Getting to the heart of it in the first session of couples therapy

books:


	• Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Sue Johnson Little, Brown and Company, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Getting to the heart of it in the first session of couples therapy

The husband read the book -- said that he and his wife had tried,
unsuccessfully, a lot of couples therapy, and thought EFT might be the
answer. At the first session, the wife had Hold Me Tight peeking out of
her purse. She said, "Sue Johnson must have read my diary." He said he was worried. "It looks worse because she's gone into the next stage -- she's stopped complaining." With very little prompting from me, the two then proceeded to let me know their negative dance. "The second chapter really said it." "We poke each other's raw spots." They delved into their attachment injury which happened "a week after we got married, years ago, and part of our communication ever since." They continued to work at the heart of it for the rest of the hour as if they'd been working this way for many sessions. As a couples therapist, I got the power of this book to accelerate the work in a way that I had not experienced before!

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Practical, useful and proven approach for couples

Touching, helpful, heart-warming and practical, Dr. Johnson has at last put words to the latest research into happy marriages for the average person. Reading it is not intellectual: each time I pick up this book I feel like I could not only understand my spouse's behavior in a deeper way, but also my own.

I can't recommend this book enough. I read the first few chapters, bought three more copies (one for my spouse), and gave the other two to friends who were in stressful moments with their own spouses. One couple now reads from the book to one another each night, and (like I did) recommended it to two other couples before they got through the first 3 chapters. The other couple bought a 2nd copy so that they could each have it available to them every day, and are now each avidly reading on their morning commutes.

In short, readers seem to find Dr. Johnson's book incredibly helpful, almost immediately. Dr. Johnson's clear, from-the-heart style seems immediately comprehensible to anyone who has ever been in love, or wanted to be. And rest of the book was even better than the beginning.

You know you've got a winner when you give a book to two friends, who each immediately give it to their two friends, and so on. Don't suffer needlessly: give this one a try for under $20!

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Readable, useful and timely

Hold Me Tight, Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

By Dr. Sue Johnson

A Layman's Viewpoint

This is an imminently readable book for anyone who is in love, been in love or wants to be. If you are in love, but puzzled by it, this book will help you understand the puzzle. If you have been in love, and wondered what happened, you might find the "what", here. If you want to be, now you will know what to look for. And if you are in love, and everything is fine, you will learn how to keep it that way.

The insights traverse the conceptual aspects of love through the personal, interpersonal and societal levels, and melds the rational and emotional influences of loving relationships smoothly. Dr. Johnson writes clearly and avoids the linguistic sandtraps and overly clinical mumbo-jumbo that usually arises when the simple word 'love" is talked about too much at one time. The writing is for married couples, all manner of couples thinking about marriage or partnership, families and those larger groups in society who care for and tend to one another. The glossary at the back is perfect for those of us who do not "speak the language" of therapists. The practices and exercises are simple and direct. Dr. Johnson says that these may done without professional help but one cannot help but think that they would be more effective with some objective, trained guidance.

Go it alone or go with someone, but, in any case, GO.
Ivan Hentschel
Running Buffalo Woodworks
[...]

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Some good points

I would recommend anything Dr. Johnson writes as her emphasis on emotions and attachment is the best theoretical standard so far. Though this book is written for the public, I think it is a bit long winded in places and not clear enough in others. Some of the theory of attachment for adults and cases illustrations need beefing up: more examples as to how attachment problems evidence themselves in marriages and secondly, longer case presentations to give you a more complete feel of the application and techniques.

The best book to give couples in or out of therapy is John Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert (Paperback). It is well organized, reader friendly, and a great teaching aide to couples therpy. It is itself a class in what makes marriages work.

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Gets right to the heart of the matter!

I have been a couples therapist for thirty years and have wanted a book I could recommend to couples to help guide their recovery. Here is a book for couples that I can recommend without reservation. Hold Me Tight is intelligent, insightful and helps couples get to the core issues of their relationship.

Susan Johnson gets right to the heart of the matter when she tells us that accessibility, responsiveness and engagement in the emotional bond are most important to a couple's happiness and satisfaction. Attachment theory is her guide in understanding how partners love and why they fight. She explains that we are wired in for connection; we seek it, we flourish when we have it, we suffer when we don't have it, we fight for it when it is pulled away and we grieve when it is gone. From years of working with couples and conducting research studies on what actually helps couples recover, Susan Johnson has designed a program of discovery and growth to help couples develop stronger bonds. Through her seven conversations, she guides couples through understanding and untangling their negative cycles of interaction, exploring and expressing underlying emotions and pain, and helping couples create new, confiding dialogues. Hold Me Tight offers couples sound and research-proven ways to understand their distress and sets them on a path to recovery.

In addition to being immensely helpful to couples, Hold Me Tight is an entertaining and enjoyable read. It is a book that all couples - and all people who want to be part of a couple - should read.

Susan Johnson is a brilliant clinician, researcher and teacher and all three show through in her book. Thank you, Susan Johnson, for your remarkable book. Douglas Tilley

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Heralded by the New York Times and Time magazine as the couple therapy with the highest rate of success, Emotionally Focused Therapy works because it views the love relationship as an attachment bond. This idea, once controversial, is now supported by science, and has become widely popular among therapists around the world. In HOLD ME TIGHT, Dr. Sue Johnson presents Emotionally Focused Therapy to the general public for the first time. Johnson teaches that the way to save and enrich a relationship is to reestablish safe emotional connection and preserve the attachment bond. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship-from Recognizing the Demon Dialogue to Revisiting a Rocky Moment-and uses them as touchpoints for seven healing conversations. Through case studies from her practice, illuminating advice, and practical exercises, couples will learn how to nurture their relationships and ensure a lifetime of love.

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