Hold Me Tight: Your Guide to the Most Successful Approach to Building Loving Relationships

Amazing model for relationships. My husband and I argued for years, then he left me. We did counseling but it didn’t work. I’ve read literally hundreds of books and articles, looking for ways to understand and sort problems in relationships. Nothing felt like it really made sense, and the counseling didn’t work. Now I know why. I just wish I’d discovered this book sooner. My husband and I had the same negative dynamics outlined in this book. The great insight it presents is to understand how those dynamics are driven by a primal need to feel loved and restore an intimate connection with a loved one. With one person pushing desperately for connection but in a way that comes across as critical and angry, and the other becoming fearful and hopeless and withdrawing. And no connection is made, so the cycle gets worse and worse. It’s not about bad behavior in the part of one or other person. It’s about connecting at an emotional level to understand each other and restore the attachment bond. All the books and articles I read talked about behaviors and dynamics, but not the underlying drivers and needs. I recognized Gottman’s 4 Horseman model, but the remedies are about changing behavior and not establishing connection. The counselor told me I should be independent and self-sufficient, aim for practical objectives on a tick list, and put my feelings to the side as they were getting in the way of practical goals. Which was the opposite of what I wanted. In contrast, EFT aims to reestablish the emotional bonding connection, which automatically fixes painful behavior dynamics driven by loss of connection, and gives a secure bond from which practical issues can be resolved. I wish I’d know about it, things might be so different.

Being married can be challenging yet paying attention to and successfully communicating our attachment needs can save even those most troublesome relationships. Dr Johnson's book helps the reader understand several aspects of attachment and how important it is in marriage. This book incorporates several powerful real life examples, plenty of scientific evidence and lots of great practical advice about ways to improve one's marriage. I would highly recommend it to any couple, new or well-established.

This is an excellent book, based on the ideas of adult attachment in relationships. It s a very accessible book if you re looking for ways of being more connected in your relationship and to explore ways of breaking unhelpful patterns.

For those of us who didn’t have meaningful emotional relationships with our parents and never learnt how to be emotionally available in the right way for our partners our friends nor anyone else. This book has been invaluable reading for me and I am immensely grateful for what it teaches and the profound impact it has had on my life.

Dr Sue Johnson is part of a movement in self-help books that are based on sound science and evidence. You could spend ages trawling through the plethora of self-help or start with a scientifically verified approach. Dr Johnson gives you that. Dr Johnson starts with the science of love and intimacy, referring to evidence that people who are in loving relationships have lower stress hormones and more resilient immune responses and are less at risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes. She writes, " Contact with a loving partner literally acts as a buffer against shock, stress and pain. The people we love...are the hidden regulators of our bodily processes and our emotional lives" (pg 25). Lovingly secure relationships are vital to our health. At the heart of our well-being is an adult attachment need for loving connections akin to a child's attachment need. Our attachment need is fundamental to our psycho-physiological nature; we are social creatures. Dr Johnson focuses on first helping you to evaluate and become aware of the dances or patterns that maintain hurt between couples. She then supports your becoming curious and compassionate about your "raw spots" or "emotionally vulnerable" parts. Our vulnerable raw spots are the flashpoints that trigger irrational rows and deadening distance in our relationships. Getting to know our own and our partner's raw spots is the starting point for building a strong relationship. In awareness and compassion for our own and our partner's vulnerability, lies the building blocks of our strength. Dr Johnson leads you through various chapters on building love and closeness in various facets of your relationships, both emotional and sexual. She presents the process of learning about each other and growing together as a series of conversations suggesting that change can be ordinary and do-able, like a conversation, if you give it time. For some couples there may be an additional complication to overcome, namely the consequences of trauma. Dr Johnson dedicates a chapter to this, to help couples consider the additional challenges that healing from trauma brings. This book will offer vital sound advise and knowledge, but the trouble with all self-help is how to apply it to yourself and your relationships. Whilst Dr Johnson's readable and touching style goes a long way, for some this may be easier than others. What Dr Johnson highlights in this work however, is that healing and thriving happens through relationships. If you are struggling to apply the ideas in the book, it may be worth considering the caring support and professional guidance that a professional relationship with a trained therapist/psychologist can offer to you and/or your partner.

