Hold Me Tight Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

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 Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

PART ONE: A New Light on Love

Love — A Revolutionary New View

Where Did Our Love Go? Losing Connection

Emotional Responsiveness — The Key to a Lifetime of Love

PART TWO: Seven Transforming Conversations

Conversation 1: Recognizing the Demon Dialogues

Conversation 2: Finding the Raw Spots

Conversation 3: Revisiting a Rocky Moment

Conversation 4: Hold Me Tight — Engaging and Connecting

Conversation 5: Forgiving Injuries

Conversation 6: Bonding Through Sex and Touch

Conversation 7: Keeping Your Love Alive

PART THREE: The Power of Hold Me Tight

Healing Traumatic Wounds — The Power of Love

Ultimate Connection — Love as the Final Frontier

Acknowledgments

Discover More

Glossary

For more information on EFT

References

About the Author

Also By Dr. Sue Johnson

 To my clients and colleagues, who have helped me to
understand love.
To my partner, John, and my children, Tim, Emma, and Sarah,
who have taught me how to feel it and give it.
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Dance me to your beauty
with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic
till I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch
and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
—LEONARD COHEN
 Introduction

I have always been fascinated by relationships. I grew up in Britain, where

my dad ran a pub, and I spent a lot of time watching people meeting,
talking, drinking, brawling, dancing, flirting. But the focal point of my
young life was my parents’ marriage. I watched helplessly as they destroyed
their marriage and themselves. Still, I knew they loved each other deeply. In
my father’s last days, he wept raw tears for my mother although they had
been separated for more than twenty years.
My response to my parents’ pain was to vow never to get married.
Romantic love was, I decided, an illusion and a trap. I was better off on my
own, free and unfettered. But then, of course, I fell in love and married.
Love pulled me in even as I pushed it away.
What was this mysterious and powerful emotion that defeated my
parents, complicated my own life, and seemed to be the central source of
joy and suffering for so many of us? Was there a way through the maze to
enduring love?
I followed my fascination with love and connection into counseling and
psychology. As part of my training, I studied this drama as described by
poets and scientists. I taught disturbed children who had been denied love. I
counseled adults who struggled with the loss of love. I worked with families
where family members loved each other, but could not come together and
could not live apart. Love remained a mystery.
Then, in the final phase of getting my doctorate in counseling
psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, I started to
work with couples. I was instantly mesmerized by the intensity of their
struggles and the way they often spoke of their relationships in terms of life
and death.
I’d enjoyed considerable success treating individuals and families, but
counseling two warring partners defeated me. And none of the books in the
library or the techniques I was being taught seemed to help. My couples
didn’t care about insights into their childhood relationships. They didn’t
want to be reasonable and learn to negotiate. They certainly didn’t want to
be taught rules for fighting effectively.
Love, it seemed, was all about nonnegotiables. You can’t bargain for
compassion, for connection. These are not intellectual reactions; they are
emotional responses. So I started to simply stay with the couples’
experiences and let them teach me about the emotional rhythms and
patterns in the dance of romantic love. I began to tape my couple sessions
and replay them over and over again.
As I watched couples shout and weep, bicker and shut down, I began to
understand that there were key negative and positive emotional moments
that defined a relationship. With the help of my thesis advisor, Les
Greenberg, I started to develop a new couple therapy, one that was based on
these moments. We called it Emotionally Focused Therapy, EFT for short.
We ran a research project giving some couples a developing version of
EFT; others a behavioral therapy, teaching communication skills and
negotiation; and others no therapy at all. The results for EFT were
amazingly positive, better than no treatment or the behavioral therapy.
Couples fought less, felt closer, and their satisfaction with their
relationships soared. The success of this study propelled me to an academic
position at the University of Ottawa, where over the years I set up more
studies with many different kinds of couples in counselors’ offices, training
centers, and hospital clinics. The results continued to be astoundingly good.
Despite this success, I realized I still didn’t understand the emotional
drama that entangled my couples. I was navigating the maze of love, but I
hadn’t yet reached its heart. I had a thousand questions. Why did the
distressed partners in my sessions seethe with such strong emotions? Why
did people struggle so to get a loved one to respond? Why did EFT work,
and how could we make it even better?
Then, in the middle of an argument with a colleague in a pub, the place
where I first began to learn about human connection, I had one of those
flashes of inspiration and understanding we read about. My colleague and I
were discussing how so many therapists believe that healthy love
relationships are just rational bargains. We are all into getting as many
benefits as we can at the smallest possible cost, goes the thinking.
I said that I knew there was a lot more than this going on in my couple
sessions. “Okay,” my colleague challenged, “so if love relationships aren’t
bargains, what are they?” Then I heard myself say in a casual voice, “Oh,
they’re emotional bonds. They’re about the innate need for safe emotional
connection. Just like [British psychiatrist] John Bowlby talks about in his
attachment theory concerning mothers and kids. The same thing is going on
with adults.”
I left that discussion on fire. Suddenly I saw the exquisite logic behind
all my couples’ passionate complaints and desperate defensiveness. I knew
what they needed, and I understood how EFT transformed relationships.
Romantic love was all about attachment and emotional bonding. It was all
about our wired-in need to have someone to depend on, a loved one who
can offer reliable emotional connection and comfort.
