Powerful message!

There is a very powerful message in this book. Every relationship has a chance to succeed as long as each person is understood and heard. I would recommend the book to anyone who is trying to build deeper relationships in their lives. I learned a lot by reading this book and have continued to refer back to it when feeling stuck in a bad pattern in a relationship.

Better than any relationship book

This book gives the reader powerful insights into their own vulnerabilities. For people who really want to LOVE. Realizing that we are all broken in different places, the author uses other couples dialogue to guide us back together. When our broken pieces fit back together - we're whole with another. This book helps in all interpersonal and group relationships. When we can see ourselves clearly, we can then validate others! Give this as a gift to as many people as possible and the world will be a better place.

Hold tight to this book

For me there is life before Sue Johnson and after Sue Johnson. This book may change your life.

A guidebook for every couple

I've been reading a number of books on couples counseling as part of working through longstanding problems that have emerged in an 8-year relationship. This is by far the best book on the dynamics of adult pair-bonded love (attachment bonds to use Johnson's term) that I have ever read. I'm buying extra copies to give friends who I know are having problems in their couple-relationships. This should be required first reading for every couple in trouble. Maybe even required reading for anyone considering a committed relationship in or out of societally defined marriage.

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!

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

A new way of looking at what's behind all those fights

I recommend this book for anyone who is in a relationship, has been in a relationship, or wants to be in a relationship.

Sue Johnson, one of the creators of emotionally-focused therapy for couples, writes about how we are emotionally wired to want to feel safe, secure, understood, and cared for in relationships and the patterns that develop when feel that these needs will not be met.

Using examples of couples' fights, from real-life examples, Sue explores what's going on beneath the fight - the vulnerabilities, for example, that are communicated because the partners are either unaware of them or don't feel safe expressing them.

Reading this book and its practical application of attachment theory to fixing what's not working in relationships (there is one chapter on theory that can be skipped, if that's not your cup of tea), it becomes clear why we seem destined to repeat the same fights, to attack each other, grow apart, or find ourselves in some version of one partner pursuing while the other withdraws - these are all strategies (albeit ones that can destroy relationships) that we have learned to cope with anxiety about not getting our needs met in a relationship.

Many of the couples I've worked with have found the book helpful, and it's also an easy introduction for marriage counselors wanting to know more about the concepts behind emotionally-focused therapy for couples.

The best couples book I've read.

There is no end to the relationship books out there, but this one is definitely different. Dr. Johnson gives us the science behind the feeling and then helps us unravel how we get stuck in aloneness and fear. Being in a loving relationship should not feel so separate. Our fast paced,independent and competitive based society leads us into developing entitlement that heightens our sense of being hurt and abandoned. Then self-perpetuating interlocking loops of pursue and defend; demand and withdraw separate us even more from the one we long to feel safe and close to. Thank you Sue Johnson, for publishing the map that guides us through this maze of confused emotions. Thank you from all my clients, my family and myself. Each of my married children have received gifts of this book. I keep mine close at hand. My husband thanks you, too.