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

These negative patterns always started when one partner tried to reach for the other and could not make safe emotional contact.

Handles are descriptive images, words, and phrases that open the door into your innermost feelings and vulnerabilities, your emotional reality.

We have to reconnect, to speak our needs in a way that moves our partner to respond.

“I like it when we can stop and turn down the volume. I like it when we both agree that this conversation is too hard, that it is out of hand and scaring both of us. It feels very powerful for us to agree that we are not going to just get stuck the way we usually do. Even if we are not quite sure where we go next,

Sharing Your Own Deeper, Softer Emotions.

They described themselves as expressing anger in a more controlled way, and expressed more positive goals, such as solving the problems and reconnecting with their partners.

What exactly is a raw spot? I define it as a hyper sensitivity formed by moments in a person’s past or current relationships when an attachment need has been repeatedly neglected, ignored, or dismissed, resulting in a person’s feeling what I call the “2 Ds”—emotionally deprived or deserted. The

Stay in the present and focus on what is happening between them right now. Look at the circle of criticism that spins both of them around. There is no true “start” to a circle. Consider the circle, the dance, as their enemy and the consequences of not breaking the circle.

When that person is emotionally unavailable or unresponsive, we face being out in the cold, alone and helpless. We are assailed by emotions—anger, sadness, hurt, and above all, fear.