Sue Johnson > Quotes

“In insecure relationships, we disguise our vulnerabilities so our partner never really sees us.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“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.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships

“Being the “best you can be” is really only possible when you are deeply connected to another. Splendid isolation is for planets, not people.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness...”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight

“Curiosity comes out of a sense of safety; rigidity out of being vigilant to threats.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“For all of us, the person we love most in the world, the one who can send us soaring joyfully into space, is also the person who can send us crashing back to earth. All it takes is a slight turning away of the head or a flip, careless remark. There is no closeness without this sensitivity. If our connection with our mate is safe and strong, we can deal with these moments of sensitivity. Indeed, we can use them to bring our partner even closer. But when we don’t feel safe and connected, these moments are like a spark in a tinder forest. They set fire to the whole relationship.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships

“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.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships

“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.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“The most functional way to regulate difficult emotions in love relationships is to share them.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“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.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“We now know that love is, in actuality, the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species. Not because it induces us to mate and reproduce. We do manage to mate without love! But because love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life. Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence. This drive to emotionally attach — to find someone to whom we can turn and say “Hold me tight” — is wired into our genes and our bodies. It is as basic to life, health, and happiness as the drives for food, shelter, or sex. We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy — to survive.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“• Emotional dependency is not immature or pathological; it is our greatest strength.”
― Sue Johnson, The Love Secret: The revolutionary new science of romantic relationships

“We have to dive below to discover the basic problem: these couples have disconnected emotionally; they don’t feel emotionally safe with each other. What couples and therapists too often do not see is that most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships

“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”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“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.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“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!”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“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.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“To be human is to need others, and this is no flaw or weakness.”
― Sue Johnson, The Love Secret: The revolutionary new science of romantic relationships

“It is an ironic paradox: being dependent makes us more independent.”
― Sue Johnson, The Love Secret: The revolutionary new science of romantic relationships

“We are never so vulnerable as when we love.” — Sigmund Freud”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“There is no such thing as constructive criticism,” says John Gottman. “All criticism is painful.” He is correct. We never like to hear that there is something “wrong” with us, or that something needs changing, especially if this message is coming from the loved one we most depend on. Psychologist Jill Hooley’s work at Harvard measures the impact of critical, hostile comments made by loved ones and shows just how venomous disparagement by those we rely on can be. This censure may even trigger relapse of mental illness, such as depression.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“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.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“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.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“We live in the shelter of each other.” — Celtic saying”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“The first and foremost instinct of humans is neither sex nor aggression. It is to seek contact and comforting connection.”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“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).”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“Louise Hawkley, of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, calculates that loneliness raises blood pressure to the point where the risk of heart attack and stroke is doubled.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“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”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence. —Theodore Dreiser”
― Sue Johnson, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships

“no one can dance with a partner and not touch each other’s raw spots. We must know what these raw spots are and be able to speak about them in a way that pulls our partner closer to us.”
― Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love