A new episode of Conversation with Alanis Morissette is now live! In this podcast Alanis talks with Sue Johnson about bonding, attachment and adult romantic relationships.
Subscribe on iTunes now and stay tuned for the next episode coming next month. Below are the references discussed in this podcast:
Hold Me Tight
Love Sense
The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy
Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy with Trauma Survivors
Shaping Love – A Seminal Study
Any researcher knows that, if you aspire to be an ‘objective’ scientist, you are not allowed to be passionately impressed by your own research. I am now going to break that rule.
It seems appropriate at the beginning of a New Year that my lab has just put out a new and rip roaring, cutting edge study (you can see it in early view in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy). This study is 25 years in the making and shows that we can now do something seemingly impossible – something that will speak to everyone who ever said to themselves, “Well what is all this love and romance stuff anyway and how does it work?” Which is pretty much everyone!
So here is the lead up. As I said in my recent book, Love Sense, in the last two decades social scientists have pretty much cracked the code of romantic love. Turns out that love is not some kind of weird morass of sex and sentiment that comes and goes mysteriously. It is an ancient, wired-in survival code designed to keep those you can depend on close – it’s THE human survival strategy par excellence. The bonds between parent and child and adult partners are our safe haven in a potentially dangerous and random universe. There are now hundreds of studies that show just this; and also tell us what the key elements in these bonds are, that is, what defines them, makes or breaks them.
But the even more incredible break-thorough is that this science is now focused enough to give us a practical map for love and loving. This map shows us how to actually shape and create love to the point where trained guides, doing the interventions that we have tested over the last 25 years, can now take a relationship that is going down in flames and show couples how to turn it around into – no, not just a comfy friendship – but a vibrant, close, loving bond.
In our study in our Ottawa lab – in the chilly capital of Canada no less – we took 32 couples, and in only 20 or so hours, we were able to show them how to move out of despair and disconnection into the kinds of bonds we all dream about and long for. And these bonds were still alive and intact when we checked on them again two years later.
For years now, we have had studies showing that our way of working with couples shifted relationships into less conflict and more satisfaction, but this is not the same as showing that it is possible to deliberately sculpt attachment – the special, deep emotional bond that our brain codes as crucial to survival. This kind of bond predicts a strong sense of self, good mental health and resilience under stress. Social psychologists suggest that, if indeed it is possible to find the key to human bonding, such bonds would take years and years to form and to move from insecurity to security. No-one has ever shown that it was possible to deliberately isolate the key elements in love, such as emotional responsiveness, and, in a short time, to systematically guide two disconnected people to shape these elements so as to change the security of their attachment bond. So we are proud. This study showed that we can do it!
What did this look like? Terry and Tim came into our lab talking about divorce. “He never talks” says Terry, “And we have zero connection. I don’t know why I stay. I am lonely and mad all the time.” “Yep that is about right”, replies Tim, “All you do is complain and demand stuff from me and tell me how damned disappointing I am. So I just shut down and turn you off.” Just 8 weeks later, Tim and Terry see each other differently. Their dance and the emotional music directing that dance has changed. They can now see how they trigger fight and flight responses in each other, and how each of them gets stuck in defensiveness and distance. But this is just the beginning. After another few weeks or so, they start doing something incredible – they begin to build a loving, responsive bond. “In just 20 weeks, we didn’t just change our problems. And we didn’t just fall back in love,” she says, “We went to a whole new level. We never knew love could be like this.” Our study showed that, whether your secret insecurity is that you are anxious and always worried about being abandoned or dismissed, or that you are usually numbed out and defensively denying your need for closeness, this process, that we call Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT for short), works and moves you into new levels of emotional connection. We call it EFT because the big seismic shift here is that people open up emotionally and become more attuned and emotionally responsive to each other’s vulnerabilities and needs. And we all know that this is what love is all about in the end. It’s all about emotional presence.
