Dr. Sue Johnson, pictured after receiving the Order of Canada in 2016, developed a model of treatment for couples, known as Emotionally Focused Therapy. She emphasized on emotional bonds, love and attachment theory as keys to helping couples repair broken relationships.Courtesy of family
Sue Johnson, the Canadian psychologist who created and popularized Emotionally Focused Therapy, an innovative approach to treating troubled couples that turned into a movement and spread around the world, died on April 23 in Victoria from a rare form of melanoma. She was 76.
Born in England, Dr. Johnson came to Canada as a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, where she earned a doctorate in psychology. Moving to Ottawa, she developed her new model of treatment, also known as EFT, as a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa and as a practising therapist.
Armed with studies showing evidence that her treatment approach was effective, she overcame resistance from other therapists who disagreed with her emphasis on emotional bonds, love and attachment theory as keys to helping clients repair broken relationships.
A tireless researcher and gifted public speaker, Dr. Johnson became a spokesperson for EFT not just at academic conferences but on TV and as a highly successful writer. In 2008, she published Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, a self-help guide to EFT written for lay readers. It has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into 30 languages.
“She was a force of nature,” said David Barlow, emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Boston University. “She was a performer in the good sense of the word. She could get up on a stage and entertain people and convey her message clearly and in an interesting way.”
Dr. Barlow said that her contribution to the field is that “she shifted the focus back to the all-important, underlying emotional life of couples,” which had been overlooked in favour of cognitive and behavioural approaches. And rather than just develop an attractive theory, he said, Dr. Johnson tackled the hard work of producing evidence to prove that her approach obtained good results.
Susan Maureen Driver was born in the English naval town of Gillingham, Kent, east of London, on Dec. 19, 1947, the only child of Arthur and Winifred Driver. Arthur, who had served in the Royal Marines during the Second World War, ran a pub with Winifred, who later became a hairdresser. The pub, called the Royal Marine, was at the centre of Sue’s life from an early age.
“I grew up in a raucous pub full of flirting and fighting,” she later recalled. That experience sparked an early fascination with the often tumultuous nature of relationships, notably that of her parents. “My parents obviously loved each other but systematically destroyed each other in front of my eyes,” she said. They separated, though they remained emotionally entwined for years after.
A Catholic priest who was a frequent patron of the pub convinced young Sue’s parents to enroll her in a nearby Catholic girls’ school even though the family was Protestant. Sue spent 13 years studying with the nuns and developed a reputation of being questioning and irreverent, announcing at the age of 12 that the Pope was “obviously not infallible,” to the chagrin of her teachers.
Sue was a strong student and after leaving the nuns, headed north where she earned an undergraduate degree in English literature at the University of Hull. Money was tight so Sue, a talented singer, teamed up with a few girlfriends and performed sea shanties at local pubs, where they were paid with beer.
On graduating from university in the late 1960s, she decided to head to Canada for graduate work. “She wanted to escape England,” her husband, John Douglas, said. As a child of the British working class – she admitted to ditching her Cockney accent and cultivating a more neutral English – she hated Britain’s class system and felt she had to leave what she saw as a restrictive and misogynist society. She sailed to Canada and took a train to Vancouver, arriving at the University of British Columbia with $20 in her pocket.
She enrolled in a master’s program, studying literature and history, and eventually landed a job as a counsellor at a residential treatment centre for emotionally disturbed teens, where she got her first taste of being a therapist. With only a year of teacher training behind her and no formal background in therapy, she was nonetheless hooked on the work and enrolled in doctoral studies in psychology at UBC, earning her PhD in 1984. That doctoral work became the foundation of EFT.
She married in the meantime, taking her husband’s surname of Johnson and continuing to use it professionally even after the marriage ended in divorce. In 1984, Dr. Johnson moved to Ottawa, where she was hired in a teaching position in University of Ottawa’s psychology department and began seeing her own clients.
Gail Palmer was a social worker in outpatient psychiatry on the Ottawa Civic Hospital’s family therapy team when Dr. Johnson arrived to head the team in 1988. “She was a dynamite presence. I mean, she wore leather pants and had red hair.” But most of all, she was “on fire” to develop her new approach to couples’ therapy and used the clinic to conduct some of her research.
