Here is the full transcript of clinical psychologist Dr Sue Johnson’s talk titled “The New Frontier of Sex & Intimacy” at TEDxUOttawa conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Announcer: Okay, and now we are very fortunate to have Dr. Sue Johnson, the best-selling author of “Hold Me Tight” and “Love Sense.” She’s a clinical psychologist and distinguished research professor at Alliant International University in San Diego, California, creator of an effective new model of relationship repair known as Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, or Couple Therapy. She has written numerous articles and trained thousands of therapists around the world.
Dr. Johnson is a recognized innovator who has changed the field of couples therapy. She divides her time between New York, San Diego, and Ottawa, and she’s going to talk to us about sexuality and attachment, and how science brings them together now. Please welcome Dr. Sue Johnson.
Sexuality and Attachment
DR SUE JOHNSON: Hi, everybody. Oh, big topic. So, as a species, we seem to be completely obsessed with sex, intimacy, and love. More specifically, we seem to be obsessed with how to put those things together in a way that makes sense. I usually give talks about bonding science, the new science of bonding and love, and how we have cracked the code of love. But what about sex?
And where does sex fit in with our understanding of love? That’s a pretty huge question, but we do sort of understand what sex is, don’t we? I mean, sex is a megawatt animal instinct. It’s a search for orgasm. It’s what my good old English barmaid mother used to call “a funny five minutes,” which is all about sensation.
It’s kind of a big selfie experience that’s in your skin. “Well, wait a minute. No, it’s not. We call it making love.” Sex is the ultimate moment of communion. It’s an ultimate wealthy experience. It’s all about relationships. So, this gets a bit confusing.
Simplifying Complex Concepts
So, let’s see if we can simplify it a bit, and see if we can look at just for a moment at bonding science, and what bonding science tells us about good sex, what good sex is. Right now, there’s an enormous buzz in our society about that good sex has to be about very extreme sensation, even to the point of pain. Good sex has to be about constant novelty. Good sex has to be about expertise in taking really exotic sexual positions.
The one I like best, the name of it I like best is called “Wailing Monkey Clasping Tree,” which is from the new “Joy of Sex.” It sounds kind of difficult to do, but you know. But basically, what bonding science says is, no, actually, the biggest factor in the quality of your sex relationship is the safety of your emotional connection with the person you’re making love with. “Hmm, that’s really interesting. How does that make sense?”
Well, it makes sense because science is telling us that we are bonding animals first and foremost, and that we need this emotional connection with other people to feel safe in the world, to even feel safe in our own skin, that this need for connection has basically wired our brain and wired our nervous system, and it’s even more powerful than lust.
And what this science is really saying is that it’s really only when you take this into account, this need for connection and safety, and really when you have at least taken care of that to a certain extent, that these other instincts, instincts like our need to explore and play and take risks, instincts like caretaking and sexuality, can really come online.
Bonding Science Insights
What these bonding theorists are saying is that passion is not just about desire. Passion is about this longing for connection, twinned with safety that allows you to have erotic play. So, let’s take three things that bonding science tells us and see what they say about sexuality.
First of all, bonding science says that sex is not just about pleasure and procreation. Sex is a potent bonding activity. When we have sex, or not even when we have sex, when we even think of our sweetie, we are flooded with a bonding hormone called oxytocin. And what oxytocin does is it reduces fear in our brain, it has us open up and trust, it makes us feel safe, it heightens our ability to look at other people’s faces and pick up their cues.
The other thing it does is it switches off the habituation effect, so that we can look at our sweetie for 30 years and still have a twinge of pleasure every time we look at their face. This makes sense of the big surveys in the US that have found that actually the people that have the best sex and the most thrilling sex are those in long-term happy relationships.
There’s also a lovely piece of research that shows that if you subliminally prime people to start to become aroused, they automatically start being more orientating towards bonding responses. They start saying they want to be closer, that they want to think about other people, that they’re willing to sacrifice to be with other people. This is fascinating.
Arousal seems naturally to access our attachment needs unless we’re working really hard to shut our emotions down and keep sex impersonal. The other thing we know from bonding science is that securely attached and connected people who have this sense of emotional safety have better sex. They have what we call synchrony sex. That’s just the name to try and capture it.
But synchrony sex is basically sex where people read each other’s cues, tune into each other, can sort of organize their responses to take each other into account, read each other’s intentions. It’s a sort of amazing act of coordination.
It takes at least as much attention, which is hard to give if you don’t feel safe, it takes at least as much attention as a couple putting together and assembling a piece of IKEA furniture. But it’s a lot more fun.