Our more clinical version of what happened is that people like Terry and Tim moved into being A.R.E. – more emotionally open and Accessible, tuned in and Responsive and deeply Engaged with each other. They began to be able to have what we call a Hold Me Tight conversation. Both of them managed to accept and explore their softer feelings – their fears and longings, put them together in a clear way and risk confiding in their partner in a way that pulled their partner close. This is what a bonding conversation looks like. People place their vulnerability, their heart, in each other’s hands. In nine previous research studies, we have found that these conversations transform unhappy relationships in a positive lasting way.
More generally, after therapy, partners reported being able to confide in the other, believed that they were precious to their partner, and that they could confidently rely on each other and turn to each other for comfort and reassurance. They also displayed new behaviors in difficult conversations, such as responding to the other’s emotional expressions with tuned-in empathy. In another previously published part of the study, female partner’s brains also showed a much diminished threat response to imminent electric shock when holding their partner’s hands. Loving connection has the power to mitigate how we perceive danger! It is the ultimate safety cue.
What does all this mean? It means that for the first time, psychologists have been able to go straight to the heart of the matter, pinpoint the defining moments in love and guide distressed partners through these moments into the territory the singer, Leonard Cohen describes as “a thousand kisses deep”. We have come a long long way from the still popular belief that love is a random mystery that comes and goes outside our control and that once it wanes, we are helpless to ignite the flame of love again or deliberately shape it.
We are finally succeeding in defining the shape of love, just as we have learned to define the nature of atoms, electrodes and DNA. In our most precious relationships, we no longer have to just Fall In and then, often disastrously, Fall Out of love. We are learning that we really can make Sense of, Shape and Sculpt loving connection – our attachment bonds.
And that is fantastic news for every one of us!
Dr. Sue Johnson, the bestselling author of Hold Me Tight and Love Sense (January 2014), is a clinical psychologist and Distinguished Research Professor at Alliant International University in San Diego, CA. Creator of an effective new model of relationship repair (Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy), she has written numerous articles and trained thousands of therapists around the world. She divides her time between New York, San Diego, and Ottawa.
Libido: Love of Life Film Project
Do you ever hide the truth about your sexuality?
Who you are attracted to?
What pleasures you feel?
What you long for?
Have you ever wished for a place to heal, grow, or challenge yourself?
Libido: Love of Life is a film collaboration with Libido creator Andrea Juhan and the talented filmmaker and Libido On-going participant, Will Harris, and a large group of amazing generous dancers and teachers, who have all dedicated themselves to sharing the richness they have found in this work. It is a beautiful look at this unique synthesis of dance and transformative movement practice.
What is Libido?
A few simple definitions:
Sexuality Life Force Vitality Creativity
Carl Jung says “Libido is appetite in its natural state”- It is an essential part of our body’s natural expression. Complicated one moment, ecstatic the next.
The Open Floor Libido programs are an exploration of embodied sexuality using the transformative power of conscious dance as a vehicle for awareness and change. If you have ever felt curious or confused about how to more fully enjoy the generative, instinctual, biological energies that move within every one of us, then this program is for you.
“The point of Libido programs is not to necessarily create a sexual experience, but rather to create space and embodied awareness for whatever experience of sexuality you are having.”
We live in a time where sexuality is, on the one hand, pervasive and casually X-rated, and on the other, boxed in with stereotypes and unrealistic expectations. Along the way there is less and less capacity for real meaning and connection. In many ways, dance and sexuality have become almost synonymous in our culture.
To move is to feel, and to move freely and authentically makes us look and feel radiant. And yet, too often we hide and diminish this powerful part of ourselves in awkward social situations with drugs, alcohol or simply a thicket of limiting beliefs.
Many of us accept a life where our potency is un-tapped and our creative potential unfulfilled. Meanwhile our sexual expression can be more unconscious than conscious. We may find it drives and pulls us, diverting us away from the bigger picture of what we truly want and need.
Through Open Floor dance meditation, we turn this dynamic around. We create a mindful communal, sex positive, environment in which we explore how the embodied energy of libido moves within and between us. We look at the ways we hold ourselves back or get in our own way.
