67 Quotes by Sue Johnson

Trauma is any terrifying event that instantly changes the world as we know it, leaving us helpless and emotionally overwhelmed.

Distressed partners no longer see each other as their emotional safe haven. Our lover is supposed to be the one person we can count on who will always respond. Instead, unhappy partners feel emotionally deprived, rejected, even abandoned. In that light, couples’ conflicts assume their true meaning: they are frightened protests against eroding connection and a demand for emotional reengagement.

Indeed, says psychologist Dan Stern of the University of Geneva, the brain is so relational that our nervous system is actually “constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their skin, as well as from within our own.

Ultimately, these remedies are ineffectual because they don’t address the source of relationship distress: the fear that emotional connection – the font of all comfort and respite – is vanishing.

The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be.

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.

We’ve long assumed that as we mature, we outgrow the need for the intense closeness, nurturing, and comfort we had with our caregivers as children and that as adults, the romantic attachments we form are essentially sexual in nature. This is a complete distortion of adult love.

Her thoughts immediately brought to mind a line by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “I shall but love thee better after death.” Some pains are sweet.

If you know your loved one is there and will come when you call, you are more confident of your worth, your value. And the world is less intimidating when you have another to count on and know that you are not alone.