are stressed. I think it's the demands of our society. You have to go back to work at a certain point, whether you're a parent or not. There's no accommodation in most workplaces for parenting. Was it the Prime

Starting point is 01:27:11 Minister of New Zealand who brought her baby into the parliament? I thought, yay, lady! Whoa! That is like, yay! She brought her baby into the parliament. That takes guts, I think. So, good for her. But boy, I can't even imagine that happening. And obviously, you can hear I'm English. I was going to say, I've heard strappy from my friend from New Zealand, but you don't seem to have a Kiwi accent, nor do you seem to have an Ottawa or Canadian accent. No, I'm from England. I came to Canada when I was 22, but you never kind of lose the accent. But I cannot imagine even today a woman prime minister walking into the British parliament with a baby and holding that. I would love that. I think that would be progress for

Starting point is 01:27:58 Britain for me. Anyway, but never mind. Sorry, I got off track there. That was off track. This whole podcast is about freely going off track when necessary. I would like to ask a very specific question, and it may be a dead end. I don't know. But I was doing a bit of reading on EFT, and there was a phrase that stuck out to me, which related to micro-interventions. So the wording of this is micro-interventions from Rogerian models of therapy, such as asking evocative questions. Now, I like evocative questions, so this drew my attention. What would be an example and what are micro-interventions from Rogerian models of therapy, such as... Evocative questions.

Starting point is 01:28:45 Exactly. Evocative questions focus on the process of how you're experiencing, not the content. So, I would say to you, Tim, what happens to you when you sit and do interviews with crazy people like Dr. Sue Johnson? And she tells you stories that have you move into your own softer feelings. What is that like for you, Tim? And you might say, oh, I don't know. You say, well, what happens in your body, Tim? Can you tell me a moment when you felt that rush of emotion? You say, oh, well, it was when you said this. Oh, so that's the trigger. And I'll help you put your emotions together with evocative questions and reflections and I'll say so when you heard me say this that was important for you that stood out

Starting point is 01:29:33 and you started to feel a lot of feelings can you help me what happened in your body so oh and I felt this tightness across my chest and I felt like I wanted to cry. And then what did you say to yourself? I said to myself, my goodness, that's just how I felt when I remember feeling that way when I was three years old. And I say, I understand. So I'll reflect it again. I'll hold it for you. I'll specify it. I'll ask evocative questions. I'll get you to stay with the experience. And then I'll say, what do you want to do when you feel that way? And you might say, I want to stop it. I want to get out. I don't want to feel any more of that right now. I want to shut it down. I want to stop the feeling. Say, okay, so you want to run. Yeah. And we've put your emotion together in a safe, specific, safe way, people can deal

Starting point is 01:30:27 with emotions that when they make sense, when they're acceptable, when there's another human being there accepting them, and when they're made specific. We can't deal with big, vague, huge, overwhelming problems. We just want to run away from them. So I'll use evocative questions. I'll use reflections. I'll use repetition to help you stay with that feeling. I'll use an image. You know, if you said to me, there's fire across, I can remember one client said, it's like walking into a fire. When you ask me to turn and open up to him, I can tell you that I'm afraid. I can look into your face and tell you because you're just a silly therapist. You don't matter to me much. Actually, that's what I said. I said, that's because I'm just

Starting point is 01:31:17 a silly therapist and I don't matter to you much. And she said, yes, that's right. So I said, so I can tell you about my fear, but when you ask me to turn and tell him about my fear, you're asking me to walk into a fire. And I knew that this lady, she was a trucker. There was an accident in front of her truck, and she'd got out of her truck, and she'd walked into flames to pull out the trucker who was trapped underneath the truck in front of her. I realized that this is an enormously powerful image. And if I want her to move more into it, if she can handle it, if she can't handle it, I'll stop. But if I want her to move more into it and I think she can handle it, I'll say, let's

Starting point is 01:32:04 stay with that image. It's like fire. Fire burns. Fire is terrifying. You're telling your partner, it's too hard for me. I can't. I can't do this right now. It's too hard. It's like walking through fire to turn and open up to you. I just can't do it. And she says, yes, that's right. I say, good, tell him that. Now I'll create, I'll clarify the emotional music, help her with it, help her accept it. And then I'll help her move this into a drama with another person. And by the way, when we do individual therapy, we've just started to really teach eFit, which is emotionally focused individual therapy.

Starting point is 01:32:51 There's a book coming out next month of September on that. When we do individual therapy, we still do this, but we use the representations inside people's heads. So you have a cast of characters inside your head, so do I. I'm very thankful. My main attachment figure when I was a child was my father. And I'm very aware that all through my adult life, especially through moments of failure, moments of joy, key moments, I can hear my father's voice. My father's still a reality for me, right? I carry him inside of me and that's what we do with our loved ones. And we talk to them and we have these

Starting point is 01:33:31 dramas with them. So if I'm doing individual therapy, I might use these same reflections and evocative questions. Instead, I'll say, you planned every interaction with your mother. You planned it for hours. You planned how to go and ask her for a hug. You planned, right? Right. So can you see that little girl who always got smacked and taken back to her room and left in the dark? Can you see that little girl sitting on the bed by herself? What would you want to say to her? What would you like to have been able to say to your mom? And she says something like, I tried so hard, mom. I tried so hard, but I could never reach you. Was it really my fault? Was I really such a bad little girl? I just think you weren't a mom. You weren't a mom to me. Say, good. What does it feel to say that?

Starting point is 01:34:27 She says, that feels different. I've never said that before to myself. I've always said, I didn't plan enough. I wasn't a good enough middle girl. So can you say that again? Can you see your mom? What does your mom look like in the chair? Close your eyes. She closes her eyes. She says, yes, I see her. I say, oh, what do you see on her face? She says, she tells me she's tired. She doesn't have time. She's tired and she's working three jobs. I should just be quiet and go to bed and stop my grizzling. Stop me. That's what she's telling me. What do you want to say to her? I want to tell her, mom, that's not fair. That's not fair. I'm just little. And I can never reach for you. I can never reach for you. You're not a mom. You're not a good mom to me. I need a mom.

Starting point is 01:35:14 And I say, how do you feel about that? She says, I feel fine. That feels good. That feels different. Then she emails me after the session and says, you know, Sue, the sessions with you are hard, so I don't understand why I sing all the way home. And it's because she moves in the session. She moves out of her obsessions, addictions with not eating, addictions for planning, anxiety, she moves. And so, she gets exhilarated because she starts to feel more whole as a human being. Some of the cliches we have about love are really awful misinformation. But one of the cliches that's really true, and this is true in most religions, is that when we're loved, we grow and expand. We grow, we find more resources inside ourselves, we find more strength inside ourselves, we're better at problem solving. When we're safe and secure and we feel we matter to others and

Starting point is 01:36:19 that they have our back, our potential and our resources come out. Now again, I'm having such fun talking to you, I'm not sure I answered your question. Oh, yes, it was about micro-interventions and things like reflecting and... And evocative questions. You gave a number of examples. Yes, okay. And I like to think of it as much conversation as interview.

Starting point is 01:36:43 So even if the interview is just a cue to take us in a different direction that works for me i want to come back to some of your evocative questions though because i wrote them down because they i think will be helpful for me and they were follow-ups to the question of what someone is feeling. So when I said that, the hypothetical was asking me how I felt when you said certain things in the interview. That was the example, which could be a real one. And then I would answer that.

Starting point is 01:37:17 And then you had follow-ups such as what did you say to yourself when you felt that? Or what did you want to do when you felt that or what did you want to do when you felt that way? But I want to go to the initial question, which is how did you feel or what did you feel in your body? And I have a little bit of experience as a client with something called the Hakomi method. Yes. And the question of how you feel and what you're feeling in your body comes up a lot. And I feel for reasons known and unknown that I have a very poor, which is surprising to me, very poor vocabulary when it comes to identifying bodily sensations. And I'm not aware of much outside of, for instance,

Starting point is 01:38:02 almost every time I would be asked what I was feeling in my body, whether it was sadness, anger, you name it, it would be tightness in the throat or tightness in the chest. And that was really all that would come up for me were these two options, maybe some tension in the forehead. And I'm curious what you do when you have a client who really can't come up with more than one or two answers to that question. What do you feel in your body? done some couples work with my girlfriend who's extremely kinesthetically aware and very self aware she always has this rich landscape she can describe and she closes her eyes and she's so specific and i'm like you know what it's just the throat again tightness in the throat and i feel kind of ridiculous and i don't feel like it gives me much to work with but how would you respond to that word salad that i just threw at you?

Starting point is 01:39:05 Well, you have to put it in context. I mean, the point is, when I go in to something like that, there's always a specific thing that's happened. A client's told me a story or is feeling something in the moment or is having a specific emotional reaction. Or if I'm working with couples, there's a piece of drama going on. So there's usually a specific trigger. And the thing about attachment science is it gives us a map to our emotional needs, vulnerabilities, feelings. It gives us a map. And what I think

Starting point is 01:39:40 it's a relatively simple, elegant map. So if you say to me, I hear you that you have a more limited vocabulary, there's a good reason for that. You were brought up as a man in a North American society. You weren't taught to look inside and pay attention to your emotions and develop a vocabulary. Your girlfriend was taught to do that. It was acceptable for her. And so women have more language. The bottom line is though, you are human beings. So you have the same basic emotions. We talk about six basic emotions and you have the same basic physiological responses. So if you said to me, Sue, I don't know how to talk about this. That's great, right? That me, Sue, I don't know how to talk about this.

Starting point is 01:40:25 That's great, right? Sue, I don't know how to talk about this. All that happens to me is when, and then it's specific. When I hear that tone in her voice, so what's the trigger? When I hear that tone in her voice, all I know is that I just go tight. I just go tight. And I just stay there with you. And I say, so help me. What do you hear in her tone? Well, she's irritated with me and she's going to be irritated with me and nothing I say is going to make any difference. So you hear her tone and you say, I've already blown it. I've blown it. I've blown it again. And when, is that right? He says, yes, that's what I say to myself. I've blown it. She's irritated with, oh my God, now we're going to get stuck in that thing. I've blown it again. You say, uh-huh. And you feel this tightness.

Starting point is 01:41:25 He says, yes. I said, mm-hmm. You help me with the tightness. It's like you shut down because this is, is it shutting down? You say, yeah, it's like shutting down, Sue. So I say, uh-huh. It's like shutting down because there's something here that's dangerous, isn't it? Then if you're a regular guy, you say something like, no, it's not dangerous.

Starting point is 01:41:46 I mean, you know, I'm not like really worried or anything. Yes, you are. Okay. You're just being a regular guy. So I say, oh, all right. It's not dangerous. It's just a bit. This gentleman said, I loved him.

Starting point is 01:42:02 He said, it's disconcerting. I said, oh. I said, oh, it's disconcerting. I said, oh, it's disconcerting. He said, yes, it's very disconcerting. I understand. So I say, so let's go over this again. So then I come over it again. When you do, this happens, you hear this in her voice, and then your body does, and it's disconcerting. And there's something here, disconcerting. Could you help me? It's like, you don't know what to do, and no matter what you do, it's not going to be right. He says, yes. I said, oh, when I feel that way, it's a little bit alarming, isn't it? He says, yes, it's alarming. I said, oh. So when you feel this tightness in your chest, it's a lump. You lead people in. The point is,

Starting point is 01:42:46 you lead them into their emotions. The point is, I know where I'm going. And so does every good EFT therapist. I know where I'm going because I've got a map. And so attachment gives us a map to how we dance together with the people we love, where those dances go in terms of outcome. It gives us a map to our own vulnerabilities and emotions. It tells us how supremely sensitive we are to signals of rejection or abandonment by other people, and that this sensitivity is wired in. There's nothing weak or strange. We've framed these vulnerabilities in very strange ways, very unaccepting ways. Some of the ways we've talked about love have been so misleading. But when you help people have the words, and there aren't that many words. There aren't that many core emotions. There aren't that many ways to dance with a loved one. You can basically reach from them when you're vulnerable.

