YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Sue Johnson

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118
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2024-06-19
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2024-06-19
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  1. “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 lists of tasks. And he's just into problem solving and he doesn't 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, yes, you are. And you've been going to bed for weeks. And I guess does it matter to you that we're not having those close moments? Listen to me. I mean, I'm on the attack and we are acutely sensitive as human beings to signs of rejection or abandonment.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “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, I catch myself doing this with my husband. If I'm upset about something, like he's been going to bed very early, that means that we don't have our snuggle time. We don't have our little chat time. Okay. And it doesn't seem to bother him at all. Don't seem to bother him that this isn't happening. So this will go on for a couple of weeks.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Whole big 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. It's reasonable that we don't know how to go there. because many of us are just not a drama that we've ever seen enacted a whole meight 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”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And it's an ancient widening 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.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “That spoke to me amazingly because psychology is often dismissed as a sort of soft science and 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. 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.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Looked like a resting brain. It looked like they will just resting there, their brain staying 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. 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. Okay. So he said, that's just a resting brain. Oh, okay, jolly good. So”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Shock was extremely painful. After therapy, we put them in the machine again, did the same thing. They saw the X. When the stranger held their hand, or when they were alone in the machine, same thing as before, their brain went berserk and they said it was extremely painful. 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.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And 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. sessions of therapy after EFT when they'd had these bonding conversations 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 X 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”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “And we were a bit brutal when I think about it. We put them in the MRI machine 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”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “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 from the University of Virginia called Jim Cohen, 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 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 MRI machine at the beginning of therapy and then at the end of therapy when they'd”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I believe I've 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 BET depression scale. For attachment, we use something called the experiences in close relationship scale, which is used in 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 attachment research. And the experiences in close relationship scale is the measure we use. However, we have also used”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “In the arms of another to heal from trauma, 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.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Close to this person, I can be open to this person. This person is 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 people deal with trauma better We see a lot of folks with PTSD. When you faced 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.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “And we know how to create that bond ongoingly in the future. That still amazes me that we know that 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 and they can say, I trust this person.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “That's a good question And it basically looks at the couples 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 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, you know, we have a good marriage. I trust this person in this marriage to be able to say, we have a more secure bond.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “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 Malonga ever and dancing. Partner.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Pressed as individuals, and we follow them up three years later, and the results hold. Which is, just so that 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 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. But it's not what really turns me on in the end. What turns me on.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “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 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.”

    2024-06-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT