Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
Dr. Sue Johnson
2008

Although this website is focused on having nourishing relationships with oneself and friends rather than how to be with a partner, this approach is so brilliant that the book deserves a place. And even though she’s writing for couples, it’s clear that the ideas apply to any close relationship.

Her approach is based on the work of John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, who began writing about family therapy in 1944 after working with children orphaned by the war. He came to believe that emotional starvation is as real as physical starvation, and put forward the theory that “keeping precious others close is a brilliant survival technique wired in by evolution.”  Hard to believe now, but his “radical” theory, that children need love and secure relationships with parents, was rejected, and almost got him thrown out of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

Although it is now commonly accepted that children need to have a secure environment in order to develop, the attachment view of love is still not accepted for adults. We tend to believe that maturity means being self-sufficent. But many studies have now confirmed that adults have the same attachment needs as children.

In this book Johnson presents Emotionally Focused Therapy to the public for the first time, with the expectation that motivated couples may be able to solve their own problems with their relationships, once they understand the basic principles. She nails the profound difficulty that couples – and friends, and parents and children - have in creating loving and long-lasting relationships. We don’t feel safe with each other. We are afraid to reveal ourselves. We don’t know how to provide the atmosphere of trust that will allow the other to feel safe with us.

She says:
What couples and therapists do not see is that most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other, Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me?  The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.

Attachment theory teaches us that our loved one is our shelter in life. When that person is emotionally unavailable or unresponsive, we face being out in the cold, alone and helpless. We are assailed by emotions – anger, sadness, hurt, and above all, fear. This is not so surprising when we remember that fear is our built-in alarm system; it turns on when our survival is threatened. Losing connection with our loved one jeopardizes our sense of security. The alarm goes off in the brain’s amygdale, or Fear Center…this almond-shaped area in the midbrain triggers an automatic response. We don’t think; we feel, we act. (p.30)

Sound familiar? Johnson describes in detail how we try to use our unconscious coping strategies to deal with this fear, and how this often turns into those terrible vicious cycle rants that never resolve anything and leave each person feeling battered. By identifying these types of interactions, partners can get some objectivity and begin to understand the motivating factors instead of getting caught up in the details.

Then she describes and gives examples of a series of types of conversations that two people can have that lead to mutual trust and understanding. It is quite beautiful to read these histories of estranged people breaking through the static of fear, finding each other again, and learning to share their essential selves.Of course, we can only share what is most real in us to the degree we know ourselves. 

I think that in current social convention, friends are generally not expected to ask each other for that level of security and reliability which fundamentally we require in order to be serene and healthy. That belongs to partner, lover, family. But friends we have attracted into our lives can become our real family, our real partners, if we invest ourselves in those relationships with steadfastness and make a container for the feelings that we are now afraid to express.

In addition, by using energy therapies to clear the emotional triggers from childhood and previous experiences that can precipitate many of the uncontrollable reactions that occur in a relationship, we can make this process of  becoming trustworthy and learning to trust much easier.

One of my favorite essays:
On Sincerity: Maeterlinck

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