Starting point is 01:43:52 You can shut down and numb out and shut them out, or you can up the ante and get anxious and demand all kinds of responses from them. That's about it. They're the main moves in the dance of love. And they can all be useful at times, but if you get stuck in one of the negative ones, like blaming and pushing and demanding and upping the ante to try and get the other person to respond, or shutting down and withdrawing, that generates a dance that ends up in disconnection and more anxiety and more problems for both of you. What would be an example of upping the ante? I understand the phrasing as it applies to poker, but could you give us an example of that? Oh, upping the ante is what I did with my description of my husband and me,

Starting point is 01:44:40 where instead of turning and saying, I'm missing our conversations, I say, I guess you're tired again. You're tired an awful lot these days. I guess you're really tired. So listen to me. You know, I'm pushing. And foolishly, what I want is for him to turn and say, oh, well, have I left you alone? I'm so sorry.

Starting point is 01:45:01 Yes, I do want these conversations. But of course, I'm using a club. So I'm smacking him to get him to respond. And the trouble with that one is the smacking pushes him further away. And that's one of the ironic things as human beings that sometimes when we love people, we're so unable to really reach for them or know how to reach for them the way we do try to reach we push them further away how do you work with or help someone work with anger so you have a couple and you're working with them one partner says whatever they say and then the other and then you ask the the other partner how that makes them feel when they hear that. And they're like, it pisses me off. I've heard this a hundred times. God damn it. When are we going to, this should be open and shut case or whatever it is. It could take a million forms. Well, most people start there.

Starting point is 01:45:52 So I say, so could you help me when your partner says this, that's hard for you to hear. That doesn't really make sense to you. And you just say, here we go again. And you get angry. I say, and then I'll stay with that. Because underneath the anger, before the anger, there's some sort of threat. There's some sort of a threat going on, right? It pisses me off because that's not what I do, right? That's just the way she sees it. I don't do that.

Starting point is 01:46:20 You know, she tells me that. So I say, okay, so it pisses you off because from your point of view, you're trying really, really hard to be a good husband. Yes. And from your point of view, she somehow picks on this one thing and it kind of proves that you're not a good husband. Yes. That makes you really, really angry. It does. And that must be very, very difficult to hear. Yes, it is. What happens to you when you hear that? I don't want to hear that I'm a failure all the time, okay? Oh, well. So in the moment before the anger, what you hear is, you hear your wife saying, you're failing, you're a bad partner. Did I say that? Well, yes. Lots of therapies teach that emotions have to be controlled and contained

Starting point is 01:47:17 and got passed. We don't do that. We honor emotions. We take people into them, listen to them, help them hear the key messages about survival and what they need that are in them, and then take them through them. And if you look at a couple at the end of EFT, they're much more emotionally balanced. And when they feel vulnerable or hurt, they're better at dealing with it. Securely attached kids, in all the research studies, there's thousands of studies on infant-mother attachment, child-parent attachment. There's hundreds and hundreds of studies on adult attachment now. When you look at them all, they all basically say, we need this connection with other people. We need it. And we have these incredible sensitivities. And there's only so many ways of dealing with them. And there's only so many emotions that

Starting point is 01:48:12 come up. The main one that people are dealing with when they get stuck in fights or incredible distance is fear. Fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of disconnection, fear that I don't really matter to you. I'm really on my own in life. And that intimidates us all. We all know that that is disempowering for us. We all know on some deep visceral level how much we need others. And the strongest among us can accept that and learn how to connect. One of my most fascinating characters in history is Winston Churchill. I find him completely fascinating. I've read all these books on Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill had the most horrible childhood relationships. He had a father who was mean and blaming and rejecting and distant, and he had a

Starting point is 01:49:14 totally distant mother who was too busy having affairs with the king and having wonderful parties. You know, they sent him to boarding school and he would write these letters that just break your heart like dear mummy which could you possibly possibly make it to the one this big event once a term and come and she wouldn't even reply to his letter so Winston Churchill grew up deprived but I don't know how he managed it. Sometimes human resilience is amazing. But what he did as an adult was he created a bond with his wife. And all the evidence is all through his life, he relied on that bond. And that when they got into a fight, this man, this powerful man, who sort of took all these impossible stands in his life. And what he would do apparently

Starting point is 01:50:09 is if they got into fights, he'd go and he'd sit down outside her bedroom door and say things like, are you mad at your Winnie? Somehow he found a way to reach for her. And she responded enough that he had this secure connection. Because they were British, British upper class, so they still slept in separate bedrooms, which is just kind of weird from my point of view. But they did that. Now my class consciousness is coming out here. So do you have any favorite books, or if you were to recommend a resource or a book, or a place to start for people interested in learning more about Winston Churchill, do you have any suggestions? There's a wonderful book. I think it's called The Last Lion. It's a

Starting point is 01:50:56 biography in three volumes of Winston Churchill, but it takes it from childhood until him dying. And it's fascinating, fascinating. I love it. In terms of books, I just read What Happened to You with Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry. And Bruce Perry, both of them are splendid. I love Bruce Perry. He's a child and adolescent psychiatrist, so he comes at attachment science in a slightly different way than me. His work dovetails with us totally brilliantly, and he says all the same things about how emotional isolation is traumatizing, and how sensitive we are, and how to grow human beings. He says all the same things. That's one recent one that I just read. You know, it's funny. I just came home

Starting point is 01:51:46 and literally that book is sitting on one of the dressers. So I think my girlfriend just bought that book. So it seems like she and I are having complimentary explorations at the moment, which is great. And the book that you named, you actually got it right, The Last Lion by William Manchester. The Last Lion box set. It is a three-volume set and has average of five stars out of five on Amazon, 260 reviews. So it seems to be well-liked. What I love about it, I think I love Winston Churchill because from my point of view, he was a successful human being in that he was always honest to himself. He

