Quotes from Sue Johnson

behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.

Romantic love was all about attachment and emotional bonding. It was all about our wired-in need to have someone to depend on, a loved one who can offer reliable emotional connection and comfort.

And when we are close to, hold, or make love with our partners, we are flooded with the "cuddle hormones" oxytocin and vasopressin.

In insecure relationships, we disguise our vulnerabilities so our partner never really sees us.

If I appeal to you for emotional connection and you respond intellectually to a problem, rather than directly to me, on an attachment level I will experience that as "no response." This is one of the reasons that the research on social support uniformly states that people want "indirect" support, that is, emotional confirmation and caring from their partners, rather than advice.

Being the "best you can be" is really only possible when you are deeply connected to another. Splendid isolation is for planets, not people.

Love has an immense ability to help heal the devastating wounds that life sometimes deals us. Love also enhances our sense of connection to the larger world. Loving responsiveness is the foundation of a truly compassionate, civilized society.

When love doesn't work, we hurt. Indeed, "hurt feelings" is a precisely accurate phrase, according to psychologist Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California. Her brain imaging studies show that rejection and exclusion trigger the same circuits in the same part of the brain, the anterior cingulate, as physical pain.

The most functional way to regulate difficult emotions in love relationships is to share them.

The greatest gift a parent has to give a child—and a lover has to give a lover—is emotionally attuned attention and timely responsiveness.

Curiosity comes out of a sense of safety; rigidity out of being vigilant to threats.

Emotional dependency is not immature or pathological; it is our greatest strength.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. —Ursula K. Le Guin

Hot sex doesn't lead to secure love; rather, secure attachment leads to hot sex—and also to love that lasts. Monogamy is not a myth.

To be human is to need others, and this is no flaw or weakness.

Sociologist James House of the University of Michigan declares that emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than smoking or high blood pressure, and we now warn everyone about these two!

Bowlby came to believe that disrupted relationships with parents or surrogate caregivers could cripple healthy emotional and social growth, producing alienated and angry individuals. In 1944, Bowlby published a seminal article, "Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves," observing that "behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.

When we love our partner well, we offer a blueprint for a loving relationship to our children and their partners. Better relationships between love partners are not just a personal preference, they are a social good. Better love relationships mean better families. And better, more loving families mean better, more responsive communities.

It is an ironic paradox: being dependent makes us more independent.

The first and foremost instinct of humans is neither sex nor aggression. It is to seek contact and comforting connection.

Negative emotions, such as anger and fear, narrow our focus, while positive emotion expands the range of our thoughts and creates the urge to play and experiment.

Love never dies of a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of natural death. —Anaïs Nin

All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure(s).

We are never so vulnerable as when we love." — Sigmund Freud