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1-Page Summary of Hold Me Tight

Overview

Logic is a great tool for solving problems, but it doesn’t always fix relationship issues. If you’re having trouble with your romantic partner, try radical honesty. It’s common to feel very strongly about something when arguing with your partner. In Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (2008), Dr. Sue Johnson explains how empathetic conversations can strengthen or repair relationships by using the power of conversation and empathy.

Emotionally focused therapy is a conversational technique that’s based on attachment theory. Attachment theory explains how children bond with their parents, and it holds that adults have similar needs for comfort and support from their partners. Today, in cultures where there are fewer community ties, people depend more heavily on their partners for emotional fulfillment.

EFT looks at the emotions behind a conflict, not what caused it. It does this by ignoring surface content and asking deeper questions about those feelings. Even if there’s no logical reason for someone to feel disappointed or angry, they still do because these are basic human needs that must be addressed in order to fix any problem and improve the relationship.

The Emotionally Focused Therapy process involves a series of conversations that help couples learn to understand what’s causing their emotional disconnect. By responding to one another with care, the couple can reconnect and nurture their love. The therapy has three fundamental requirements: being available for deep discussion, addressing the issues raised in conversation, and showing affection so your partner feels valued and heard.

Couples often blame sexual problems on their relationship issues, but it’s actually the other way around. When couples are emotionally disconnected, they don’t have much of a sex drive. Once they reconnect and feel better about each other, their sex life will naturally improve.

It’s not easy to maintain a romantic relationship. Both partners need to work hard at communicating their needs and feelings, as well as responding to each other openly. The payoff is a happy, healthy relationship that can last for the rest of your life.

Key Point 1: Even a casual disagreement with a romantic partner can lead to debilitating insecurity about the relationship.

Arguing with a romantic partner can be scary because it makes you feel insecure about your relationship. This is due to the fact that we’re programmed to think of love as something that keeps us safe from famine and predators, like our ancestors did thousands of years ago.

Romantic partners argue and bicker. Sometimes that’s because of something specific, like who will pick up a child from school. Other times the conflict is more emotional in nature, with each person longing for dependability or feeling detached from their partner. They express these feelings in unclear language that makes it hard for the other to understand what they’re really saying. And often people aren’t aware of how they feel about things until someone else points it out to them.

When there is a lack of emotional intimacy in the relationship, it often leads to distrust. There’s a feeling that your partner doesn’t care about you or isn’t trustworthy. One way to overcome this problem is through EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques).

Key Point 2: Romantic relationships are defined by moments of raw emotion.

In the beginning of a relationship, seemingly inconsequential things can make or break it. This is because lovers’ quarrels are often about deeper concerns related to the strength of their romantic attachment. For example, if one partner feels insecure in the relationship and his/her partner doesn’t pay attention to him/her at a party, that could cause resentment. Or if one partner’s phone goes off when he/she is trying to reach out to his/her significant other (and s)he gets frustrated by this act), then they will feel like their love isn’t being reciprocated and may feel negatively toward their significant other as well. These dramatizations are normal parts of relationships but are important because they have surprising power over how people view each other and whether or not they stay together long-term