Experience this ground-breaking work to renew trust and intimacy within your relationship, deepen your emotional connection and closeness with one another and create a secure base for both people to flourish.
Move out of negative cycles that keep you feeling stuck and alone
Make sense of your own as well as your partner’s emotions
Forgive injuries that keep you from really opening up with your partner
Communicate your emotional needs for connection
Establish a secure and intimate bond for one another
Restore commitment and hope
Decrease isolation, distance and loneliness
Learn to manage intense and negative emotion
Rebuild safety and trust (where there has been trauma)
Manage the sense of chaos (where there has been betrayal)
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
The message of EFT is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. EFT focuses on creating and strengthening this emotional bond by identifying and transforming the key moments that foster an adult loving relationship.
>>> Listen to Dr. Sue Johnson and Tim Ferris talk about the efficacy of Emotionally Focused Therapy.
EFT has an astounding 70 – 75% success rate and results have been shown to last, even in the face of significant stress. It is recognized by the American Psychological Association as empirically proven.
Hold Me Tight
Hold Me Tight the book presents a streamlined version of EFT. It walks the reader through seven conversations that capture the defining moments in a love relationship and instructs how to shape these moments to create a secure and lasting bond. Case histories and exercises in each conversation bring the lessons of EFT to life.
Seven Transforming Conversations:
Recognizing Demon Dialogues
In this first
conversation, couples identify negative and destructive remarks in order
to get to the root of the problem and figure out what each other is
really trying to say.
Finding the Raw Spots
Here, each partner learns to look beyond immediate, impulsive reactions to figure out what raw spots are being hit.
Revisiting a Rocky Moment
This conversation provides a platform for de-escalating conflict and repairing rifts in a relationship and building emotional safety.
Hold Me Tight
The heart of the program: this
conversation moves partners into being more accessible, emotionally
responsive, and deeply engaged with each other.
Forgiving Injuries
Injuries may be forgiven but
they never disappear. Instead, they need to become integrated into
couples’ conversations as demonstrations of renewal and connection.
Knowing how to find and offer forgiveness empowers couples to
strengthen their bond.
Bonding Through Sex and Touch
Here, couples find how emotional connection creates great sex, and good sex creates deeper emotional connection.
Keeping Your Love Alive
This last conversation is
built on the understanding that love is a continual process of losing
and finding emotional connection; it asks couples to be deliberate and
mindful about maintaining connection.”
* from: https://iceeft.com/what-is-hold-me-tight/
What Leading Relationship Experts and Authors say about Hold Me Tight:
Wonderful… Hold Me Tight® Workshops blends the best in research findings with practical suggestions from a caring and compassionate clinician. Hold Me Tight® will be of great benefit to couples trying to find their way to better communication and deeper, more fulfilling ways of being with each other. Bravo!
Daniel J Siegel, MD, author of Parenting from the Inside Out
At last a road map through Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy with its creator. Dr. Johnson’s superb science, humor, and clinical wisdom are finally accessible to all of us. I couldn’t pick a smarter, warmer and more real guide for this journey.
John Gottman, PhD, bestselling author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work and co-author of And Baby Makes Three
Dr. Sue Johnson is the most original contributor to couples therapy to come along in the last thirty years. This book will touch your heart, stimulate your mind and give you practical strategies for improving your relationship.
William J. Doherty, PhD, author of Take Back Your Marriage
A much-needed message to all couples and therapists, and I recommend it to all
Harville Hendrix, PhD, author of Getting the Love You Want
Hold Me Tight® Couples Workshops
Dr. Sue Johnson developed the Hold Me Tight® program, based on Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and her bestselling book, Hold Me Tight.
In this workshop, we will teach you how to connect in a more powerful and harmonious way. This weekend will be Positive, Pro-active and Fun! And the skills you learn will continue to serve your relationship once you leave the workshop.
We keep the workshop small and intimate to ensure value and enhance the experience. We welcome people of all backgrounds, ages, faiths and sexual orientations.
Our Hold Me Tight® couples workshops are always Sold-Out!
What is Included
• A workbook full of information, guidance and helpful exercises.
• Engaging presentations, video demonstrations of other real life couples, and the opportunity for many private exercises and conversations with your partner.
• Personal support and guidance as needed.
• Continental breakfast, coffee, tea and light snacks will be provided throughout the day. Lunch is on your own. Please feel free to bring your own snacks and drinks as well. (We are located in Nevada City near cafes, a deli and a grocery store.)
• Post-workshop complementary followup support.