Starting point is 01:52:35 was always Winston. He took huge risks, even though some of those risks made him massively unpopular. There were periods of time when he was hated in the House of Commons. His peers despised him, criticized him. He was creative. He was always honest. He was always who he was. I love that he used to go up in the blitz. Everyone else used to go into the shelters. He used to go up on the roof and watch the blitz as it was happening. In the First World War, all his upper-class colleagues, if they were in the battle at all, they were way behind the lines in a nice hotel somewhere. Winston gave up being a member of parliament and asked to go into the trenches. He said he wanted to see them. He wanted to see what they were like. He wanted to be there in the trenches. And mind you, he took his butler with him, which most of the men in the

Starting point is 01:53:30 trenches didn't have a butler. But nevertheless... Man, I would love to hear the conversation with the butler on that decision. Yes. So probably the butler didn't want to go into the trenches, but he was a risk taker. He had huge integrity. He was passionate. He stayed with that passion, even though there were long periods of time he was completely rejected socially. He was true to himself and he was passionate. And I think he was one of the few human beings who could have led England through the Second World War and made it. I don't know who who could have led England through the Second World War and made it. I don't know who else could have come forward to do that. So I find him fascinating. I find

Starting point is 01:54:11 figures like him that have courage and stand for something. And even when the prevailing winds are going the other way, I always find that fascinating. you still dance tango is that something that you still pursue i still dance tango and covid has been so awful and of course the parallel with couple relationships is obvious you know when i first started to learn tango my tango teacher would be teaching me and i suddenly suddenly say things like, stop, I got to write that down because it would be relevant for therapy. I mean, tango is about attunement and so is love. Tango is about standing up, moving with somebody, changing weight with somebody, tuning into somebody, and there's a safety check there. There's a, can I find you? Are you going

Starting point is 01:55:06 to respond to me? Are you there? Can I feel you? And then if the answer is yes, if sometimes you go through the motions, the answer is no. And you go through the motions, you do the steps. But if it's a good dance, you find the other person and it's like, oh, there you are. There you are. Oh, I can feel that. Ah. And we tune into the music at the same time and we start to play. And there's a synchrony there that happens in hold me tight conversations, happens in good sex, happens in it's play and synchrony and and its two human beings impacting each other, responding to each other, sending cues, tuning into the cues. There's something intoxicating about it. So when I realized the parallel, I was not good at it, I want to tell you.

Starting point is 01:56:01 My teacher, who was not big on empathy, said something like, why do you want to teach tango? You're uncoordinated. You don't have any balance. You're not 22. I said, thanks very much. I'm in my late 50s, actually, so thanks very much for that comment. At the time I learned tango, I said, this is going to be very difficult for you. And I said, well, then shut up and start teaching me because I'll just work harder at it than everyone else. That's all. He said, why do you want to do it? I said, because there's something here. I get these little tiny moments where we're both moving together to this beautiful music that are just joyful. He just looked at me and said,

Starting point is 01:56:44 all right then, but you're going to have to work really hard. There's so many parallels. I can remember one lesson when I said to him, I got angry and I said, you're not sending me any cues. It's a bit like a couple. And just for people listening, this happens all the time. These arguments between tango couples, they get into these bickering fights all the time. So please continue. So this is my teacher, right? And he says, he's trying to teach me this new move.

Starting point is 01:57:12 And I say, you're not saying anything. You're not sending me any cues. He says, the cues I am sending you are enormous. I said, what are you talking about? You're not sending me any cues. You're just being ridiculous. cues. You'd be just being ridiculous. So bless his heart. He does what we do in EFT. He says, feel it. He moves his shoulders slightly to the right, about a millimeter. Can you feel that? I said, no.

Starting point is 01:57:40 He says, do it again. Feel it. Can you feel it? No. He does it 20 times. I go, oh. And sometimes that's what you have to do in couple relationships. You have to slow everything down and give people time to listen to a new thing they're not used to hearing or can't take in. You have to slow it down. And you can't just do all this stuff fast. So then I go, oh, I got it. And then he says, right. Then he says, now follow it. And I turn. This happened all the time, the parallels in relationships and they were the same. So I'd go to tango lessons and get completely enthralled intellectually, emotionally, physically. I adore tango. But I have to say, I probably shouldn't say this on air.

Starting point is 01:58:33 Oh, no, you're allowed. Please do. Mostly I find it's easier to dance with women. And there are many women leaders. And I can't figure out why that is, but I think it's because women have had to learn to tune into other people in order to survive socially over the years. They've had to do that. So maybe it's a little easier for them. But I find with women leaders often, or maybe I just

Starting point is 01:59:03 feel a little safer with women leaders. Maybe that's what it is. I don't know. But often I find it easier to dance with women, although I've had some amazing male partners too. One of the big arguments in my marriage was that we started dancing tango and then my husband said he wasn't going to do it. He didn't like it. So I won't tell you what Sue Johnson said to that. It was not a positive evening. The post was like, you can't do that to me. You know, I need a partner.