Libido Fundamentals are a place to practice full embodied engagement with Libido energy, the same energies that you may find in the bedroom (positive and challenging) are available and at play thru the dance – it’s not about acting out sexually, it is about opening and expanding the passion and power of Libido into all areas of your life.
The Libido Fundamentals workshops touch on the powerful universal elements involved in feeling, moving, and increasing the ability to fully embody this energy.
Many participants take these course many times! Libido courses support unapologetic pleasure, and the capacity to experience the transcendent possibilities that whole-hearted libido can offer us.
The On-going Libido Program is a deeper longer unpacking of the Libido terrain…a commitment is made for over two years: same people, same staff, same venue – but that’s about all that stays the same. The length of the program gives us the possibility to explore the threads of our personal history with Libido; to develop emotional intelligence around our sexuality and the choices we make. Over time and deep honest interactions, our dances bring healing of the places that have been hurt, and offer us the resources to develop our relational, creative and spiritual expressions Libido.
The pleasure and beauty of this journey is well worth the challenges and risks.
These programs are OPEN TO ALL: couples or individuals, virgins and experienced lover’s heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, queer, and all combinations therein. In short anyone with a body!
Find a workshop! www.openfloor.org
Andrea Juhan: a therapist, a dancer, three decades a student/teacher of Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms, and Gestalt Awareness Practice, and Integrative Body Psychotherapy; she has created her own form of Movement Practice called Open Floor –together with other gifted teachers she cofounded Open Floor International. Her unique form of group process Open Floor Encounter and Libido programs are taught worldwide.
There are few interactions that come close to the experience of the original holding and bonding between mother (or primary caregiver(s)) and child. Certainly fewer that hold as much importance. For those of us who were held, nurtured, fed and cared for in this most intimate, skin-on-skin way, we have a remembrance of this sense of unity, this warmth, this merging, this direct experience of light melting into light. We may not consciously remember the details, but every fiber of our being and body registers this security, this safety-in-existence, this osmosis-like assurance born of love and union, along with the release of oxytocin in our bodies. The only thing that might trump it could be the return to the uterus itself.
This touch-bonding with mom (or caregiver) lets us know that the world that we are emerging into is safe. Imagine the far-reaching effects of this single form of interaction alone, and what it portends for later in our lives as we grow into adulthood: the knowledge that we indeed EXIST in a context of assurance and warmth, that life is good. That life is safe, love is available, and tenderness is the norm. Certainly there are ways that life informs us of our individuation and perhaps bursts this bubble as we grow, yet this initial connectedness carries us through the vicissitudes of life the way a perfectly balanced (and light!) meal can carry us through an ultra-marathon.
The need we have for this physical experience of connection never goes away. To take the marathon metaphor even further, around mile 15, let’s be honest, we might benefit from a topping-up in the form of an orange—or in the case of snuggles, a hug, or an arm around our shoulder. While the initial reaching out for contact may have been met well in the first many days, weeks, and months of our lives, this yearning we have (or as I call it, “the urge to merge”) never goes away entirely.
Then there are those of us who didn’t fare so well during this vital and inaugural stage of development. For a host of reasons, many of us don’t fall into the category of having been “well-snuggled” out of the gate. To say this lack of having had this primordial itch scratched could have far-reaching effects—like leaving us feeling “hungry” throughout life—would be an understatement. It is a vital need that science, neurobiology, spirituality, and psychology ALL agree on:
We need this vital interaction, this vital touching of skin and souls, to not only thrive and feel the connectedness of life, love, and god that is our birthright, but as babies, we actually need it to LIVE.
Sure, for survival reasons in the face of neglect we may (understandably) pretend we don’t need it, or even convince ourselves and our psyches that we don’t for not having had access to it from day one. The pain of recognizing this lack may have been too much to bear, and so we shut it down as part of our survival strategy; yet a big part of our survival and consciousness aches for the melding of loving energies, even as we shut down our conscious reaching out for it. Yet need it we do, and preciously, if not at times painfully. No human is exempt. Touch is one of our most basic forms of communication, connecting us to ourselves and to each other. Phyllis Davis’s book The Power of Touch is a gorgeous guidebook for rediscovering this essential healing language.
