Top 50 Sue Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Sue Johnson

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

— Sue Johnson

4. “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

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

— Sue Johnson

6. “Naming an emotion begins the process of regulating it and reflecting on it.”

— Sue Johnson

7. “The key to restoring connection is, first, interrupting and dismantling these destructive sequences and then actively constructing a more emotionally open and receptive way of interacting, one in which partners feel safe confiding their hidden fears and longings.”

— Sue Johnson

8. “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

9. “When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness...”

— Sue Johnson

10. “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.”

— Sue Johnson

11. “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

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

— Sue Johnson

13. “Emotional Responsiveness – The Key to a Lifetime of Love A person’s “heart withers if it does not answer another heart.” – Pearl S. Buck Tim.”

— Sue Johnson

14. “The emotions do not deserve being put into opposition with “intelligence.” The emotions are themselves a higher order of intelligence. – O. Hobart Mowrer.”

— Sue Johnson

15. “The results of EFT, as measured in a multitude of studies, have been astoundingly positive – better, in fact, than the outcomes of any other therapy that has been offered.”

— Sue Johnson

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

— Sue Johnson

17. “Learning to love and be loved is, in effect, about learning to tune in to our emotions so that we know what we need from a partner and expressing those desires openly, in a way that evokes sympathy and support from him or her.”

— Sue Johnson

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Sue Johnson

21. “In a group of studies Mikulincer showed that when we feel safely connected to others we understand ourselves better and like ourselves more.”

— Sue Johnson

22. “And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself Beloved on the Earth.” – Raymond Carver.”

— Sue Johnson

23. “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! Perhaps these findings reflect the time-honored saying “Suffering is a given; suffering alone is intolerable.”

— Sue Johnson

24. “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

25. “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.”

— Sue Johnson

26. “As Aristotle said, “What a society honors will be cultivated.” It is time for us to understand, honor, and cultivate the deepest relational elements in our nature.”

— Sue Johnson

27. “We, too, as the Celtic saying goes, “live in the shelter of each other.” World War II historians have noted that the unit of survival in concentration camps was the pair, not the individual. Surveys show that married men and women generally live longer than do their single peers.”

— Sue Johnson

28. “The quality of our love relationships is also a big factor in how mentally and emotionally healthy we are. We have an epidemic of anxiety and depression in our most affluent societies. Conflict with and hostile criticism from loved ones increase our self-doubts and create a sense of helplessness, classic triggers for depression. We need validation from our loved ones. Researchers say that marital distress raises the risk for depression tenfold!”

— Sue Johnson

29. “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.”

— Sue Johnson

30. “Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University makes the point that, “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you are playing.”

— Sue Johnson

31. “Jack Kornfield offers a beautiful image for our new understanding: “We can let ourselves be carried by the river of feeling – because we know how to swim.”

— Sue Johnson

32. “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

33. “When we feel safely linked to our partners, we more easily roll with the hurts they inevitably inflict, and we are less likely to be aggressively hostile when we get mad at them.”

— Sue Johnson

34. “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.”

— Sue Johnson

35. “We live in the shelter of each other.” – Celtic saying.”

— Sue Johnson

36. “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

37. “Emotion comes from a Latin word emovere, to move. We talk of being “moved” by our emotions, and we are “moved” when those we love show their deeper feelings to us. If partners were to reconnect, they indeed had to let their emotions move them into new ways of responding to each other. My clients had to learn to take risks, to show the softer sides of themselves, the sides they learned to hide in the Demon Dialogues.”

— Sue Johnson

38. “This healthy dependence is the essence of romantic love. The bodies of lovers are linked in a “neural duet.” One person sends out signals that alter the hormone levels, cardiovascular function, body rhythms, and even immune system of the other. In loving connection, the cuddle hormone oxytocin floods lovers’ bodies, bringing a calm joy and the sense that everything is right with the world. Our bodies are set up for this kind of connection.”

— Sue Johnson

39. “We are never so vulnerable as when we love.” – Sigmund Freud.”

— Sue Johnson

40. “Love can begin in a thousand ways-with a glance, a stare, a whisper or smile, a compliment, or an insult. It continues with caresses and kisses, or maybe frowns and fights. It ends with silence and sadness, frustration and rage, tears, and even, sometimes, joy and laughter. It can last just hours or days, or endure through years and beyond death. It is something we look for, or it finds us. It can be our salvation or our ruin. Its presence exalts us, and its loss or absence desolates us.”

— Sue Johnson

41. “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.”

— Sue Johnson

42. “Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in his book on the trauma of combat, Odysseus in America, reminds us that there are “two momentous human universals”: that we are all born helpless and dependent, and that we are all mortal and we know it. The only healthy way to deal with this vulnerability is to reach out and hold each other. Then, calmed and strengthened, we can walk out into the world.”

— Sue Johnson

43. “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

44. “If we love our partners, why do we not just hear each other’s calls for attention and connection and respond with caring? Because much of the time we are not tuned in to our partners. We are distracted or caught up in our own agendas. We do not know how to speak the language of attachment, we do not give clear messages about what we need or how much we care. Often we speak tentatively because we feel ambivalent about our own needs. Or.”

— Sue Johnson

45. “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.”

— Sue Johnson

46. “As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you will wind up somewhere else.”

— Sue Johnson

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

— Sue Johnson

48. “She devised a very simple experiment to look at the four behaviors that Bowlby and she believed were basic to attachment: that we monitor and maintain emotional and physical closeness with our beloved; that we reach out for this person when we are unsure, upset, or feeling down; that we miss this person when we are apart; and that we count on this person to be there for us when we go out into the world and explore.”

— Sue Johnson

49. “The demand-withdraw pattern is not just a bad habit, it reflects a deeper underlying reality: such couples are starving emotionally. They are losing the source of their emotional sustenance. They feel deprived. And they are desperate to regain that nurturance.”

— Sue Johnson

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

— Sue Johnson