Quotes from Sue Johnson

When we feel generally secure, that is, we are comfortable with closeness and confident about depending on loved ones, we are better at seeking support

physically healthy infant primates who were separated from their mothers during the first year of life grew into socially crippled adults. The monkeys failed to develop the ability to solve problems or understand the social cues of others. They became depressed, self-destructive, and unable to mate.

Love, it seemed, was all about nonnegotiables.

The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be. Although this flies in the face of our culture's creed of self-sufficiency, psychologist Brooke Feeney of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh found exactly that in observations of 280 couples. Those who felt that their needs were accepted by their partners were more confident about solving problems on their own and were more likely to successfully achieve their own goals.

effective dependency" and how being able, from "the cradle to the grave," to turn to others for emotional support is a sign and source of strength.

The kids who can calm themselves usually have warmer, more responsive mothers, while the moms of the angry kids are unpredictable in their behavior, and the moms of the detached kids are colder and dismissive.

But it's not just whether or not we have close relationships in our lives—the quality of these relationships matters, too. Negative relationships undermine our health.

Maybe there is something deeply wrong with me," Carol tells me. "It's just like my mom used to say, I am too difficult to love.

Spouses depending on each other too much was what wrecked marriages!

Simply holding the hand of a loving partner can affect us profoundly, literally calming jittery neurons in the brain.

Love is not the icing on the cake of life. It is a basic primary need, like oxygen or water. Once we understand and accept this, we can more easily get to the heart of relationship problems.

Love affairs are just rational bargains," lectured a famed psychologist thirty years ago at an international conference in Banff. "They're negotiations about profit and cost. We all want to maximize our profit.

One reason is that we are increasingly living in social isolation.

For better or worse, in the twenty-first century, a love relationship has become the central emotional relationship in most people's lives. One reason is that we are increasingly living in social isolation.

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 amygdala, or Fear Central

couples spend an average of twelve minutes a day talking together.

they're emotional bonds. They're about the innate need for safe emotional connection. Just like [British psychiatrist] John Bowlby talks about in his attachment theory concerning mothers and kids. The same thing is going on with adults.

We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy — to survive.

Emotional connection is crucial to healing. In fact, trauma experts overwhelmingly agree that the best predictor of the impact of any trauma is not the severity of the event, but whether we can seek and take comfort from others.

Conventional wisdom held that coddling by mothers and other family members created clingy, overdependent youngsters who grew up into incompetent adults. Keeping an antiseptic rational distance was the proper way to rear children.

From your viewpoint, is your partner accessible to you? I can get my partner's attention easily. T F My partner is easy to connect with emotionally. T F My partner shows me that I come first with him/her. T F I am not feeling lonely or shut out in this relationship. T F I can share my deepest feelings with my partner. He/she will listen. T F

Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence.

the fact that his shut-down strategy works just fine in many situations. But in love relationships, it simply alarms his partner and writes the next part of the story with a negative slant.

Generally in love, sharing even negative emotions, provided they don't get out of hand, is more useful than emotional absence. Lack of response just fires up the primal panic of the other partner.