There is great news for those of us who were under-touched during this pivotal time: We can all heal our attachment wounds at any time in our lives. There are many forms of healing in this regard. Therapists are slowly becoming more open to offering this survival-need touch in professional environments and workshops. In more modern therapeutic contexts, the age-old “ethics” of there being zero touch allowed is softening, and not a moment too soon. Yes, people are afraid of harassment charges and the legal implications in an ever-broadening litigious (aka irresponsible) society. Some therapists and workshop leaders are resistant for more altruistic reasons—they don’t want to thwart or arrest a client’s process through transference or interpreted sexual impropriety. While these concerns are certainly valid, when taken to a rigid extreme, they block what could become some of the most corrective experiences of a person’s life.
There is an increasing knowledge of a limit to what top-down (singularly cognitive) therapies can offer. In our modern world, where bottom-up (body or somatic oriented) therapies are getting more of their moment in the sun, it is impossible not to notice the quality of healing and trauma recovery that can be born of skillful, attuned, sensitive, respectful, and appropriate touch, when permission is granted by the client. In my opinion, a combination of the top-down AND the bottom-up approaches can benefit anyone committed to truth, healing, and wholeness.
The following are other forms of healing touch to consider:
The slow and titrated approach of certain healing modalities, like Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing. This model has a deep knowledge of the entire physical, neurobiological and emotional system, and a knowledge of how to skillfully usher our bodies into discharging any past traumas that might preclude us from associating touch, or even rest, with safety.
The corrective effect felt from skillful hands-on healers, which include reiki and hands-on energy healing.
Yoga that is trauma-informed. Approaches that adopt some functional and healing contact are slowly being integrated into the more innovative yoga practices, which introduces skillful touch into the practice by a teacher, practitioner, or a partner.
There is perhaps no better version of healing than can be found in a simple hug. Practiced with your partner, a friend, a family member. When mutually agreed to, a hug can afford a moment of healing, of re-wiring our brains, of learning or re-learning the ebb and flow of generosity and receptivity in a way that can touch on the early hunger for this quality of such contact.Dr David Schnarch, in his book Passionate Marriage and in his workshops, recommends the “hugging till relaxed” exercise with your partner. It can support the slow softening of boundaries in a functional way within the context of committed intimacy. While it may not be the instant panacea for past challenges, it can serve as a slow-moving investigation back home to each other when each movement and subtle shift can be used for the benefit of uncovering fears, repressed memories or feelings, or resistances between each other (often having to do with unresolved pain from our past). My husband and I tried this exercise at David’s workshop years ago, and we return to it when words don’t seem to be working their magic of re-connecting us—or even if we just want to connect but don’t have the energy for verbal discourse (at night, let’s say, after a full day with our five-year-old, when we have no gas left in our tanks to be conversationally engaging). It also offers a quality of connection that can go beyond the often fraught (if not largely wonderful) version of touch during healthy sex.
Visiting Ammachi, the hugging saint. Ammachi (or “Amma,” as she is affectionately referred to) is known for traveling the planet and offering hugs to hundreds of thousands of people—delicate, maternal, and heart-full embraces that transform. All over the planet, Amma is sought out for these powerful moments of interaction, which are often coupled with her talks.
Dr. Margaret Paul, in her book Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved by God, extols the gifts of healing in an exercise she calls “mother bonding.” She invites a friend or family member (in the case of this exercise, a female) to remove any agenda other than to bring life’s love through to the person being held. I have had the pleasure of being on both sides of this exercise, and I have to say that after being held in this way for 20 minutes at the back of my tour bus, while on tour ten years ago, I noticed my food obsession and my desire to reach for a cocktail after the show completely evaporated for my having been held. A revelation for me.
Dr. Wendy Maltz has an excellent DVD entitled “Re-learning Touch” that slowly guides couples through reclaiming and revitalizing the subtleties of touch ranging from non-sexual to sexual.