I believed I had discovered, or rediscovered, what love is all about and
how we can repair it and make it last. Once I began to use the frame of
attachment and bonding, I saw the drama surrounding distressed couples so
much more clearly. I also saw my own marriage much more clearly. I
understood that in these dramas we are caught up in emotions that are part
of a survival program set out by millions of years of evolution. There is no
sidestepping these emotions and needs without contorting ourselves all out
of shape. I understood that what couple therapy and education had been
lacking was a clear scientific view of love.
But when I tried to get my views published, most of my colleagues did
not agree at all. First they said that emotion was something that adults
should control. Indeed, that too much emotion was the basic problem in
most marriages. It should be overcome, not listened to or indulged. But
most important, they argued, healthy adults are self-sufficient. Only
dysfunctional people need or depend on others. We had names for these
people: they were enmeshed, codependent, merged, fused. In other words,
they were messed up. Spouses depending on each other too much was what
wrecked marriages!
Therapists, my colleagues pronounced, should encourage people to stand
on their own two feet. This was just like Dr. Spock’s advice on how parents
should handle their youngsters — picking up a crying child is the way to
create a weakling, he warned. Trouble is, Dr. Spock was dead wrong when
it came to kids. And so were my colleagues when it comes to adults.
The message of EFT is simple: Forget about learning how to argue
better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or
experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit 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.
Adult attachments may be more reciprocal and less centered on physical
contact, but the nature of the emotional bond is the same. EFT focuses on
creating and strengthening this emotional bond between partners by
identifying and transforming the key moments that foster an adult loving
relationship: being open, attuned, and responsive to each other.
Today EFT is revolutionizing couple therapy. Rigorous studies during
the past fifteen years have shown that 70 to 75 percent of couples who go
through EFT recover from distress and are happy in their relationships. The
results appear lasting, even with couples who are at high risk for divorce.
EFT has been recognized by the American Psychological Association as an
empirically proven form of couple therapy.
There are thousands of EFT-trained therapists in North America and
hundreds more in Europe, England, Australia, and New Zealand. EFT is
being taught in China, Taiwan, and Korea. More recently, major
organizations, including the U.S. and Canadian military and the New York
City Fire Department, have sought my help in introducing EFT to distressed
members and their partners.
EFT’s ever-broadening acceptance and application has also brought
growing awareness of this approach to the public. Increasingly, I have been
besieged by pleas for a simple, popular version of EFT, one ordinary folks
can read and apply on their own. Here it is.
Hold Me Tight is designed to be used by all couples, young, old, married,
engaged, cohabiting, happy, distressed, straight, gay; in short, all partners
seeking a lifetime of love. It is for women and for men. It is for people from
all walks of life and all cultures; everyone on this planet has the same basic
need for connection. It is not for people who are in abusive or violent
relationships, nor for those with serious addictions or in long-term affairs;
such activities undermine the ability to positively engage with partners. In
those instances, a therapist is the best resource.
I’ve divided the book into three parts. Part One answers the age-old
question of what love is. It explains how we often slip into disconnection
and lose our love, in spite of the best intentions and the greatest insights. It
also documents and synthesizes the massive explosion of recent research
into close relationships. As Howard Markman of the Center for Marital and
Family Studies at the University of Denver says, “This is moon shot time
for couple therapy and education.”
We are, at last, building a science of intimate relationships. We are
mapping out how our conversations and actions reflect our deepest needs
and fears and build or tear down our most precious connections with others.
This book offers lovers a new world, a new understanding of how to love
and love well.
Part Two is the streamlined version of EFT. It presents seven
conversations that capture the defining moments in a love relationship, and
it instructs you, the reader, on how to shape these moments to create a
secure and lasting bond. Case histories and Play and Practice sections in
each conversation bring the lessons of EFT alive in your own relationships.
Part Three addresses the power of love. Love has an immense ability to
help heal the devastating wounds that life sometimes deals us. Love also
enhances our sense of connection to the larger world. Loving
responsiveness is the foundation of a truly compassionate, civilized society.
To help you through the book, I’ve included a glossary of important
terms at the end.
I owe the development of EFT to all the couples I’ve seen over the years,
and I make liberal use of their stories, disguising names and details to
protect privacy, throughout this book. All stories are composites of many
cases and are simplified to reflect the general truths I have learned from the
thousands of couples I have seen. They will teach you as they taught me.
This book is my attempt to pass that knowledge on.

I started seeing couples in the early 1980s. Twenty-five years later, it

amazes me that I still feel passionately excited when I sit down in a room to
work with a couple. I still get exhilarated when partners suddenly
understand one another’s heartfelt messages and risk reaching out to each
other. Their struggle and determination daily enlightens and inspires me to
keep my own precious connection with others alive.
We all live out the drama of connection and disconnection. Now we can
do it with understanding. I hope this book will help you turn your
relationship into a glorious adventure. The journey outlined in these pages
has been just that for me.
“Love is everything it’s cracked up to be . . . ,” Erica Jong has written.
“It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And
the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, your risk is even greater.” I
couldn’t agree more.
 PART ONE

A New Light on Love