Hold Me Tight® Seattle Workshops are divided into 7 conversations for a lifetime of love based on Sue Johnson’s best selling book from 2008 and the Emotionally Focused Therapy process.
Each conversation is introduced with a time of teaching and group discussion.
Next Dennis and Kim or another couple from the HMTS team demonstrates the conversion.
Couples then take some time individually to prepare for their own conversation.
Finally, couples head to their private break-out space to walk through the structured conversation with their partner, supported by a HMTS team member for part of the breakout.
In the first 3 conversations you learn about the cycle, your relationship’s enemy – the stuck patterns you get caught in over and over regardless of topics.
Conversation 4 provides a process of identifying your core relationship needs and practice sharing them with your partner. This process becomes the antidote to the cycle or “Demon Dialogue” as Sue Johnson refers to them.
In conversations 5-6 you apply the skills from the first 4 conversations to specific parts of your relationship.
1. Recognizing Demon Dialogues
First, you identify common behavior pattens and the emotions and intentions that drive disconnection and conflict. Then you share your basic moves and experience in the cycle with your partner.
2. Finding the Raw Spots
Next, you find links between your current reactive response to your partner and past raw spots or wounds from past relationship injuries, often in childhood. As you share about the a source of a raw spot with your partner it begins to help your partner see they are not the primary cause of your cycle.
3. Revisiting a Rocky Moment
Once you can spot your demon dialogues and accept both your and your partner’s parts in the cycle what do you do? Conversation 3 provides a tool for reconnecting and repairing after getting caught up by the cycle.
4. Hold Me Tight® Conversation
Now, building off of what you learned in the first 3 conversations you start to identify what you need from your partner to tame the cycle. You share these concerns with your partner and then practice asking them what you need.
5. Repairing Injuries
In your fifth conversation you use this same process and skill from the Hold Me Tight Conversation and apply them to a specific time of hurt in your relationship.
6. Bonding Through Sex and Touch
Building on what you learned in the Demon Dialogue convo, you apply the same principles to understanding your cycle during times of sexual disconnection.
7. Keeping Your Love Alive
The last conversation in the program builds on the understanding that a love relationship is a continual process of losing and finding emotional connection; it gives couples a menu of tools to be more deliberate in the ongoing care of their intimate connection.