Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love | Sue Johnson

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love | Sue Johnson | Getting to the heart of it in the first session of couples therapy

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Hold Me Tight: Sev...

	Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Sue Johnson Little, Brown and Company, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Heralded by the New York Times and Time magazine as the couple therapy with the highest rate of success, Emotionally Focused Therapy works because it views the love relationship as an attachment bond. This idea, once controversial, is now supported by science, and has become widely popular among therapists around the world. In HOLD ME TIGHT, Dr. Sue Johnson presents Emotionally Focused Therapy to the general public for the first time. Johnson teaches that the way to save and enrich a relationship is to reestablish safe emotional connection and preserve the attachment bond. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship-from Recognizing the Demon Dialogue to Revisiting a Rocky Moment-and uses them as touchpoints for seven healing conversations. Through case studies from her practice, illuminating advice, and practical exercises, couples will learn how to nurture their relationships and ensure a lifetime of love.

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The best couples book I've read.

There is no end to the relationship books out there, but this one is definitely different. Dr. Johnson gives us the science behind the feeling and then helps us unravel how we get stuck in aloneness and fear. Being in a loving relationship should not feel so separate. Our fast paced,independent and competitive based society leads us into developing entitlement that heightens our sense of being hurt and abandoned. Then self-perpetuating interlocking loops of pursue and defend; demand and withdraw separate us even more from the one we long to feel safe and close to. Thank you Sue Johnson, for publishing the map that guides us through this maze of confused emotions. Thank you from all my clients, my family and myself. Each of my married children have received gifts of this book. I keep mine close at hand. My husband thanks you, too. T. Livingston. MFT

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Getting to the heart of it in the first session of couples therapy

The husband read the book -- said that he and his wife had tried,
unsuccessfully, a lot of couples therapy, and thought EFT might be the
answer. At the first session, the wife had Hold Me Tight peeking out of
her purse. She said, "Sue Johnson must have read my diary." He said he was worried. "It looks worse because she's gone into the next stage -- she's stopped complaining." With very little prompting from me, the two then proceeded to let me know their negative dance. "The second chapter really said it." "We poke each other's raw spots." They delved into their attachment injury which happened "a week after we got married, years ago, and part of our communication ever since." They continued to work at the heart of it for the rest of the hour as if they'd been working this way for many sessions. As a couples therapist, I got the power of this book to accelerate the work in a way that I had not experienced before!

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Readable, useful and timely

Hold Me Tight, Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

By Dr. Sue Johnson

A Layman's Viewpoint

This is an imminently readable book for anyone who is in love, been in love or wants to be. If you are in love, but puzzled by it, this book will help you understand the puzzle. If you have been in love, and wondered what happened, you might find the "what", here. If you want to be, now you will know what to look for. And if you are in love, and everything is fine, you will learn how to keep it that way.

The insights traverse the conceptual aspects of love through the personal, interpersonal and societal levels, and melds the rational and emotional influences of loving relationships smoothly. Dr. Johnson writes clearly and avoids the linguistic sandtraps and overly clinical mumbo-jumbo that usually arises when the simple word 'love" is talked about too much at one time. The writing is for married couples, all manner of couples thinking about marriage or partnership, families and those larger groups in society who care for and tend to one another. The glossary at the back is perfect for those of us who do not "speak the language" of therapists. The practices and exercises are simple and direct. Dr. Johnson says that these may done without professional help but one cannot help but think that they would be more effective with some objective, trained guidance.

Go it alone or go with someone, but, in any case, GO.
Ivan Hentschel
Running Buffalo Woodworks
[...]

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Wonderful relationship builder

This is a great book for anyone in a relationship, whether troubled or not. Cheaper than a therapist, too!

Some good points

I would recommend anything Dr. Johnson writes as her emphasis on emotions and attachment is the best theoretical standard so far. Though this book is written for the public, I think it is a bit long winded in places and not clear enough in others. Some of the theory of attachment for adults and cases illustrations need beefing up: more examples as to how attachment problems evidence themselves in marriages and secondly, longer case presentations to give you a more complete feel of the application and techniques.

The best book to give couples in or out of therapy is John Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert (Paperback). It is well organized, reader friendly, and a great teaching aide to couples therpy. It is itself a class in what makes marriages work.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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