Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (The Dr. Sue Johnson Collection, 1)
Are you looking to enrich a healthy relationship, revitalize a tired one, or rescue one gone awry? We all want a lifetime of love, support, and companionship. But sometimes we need a little help.
Enter Dr. Sue Johnson, developer of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy and "the most original contributor to couple's therapy to come along in the last thirty years," according to Dr. William J. Doherty, PhD. In Hold Me Tight, Dr. Johnson shares her groundbreaking and remarkably successful program for creating stronger, more secure relationships.
The message of Hold Me Tight is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, get to the emotional underpinnings of your relationship by recognizing that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Dr. Johnson teaches that the way to enhance or save a relationship is to be open, attuned, and responsive to each other and to reestablish emotional connection. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship and uses them as touch points for seven healing conversations, including:
- Recognizing the Demon Dialogues
- Finding the Raw Spots
- Revisiting a Rocky Moment
- Forgiving Injuries
- Keeping Your Love Alive
Through stories from Dr. Johnson's practice, illuminating advice, and practical exercises, you will learn how to nurture, protect, and grow your relationship, ensuring a lifetime of love.
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Community Reviews
Basic point, couples build successful relationships by making each other feel psychologically safe and responding to each other's needs for connection / attachment. The theory seems to have started in child psychology; Johnson extended it to adults.
She spends most of the book applying these ideas to specific situations, such as: (1) identify common unsafe conversations (e.g., stonewalling, blaming); (2) arrest unsafe conversations once they have started (e.g., describing what is happening, using words and gestures to create safety); (3) create strong emotional bonds by being open, expressing your needs, and responding when your partner does this (the eponymous hold me tight conversation).
The author sprinkles in a hodge podge of other chapters about trauma, sex, emotionally charged topics, etc. These various ideas are helpful. However, if they had been separated from the core 'system' above, the book would have been simpler and easier to apply.
The book is not well edited. One reviewer called it "profound ideas expressed in amazingly barfy language" and I'm not sure I can improve on the description. A typical sentence reads: "An attachment cue that irritates a raw spot sets of an "uh, oh" alarm." Woof.
Johnson needlessly invents about one term per page, crams them together into sentences, and then challenges us to remember what they all mean simultaneously. It's exhausting, but her ideas are worth it.
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