Starting point is 01:59:38 And he basically said, it hurts my back. I'm not going to do it. And so that was very difficult, but we got through it. He goes hiking, and I don't particularly like it when he goes hiking up mountains all by himself. It scares me. And for quite a while, he didn't particularly like it when I would go off to the Malanga. And as he put it, insist on dancing very, very close to other men for hours i'm dancing tango the just fact that it's very very close is just the way it is right anyway one of my close friends does not dance he does not dance but his wife loves ballroom dance and dances a variety of different styles and i remember remember one Saturday, it might've been a Friday,

Starting point is 02:00:25 it was a Saturday. He said, here's my wife's evening. And he sent a photograph that she'd sent him. She's in this really sleek, super sexy dress, all done up, looking gorgeous, dancing with this Latin guy, they're face to face, sweating all over each other. And then he said, here's my evening. And he sent a photograph and it was a table with arts and crafts with like a half a dozen kids going totally batshit crazy. And he painted quite a picture for himself. And I just want to backstep into what you were saying about tango. It's making me really want to dance again. I haven't danced in a very, very long time. But for people who don't know, so a few things on the gender split. In Argentina, a lot of the tango began in the port town of Buenos Aires with men dancing with other men. It was

Starting point is 02:01:17 actually very common, very, very common. And even now you can find, and I trained because oftentimes in the classes when I was there, we wouldn't have enough women or you wouldn't have enough men. So women would dance with women, men would dance with men. And there are two brothers. I can't recall their names. I know who they are. Yes. They're incredible. Do you know the name? Do you remember the name? No, but they're amazing. Oh, they they're amazing. and you're bringing back so many memories for me. I remember being at different milongas like Niño Bien or Sunderland,

Starting point is 02:02:09 and all these different milongas. And what struck me so much when I went to some of my first milongas, which for people wondering start really late and end really late in Argentina, they often don't even really get going until midnight. It could be a Tuesday, it doesn't matter. And I went in and I noticed that many of the best female dancers danced with their eyes closed. And the complexity of the movements were one thing. And you watch and you just can't understand how it's possible for someone to dance so deftly with such subtlety so quickly with their eyes closed. But on top of that, as a beginner, you walk in and you think to

Starting point is 02:02:46 yourself, these two must have been practicing for months and months and months, years and years together. And then you find out it might be the first night they ever met. It's all cues and improv. It's just mind blowing. It's so impressive. And it's the synchrony, that kind of physical and emotional synchrony, moving with the music, that synchrony elicits joy in human beings. It's the reason why birds have mating rituals. Swans move their necks in unison. They do this ritual. They move into synchrony.

Starting point is 02:03:21 It happens with mothers and children. They move into synchrony. It happens with mothers and children. They move into synchrony. The little child opens his eyes. The mother leans forward and opens her eyes wider. A synchrony in tango, synchrony in lovemaking between lovers, synchrony in hold-me-tight conversations. This is our nervous system buzzing and saying, yes, this is belonging. This is safety. This is joy. And our nervous system buzzes with this. And it's so rewarding. I tried to explain to my husband why I needed to keep tangering at one point. And I said, when I dance with, I used a woman as an example, when I dance with Mary Ellen, in 12 minutes of dancing, I'll have four straight moments of this incredible synchrony

Starting point is 02:04:14 when my brain is out sitting in a chair looking and saying, how are you doing this? I don't understand how you're doing this. You don't know any of these moves. And what happened there? I don't understand how this is going because your prefrontal cortex isn't subtle enough. It's like you're picking up on attunement and moving with someone. And this is what human beings can do. We can read these cues incredibly fast. We have these mirror neurons in our brains that pick up the cues from somebody and feel them in our own body and uses the basis of empathy. And it's a beautiful thing. And so, yeah, when I first went to Malanga, I stood there and said, how do they do this? This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, and it's impossible. I don't understand.

Starting point is 02:05:07 I want to do it. I want to do it. But it takes a long time. And in a way, it's kind of the same discovery that our couples go through, where somebody will say to me, I never felt this before. I never knew you could feel this way. I never knew people could feel this way. I never knew people could have these kinds of conversations. I never knew that I could talk about my feelings like

Starting point is 02:05:33 this. I never knew that I would talk about my feelings and I would look up and see in the other person's face that they wanted me and that they wanted this. And someone will say, you don't have to keep problem solving or taking care of everything. You don't have to keep solving all the problems. What I want is you. If you tell me you're overwhelmed by this problem, that's what I want. I want the connection with you. And the other person goes, I've had people say, what did you say? And the person has to repeat it like four times. Then they look at me with this blank look and I say, you can't take that in. You've never imagined a drama with another human being where somebody might say that to you. And they go, no. And then they weep because in the

Starting point is 02:06:28 end, what none of us can bear is the feeling that we're alone and that we don't matter to another human being. And our world doesn't talk much about that. When I first heard that you wanted to talk to me, I thought, why does he want to talk to me? He's into business and he's into teaching people how to make money. And then somebody said, no, no, he's into success and what helps people feel successful. And I thought, oh, well, that's okay because from my point of view, success is about being really alive. And being really alive is about being connected with others and knowing that they are our greatest resource and that that's where we are most alive, whether we're dancing tango,

Starting point is 02:07:15 making love, responding to our child. It's such fun to talk to you. You're fun. I never know what questions you're going to ask. Sometimes you ask quite intricate questions. That's really fun. You're fun, too. you're going to ask. Sometimes you ask quite intricate questions. That's really fun. if not all couples. And I'd love to pose a situation and hear how you might approach it. And that is, couple who love each other dearly, they actually do not seem to be shutting down, at least obviously. They've been together a long time, and maybe the passion, the fire has simply

Starting point is 02:08:04 died down somewhat. They're more, I don't want to say roommates because that has a pejorative sound to it, but they're good parents, they love each other, they maybe still go on dates and so on. But for whatever reason, that sexual spark is not as strong as it used to be. How would you approach that situation, that couple? What's always interesting to me about sexuality and sexual conversations is that our world, arguably, I mean, sex is everywhere now compared to even, say, 20, 30 years ago. Theoretically, we're more open and we're more accepting about sex. We're not so restrained and all that. So what's fascinating to me is it seems to me that people, couples,

Starting point is 02:08:53 have an incredibly hard time having a conversation about their sex lives. And that's still true, and it was true 30 years ago, and it's still true now. And I think it's because in sex, people are literally naked. They are vulnerable and they don't know how to even begin that conversation. So what we do is we create safety in the relationship. We have them look at the relationship and we walk into that conversation. One of the big conversations about that one is there's a lot of evidence now, I think it's really good research, about the difference between male and female sexuality. And there's a lot of evidence that women respond differently to physiological to sexual cues. A woman can be physiologically

