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

by Sue Johnson

Neglect will kill love. Love needs attention. Knowing your attachment needs and responding to those of your lover can make a bond last until “death us do part.”

All the clichés about love — when people feel loved they are freer, more alive, and more powerful — are truer than we ever imagined.

Being in a loving relationship augments our caring and compassion for others, in our family and in our community.

Feeling loved and secure makes us kinder and more tolerant people.

When we love our partner well, we offer a blueprint for a loving relationship to our children and their partners.

When we are at our best, we offer support and caring to others because we recognize that they are just like us, human and vulnerable.

Feeling connected, feeling with someone goes hand in hand with feeling for that person.

But I think first we have to learn it and feel it in the tender embrace of a parent or a lover.

“When your heart speaks, take good notes.”

A.R.E. An acronym for a conversation that positively addresses the question Are you there for me? Attachment theory and research tell us that emotional Accessibility (Can I reach you? Will you pay attention to me?), Responsiveness (Can I rely on you to respond and care about my feelings?), and Engagement (Will you value me, put me first, and stay close?) characterize secure bonding interactions between intimates.

Demon Dialogues The three patterns of interaction that form self-perpetuating feedback loops and make secure connection more and more difficult. These patterns are: Find the Bad Guy, or mutual blaming and criticism; the Protest Polka, wherein one person protests lack of safe emotional connection and the other defends and withdraws (the polka is also known as the Demand-Withdraw cycle); and Freeze and Flee, in which both partners withdraw in self-protection.