World authority on love and intimate relationships

SUSAN JOHNSON December 17, 1947-April 23, 2024

I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Dr Susan Johnson in April. Sue was born in England and died in Canada, where she had lived for most of her life.

Aged 76, Sue, a world-renowned authority on love and relationships, was named a member of the Order of Canada and was a recipient of an award for distinguished professional contributions to applied research from the American Psychological Association. Although I never met her, I was fortunate to attend the two-day Johnson-Gottman Summit, in which she featured in 2013. I’m also intimately acquainted with her work.

Sue thought she was an effective therapist until she had to do couples therapy as part of her doctoral thesis in the 1980s. She, like most other couples’ therapists at that time, wasn’t particularly successful in helping couples relate better or be happier.

Her dogged determination to solve the puzzle of why relationship counselling had a low success rate is inspirational. After videotaping her therapy sessions, she watched each of them six to eight times trying to better understand what was happening in attachment relationships. This endeavour led her to comprehend the heart of what matters to lovers.

Previous relationship therapies had focused on modifying behaviour and thinking. Emotion had to be tamed. However, Sue came to see that when couples share their emotional world with each other, their love deepens. Additionally, she identified that emotional connection is a vital ingredient in attachment relationships. What’s more, contrary to the beliefs of her predecessors, Sue recognised that mutual emotional dependence is a strength that can provide shelter in times of personal crisis.

Sue also came to believe that love has enormous power to help heal the devastating emotional wounds from our past, and that it can also augment our sense of connection with others. Compellingly, she learnt that to be happy couples need to feel really loved, prioritised, understood and supported by each other.

Having observed clients protesting when they didn’t get an emotional response from their partner, she began to see couples’ fights as disconnection protests. From this observation, later research suggested that we’re actually hard-wired to protest under certain circumstances. And, ultimately, her research revealed that emotional responsiveness is the highest predictor of couples’ relationship satisfaction.

Together with her doctoral thesis supervisor Dr Leslie Greenberg, Sue channelled what she learnt about couples’ dynamics into a therapeutic model, which evolved into emotionally focused couple therapy (EFCT). Research later demonstrated that distressed couples’ relationship satisfaction rocketed after they engaged in EFCT.