Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (The Dr. Sue Johnson Collection Book 1)

by Sue Johnson

My couples didn’t care about insights into their childhood relationships. They didn’t want to be reasonable and learn to negotiate. They certainly didn’t want to be taught rules for fighting effectively. Love, it seemed, was all about nonnegotiables. You can’t bargain for compassion, for connection. These are not intellectual reactions; they are emotional responses.

Romantic love was all about attachment and emotional bonding. It was all about our wired-in need to have someone to depend on, a loved one who can offer reliable emotional connection and comfort.

Once I began to use the frame of attachment and bonding, I saw the drama surrounding distressed couples so much more clearly. I also saw my own marriage much more clearly. I understood that in these dramas we are caught up in emotions that are part of a survival program set out by millions of years of evolution. There is no sidestepping these emotions and needs without contorting ourselves all out of shape. I understood that what couple therapy and education had been lacking was a clear scientific view of love.

First they said that emotion was something that adults should control. Indeed, that too much emotion was the basic problem in most marriages. It should be overcome, not listened to or indulged. But most important, they argued, healthy adults are self-sufficient. Only dysfunctional people need or depend on others. We had names for these people: they were enmeshed, codependent, merged, fused. In other words, they were messed up. Spouses depending on each other too much was what wrecked marriages!

recognize and admit 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. Adult attachments may be more reciprocal and less centered on physical contact, but the nature of the emotional bond is the same. EFT focuses on creating and strengthening this emotional bond between partners by identifying and transforming the key moments that foster an adult loving relationship: being open, attuned, and responsive to each other.

Rigorous studies during the past fifteen years have shown that 70 to 75 percent of couples who go through EFT recover from distress and are happy in their relationships. The results appear lasting, even with couples who are at high risk for divorce. EFT has been recognized by the American Psychological Association as an empirically proven form of couple therapy.

“Love is everything it’s cracked up to be . . . ,” Erica Jong has written. “It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, your risk is even greater.”

Marilyn Yalom, in her scholarly book on the history of the wife, admitted defeat and called love an “intoxicating mixture of sex and sentiment that no one can define.”

For better or worse, in the twenty-first century, a love relationship has become the central emotional relationship in most people’s lives. One reason is that we are increasingly living in social isolation. Writers like Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone point out that we suffer from a dangerous loss of “social capital.” (This term was coined in 1916 by a Virginia educator, who noted the continuous help, sympathy, and fellowship that neighbors offered each other.) Most of us no longer live in supportive communities with our birth families or childhood friends close at hand. We work longer and longer hours, commute farther and farther distances, and thus have fewer and fewer opportunities to develop close relationships.

Inevitably, we now ask our lovers for the emotional connection and sense of belonging that my grandmother could get from a whole village.

This drive to emotionally attach — to find someone to whom we can turn and say “Hold me tight” — is wired into our genes and our bodies. It is as basic to life, health, and happiness as the drives for food, shelter, or sex. We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy — to survive.

Bowlby rebelled against the professional dictum that the crux of patients’ problems lay in their internal conflicts and unconscious fantasies. Bowlby insisted the problems were mostly external, rooted in real relationships with real people.

four behaviors that Bowlby and she believed were basic to attachment: that we monitor and maintain emotional and physical closeness with our beloved; that we reach out for this person when we are unsure, upset, or feeling down; that we miss this person when we are apart; and that we count on this person to be there for us when we go out into the world and explore.

physically healthy infant primates who were separated from their mothers during the first year of life grew into socially crippled adults. The monkeys failed to develop the ability to solve problems or understand the social cues of others. They became depressed, self-destructive, and unable to mate.

Bowlby himself had maintained that adults have the same need for attachment — he had studied World War II widows and discovered they exhibited behavior patterns similar to those of homeless youngsters — and that this need is the force that shapes adult relationships.

Psychologists use words like undifferentiated, codependent, symbiotic, or even fused to describe people who seem unable to be self-sufficient or definitively assert themselves with others. In contrast, Bowlby talked about “effective dependency” and how being able, from “the cradle to the grave,” to turn to others for emotional support is a sign and source of strength.

When they felt secure with their lover, they could reach out and connect easily; when they felt insecure, they either became anxious, angry, and controlling, or they avoided contact altogether and stayed distant.

The overall conclusion: a sense of secure connection between romantic partners is key in positive loving relationships and a huge source of strength for the individuals in those relationships.

When we feel generally secure, that is, we are comfortable with closeness and confident about depending on loved ones, we are better at seeking support — and better at giving it.

When we feel safely linked to our partners, we more easily roll with the hurts they inevitably inflict, and we are less likely to be aggressively hostile when we get mad at them.

when we feel safely connected to others we understand ourselves better and like ourselves more.

securely bonded adults were more curious and more open to new information. They were comfortable with ambiguity, saying they liked questions that could be answered in many different ways.

The more we can reach out to our partners, the more separate and independent we can be.

Distress in a relationship adversely affects our immune and hormonal systems, and even our ability to heal.

Contact with a loving partner literally acts as a buffer against shock, stress, and pain.

Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.

Eventually, the what of any fight won’t matter at all. When couples reach this point, their entire relationship becomes marked by resentment, caution, and distance. They will see every difference, every disagreement, through a negative filter.

Until we address the fundamental need for connection and the fear of losing it, the standard techniques, such as learning problem-solving or communication skills, examining childhood hurts, or taking time-outs, are misguided and ineffectual. Happy couples do not talk to each other in any more “skilled” or “insightful” ways than do unhappy couples, Gottman has shown.

When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness, according to a landmark study by Ted Huston of the University of Texas. Indeed, 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.

We are never more emotional than when our primary love relationship is threatened.

The drama of painful emotions didn’t seem to be so overwhelming. These negative patterns always started when one partner tried to reach for the other and could not make safe emotional contact.

When safe connection seems lost, partners go into fight-or-flight mode. They blame and get aggressive to get a response, any response, or they close down and try not to care. Both are terrified; they are just dealing with it differently. Trouble is, once they start this blame-distance loop, it confirms all their fears and adds to their sense of isolation. Emotional edicts as old as time dictate this dance; rational skills don’t change it. Most of the blaming in these dialogues is a desperate attachment cry, a protest against disconnection. It can only be quieted by a lover moving emotionally close to hold and reassure. Nothing else will do. If this reconnection does not occur, the struggle goes on. One partner will frantically try to get an emotional response from the other. The other, hearing that he or she has failed at love, will freeze up. Immobility in the face of danger is a wired-in way to deal with a sense of helplessness.

If you know your loved one is there and will come when you call, you are more confident of your worth, your value. And the world is less intimidating when you have another to count on and know that you are not alone.

Accessibility: Can I reach you? This means staying open to your partner even when you have doubts and feel insecure. It often means being willing to struggle to make sense of your emotions so these emotions are not so overwhelming. You can then step back from disconnection and can tune in to your lover’s attachment cues.

Responsiveness: Can I rely on you to respond to me emotionally? This means tuning in to your partner and showing that his or her emotions, especially attachment needs and fears, have an impact on you. It means accepting and placing a priority on the emotional signals your partner conveys and sending clear signals of comfort and caring when your partner needs them. Sensitive responsiveness always touches us emotionally and calms us on a physical level.

Engagement: Do I know you will value me and stay close? The dictionary defines engaged as being absorbed, attracted, pulled, captivated, pledged, involved. Emotional engagement here means the very special kind of attention that we give only to a loved one. We gaze at them longer, ...

We must know what these raw spots are and be able to speak about them in a way that pulls our partner closer to us.

For all of us, the person we love most in the world, the one who can send us soaring joyfully into space, is also the person who can send us crashing back to earth. All it takes is a slight turning away of the head or a flip, careless remark. There is no closeness without this sensitivity. If our connection with our mate is safe and strong, we can deal with these moments of sensitivity.

Find the Bad Guy is a dead-end pattern of mutual blame that effectively keeps a couple miles apart, blocking reengagement and the creation of a safe haven.

I call it the Protest Polka because I see it as a reaction to or, more accurately, a protest against the loss of the sense of secure attachment that we all need in a relationship. The third dance is Freeze and Flee, or as we sometimes call it in EFT, Withdraw-Withdraw. This usually happens after the Protest Polka has been going on for a while in a relationship, when dancers feel so hopeless that they begin to give up and put their own emotions and needs in the deep freeze, leaving only numbness and distance. Both people step back to escape hurt and despair. In dance terms, suddenly no one is on the floor; both partners are sitting out. This is the most dangerous dance of all.

We have only two ways of protecting ourselves and holding on to our connections with our partners when we do not feel safe and responded to. One route is to avoid engagement, that is, to try to numb our emotions, to shut down and deny our attachment needs. The other is to listen to our anxiety and fight for recognition and response.

The purpose of Find the Bad Guy is self-protection, but the main move is mutual attack, accusation, or blame. The starting cue for this pattern of responses is that we are hurt by or feel vulnerable with our partner and become suddenly out of control. Emotional safety is lost. When we are alarmed, we use anything that promises to give us back this control. We can do this by defining our partner in a negative way, by shining a black light on him or her. We can attack in reactive anger or as a preemptive strike.

The more you attack, the more dangerous you appear to me, the more I watch for your attack, the harder I hit back. And round and round we go. This negative pattern has to be shut down before a couple can build true trust and safety. The secret to stopping the dance is to recognize that no one has to be the bad guy. The accuse/ accuse pattern itself is the villain here, and the partners are the victims.

This is where partners bring up detailed example after detailed example of each other’s failures to prove their point. The couple fight over whether these details are “true” and whose bad behavior “started this.” To help them recognize their Demon Dialogue, I suggest that they: • Stay in the present and focus on what is happening between them right now. • Look at the circle of criticism that spins both of them around. There is no true “start” to a circle. • Consider the circle, the dance, as their enemy and the consequences of not breaking the circle.

“We are starting to label each other, to prove the other one is the bad one here. We are just going to get hurt more if we get stuck in this dance. Let’s not get caught in an attack-attack dance with each other. Maybe we can talk about what happened without it being anyone’s fault”?

Attachment relationships are the only ties on Earth where any response is better than none. When we get no emotional response from a loved one, we are wired to protest. The Protest Polka is all about trying to get a response, a response that connects and reassures.

One partner is demanding, actively protesting the disconnection; the other is withdrawing, quietly protesting the implied criticism.

An aggressive response seems to be wired into primates when a loved one on whom an individual depends acts as if the individual does not exist. An infant human or monkey will attack a stonewalling mother, in a desperate attempt to obtain recognition. If no response occurs, “deadly” isolation, loss, and helplessness follow.

• “I get mad, sure I do. He just doesn’t seem to care, so I smack him, sure I do. I’m just trying to get a response from him, any response.” • “I am just not sure I matter to him. It’s like he doesn’t see me. I don’t know how to reach him.”

Examining these statements closely reveals a wealth of attachment themes: feeling unimportant to or not valued by a partner; experiencing separateness in terms of life and death; feeling excluded and alone; feeling abandoned at a time of need or being unable to depend on a partner; longing for emotional connection and feeling anger at a partner’s lack of responsiveness; experiencing the lover as a friend or a roommate.