Quotes from Sue Johnson

But love is like a language. If you speak it, it flows more and more easily. If you don't, then you start to lose it.

Change starts with seeing the pattern, with focusing on the game rather than the ball.

couples' conflicts assume their true meaning: they are frightened protests against eroding connection and a demand for emotional reengagement.

Love is a continual process of seeking and losing emotional connection, and reaching out to find it again. The bond of love is a living thing. If we don't attend to it, it naturally begins to wither. In a world that is moving even faster and requiring us to juggle more and more tasks, it is a challenge to be present in the moment and to tend to out own and our partner's need for connection.

Which strategy we adopt when we feel disconnected—becoming demanding and critical or withdrawing and shutting down—partly reflects our natural temperament, but mostly it is dictated by the lessons we learn in the key attachment relationships of our past and present.

We live in the shelter of each other." —Celtic saying

Once we get caught in a negative pattern, we expect it, watch for it, and react even faster when we think we see it coming.

As the Irish poet John O'Donohue puts it, "There is a huge and leaden loneliness settling like a frozen winter on so many humans.

The secret to stopping the dance is to recognize that no one has to be the bad guy. The accuse/accuse pattern itself is the villain here, and the partners are the victims.

Well, first you have to see the circular pattern of responses and really understand that proving the other wrong just pushes you further and further apart. The temptation to be the "winner" and to make the other admit she is at fault is just part of the trap.

Robert Putnam notes in his seminal book on the loss of social connection in Western societies, Bowling Alone, "Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it: without a real world counterpart, Internet contact gets ranty, dishonest and weird." We

Bowlby talked about "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.

Sitting, years later, watching the last of the ice finally melting on our lake one morning in early April and hearing my husband and children walking through the woods behind me. They were laughing and talking, and I touched for a moment the deepest joy, the kind of joy that was, and still is, entirely enough to fill up my heart for this lifetime.

love is like a language. If you speak it, it flows more and more easily. If you don't, then you start to lose it.

Both men and women are inculcated with social beliefs that help ensnare them in the polka. Most destructive is the belief that a healthy, mature adult is not supposed to need emotional connection and so is not entitled to this kind of caring.

The key moments of change in EFT were moments of secure bonding. In these moments of safe attunement and connection, both partners can hear each other's attachment cry and respond with soothing care, forging a bond that can withstand differences, wounds, and the test of time.

We have to learn to recognize calls for connection and how desperation turns into "I push, I poke, anything to get him to respond," or "I just freeze, so as to stop hearing more and more about how flawed I am and how I have lost her already.

When they felt secure with their lover, they could reach out and connect easily; when they felt insecure, they either became anxious, angry, and controlling, or they avoided contact altogether and stayed distant

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 — and better at giving it.

Researchers say that marital distress raises the risk for depression tenfold!

Hundreds of studies now show that positive loving connections with others protect us from stress and help us cope better with life's challenges and traumas.

Emotion is actually nature's exquisitely efficient information-processing and signaling system, designed to rapidly reorganize behavior in the interests of survival.

The truth is, we will never create a really strong, secure connection if we do not allow our lovers to know us fully or if our lovers are unwilling to know us.

the quality of the connection to loved ones and early emotional deprivation is key to the development of personality and to an individual's habitual way of connecting with others.