Hold Me Tight is one of the most compassionate and insightful relationship books I’ve ever read. Dr. Sue Johnson blends science and soul, using attachment theory and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) to gently guide couples back to connection and emotional safety. Rather than offering surface-level fixes, this book gets to the heart of what we all long for—to be seen, understood, and securely loved. The real-life stories and seven conversations offer a powerful roadmap for navigating conflict, healing old wounds, and strengthening love. This isn’t just a book for couples in crisis—it’s for anyone who wants to build a deeper, more secure bond. Honest, tender, and transformative. A must-read.

Every time you and your partner have a disagreement, you have two basic choices. Firstly, you could blame, grab control, dismiss, shut down, shut your partner out or get revenge. Secondly, you could take a deep breath, tune into your emotions and those of your loved one, take a risk, reach out, confide in or hold your partner. This is just one piece of advice from this admirable book. It's hard to review books of contemporary writers who are working in the same area as me. Johnson is the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy which she founded in Canada and is now spreading round the world. We started working with couples at about the same period... I started in 1985.... but I did not recognised her description of couple work in this era being all transactional (how to negotiate better) and ignoring the emotional content of the argument. Hold me tight is both a manifesto for EFT and an explanation of how it works. Although it takes the reader through seven conversations to turn round a relationship, I don't how it would work on its own. Personally, I would recommend it more as something to read if you were thinking of approaching an EFT therapist or a way of gaining wider understanding while working with one.

Simply the most insightful and helpful book I have ever read on the subject of relationships. It is beautifully written, and as a man I'm not ashamed to admit that I was moved to tears on several occasions as I read through the case studies related by the author, and how she helped these couples to restore a safe emotional connection by working through her Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy programme. As I read through the Seven Transforming Conversations it became so painfully clear to me how my former partner and I had got so dreadfully caught up in the downward spiral of the 'demon dialogues' and how we kept rubbing each other's 'raw spots'. Sadly, by the time I started reading this book, my former partner and I had already ended the relationship - it had become so volatile over a 2 year period, complicated for several reasons, resulting in several break-ups. In the end we had just inflicted too much emotional hurt on each other. If only we'd been aware of this book before breaking up, I'm absolutely convinced it would have enabled us to understand how we had become so disconnected, to heal our emotional wounds and ultimately save our relationship. But at least, having now read the book, I have learned some incredibly powerful lessons, and am so much more switched on about how to connect safely with a partner. I really can't recommend this book strongly enough - I feel like I've been to Relationship University and graduated with flying colours! And of course, I'm very confident my next partner will approve of what I have learned!

Great book

Simply the best book I've read about relationships. Based on John Bowlby's masterful work on attachment needs, the origin of attachment style theory and the related quizzes you find on the internet these days. This is takes the application of attachment out of the descriptive realm of styles and natural tendencies, to life application of dealing with attachment needs in a real here and now relationship with someone you love and who loves you in return. I love the book!

The book is excellent for relationships, mainly for partners, but can be applied to family and friends. The book apart from teaching the concept of conflict management, helps to bring the message home with examples with couples who have gone through the same issues. I found the book very helpful indeed!

This is an important book that teaches couples how to be attentive in a meaningful way to each others feelings about their relationship. These feelings arise from a partner's emotional hardwired perspective on attachment. Attachment styles include the anxious, the avoidant and the secure. For the first two, insecurities about attachment translate into feelings that are interpreted as a literal threat to life. This is why so many people feel so incredibly bad when they are rejected or feel that their relationship is threatened. We are hardwired this way by nature and evolution, as isolation meant death at the beginnings of humanity. When couples fight, they tend to do so at the level of relatively unimportant issues but with an underlying feeling of threat to life. This is why seemingly minor disagreements can escalate into major arguments. Couples also tend to fight in a pattern where on attacks and the other becomes unavailable. This is a recipe for a vicious cycle. The key is to identify when this cycle is manifesting itself, recognize it as such and then address the underlying emotional needs. Partners need to express what they are specifically feeling and what triggers that feeling. Ideally both partners can share and develop a deeper understanding of each others basic attachment survival needs. This honest and open process leads to stronger bonds of love.

Good one