Big Ideas

Hold Me Tight offers a battle tested methodology for building strong, lasting, loving relationships based on years of research working with thousands of patients. Instead of focusing on tactics such as communication and conflict resolution skills, Dr. Johnson helps couples build a foundation of emotional accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement.

Her methodology, called Emotionally Focused Therapy or EFT for short, emphasizes the need to establish emotional safety and connection first. Only once emotional safety is established, couples can begin the work of finding positive ways to address the core problems impacting their relationship.

Problems in a relationship generally manifest as one of three patterns:

• Find the Bad Guy - casting mutual blame, blocking reengagement, and creating independent safe havens
• Protest Polka - one partner attacks, the other retreats in an attempt to regain a loss of connection
• Freeze and Flee - both partners shut down emotionally and disconnect
  

Next, partners identify their raw spots, or "hypersensitivity formed by moments in a person's past or current relationships when an attachment need has been repeatedly neglected, ignored or dismissed." Once the triggers have been identified as well as the patterns of conflict that ensue when a raw spot is rubbed, couples can start to reengage around particularly painful subjects without falling into those same, destructive patterns.

By continuing to having conversations with each other around difficult areas in a way that's responsive and engaged, couples build trust, safety, and connection. With practice they learn to forgive past wrongs while creating new narratives for their past, present and future.

Notes

A New Light on Love

Love - A Revolutionary New View

• Love is "the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species."
• Love is "our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence."
• Attachment Theory
• ~Solid research suggests that children require physical and emotional connection with a parent for healthy emotional and social development
• ~Less culturally accepted but equally true is the fact that adults also require secure physical and emotional connection in order to thrive.

Where Did Our Love Go? Losing Connection

• "Most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection."
• "Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me?"
• Conflict triggers an unconscious, primitive fear of losing our core emotional support system.
• More securely attached partners are better able to manage temporary disconnection whereas for less securely attached partners this fear can take over and damage the relationship.
• "Until we address the fundamental need for connection and the fear of losing it, the standard techniques, such as learning problem-solving or communication skills, examining childhood hurts, or taking timeouts, are misguided and ineffectual."
• "The standard remedies do not address yearnings for or threats to safe emotional connection."
• "When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness."

Emotional Responsiveness - The Key to a Lifetime of Love

• EFT = Emotional Focused Therapy
• "The basis of EFT is seven conversations that are aimed at encouraging a special kind of emotional responsiveness."
• Emotional responsiveness has three main components:
• ~Accessibility: Can I reach you?
• Responsiveness: Can I rely on you to respond to me emotionally?
• ~Engagement: Do I know you will value me and stay close?
• A.R.E. as in "Are you there, are you with me?"

Seven Transforming Conversations

I. Recognizing the Demon Dialogues

• Couples exhibit three primary behavioral patterns when they are struggling to safely connect with each other
• Find the Bad Guy
• ~mutual blame
• ~blocking reengagement
• ~creation of a safe haven
• Protest Polka - a reaction to the loss of the sense of secure attachment
• Freeze and Flee
• ~hopelessness
• ~emotional numbing
• ~distancing
• People have "two ways of protecting ourselves and holding on to our connections with our partners when we do not feel safe and responded to."
• ~Avoid engagement, numb our emotions, shut down, and deny our attachment needs
• ~Listen to our anxiety and fight for recognition and response
  

Find the Bad Guy

• "The purpose of Find the Bad Guy is self-protection, but the main move is mutual attack, accusation, or blame."
• "The starting cue for this pattern of responses is that we are hurt by or feel vulnerable with our partner [...] emotional safety is lost."
• "The secret to stoping the dance is to recognize that no one has to be the bad guy. The accuse/accuse pattern itself is the villain here, and the partners are the victims."
  

The Protest Polka

• "One partner reaches out, albeit in a negative way, and the other steps back, and the pattern repeats."
• This can go on indefinitely because "attachment relationships are the only ties on Earth where any response is better than none."
• "The Protest Polka is all about trying to get a response, a response that connects and reassures."
• "Unlike the obvious attack-attack pattern of Find the Bad Guy, the Protest Polka is more subtle. One partner is demanding, actively protesting the disconnection; the other is withdrawing, quietly protesting the implied criticism."
• "Both men and women are inculcated with social beliefs that help ensnare them in the polka. Most destructive is the belief that a healthy, mature adult is not supposed to need emotional connection and so is not entitled to this kind of caring."
• Recognizing the phases of the polka and seeing it in its entirety is critical to exit the polka and build a healthy relationship.
  

Freeze and Flee

• "Both partners are shut down into frozen defense and denial. Each is in self-protection mode, trying to act as if he or she does not feel and does not need."
• "This is what happens when the pursuing, critical partner gives up trying to get the spouse's attention and goes silent."
• "The real problem with the Freeze and Flee cycle is the hopelessness that colors it. Both of these partners had decided that their difficulty lay in themselves, in their innate flaws. The natural response to this is to hide, to conceal one's unlovable self."

II. Finding the Raw Spots

• A raw spot is a "hypersensitivity formed by moments in a person's past or current relationships when an attachment need as been repeatedly neglected, ignored or dismissed, resulting in a person's feeling what I call the "2 Ds" - emotionally deprived or deserted."
• "These sensitivities frequently arise from wounding relationships with significant people in our past"
• ~Parents
• ~Siblings
• ~Past lovers
• "If you find yourself continually stuck in a Demon Dialogue with your lover, you can bet it is being sparked by attempts to deal with the pain of a sort spot, or more likely, spore spots in both of you."
• Signs that a raw spot has been hit
• ~"Sudden radical shift in the emotional tone of the conversation"
• ~"Reaction to a perceived offense often seems way out of proportion"
• "We will never create a really strong, secure connection if we do not allow our lovers to know us fully, or if our lovers are unwilling to know us."
• "We want and need our lovers to respond to our hurt. But they can't do that if we don't show it. To love well requires courage - and trust."

III. Revisiting a Rocky Moment

• "To reconnect, lovers have to be able to de-escalate the conflict and create a basic emotional safety."
• Steps to de-escalate disconnection
• ~Stopping the game
• ~Claiming your own moves
• ~Claiming your own feelings
• ~Owning how you shape your partner's feelings
• ~Asking about your partner's deeper emotions
• ~Sharing about your own deeper, softer emotions
• ~Standing together

IV. Hold Me Tight - Engaging and Connecting

• "By deliberately creating moments of engagement and connection" couples can build and sustain a secure bond over time, long after the initial spark
• The goal of conversations 1, 2, and 3 is to establish emotional safety
• The Hold Me Tight conversation is about generating "positive patterns of reach for and responding to your loved one."
• Two parts
• ~What am I most afraid of?
• ~What do I need most from you?
• The "what am I most afraid of" part of the conversation is aimed at gaining greater emotional clarity and communicate our core attachment fears
• The "what do I need most from you" part of the conversation involves "directly stating the attachment needs that right now only your partner can satisfy."
• It's not easy to accept and acknowledge your own emotional reality, but it can be even harder to open it up to your partner.
• "By knowing and trusting their own emotions and reaching past their fears, they are stronger, individually and together. When couples can do this, they can more easily repair conflicts and rifts and shape a nurturing, loving connection."

V. Forgiving Injuries

• "Certain incidents do more than just touch our raw sports or 'hurt our feelings'. They injure us so deeply that they overturn our world. They are relationship traumas."
• They are the "Never Again" moments.
• "Lack of an emotionally supportive response by a loved one at a moment of threat can color a whole relationship ... it can eclipse hundreds of smaller positive events and, in one swipe, demolish the security of a love relationship."
• The power comes from a negative answer to the fundamental questions
• ~"Are you there for me when I am most in need?"
• ~"Do you care about my pain?"
• "Until these incidents are confronted and resolved, true accessibility and emotional engagement are out of the question."
• "Sometimes partners do succeed in compartmentalizing traumas, but this results in a cool and distant relationship. And the barricade works only for a while. Injured feelings break out  at some point when attachments needs come to the fore."
• "The only way out of these attachment injuries is to confront and heal them together."
• "The first goal for partners is forgiveness."
• "Renewed trust is the ultimate goal."
• Six Steps to Forgiveness
• ~"The hurt partner needs to speak his or her pain as openly and simply as possible."
• ~"The injuring partner stays emotionally present and acknowledges the wounded partner's pain and his/her part in it."
• ~"Partners start reversing the 'Never Again' dictum"
• ~"Injuring partners now take ownership of how they inflicted this injury on their lover and express regret and remorse."
• ~"A Hold Me Tight conversation can now take place, centering around the attachment injury."
• ~"The couple now create a new story that captures the injuring event, how it happened, eroded trust and connection, and shaped Demon Dialogues. Most important, the story describes how they together confronted the trauma and began to heal it."
• "Injuries may be forgiven, but they never disappear. Instead the best outcome, they become integrated into couples' attachment stories as demonstrations of renewal and connection."

VI. Bonding Through Sex and Touch

• Sex is an essential component in keeping couples together and building a lasting relationship.
• "Secure bonding and fully satisfying sexuality go hand in hand; they cue off and enhance each other. Emotional connection creates great sex, and great sex creates deeper emotional connection."
• "When partners are emotionally accessible, response and engaged, sex becomes intimate play, a safe adventure."
• "Satisfied partners see sex as just one of many sources of pleasure and intimacy, while despondent partners home in on sex and often view it as the chief source of trouble."
• Sex is often a leading indicator of a couple losing connection and a lack of emotional safety.
• Three Kinds
• ~Sealed-Of-Sex
• ~Solace Sex
• ~Synchrony Sex
• In Sealed-Of-Sex "the goal is to reduce sexual tension, achieve orgasm, and feel good about our sexual prowess. It happens with those who have never learned to trust and don't want to open up, or who are feeling unsafe with their partners. The focus is on sensation and performance."
• Solace Sex "occurs when are seeking reassurance that we are value and desired ... the goal is to alleviate our attachment fears."
• Synchrony Sex "is when emotional openness and responsiveness, tender touch, and erotic exploration all come together. This is the way sex is supposed to be."
• The most common sexual problems:
• ~low sexual desire in women
• ~premature ejaculation or lax erections in men
• "Passion is not a constant. Desire naturally waxes and wanes."
• "These fluctuations, however, hit a nerve in most of us and, unless we can talk about them openly, can easily spark or heighten relationship problems."
• "Many partners can tolerate infrequent intercourse, but they cannot tolerate feeling that their partners do not desire them."
• Using A.R.E. conversations can help each partner express their needs and create a space for each to have those needs met

VII. Keeping Your Love Alive

• "A.R.E. conversations are the language of love. They shore up the safe haven that is your relationship and nurture your ability to be flexible, to explore, and to keep your love alive and growing."
• Steps for taking your love into the future:
• ~"Recapping and reflecting on the danger points in your relationship where you slide into insecurity and get stuck in Demon Dialogues."
• ~"Celebrating the positive moments, big and small."
• ~"Planning rituals around the moments of separation and reunion in your daily lives to mark recognition of your bond, support, and responsiveness."
• ~"Helping each other identify the attachment issues in recurring differences and arguments and deciding how to defuse these issues up-front to deliberately create emotional safety and trust."
• ~"Create a Resilient Relationship Story. This story describes how the two of you have built and are continuing to build a loving bond."
• ~"Create a Future Love Story. This story outlines what you want your bond to look like five or ten years down the road and how you would like your partner's help in making the vision a reality."
• "When you move into new ways of connecting with your partner, it is useful to take the new emotions, perceptions, and responses and integrate them into a narrative that captures all these changes. The Resilient Relationship Story give you a coherent way of reflecting on your relationship drama, a drama that is always unfolding no matter how clear your focus."
• "In the end, all of this review ritual, and story making are simply ways of encouraging couples to continuously pay attention to their relationships. This attention is the oxygen that keeps a relationship alive and well."

Healing Traumatic Wounds - The Power of Love

• "If you have a responsive love partner, you have a secure base in the chaos. If you are emotionally alone, you are in free fall."
• "Having someone you can rely on for connection and support makes healing from trauma easier."
• "If we cannot successfully connect with others, our struggles to cope with trauma become less effective, and our main resource, our love relationship, often begins to sink under its weight."
• "On the other hand, facing the monster with a loved on beside is gives us the best shot at finding our strength and resilience."
• "Whether we explicitly share what has happened to us or not, trauma is always a couple issues. Partners feel the string and stress as they watch their lvoers cope with their wounds, and they also grieve their changed relationships."
• A secure bond helps deal with trauma by
• ~"Soothing pain and giving us comfort"
• ~"Helping us hold on to hope"
• ~"Reassuring us that the "new" person we have become is still valued and loved"
• ~"Helping us to make sense of what happened"
• "Emotional connection is crucial to healing."
• "The biggest sticking point in relationship problems, in my opinion, is the feeling of shame that afflicts survivors."
• "We need our partner to be a safe haven and also a true witness to our pain, to assure us we are not to blame for what happened and that we are not weak for being helpless and overwhelmed."