Skillful massage like cranial sacral or other types of massage received from medically- or physically-intuitive practitioners can break the barrier into an experience of healing that requires a context of safety, kind presence, and skill.
Contact dance or contact improv that is trauma-informed. When led by a teacher who is deeply attuned to the crucial importance of healthy boundaries and incorporates that understanding into the way he or she teaches the process, contact improv can be a powerful way to rediscover positive touch through shared momentum and shared weight through movement.
Work with animals. If touch is associated with abuse or trauma from our past, sometimes starting the touch inquiry with a favorite pet can be a great first step. Feeling our favorite pet’s heartbeat and warmth and sweetness, and resting into that quiet with them, can take us slowly from what feels foreign (resting into the warmth of physical contact) into deep healing.
May what might be a slow journey back into the arms of the divine mother be one that is offered to you, no matter what point in your life you risk reaching for it again. For reaching out for this quality of touch and contact is to be human. Is to be chemically, hormonally, and scientifically corroborated. Is to be alive. Is to be loved. And is to be godly. May you rest in the arms of love for as long as your nervous system and heart need for you to touch on the innocence of who you were … and the deep preciousness of who you are.
Personally created chakra-inspired oil/water/salt blend sprays. To serve as reminders, as intention setters , for energy clearing…to both start or end my day. Or to mark transitions. Each correlate and associate to a chakra…but as one of my mentors Joel Bruce Wallach has inspiringly taught, it is always fun to take what we have learned and update it and personalize it. (he is one to pose questions like: “what if you brought the heart energy that the 4th chakra is known for and blended it with what your root chakra is known for…the physical and the compassionate integrating into one?”). I love to blend all my personal knowledge with many other (sometimes rigidly autonomous) teachings and see what happens when 1 PLUS 1 equals 20…. in a way that works for me, personally.
Here is the outcome of my having dived into doing just that…and then some.
1. PHYSICAL. Root—tribe. In this one I have melissa oil and clean water and a dash of Epsom salt. This is a reminder to ground, to be IN my body (I have the tendency to disassociate), to be present. To notice my surroundings and the sensations within my body.
2. GENERATE. Sacral—artistic and sexual. I have jasmine in this one, water, Epsom salt. When I am seeking solutions, images that inspire, wanting to create something of service, an article, a song, an idea. Clears the air to make room for the clean-and-ready slate.
3. RELATIONAL. Solar—power. I have blood orange and mandarin in this one. Water. Epsom salt. When I am engaging in a conversation that might be challenging. When I am going into a meeting where it is incumbent upon me to find a solution that benefits all. When I am seeking solutions for how to have a dynamic be more grace-tinged.
4. FEMININE. Heart—compassion. I have Bulgarian rose and water and Epsom salts in this one. When I am connecting intimately within my own self, with other (micro), with a larger crowd (macro). When I want to make sure that all that I say is fueled by love (if not siphoned through my intellect) and guided by a mutual care (for self and other). When empathy is asked of me (yet not too much).
5. ART. Throat—communication. I have neroli and water and Epsom salt in this one. When expressedness and the need to speak truthfully and courageously is asked of me. When there is something within me churning (often keeping me up at night)…that needs to be written, fleshed out, spoken, sung., physically moved through me.
6. ENERGETIC. Third eye—intuition. I have white sage in this one. Water and Epsom salt. When the 6th sense is being called upon..the sensing into an answer, trusting my gut, attuning to an answer that serves the highest good of all involved. Or when I just want to still my thoughts, the movement, my monkey mind enough to access the big answers.
7. STILLNESS. Crown—spiritual connection. I have Frankincense in this one. Water. Epsom salts. When I want to remember the truth of who I am (consciousness, awareness—that includes all parts, ego, life circumstances etc). When I want a reminder that there is a truth that underlies all the changes and waves and fluctuations of life that is permanent, unchanging, unwavering. Constant. Like the sun—whether there are clouds or whether the sky is clear—the sun remains. Reminds me of deep silence. Deep breaths. Love itself.
