PATTERNS OF LOVE

The Best Relationship Book I Have Ever Read

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

Imagine you want to meditate. You choose a quiet place, light a candle, burn some incense, sit in the lotus position, adopt your inner smile and press the play button: the room is filled with nihilistic thrash metal music. Chances are your meditation will be a disaster. Mine would be. Maybe there are meditators out there able to meditate in any condition, but a beginner would not stand a chance.

If you will be willing to go beyond its kitschy title, you will find tons of valuable insights and some of the best tools to improve relationships.

The way dr. Sue Johnson applies The Attachment Theory to adult relationships is simply genius. Considered as the most effective couples therapy available today and backed by a lot of research support, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) has astonishing results: 90% of couples who go through EFT significantly improve their relationship.

What I love the most about this book is the fact that speaks about patterns. Remember? The patterns we find everywhere in nature? We found them also in the realm of invisible — even in love.

Dr. Sue Johnson does a great job describing these patterns. She focuses on the “music of the relationship”. This silent music that we cannot hear, only recognize it in the dance performed by the couple.

There are three main dances performed by struggling couples:

• Find the Bad Guy
• Protest Polka
• Freeze and Flee or Withdraw-Withdraw

Another term used is “The Demon Dialogues”. I love it. I love it a lot. I have my moments when I look back to an event, shaking my head and thinking “it was not me, I am not like that.” Maybe you have yours too.

This is true. It is not us. Or at least not the rational part of us. It is our fear. Our pain. And the word “demon” is not an exaggeration — when they take over us it really feels like a destructive entity.

The best part about knowing these patterns is that we can learn to recognize and interrupt them. We do not need better negotiation skills, we need better habits and better questions. We just need to recognize the dynamic, pause, and ask ourselves:

“Wait a minute, what is happening here?”

Then, when we recognize the dance and change the music. We change the music with our words. With emotions. With the way we look, touch, and talk to each other. And when we fail and go back to old patterns, we stop again, spot the pattern and change it again.

Pretty easy, isn't it?

OK, maybe it is not so easy. But it is way easier than living a life flooded with conflicts, anger, fear, disconnection, and pain.

We have to dive below to discover the basic problem: these couples have disconnected emotionally; they don’t feel emotionally safe with each other. What couples and therapists too often do not see is that most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and re-establish a sense of safe connection. (Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love — Dr.Sue Johnson)

And when we are able to change the music, we change the dance too.

If you want more reasons to read this book, here you have some challenges both for the lover and the writer in you inspired by the seventh Conversation, boldly titled “Keeping Your Love Alive:”

Create a Resilient Relationship Story.

This story describes how the two of you have built and are continuing to build a loving bond. It tells how you get stuck in conflict and distance and how you have learned to repair rifts, reconnect, and forgive hurts. It is a story about falling in love again and again. (Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love — Dr.Sue Johnson)

Create a Future Love Story.

This story outlines what you want your bond to look like five or ten years down the road and how you would like your partner’s help in making the vision a reality. (Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love — Dr.Sue Johnson)

Have you ever heard about The Steering Wheel Effect? Our brains are biological answering machines. Built into them is this amazing dispositive we have that acts as a steering wheel for our subconscious.

Yes, this is what I am saying: we are not as powerless as we think when it comes to our subconscious. We have an effective way to access it: we need to put better questions.

I bet every one of us asks a lot of questions when thinking about the future… How do we know which ones are better? The fastest way to recognize them is that they lead you to answers that make us feel inspired, safer, and more optimistic.

I cannot think about many subjects more worth thinking and writing about them than all the things we can do to strengthen our love, improve our relationships and brighten our lives.

Thank you again for reading. This story is the better version of one of my first articles. 🙂

If you enjoy my articles, this is a list of my favorite stories, the ones I am dreaming to transform into a science-fiction novel: