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.

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.

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.

everyone on this planet has the same basic need for connection.

This book offers lovers a new world, a new understanding of how to love and love well.

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.

“There is a huge and leaden loneliness settling like a frozen winter on so many humans.”

love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life.

Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence.

This drive to emotionally attach — to find someone to whom we can turn and say “Hold me tight” — is wired...

We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and ment...

She devised a very simple experiment to look at the 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.

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.

Openness to new experience and flexibility of belief seems to be easier when we feel safe and connected to others.

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

Having close ties with others is vital to every aspect of our health — mental, emotional, and physical.

emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than smoking or high blood pressure, and we now warn everyone about these two!

“Suffering is a given; suffering alone is intolerable.”

The quality of our love relationships is also a big factor in how mentally and emotionally healthy we are.

We need validation from our loved ones.

Hundreds of studies now show that positive loving connections with others protect us from stress and help us cope better with life’s challenges and traumas.

Simply holding the hand of a loving partner can affect us profoundly,

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

Love is not the icing on the cake of life. It is a basic primary need, like oxygen or water.

What couples and therapists too often do not see is that most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection.

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?

we do not give clear messages about what we need or how much we care.

Happy couples do not talk to each other in any more “skilled” or “insightful” ways than do unhappy couples,

Perhaps because they have more oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, in their blood, women reach out more to others when they feel a lack of connection.

When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness,

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

Distressed partners may use different words but they are always asking the same basic questions, “Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you come when I need you, when I call?” Love is the best survival mechanism there is, and to feel suddenly emotionally cut off from a partner, disconnected, is terrifying. We have to reconnect, to speak our needs in a way that moves our partner to respond.

Loving connection is the only safety nature ever offers us.

When safe connection seems lost, partners go into fight-or-flight mode.

It can only be quieted by a lover moving emotionally close to hold and reassure. Nothing else will do.

If you know your loved one is there and will come when you call, you are more confident of your worth, your value.

Emotional engagement here means the very special kind of attention that we give only to a loved one. We gaze at them longer, touch them more. Partners often talk of this as being emotionally present.

no one can dance with a partner and not touch each other’s raw spots.

Once we get caught in a negative pattern, we expect it, watch for it, and react even faster when we think we see it coming.

“When in doubt, say or do nothing” is terrible advice in love relationships.

If I appeal to you for emotional connection and you respond intellectually to a problem, rather than directly to me, on an attachment level I will experience that as “no response.”

Often men say that they do not know how to respond on an emotional level. But they do! They do it when they feel safe, most often with their children.

If a safe, loving bond is to stay strong and grow, couples have to be able to repair moments of disconnection and step out of common dead-end ways of dealing with them, ways that actually exacerbate disconnection by destroying trust and safety.

For example, Juan found that just telling his wife, Anna, “I see that you’re really upset and need something from me but I don’t know what to do here,” was enough.

No one is reaching for anyone here. No one will take any risks. So there is no dance at all. If the couple doesn’t get help and this continues, a point comes when there is then no way to renew trust or revive the dying relationship. Then this Freeze and Flee cycle will finish the partnership.

He wondered if it was because he was simply too serious and “in his head” to be with a woman.

What other information could possibly be as relevant in our daily framing of who we are? Those we love are our mirror.

Withdrawal and rage are the hallmarks of Demon Dialogues, and they mask the emotions that are central in vulnerability: sadness, shame, and, most of all, fear.