What to Expect
The Hold Me Tight® Workshop is designed around seven conversations based on the Hold Me Tight book, all of which have been shown to be essential to successful relationships. You will learn how to understand and improve your relationship with presentations by the workshop leaders, private exercises and conversations with your partner and by watching video demonstrations of other couples.
Although Dalia encourages questions and comments, you do not need to speak in the group if you do not wish to. All of the dialogues with your partner will be done in private, as privacy, confidentiality and comfort are of upmost importance.
You will learn to identify the “dance” that has kept you locked in anger and isolation and learn to change the steps that are keeping you both from getting your attachment needs met. You will find the safety to be vulnerable, soften and open to giving and receiving care from each other. You will tap into your deeper needs and longings and learn to communicate them and respond to them in each other.
Workshop Facilitators
Dalia Anderman, LMFT is a Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice in Northern California with offices in Nevada City and Sacramento.
Dalia has over 20 years of experience working with individuals, couples, and families on a wide range of issues.
Over the past 10 years, Dalia’s primary clinical modality has been Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). She has advanced experience in EFT including attending many trainings by Sue Johnson, the creator of EFT.
Dalia’s passion lies in the map and tools that this attachment-based system has given us to help couples discover that the secret to their relationship is not in the solving of the ‘argument of the day’ but in understanding the longing and desperation when our connection to our loved ones is severed. She has helped numerous couples find their way back to connection, intimacy, vulnerability, and sexual desire.
Dalia has been leading, teaching, and facilitating the Hold Me Tight® couples workshop program nationally and internationally for over 5 years including in Israel, South Africa, and around the United States.
Keeping the Hold Me Tight® Couples Workshop group small, Dalia developed an intimate and experiential format to the workshop, allowing couples to dive deeper into their relationship.
Though working with couples is her main passion and focus, Dalia is also fully trained and specializes in EMDR, CBT, Family Systems, trauma, addiction, parenting, sexual and intimacy issues, and life’s transitions. She is also on the Mental Health medical team at Burning Man.
Owen Marcus, MA, author, workshop facilitator, and TEDxTalk presenter on Masculine Emotional Intelligence, will once again be joining us.
Owen brings with him decades of leading and facilitating men’s groups all over the country and teaching men how to access their masculine vulnerability. For over three decades, he’s leveraged his training in trauma and somatic experiences to design a unique model for men’s emotional growth. He saw that the struggle is not that men are screwed up; it’s that they were never trained how to succeed emotionally. Their relationships and careers suffer because men’s emotions are anything but their superpower. Owen’s approach is to facilitate deep change quickly and have it continue to develop.
Owen’s method emphasizes connecting with one’s physical sensations, laying the foundation for deeper interpersonal connections. By practicing this, men learn and embody emotional expression, paving the way for challenging discussions, shared decisions, and richer relationships. Participants are often taken aback when they witness fellow men showcasing vulnerability in a supportive environment, something they once deemed impossible. Once these men bond, they seamlessly carry these newfound skills into their personal and professional lives.
Owen leads his team at MELD in creating programs for tech companies such as Google, for therapists, and for individual men. His leadership trainings for men and businesses transform emotional limitation into relationship mastery.
>>>Watch Owen Marcus and Dr. Sue Johnson on an Evryman Global Community CalL.
His work with couples comes from teaching himself that to have a nourishing relationship, we need to connect and to connect, we need to open up. For many of us, we were never given good models, let alone tools on how to do these simple tasks.
Owen speaking on an ABC News clip about his work and male loneliness.
Grow Up: A Man’s Guide to Masculine Emotional Intelligence
TEDx Talk: What 10,000 Years of Progress has Cost.
What Participants are Saying…
Read more workshop experiences
Upcoming Workshops
While we have not scheduled any upcoming workshops at this time, we do have a couple of other options below.
6-day Hold Me Tight® Couples Retreat in Costa Rica
Date: April 16-21, 2026
Find details here.
Schedule your own Intensive Private Couples Retreat
Find details here.
(I have temporarily disabled the Registration Form to reduce spam until we have a workshop scheduled. If you would like to be notified about workshops, I include them in my newsletter that you can sign up for at the bottom of the page!)
Cancellation Policy
Your registration fee is non-refundable, but transferable. Once registered, if unforeseen circumstances prevent you from attending the Hold Me Tight® Workshop you registered for, you are welcome to attend another workshop within that calendar year instead. However, if you cancel within 72 hours or fail to show up for the workshop, there will be a $75 transfer fee applied. All workshops are enrolled on a first come, first serve basis.
Hold Me Tight® is a registered trademark of Sue Johnson.