Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
Book Summary of “Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love”.
The headline of the full-page obituary of Canada’s Globe and Mail on Saturday, May 04, 2024 read, Psychologist Started Global Movement with Emotionally Focused Therapy. As a counselling therapist, like hundreds, if not thousands of therapists around the globe, I took courses from Dr. Sue Johnson. I also read a couple of her books including the 2008 bestselling book, Hold Me Tight.
Of course, I felt sad. was an inspiring and passionate teacher of the impact of relational attachment. She thoroughly researched her experiences while staying faithful to Attachment Theory. Also, sad and shocking was that Johnson died at age 76 of a rare form of melanoma, a year younger than me.
Overview of Hold Me Tight
As mentioned, Johnson’s underpinning philosophy was supported by the 1960s research of the late British psychologist, John Bowlby, who described attachment as:
“a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.”
Bowlby proposed that infant and early attachments serve as a blueprint for how we relate to others throughout our lives. This theory also aligns with the Polyvagal Theory developed by Dr. Stephen Porges in the last 20 years.
Bowlby described four basic behaviour patterns related to attachment:
- Checking for and maintaining emotional and physical closeness with caregivers.
- Reaching out to caregivers when feeling distressed or discouraged.
- Missing caregivers when separated from them.
- Trusting them to be there when as we go out into the world.
Johnson proposed that all these attachment tendencies exist in our primary and intimate relationships.
In Johnson’s couples work she focused on rebuilding emotional connection and repairing couples’ bonds with one another. To support her goal of strengthening couples’ relationships, in “Hold Me Tight” she describes her model, includes many couple examples, and stories, and provides guidance to engage in her Seven Conversations. These are crucial conversations that can deepen any relationship if both partners are courageously willing to engage in them.
Key Concepts in Hold Me Tight
- The importance and influence of connection and love on your physical and emotional well-being is explored. Our mental health is significantly affected by our intimate relationships.
- Emotional reactions or triggers are explained in relationship to patterns of disconnection to ourselves, and our partners.
- Conversation one is about acknowledging our dysfunctional reactions showing u up in our relationship. Johnson referred to these as Demon Dialogues.
- Conversation two is about becoming aware of our tender spots or triggers. Johnson referred to this process as Finding the Raw Spots. Trauma is often involved in our nervous system reactions. She emphasizes the importance of being honest with our partners about these triggers so that we can avoid stepping on them.
- Conversation three is about putting a plan in place to better manage our differences, conflicts, and moments of triggering one another’s Raw Spots.
- Conversation four is about the importance of the key theme of Hold Me Tight. It’s about becoming emotionally safe and welcoming for one another, a soft place to land.
- Conversation five is about the role of forgiveness in relationships; how to effectively offer it affectively and receive it.
- Conversation six is about how touch and sex play a significant role in emotional and safe connection. She also explores the different means and desires for sex.
- Conversation seven is about deepening a loving and connected relationship. Johnson emphasized the importance of how repair disconnection. Connection, disconnection, and re-connection are a part of most healthy relationships.
- Johnson also encouraged readers to delve into and heal their own trauma. This would benefit the individual and enable them to bring their best selves to the relationship.
17 Sue Johnson Quotes:
- “For better or worse, in the twenty-first century, a love relationship has become the central emotional relationship in most people’s lives.
- “Inevitably, we now ask our lovers for the emotional connection and sense of belonging that my grandmother could get from a whole village. Compounding this is the celebration of romantic love fostered by our popular culture.”
- “The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be.”
- “Science from all fields is telling us very clearly that we are not only social animals, but animals who need a special kind of close connection with others, and we deny this at our peril.”
- “Love is not the icing on the cake of life. It is a basic primary need, like oxygen or water. Once we understand and accept this, we can more easily get to the heart of relationship problems.”
- “The lack of emotional responsiveness rather than the level of conflict is the best predictor of how solid a marriage will be five years into it. The demise of marriages begins with a growing absence of responsive intimate interactions. The conflict comes later.”
- “When we are attacking or counterattacking, we try to put our feelings aside. After a while we can’t find them at all. Without feelings as our compass in the territory of close relationships, we are effectively lost.”
- “If we cannot name and accept our own attachment needs, sending clear messages to others when those needs are “hot” is impossible.”
- “We all are vulnerable in love; it goes with the territory. We are more emotionally naked with those we love and so sometimes, inevitably, we hurt each other with careless words or actions.”
- “If we have generally found others to be safe havens and have a secure bond with our lover, then it is easier for us to keep our emotional balance when we feel vulnerable, connect with our deepest feelings, and voice the attachment longing that is always part of us.”
- “Partners often try to handle relationship injuries by ignoring or burying them. That is a big mistake.”
- “Letting go of resentment and absolving a person’s bad conduct is the right and good thing to do. But this decision alone will not restore faith in the injuring person and the relationship. What partners need is a special type of healing conversation that fosters not just forgiveness but the willingness to trust again.”
- Understanding attachment injuries and knowing that you can find and offer forgiveness if you need to gives you incredible power to create a resilient, lasting bond. There is no injury-proof relationship. But you can dance together with more verve and panache if you know you can recover when you step on each other’s toes.
- “Emotional connection creates great sex, and great sex creates deeper emotional connection.”
- “Secure relationships are a supple springboard for the most arousing adventurous encounters. And in turn, keeping your physical relationship open, responsive, and engaged helps keep your emotional connection strong.”
- “I help couples design their own bonding rituals, especially recognizing moments of meeting and separation or key times of belonging. These are deliberately structured moments that foster ongoing connection.”
- “Love is not a mystical, mysterious force that sweeps us off our feet, as those love songs suggest. It is our survival code and contains an exquisite logic that we are now able to understand. This means that a resilient, deeply satisfying love relationship is not a dream, but an attainable goal for us all. And that changes everything.”
Conclusion
Sue Johnson’s legacy will live on in her presentations (many available online), the therapists she trained, and the books she wrote, including the practical and helpful, Hold Me Tight.