Clients would agree to be interviewed by Dr. Johnson with psychology residents and others observing their interaction from behind a one-way mirror. It was a daunting prospect but she would put her clients at ease immediately by greeting them in the waiting room, crouching down and reassuring them about the coming session. “She would just make it incredibly safe,” Ms. Palmer said.
At the time, couples therapy emphasized the need to change behaviour and to learn how to compromise, Ms. Palmer said, but that approach often boomeranged. She recalled giving couples “homework,” which involved designating certain days as “caring days,” where they would work on caring for each other by sharing tasks. “Guess what? They would go home and fight about caring days,” Ms. Palmer said.
EFT challenged the idea that there was too much emotion in most marriages and that feelings needed to be controlled. Couples who were too dependent on each other emotionally were considered dysfunctional. EFT rejected that outlook. “The message of EFT is simple,” Dr. Johnson wrote. “Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner.”
Dr. Johnson wasn’t just tireless, she was charismatic when she gave talks, whether to students or academics, Ms. Palmer said. “She’d intersperse her teaching with all these stories that were so mesmerizing. She’d have hundreds of people in the palm of her hand.”
In 1999, Dr. Johnson joined Ms. Palmer and another colleague to found the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute, which became the centre of their practice. She later established the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy, which now offers training for therapists through 100 affiliated centres in 30 countries from Canada, the U.S. and Britain to China, Iran and Australia. Ms. Palmer recently travelled to northern Quebec to present EFT to the local Inuit community after the program was translated into Inuktitut.
In 1987, a hospital colleague introduced her brother, Mr. Douglas, to Dr. Johnson. The two immediately clicked and within a year they were married and began a remarkable personal and professional collaboration. “It was one of those things that happens when you’ve had a previous marriage and when you find this person, you say, this is what I’ve been looking for,” Mr. Douglas said. “We fell in love but she taught me how to love in a whole different way.”
Mr. Douglas, a manager at an engineering firm, began to help Dr. Johnson with the financial side of her work and after her career took off, he left his job and concentrated on running Dr. Johnson’s business affairs, including publications, personal appearances and a range of other activities.
In the highly competitive world of couples’ therapy, where high-profile practitioners vie for attention, Dr. Johnson also attracted criticism, notably from therapists who questioned the validity of her scientific evidence and disagreed with her emphasis on attachment theory to the exclusion of other motivations that can also be at the core of romantic love.
After writing a dozen books, chapters for other publications and many articles, mostly for professional audiences, Dr. Johnson decided to head in a new direction, releasing Edgar and Elouise in 2022. The book was inspired by encounters with her nine-year-old granddaughter Amelie, who would visit every Monday afternoon for homeschooling. The two would inevitably end up playing with two large puppets, Edgar, a depressed crow, and Elouise, an arrogant fox. Helping along the relationship between the two friends was Spike, whom Dr. Johnson described as “a kind of therapist porcupine.”
Locked down by COVID-19 and deprived of their weekly get-togethers, Dr. Johnson decided to write down the stories in a book illustrated with watercolour drawings. Edgar and Elouise teaches about love, friendship and dealing with emotions, but Dr. Johnson insisted that it was more than a children’s book, saying it could be read by anyone from 9 to 90. “You can read it on different levels.”
When she approached publishers, she was told she would have to adapt it because “it didn’t fit into any of the nice, neat little boxes they want,” Dr. Johnson said, adding that “the market can go to hell. This is my thing and if people don’t want to read it, that’s okay.” So she self-published the book.
After retiring from the University of Ottawa, she and her husband moved to Victoria in 2018 to be closer to their three children.
When Dr. Johnson wasn’t travelling internationally, she spent time on a range of pursuits including gardening, hiking, reading history and tango dancing. She kept on working until six weeks before her death.
She was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2016 and named Family Psychologist of the Year by the American Psychological Association in 2016, among several honours.
Dr. Johnson leaves her husband, Mr. Douglas; children, Sarah, Tim and Emma; and her granddaughter, Amelie.
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