We just did a brain scan study, and this is kind of an aside that I’m going to put in because I can’t resist it. We just did a brain scan study where we actually found that contact with somebody, a partner where you’ve just had bonding conversations with that partner, is so powerful in terms of shutting down fear that we could put you in an fMRI machine and tell you you’re about to be shocked on your ankles.
And if you’re holding your partner’s hand in these circumstances, your brain will stay completely calm. In other words, this sense of safety of this bond is so powerful that it cuts out threat responses and it also tones down your sensitivity to pain. So this is fascinating, fascinating stuff. The other thing that bonding research tells us is that sex is a safe adventure. What do I mean by that?
Well, I think that in terms of, you know, why do people go zip lining? Well, they can let themselves go into the thrill of zip lining. I think it’s a crazy activity, but they’re all smiling away, right? So they let themselves go. Why? Because they know that they’re held onto by a line. They feel safe. The very fact they’re hooked in means that they can let themselves go with the thrill. And there are thousands of studies that make it very clear that when we feel securely connected to somebody, then we can be open to new ideas, we can be curious, we can explore, we can take risks.
So when Amy turns to her husband and says, “You know, sweetie, the fact that I could tell you the other night that some of the positions we take when we make love really scare me, I don’t know why. They really scare me. And the fact that you came and held me when I told you that, somehow that’s made all the difference.” It somehow freed me up. I just feel like I can explore now because I feel safe with you. A bonding theorist would say, exactly.
So the other thing about this is this sense of safety before you can really go into adventure and thrill really seems to be a defining feature in women’s sexuality. If you put men and women into an fMRI machine and subliminally arouse them, everybody’s brain lights up. Yeah. Everybody’s brain lights up. But the interesting thing is, only in women does the prefrontal cortex switch on like crazy. It’s almost like desire primes the woman’s brain to say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What’s happening? Is this safe? Is this safe?”
Understanding Women’s Sexuality
Make sense? Women are very physically vulnerable in sex. And it also makes sense that often, as a couples therapist, what I hear is that women need to talk and check out the relationship before they can let themselves go and descend into arousal. So for women, and I’m talking to all the guys in the room, for women, talking like this before making love is a key part of foreplay. And that’s not because we’re rather strange, that’s because of what I’m talking about here.
Third point. Bonding science says that sex is an emotional dance. How you connect emotionally is how you connect sexually. The signals between partners is the music of the dance. So, securely attached folks who have a lot of security between the two of them are more open emotionally. They can play with their emotions. And when the music in the dance has more range and more depth, then the dance becomes much more multi-dimensional, much more fascinating.
So, we know, for example, if you talk to securely attached folks, they’ll give you a lot of reasons for making love. They’ll say, well, we make love for pleasure, we make love for tension release, we make love to make up, we make love to please each other, we make love just because we feel loving. There’s lots of dimensions to our sexuality. The other thing about that one is there’s this beautiful little feedback loop where in-tune sexuality cues safe sense of bonding and a safe sense of bonding and attachment cues in-tune sexuality. Now, isn’t that a lovely little feedback loop?
So, what I’m telling you is three basic things that we know from bonding science. Sex is a safe adventure. Sex is an emotional dance. And also, sex is a potent bonding activity. One little piece here which isn’t such good news is that when we have trouble with emotion and trouble with safety, it really does set us up for specific kinds of not-so-satisfying sex.
So, people who are really, really focused on rejection and very anxious in sexuality and overwhelmed with emotion, they tell us that in sexuality they’re really focused on whether it’s a proof of love and they’re really focused on comfort. We call it solid sex. And they don’t really care about eroticism. Other folks tell us that they don’t want to be emotionally engaged. They don’t want to be close. They’re quite comfortable shut down emotionally and not connected.
And what they tell us is they just focus on sensation. And they also tell us that sex is a pretty lonely experience and they don’t enjoy it very much. We call this sealed-off sex. The essence of sealed-off sex is it’s like dancing without music. If you like, you can capture it in thinking about the idea that it’s like somebody saying to you, “having a lovely time, wish I was here.”
So, to finish off, what am I telling you? I’m telling you that at this point, the science of love and bonding is something that gives us a new understanding of love so that we can shape it. We know now that safe emotional engagement is the key ingredient in relationships that turn us on in bed and out of bed. A 17th century Moroccan rabbi said, “When the eye of the heart is open, in every atom there are a thousand secrets.”
I’m suggesting that when the heart is open and when we feel safe in sexuality, there are an infinite number of discoveries that go on and on. And love and passion are something that is constantly renewed. And science is now at the point where it’s helping us reach for those 100 secrets with every touch and every shared breath. Thank you.