Sue Johnson, a British-born Canadian clinical psychologist and best-selling author who developed a new method of couples therapy based on emotional attachment, challenging what had been the dominant behavioral approach – the idea that behaviors are learned and can therefore be modified – has died. on April 23 in Victoria, British Columbia. She was 76 years old.
Her death at the hospital was caused by a rare form of melanoma, said her husband, John Douglas.
When divorce rates increased in the 1970s, couples therapy took off. Drawing on traditional psychotherapy practices, therapists have focused primarily on helping troubled couples communicate more effectively, delve into their education, and “negotiate and haggle,” as Dr. Johnson puts it, over issues. controversial issues like parenting, gender and household chores.
In her own practice, however, she became frustrated with how her couples seemed to be stagnating.
“My couples didn’t care to gain insight into their childhood relationships,” she writes in her million-selling book “Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love” (2008). of copies and translated into 30 copies. LANGUAGES. “They didn’t want to be reasonable and learn to negotiate. They certainly didn’t want to learn rules to fight effectively. Love, it seemed, was all about non-negotiables. You can’t negotiate compassion, connection. These are not intellectual reactions; these are emotional responses.
In conventional therapies that sought to modify behavior, emotions had long been seen as problematic in managing marital problems – something to be tamed – and dependence on a loved one was seen as a sign of dysfunction. .
Dr. Johnson thought otherwise. She was familiar with the attachment studies of John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who studied children traumatized by being orphaned or separated from their parents during World War II. Later researchers began to focus on adult attachments and noted how secure bonds between couples helped them weather inevitable relationship storms.
Dr. Johnson began to view a couple’s mutual emotional dependence not as a weakness but as a strength, and thus developed techniques to help couples strengthen these bonds. While preparing for a Ph.D. At the University of British Columbia, she filmed her therapy sessions and analyzed couples’ behaviors, from which she fashioned a treatment model with the help of her thesis advisor, Leslie Greenberg. They called it Emotionally Focused Therapy, or EFT.
They then tested their method by giving some couples behavioral therapy, some EFT, and others no therapy at all. Couples who underwent EFT fared the best: they argued less, felt closer to each other, and “their overall satisfaction with their relationships soared,” she said. writes Dr. Johnson.
She refined her method using the paradigm of attachment theory, which notes that pair bonding – the term for selective associations between two individuals of the same species – is a survival technique developed over millions of years. years of evolution. His thesis was a scientific vision of love.
But when she published her work, her colleagues cried foul. They asserted, she wrote, that “healthy adults are self-sufficient. Only dysfunctional people need or depend on others. We had names for these people: they were entangled, codependent, fused, fused. In other words, they were messed up.
Decades of EFT studies have proven her colleagues wrong, she says. Nearly 75 percent of couples who underwent the therapy, she wrote, reported being happier in their relationships, even those who were at high risk of divorce. EFT has been recognized by the American Psychological Association as an evidence-based approach and is now taught in graduate schools and internship programs.
“By focusing on creating attachment security between couples,” said Dr. John Gottman, co-founder of the Gottman Institute in Seattle, which seeks to strengthen relationships, “Sue focused on The idea of trust and how couples can build mutual trust in the moment, and it has changed everything in the field of couples therapy.
Dr. Julie Gottman, his wife and co-founder, added: “In some ways, we are all still children, and when we seek lifelong love with our partners, we really need to know that we are fully accepted and embraced in the world. the same way a parent hugs their child, and with that kind of acceptance, people can truly thrive.
Studies have shown that consistent emotional support and strong bonding with a partner lowers blood pressure, strengthens the immune system, and reduces cancer mortality rates and the incidence of heart disease.
“In terms of mental health,” Dr. Johnson wrote in “Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships” (2013), “a close relationship is the best predictor of happiness, far more so than making a lot of money or Win the lottery. . It also significantly reduces susceptibility to anxiety and makes us more resilient to stress and trauma.
In 2007, Dr. Johnson set out to show how EFT affected the brain. She worked with Dr. James Coan, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, who had shown, by analyzing areas of the brain that register fear, how holding hands would relieve stress in couples.
First, Dr. Johnson recruited heterosexual couples who reported being unhappy in their relationships. The researchers then subjected the women to electric shocks while their partners held their hands. For these couples, holding hands had no effect. Then Dr. Johnson treated the same couples with a course of EFT – about 20 sessions – and repeated the test. In the second trial, the area of the women’s brains that would respond to threats remained silent.
“It was incredible, because this is what Sue had predicted as far back as 1989 without knowing anything about the brain,” Dr Coan said. “She was a model for stubbornly subjecting her therapeutic intuitions to scientific testing. You have to be a clinical psychologist to understand how rare this is.
“Love is a fundamental survival code,” Dr. Johnson wrote in “Love Sense.”
Susan Maureen Driver was born on December 19, 1947, in Gillingham, England, the only child of Arthur and Winifred Driver. The Drivers ran a pub called the Royal Marine and Sue grew up in this noisy environment. “I spent a lot of time watching people meet, talk, drink, fight, dance, flirt,” she wrote. Her parents’ relationship was chaotic and controversial, and they divorced when she was 10.
She completed a degree in English literature at the University of Hull in East Yorkshire before moving to Canada, where she completed a master’s degree in literature and history at the University of British Columbia and worked as a counselor in a residential center for troubled adolescents. After beginning training as a therapist, she enrolled in a psychology doctoral program and received her Ph.D. in 1984. Her thesis was on her work with EFT and she was hired by the University of Ottawa to teach in its psychology department.
Dr. Johnson was married briefly in the 1970s and retained her first husband’s last name. She met Mr. Douglas, who ran an engineering company, in 1987, and they married a year later. In addition to Mr. Douglas, she is survived by their children, Sarah Nakatsuka and Tim and Emma Douglas.
In 1998, with Mr. Douglas and others, Dr. Johnson co-founded the International Center of Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy. He trains and certifies therapists around the world in EFT and conducts clinics on the method. The Canadian and American military have offered EFT programs to service members, and EFT has been used to reduce stress in couples dealing with a partner’s heart disease, diabetes, or Parkinson’s disease.
“Underneath all this distress,” Dr. Johnson said, “partners ask themselves: Can I count on you? Are you there for me?
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