Starting point is 02:09:43 aroused, for example, by a sexual cue. If you look at her in an MRI study, I think this was by a man called Gilath Basson, a Canadian researcher, also talks about this. There's quite a few people. I think Chisholm talks about it. So the evidence is a woman can be physiologically turned on, and if you ask her if she's turned on, she'll tell you no. Whereas with a man, physiological arousal and experience just goes together like that. They have an erection, they say, I'm aroused. With the woman, there's something else that seems to happen. What seems to happen is that the woman's physiologically aroused and then her prefrontal cortex queues in. And her prefrontal cortex, the theory now is from these studies,

Starting point is 02:10:30 that her prefrontal cortex basically checks out the safety of the relationship. Which makes sense because women are, I mean, let's face it, if you look at the sex act, women are vulnerable. They're naked. They're going to open their body. They're going to be penetrated by a stronger animal. This is a basic thing. So it's almost like women check out the relationship and the connection and the safety before they then feel, they actually let themselves feel aroused. And so women take longer often to be aroused. Somebody said to me,

Starting point is 02:11:07 what's the best foreplay I can do with my wife? I said, well, have you heard her talking here? I think what she's telling you is the best foreplay you can do with your wife is to talk to her and share with her and turn up. Well, basically I didn't say turn up emotionally, but that's where I was going. You know, like show her who you are, you know, stand out on the dance floor, open your arms, you know, it's like, and so women have a slower pace often. Women have responsive desire. They don't start off from lust. They start off from being open to their partner or being curious. They don't start from the same place as men. And people haven't known how to talk about that. And so men and women miss each other.

Starting point is 02:11:52 And also men, men talk about how the classic story is that men start talking about how they want sex. But time and time again, when we're dealing with a couple's sexual relationship, if you really go in and you really stay there, it's not just about orgasm. Because let's get real. If it's just about orgasm, men can give themselves an orgasm very efficiently, and so can women. There's amazing vibrators out there. Okay. So that's not an issue. So it is not just about orgasm. Because if you listen to the man who says he's always badgering his wife for sex, what it comes down to is, on an emotional level, and he has a hard time getting there, he wants to feel wanted. He wants to feel desired. In that, men and women are the same. And when that somehow a couple give each other the message,

Starting point is 02:12:48 I don't particularly desire you. One way of dealing with it if you have other good things in the relationship is to just shut that part of your relationship down and numb it out. But you can bring it alive, but you have to be able to be ARE. You have to be able to take some emotional risks. You have to turn and say, you love this kind of sex. Well, I want to tell you that for 20 years, I've hated it. I hate it. One lady said, you think it's the sexiest thing in the world to come up behind me and bite my neck. I hate it when you do that. And he says, what are you talking about? And she just didn't feel safe enough to turn and say, I hate that. And here's why I hate it. People hang back, they shut down. But passion is about feeling safe enough to be completely absorbed in the

Starting point is 02:13:42 experience and let it take you over. Passion is about full engagement. And we talk about it like it's all about novelty. It's not all about novelty. Novelty can turn passion on. But the research is clear from people like Laumann at the University of Chicago. The people who have the best sex, have it most often, and who feel most enthralled, find it most thrilling, are people in what you would call safe long-term relationships. Because then you can let go. Passion is about erotic play. You can let go and play. And lots of couples have sort of put that part of their relationship off to the side. They haven't known how to tune into each other. They haven't maybe accepted their own emotional needs. They haven't known how to tune into each other. They haven't maybe

Starting point is 02:14:25 accepted their own emotional needs. They haven't known how to talk about it. So we simply create safety and we open it up for them and they start to share and talk and find it again. They have to have acceptance. Somebody has to be able to say, I was brought up a Catholic. There's some part of me that can never quite accept my own sexuality. And some part of me just needs you to be dominant, demand it of me. And then I can get turned on. Well, she needs to be able to tell that to her partner because he always comes on to her considerate and-key. He doesn't want to offend her in any way. Well, it doesn't work. So, people have to be able to examine the way they dance together and share.

Starting point is 02:15:13 Then they can find each other. It's the same with sexual problems. Hold Me Tight, one of my favorite stories, I've got it in the book of the man who has erectile dysfunction. And the trouble is not that he has erectile dysfunction. The trouble is he freaks out every time he has erectile dysfunction and shuts down and withdraws from his wife. And then she gets upset and feels rejected and abandoned. So the whole relationship starts to go to hell. When they can talk about it, connect with it. And I suggest that sometimes, I think we call his penis George, I can't remember now, that I say sometimes George goes for a nittle nap. And it's no big deal if they can stay connected with each differently because they have this safe connection. But the trouble was the sexual problem was interfering with their safe connection and everyone was playing it safe and being nice to each other and keeping everything calm. The thing is, what we've learned about attachment science can help us shape our

Starting point is 02:16:22 emotional relationships and our sexual relationships. It gives us a map for how to do that. And it really challenges the old cliche that love and passionate love has a best before date. It really challenges that. Love has to be remade and passion isn't the same over 30 years but it can still be made and remade and there are times when people are more tuned into that than others but anyway that's we could talk about sex forever so that's a there's some huge topics here tim they they are we may have to do a round two or three and four to talk about let me ask a follow-up which is sort of the the opposite end of the spectrum with respect to one example you gave so the one of the examples you began with was that of

Starting point is 02:17:16 female physiological arousal often preceding psychological arousal. And I'd be curious to know, because this seems to be common, at least among many men that I know and many men who write to me in some fashion, that they're extremely attracted to their partner for a period of time, and they see this in relationships one after the other, for six, nine months, whatever it is. in relationships one after the other, for six,

Starting point is 02:17:45 nine months, whatever it is. And then it's not that they stop being attracted to their partner, they still can objectively and subjectively look at their partner and find them sexy and attractive, but they just do not have as much sex drive as they would like at a certain point in the relationship. Do you have any, not necessarily advice for them, but could be advice, but thoughts on how to approach that? So not a situation where the male is demanding or hoping for more sex, although that might be the case, but in fact a situation where the woman

Starting point is 02:18:17 has more sustained sex drive than the male. Well, that's an interesting one. I don't know. I mean, we condition men to think about physiologically their sexual need and their sexual response is very available to them compared to women, and it seems to be immediate. And we condition men to accept their sexuality and to accept sort of lust and to expect a certain amount. So I don't know. I think it depends. And I may have been prejudiced

Starting point is 02:18:45 because the cases that I've seen in that situation have usually been that there's another whole element going on, which is that there's a certain point in relationships where people realize that they're vulnerable and that this person holds their heart in their hand. And for some people, before that, the infatuation and the excitement and the novelty and all that stuff can carry them forward. And then there's a moment when it's kind of like the bonding scenario kicks in, and they realize they're vulnerable. This other person can hurt them, and they need this person. They need certain responses from this person. And for some folks, that is exceedingly difficult. And they can't even really put their finger on what that's about. And they start to shut down.

Starting point is 02:19:53 And I can remember one very dramatic case of this, where this guy pursued this woman and adored her and everything was great. And then they got married. And literally, they got married and she became immediately pregnant and was very ill with the pregnancy. So she kind of withdrew. So from his point of view, he took the ultimate risk, which he said he was never going to do and got married. And the minute he did that, from his point of view, this person became unavailable. He completely shut down his sexuality. Completely. He numbed it out.

Starting point is 02:20:22 Except in his mind, in his mind, she was still the most attractive woman in the world he still you know had all kinds of active fantasies I mean he still had lust he just shut it all down and that was all about the emotional reality of him suddenly coming up against this reality that he needed her he'd risked and suddenly she wasn't there. And of course, that was a very familiar experience for him from his childhood. And then she got angry, of course, because he wouldn't. He shut down and the whole relationship went bad. So these emotional scenarios can be complex. You have to ask what's going on. I think there's also a point in couples' lives, especially in our present world, where they get caught up in

Starting point is 02:21:11 parenting, caught up in tasks, caught up in what we've decided is success, which is working longer and longer hours, being on your devices all the time. Literally, they don't pay any attention to the relationship and to the emotional music and to the connection. And then they suddenly expect it to be there in bed. Well, it's not because it all sort of goes together. So we don't find it that difficult to help people, if they want, to go through those blocks. We don't find it that difficult to help people deal with their sex life differently, with problems, or to reawaken that passion. In fact, what we find is when people start having hold-me-tight conversations, we don't even talk about sex. They tell us their sex life improves because they start to be able to play and take

Starting point is 02:22:04 risks with each other and tell each other things they've never be able to play and take risks with each other and tell each other things they've never been able to tell each other before and accept their own sexual desires or sensitivities in a new way and share them. So then this openness, this emotional openness and responsiveness turns into physiological openness and responsiveness. It's very hard to be open and physiologically responsive when you're afraid and guarding yourself all the time. Yeah, those two sound almost entirely mutually exclusive.

Starting point is 02:22:36 Well, I would like to, if you're open to a few more minutes, just to hear your description, since people will want to explore this more of hold me tight online the relationship enhancement program what brought you to develop that and what can people expect if they engage with that what brought me to develop it was insanity because um it's a story of my life yes it was insane amount of work okay and um i And I got obsessed with the fact that we, from my point of view, this science and all our work had created this enormous possibility for people to have much better relationships, much more secure families, better mental health, and somehow people weren't

Starting point is 02:23:22 getting the message. I just became so disconcerted by that that I said, we've got to do an online program. This is the only way it's going to reach people. So my colleagues, bless their hearts, I seem to have this ability to go in and say insane ideas and then people pick them up and suddenly we're working for about four years on this huge project. So we created this. The online program, it's got little talks. It's got three couples going through the process. You see the three couples working. It's got little bits of

Starting point is 02:23:59 music, little exercises. It's customized. We put a huge amount of work into it. I don't know of any other program like it out there, especially not based on tested interventions and a clear science of what love relationships are about. We get very good feedback on it. I'm very encouraged by the fact that the military, the US military, I believe, and the Canadian military are using it now. And the government of British Columbia, where I live on the west coast of Canada, has just bought a number of them. I think they're going to give them to first responders whose relationships are having

Starting point is 02:24:39 a hard time. The Heart Institute is talking about creating an online program because they have a live program in their hospital now in Ottawa. So I'm very encouraged by the fact that institutions are picking it up, but it's supposed to take the Hold Me Tight book and turn it into a live, engaging online program that you can do with your partner. And there's some research on the educational program based on Hold Me Tight. There's no research yet on the online program, but we're still working on it. We want to, for example, the three couples who agreed to be filmed through this, we just took the first three couples that came into the studio in Ottawa and did those conversations with me in a very

Starting point is 02:25:26 snowy winter. So when I look at them now, it looks a little dated, those three couples. There's a young couple, a couple that are facing all kinds of other difficulties, and an older couple. They're still useful, you can still see, but we've started to add conversations like we have a black couple right now with a black facilitator talking about that and talking about issues with racism and how that impacts your relationship. We're trying to put new conversations in. You can see a couple go through it. You can hear me talk about it. You can learn about it. You can hear the stories about it. You can do exercises. I mean, it's really designed to lead you into being able to have your own hold me tight conversation. And I think, well, I'm a bit crazy about all this, but we need books and we need online programs. We need to educate people about relationships. It's insane that we have all this science and

Starting point is 02:26:27 understanding and that we are not sharing it and putting it out so that we can have more positive, loving, cooperative relationships and more secure families. From my point of view, it's insane. So we created the program and we're going to keep adding to it. And hopefully institutions will keep picking it up. And for a while we did it and online wasn't popular. And so it just sat there and I thought, what do I have to do to get this stuff out there? But it has picked up quite a lot. People are hearing about it. I think this conversation will help at least with a handful of people. Yes. So that's the hope. And this has been so much fun. Dr. Sue Johnson, you are a blast to talk to. And I will, of course, add show notes with links to everything and people can find you

