Susan Johnson: Emotional Attachment

Susan Johnson is known in professional circles and elsewhere as one of the top clinical psychologists in the country when it comes to the science of relationships. Focusing on the relatively new theory regarding emotional attachment and how it plays a major role in how couples and families get along, she has developed a system called Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy. This therapy has been used in the field countless times and has been proven to work better than many other more traditionally based couples therapies.

In addition to her work in developing new strategies, she is the director of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute as well as the International Center for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy. She also works as a professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Ottawa. She is an accomplished author as well, having written many books and articles for the professional audience. She is also the author of the book, Hold Me Tight, Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, which was written for a mass audience and streamlines many of the concepts upon which EFT is based.

It is that EFT program for which Susan Johnson is best known. With her books and clinical centers, she has aimed to take couples therapy away from the negotiation based systems, instead focusing on emotional attachments. These theories help the scientific world to understand more about the nature of adult love and show that the exchange of resources has very little to do with why people get or stay married through their lives. If this is true, it goes to show that negotiation skills are not the answer when it comes to treating a couple’s problems. Additionally, it moves away from the school of thought which says that marriage and love is nothing more than an evolutionary process, intended to trick people into procreating and furthering the species.

Instead, Susan Johnson argues in her therapeutic work, love comes out of hard wiring in every normal person’s brain which tells us that we need to form emotional bonds which are strong and long lasting. Because of this need, the average adult sees isolation as a dangerous state, perhaps something that is left over from when we are babies. On the flip side, our brains see emotional attachment as a kind of safety net, one which we need to survive. EFT takes these concepts and goes to the next logical step, which is to say that people need emotional attachment to stay healthy.