Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B001BC2OBE | Format: PDF
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Description
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 best couple therapist in the world," according to best-selling relationship expert Dr. John Gottman. 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 - from "Recognizing the Demon Dialogues" to "Forgiving Injuries" - and uses them as touch points for seven healing conversations. 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.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 9 hours and 2 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Brilliance Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: April 8, 2008
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B001BC2OBE
The problem with therapy and relationship books is that they are all the equivalent of medieval "medicine." There is no science, no data-driven outcomes, no predictive hypothesis testing and hence no real progress. Every practitioner has their own set of nostrums, some helpful and some absurd, just like every witch-doctor has his own set of feathers and fetish items. Step forward Sue Johnson. Although she has taken only baby-steps towards a true scientific model of attachment relationships, it's welcome progress indeed. Unlike the vast majority of her peers, she grasps that our behaviors have been fashioned by selection pressure over the millennia. She looks for why such behaviors should have adaptive value, and this enables her to side-step the mumbo-jumbo of co-dependence, inappropriate behavior, etc. and get right to the heart of what seems to be going on between couples when their relationship is in trouble.
For people who want confirmation that their partner is "too clingy" or "too cold" or whatever, this is not the book for you. Nor is it a "why you should be strong and suck it up" book. It is about our basic needs, our need for at least one other adult human being to be there for us when we need it. It is about why we're wired up to be that way, what kinds of behaviors result from this hard-wiring, how things can go wrong, and how things can be fixed. At the heart of the book is Johnson's vision of us as all needing at least one refuge, one place of safety and support in an otherwise indifferent and cold universe. Unfortunately, for most people, marriage or an equivalent domestic relationship fails to provide this refuge because we keep misunderstanding our partner's needs and impulses - and very often we misunderstand our own too.
This, together with Gottman's book, is an attempt to deliver an objective and clear guide to resolving relationship difficulties and/or strengthening them. This book (unlike Gottman's) is rooted in attachment theory, which is probably the closest thing to a scientifically based approach to human relationships, or at least there's a biological and evolutionary framework for understanding our emotional needs in relationships. The need for this objective foundation for understanding relationships is pretty obvious when you begin to read through the literature; most of it is vague, superficial or embarrassingly facile. This book attempts to tether its approach to something concrete and verified: we need to be and to feel securely connected to our mates and this need is confirmed in all sorts of ways, both with scientific studies and in anecdotal and clinical settings.
The problem is: what exactly is a secure attachment? When Sue Johnson presents case studies, the answer is something like: partner's need to reaffirm there basic desire and need for a secure attachment. This is done by saying things like: I really need to feel connected, loved, appreciated, valued and desired by you. Relationships flourish when these connected feelings are expressed and reaffirmed. But when you get down to nuts and bolts what behavior exactly, both verbal and physical, constitutes an expression of attachment? And here I think this book fairs about as well as any other.
The fact is that the ways that people can express and feel attached to each is about as varied as all the forms of expression that are available to human beings.
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