Starting point is 02:27:21 at Dr. Sue Johnson, D-R-S-U-E Johnson, J-O-H-N-S-O-N, drsuejohnson.com. They can find the Hold Me Tight online program at holdmetightonline.com. You're on all the social. I'll link to those in the show notes and people can find you on Twitter at drdr, that's at dr underscore suejohnson. Is there anything else that you would like to say any closing comments any requests of my audience anything at all that you would like to add before we close this first very enjoyable conversation for me at least i don't want to speak for you the only thing that occurs to me is to say on a personal level that one of the enormous realities of my childhood was that I understood that my parents loved each other and they fought continually. That was something that distressed me, puzzled me, alarmed me, freaked me out. And I think

Starting point is 02:28:24 way back there somewhere, sitting on the stairs in the dark, listening to them fight, I somehow felt that there had to be a better way. There had to be a better way. And I think the other thing was I adored my father. And in the end, the fact that marriage didn't work destroyed him, whereas the Second World War didn't destroy him. All kinds of other things didn't destroy him, but the fact that that marriage didn't work destroyed him, whereas the Second World War didn't destroy him. All kinds of other things didn't destroy him, but the fact that that marriage didn't work destroyed him. So I knew how important relationships were. And for me, when I started to see couples, and I started to see patterns, and then I started to link it to attachment science, and I suddenly realized that there was a way that we can understand love, that we can understand and shape our most precious

Starting point is 02:29:13 relationships. That is just something that I just feel like we need so desperately. It's so important on so many levels that I just want people to know that you don't have to fall in and out of love and that even if you've never seen this kind of bonding, you can find it. We can show it to you on a video. We can tell you a story about it. You can do it. It's wired into us that there's incredible hope for relationships because more and more people are living alone. More and more people are giving up on love relationships. More and more people are saying things like monogamy is impossible, doesn't work. This just brings up despair in me because it's like we have this we have the way forward and we're not using it so that's why i do things like make crazy online programs that

Starting point is 02:30:16 take me four years and anyway it's been amazing fun to talk to you thank you it's been a great time and i'm so glad that you were able and grateful that you were willing to carve out the time to have this conversation i really think it's going to help a lot of people this has been incredibly helpful for me personally i've taken a ton of notes i have a lot of things to follow up on. I'm going to have some very, very, I think some very bonding and engaging conversations with my girlfriend. And this has inspired me to further seek out the tools that help us to shape the love that we need and want

Starting point is 02:30:59 instead of just waiting for some miracle to fall from the sky or a disaster to fall from the sky. And it's very enabling to hear you speak and to get a better understanding of your work. And certainly I can only imagine to engage with the work that you've developed. So I'm very grateful to you for the time and for the work that you're doing. I think these tools are invaluable and never more needed, certainly, than right now. I think that word despair that you mentioned is something that a lot of people have become intimate with in the last year, but that the last year has really just

Starting point is 02:31:36 magnified, I think, an underlying despair that many people already felt. I agree. And I'm so glad that we were able to take the time together. So thank you very, very much. And perhaps if you have time in the future, we'll do a round two, but we'll, no need to rush that. But really, really tremendously enjoyed this conversation. So thank you again. You're welcome. Lovely to talk to you. Lovely to talk to you. And you ask wonderful questions. So I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure entirely. And for everybody listening, we'll have links to everything

Starting point is 02:32:10 in the show notes as usual at tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've

Starting point is 02:32:44 found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field. And then I test them. And then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 02:33:27 This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1?

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Starting point is 02:34:57 Now, I do my best always to eat nutrient dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals,

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Starting point is 02:36:17 As some of you know, I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess. As many of you probably know, I've tried all the dating apps. And while there's some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League. I've been using it for a few months now, and I found some great matches. I'm going to use this ad, this sponsor read, to selfishly share my own profile with the ladies

Starting point is 02:36:45 listening to this podcast. My handle is Tim Tim. That's at Tim Tim or just Tim Tim. I think you can search by person and just put in Tim Tim and you'll find me. And then you can match with me. I'll tell you more about what I'm looking for in a bit. But before that, why did I end up using the League? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck. On the League, you're starting with a baseline of smart people, and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to. It's much easier. It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go up and speak with. So more than half of the League users went to cute to go up and speak with. So more than half of the league users went to top 40 colleges and you can make your filters really selective.

Starting point is 02:37:30 So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work. And that is one of the reasons that I use it. Second, people verify using LinkedIn so you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months. It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations. I haven't found any other dating app

Starting point is 02:37:55 that allows you to do this. So for instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding, have those as interests as I like to spend, say two to three months of the year in the mountains. I'm a rivers and mountain sky. The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities. So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out, features available in the league include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles,

Starting point is 02:38:25 ability to block your profile from co-workers, bosses, family, etc. That's very easy to do. You can search by interest, you can get profile stats, and there is a personal concierge in the app. So there's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for? I am looking for a woman who is well-educated and who loves skiing or snowboarding or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important. So just I'll leave it at that for now. Someone who's default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half full type of person who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years. Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful, and she would love polarity in a relationship.

Starting point is 02:39:08 She's athletic and has some muscle. I like strong women, not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea. Could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle, loves to read, and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag date Tim, so hashtag date Tim, in a message to your concierge in the app

Starting point is 02:39:24 to get us paired up. Again, you can also find my profile under the handle Tim Tim. So hashtag date Tim in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up. Again, you can also find my profile under the handle Tim Tim. That's all one word. T-I-M-T-I-M. So these are all reasons why I was excited when the league reached out to sponsor the podcast. Not the least of which is that I get to pitch my dating profile on the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three, three minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch. So check it out. Download the league today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating. You can really get good matches

Starting point is 02:40:01 instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So download the league today on iOS or Android and check it out. Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the waitlist and have your profile reviewed first. Check it out. The league on iOS or Android.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson

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