Thanking Those Who Came Before Us

Reflections on the life and work of Sue Johnson.

I was checking my phone a few minutes ago, assuming I’d see nothing of importance and shut off my devices for the night. Instead, I saw a post saying we had lost a giant — that Sue Johnson had died after a 3-year battle with cancer.

For those of you who don’t know who Sue Johnson is, she developed something called Emotionally Focused Therapy, what’s become the golden standard for couples work in the counseling world. In her books, she talks about she was not satisfied with seeing relationships as transactional and wanted to help couples in more meaningful ways — helping them to see, repair, and invest in the emotional bond that was central to the relationship.

Her life and work has stood out to me as fascinating in so many ways. I loved that she saw a problem and decided to do something about it and ended up literally changing the world. I loved that she both made clear that her therapeutic approach was focused on emotions and made sure to demonstrate that it was scientifically evidenced-based. I loved that she would say things like, Secure attachment leads to hot sex in her beautiful British accent. I loved that videos of her counseling clients included her sitting only inches away from them, truly in it with these couples, stepping into their pain, literally holding her clients when necessary.

In and through all of these things and more, I’ve especially loved how she demonstrated honoring the dignity of our embodied beings — our visceral emotions, gut-wrenching longings, and implicit body memories.

What’s fascinating about all of this for me, along with the work of other therapeutic titans, is to compare it with how so much of the church and faith communities have approached people and the entirely of their embodied beings differently. I think about people who have been told their whole lives that they are fundamentally bad and that this is gospel truth. I think about people who have been shamed for enduring the impacts of posttraumatic stress disorder, told to instead have more faith in God. I think about people who have longed for a deeper connection in their relationships, scrutinized for being needy or not relying on God to be enough for them. These experiences are certainly not every person’s story in the church. At the same time, they certainly are many peoples’ stories.

And so, when I think about the life and work of Sue Johnson, I think about someone who came before the Christian therapists and authors who have been able to package their therapeutic theories in Christian books — someone who was doing the hard work of being-with others in their pain, seeing their dignity, and stepping into the sacred spaces of restorative work, all before it was more common for Christians to be doing this work. I think of a pioneer who (unknowingly?) exuded the mercy, grace, loyal love, faithfulness, and patience of the God whose image she was created in. And when I think about this, I have to think about how much we owe to these women and men who really got it before so much of mainstream Christian culture did.

How can we possibly thank those who went before us like this? How do we thank women and men who lived out a representational presence of our God¹ that they weren’t even trying to reflect, but instead, that they reflected in their life and work simply because they were created in God’s image and lived this out beautifully as they honored the image of God in others, again, not trying to do so, but simply because they saw this as basic human decency?

I ask this incredibly long winded question to answer with this: I don’t know if there is anything that can appropriately thank people like Sue Johnson for her work. Even so, I want to honor her life by saying thank you.

Thank you Sue for seeing and hearing the pain and longings that were beneath the surface that were so often silenced or shamed as people being high maintenance or nagging.

Thank you Sue for giving a voice to the hurting parts of so many people that simply longed for love and security.

Thank you Sue for cultivating spaces where couples could find each other and see that they weren’t that different — that even in their different ways of trying to self protect, there was pain inside that could be soothed by the other’s presence.

Thank you Sue for honoring relationships and people as more than transactions, going out of your way and climbing mountains to change how the world would understand relationships.

Thank you Sue for so beautifully living out God’s heart and gently encouraging others to do the same.

Thank you.

1. See Marc Cortez’s work on Theological Anthropology.