Hold Me Tight

Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

By: Sue Johnson

Narrated by: Helen Keeley

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Strengthen and deepen your relationships with revelatory practical exercises, seven profound conversations, and sage advice from “the best couple’s therapist in the world” (John Gottman, PhD, bestselling author)

Are you looking to enrich a healthy relationship, revitalize a tired one, or rescue one gone awry? We all want a lifetime of love, support, and companionship. But sometimes we need a little help.

Enter Dr. Sue Johnson, developer of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy and “the most original contributor to couple’s therapy to come along in the last thirty years,” according to Dr. William J. Doherty, PhD. In Hold Me Tight, Dr. Johnson shares her groundbreaking and remarkably successful program for creating stronger, more secure relationships.

The message of Hold Me Tight is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, get to the emotional underpinnings of your relationship by recognizing 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. Dr. Johnson teaches that the way to enhance or save a relationship is to be open, attuned, and responsive to each other and to reestablish emotional connection. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship and uses them as touch points for seven healing conversations, including:

• Recognizing the Demon Dialogues
• Finding the Raw Spots
• Revisiting a Rocky Moment
• Forgiving Injuries
• Keeping Your Love Alive

These conversations give you insight into the defining moments in your relationship and guide you in reshaping these moments to create a secure and lasting bond.

Through stories from Dr. Johnson’s practice, illuminating advice, and practical exercises, you will learn how to nurture, protect, and grow your relationship, ensuring a lifetime of love.

Life Changing

I first read this book in the aftermath of a divorce. I was trying to understand what went wrong and find hope for the future. While many books helped, this book was life changing.
Now, seven years into a happy marriage, my wife and I read the book as part of her book club. Though our relationship has occasional conflict, we have a generally happy marriage. Even still, we have grown closer together as we have discussed these words.
Read it. It can provide greater hope, healing, and happiness for any relationship.

Valuable insight, presented pretty well.

This is an important book. As the author points out, and most of us already know, finding and holding on to love tends to be the most important thing in life. Career achievement, wealth, and social recognition take up much of our time, along with the pursuit of sex, but people widely acknowledge pertaining any or all of these things without meaningful connections in our lives leaves us feeling despondent rather than successful. Even health, which is legitimately precious, matters to many of us mostly because of our desire to spend more and better time with loved ones. Reading this book in the wake of the 2020 global pandemic is especially interesting, since so many of us are coming out of a period of profound restriction and even isolation. face with returning to the pre-pandemic status quo, many millions of people (especially Americans, who are perennially overworked) are considering abandoning their careers entirely in favor of doing something that allows them more time with family.

My wife and I communicate pretty well. Our life together has experienced some profound changes, and we noticed over the last year or so did all that we remained close, we were getting into more fights. Often, the subject of these fights would be something trivial, but they could come out of nowhere and would often expand into substantial arguments in the emotional sense, with each of us feeling deeply frustrated and resentful. We decided to try couples therapy, and our therapist recommended "Hold Me Tight." I opted for the audio book because it's my tradition to listen to audiobooks instead of music when I run in the morning.

The core of Dr. Johnson's presentation is simple but profound: adult humans need connection as desperately as infants. Adult love is modified from infant love by the influences of sexuality, but the "healthy dependence" of knowing a partner will be there when needed is as strong as a child seeking a parent. Denied or cut off from such support, people will go through the same behaviors as adults that they would have children, demanding attention by acting out or sullenly withdrawing into themselves. This may seem obvious, but from a scientific perspective, it has only recently been given any credit; in fact, as Johnson lays outx it's been less than a century since Western science conceded that love even mattered for infants. In making that admission, science double down on the notion that adults did not need love, preferring to see relationships as negotiations between rational actors. That claim is false: humans are defined by emotion. Only after our amygdalas feel do our prefrontal cortexes she can understand what we are feeling through rational thought.

From this book, I have already gained some substantial insights into why I behave the way I do when I hear certain things my wife says. I am more aware of the fears, jealousies, and concerns that underwrite some of my less anticipated responses. She is reading this book separately from me, and I can't speak to what she might take away from it. There are also limits to the audiobook form when trying to do some of the exercises Dr. Johnson recommends, and it might be there a written copy would have been more helpful for those activties. (On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have been just reading it yet.)

"Hold Me Tight" doesn't have all the answers. Every couple's interactions are unique, and everyone is dealing with his or her own situation. what does provides a framework through which to understand yourself in your interactions more easily. readers will benefit from tools that can use to consider their own responses, channel their perspectives into understanding their true needs, and put in the hard work involved in maintaining a healthy, successful human relationships.

I highly recommend this book.

wish I'd read this sooner

this was so insightful to help identify the cycle that trips up relationships. highly recommend

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During the darkest time of my marriage listening to Hold me Tight has helped me get out of my own head and stop just assuming I knew exactly what my wife needed. In reality I just needed to realize how much I stopped verbalizing to my wife how much her advice and guidance means to me vs acting distant and disconnecting which ultimately made her feel disrespected and leaving her confused.

Answers!!!

I found a wealth of knowledge, guidance and flat out answers to questions that have slowly deteriorated my relationship(s) for years. If you are struggling with your significant other, it’s likely you’ll find what you’re looking for here!