Do You Dance Like this as A Couple?
The negative cycle begins and ends at exactly the same point. She reaches for her husband, her need gets missed and then she shouts and spews anger as she feels ignored. This then causes her partner to pull away as they run and hide.
Book Review for Hold Me Tight, by Dr. Sue Johnson
When most couples first get married, they believe that their job is done. The hard part is behind them. They have met the love of their life and now they can happily breathe a sigh of relief in knowing that they have found the ONE.
Of course, the bubble usually pops at some point, usually after the marriage. Couples realize new things about their partners that they never noticed before. Raw spots get triggered. Often painful and lonely moments creep in. Feelings of hurt and abandonment arise as our dream partner says or does the wrong thing, hits a raw nerve, behaves less than perfectly.
In Sue Johnson’s seminal book, Hold Me Tight, she describes these painful moments as she vividly describes couples who were just about ready to throw in the towel thinking they must have married the WRONG ONE! She vividly illustrates how our early childhood attachment wounds (a theory developed by 1950’s psychologist John Bowlby) remain with us as we choose partners in hopes of healing those wounds. Yet instead despite all of our best efforts, we reach for partners who trigger those same wounds, for the simple reason that we are attracted to that which we know.
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Hold Me Tight is an attempt to offer couples a window into a better understanding about how our connection with our partners can sometimes go awry. She also explains how our demon dialogues – those pesky conversations we replay time and again with the love of our life – can be transformed to Hold Me Tight moments.
In this book, Sue Johnson uses seven primary examples of where most couples will go wrong. She eloquently demonstrates how rewriting these pain inducing conversations, by hearing one another’s deepest fears and seeing our partner in a new light using the attachment goggles, can help bring couples together as they gain a better understanding and appreciation for the other’s wounds.
Hold Me Tight and the theory that underpins the book, “Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy” (EFT), represents a groundbreaking approach to couples therapy. EFT has 20 years of research to back it up. While most schools of couples therapy yields results as low as 35%, EFT touts results as high as 75%.
The EFT approach is so groundbreaking that creators of other well-known programs including John Gottman (the Gottman Method) and Harville Hendrix (Imago Therapy) support the use of this technique for first line treatment in order to heal the couple’s wounds.
Click here to purchase a copy of the book.
