Dear readers,
It has been a long while since my last blog. I try to be consistent with writing to you, but at times life gets too busy, especially with all the preparation for our Hold Me Tight® Couples Retreat in Costa Rica. We just got back and it was an amazing experience.
Creating the Costa Rica retreat has been a long time dream of mine, and has also been challenging. Previously, I’ve been facilitating Hold Me Tight® weekend workshops here in Nevada City, as well as in NYC, Israel, and other spots around the world.
The Costa Rica retreats took the format of a Hold Me Tight® weekend workshop, and transformed it into a week, adding more somatic work, experiential exercises, and of course excursions to some of the areas that magical Costa Rica has to offer. It all happened at the Imiloa Institute, a place I fell in love with 3 years ago, and wanted to share with others.
The transformations couples were able to experience there, were beyond any of my expectations, absolutely amazing.💜 Couples discovered new possibilities, went deeper into their emotions, and understood their relationships in a more profound way. The group created a tight knit community, fostering deep connections, and bonding as a group as well as in their private couples work.
Thank you Karen Stockham and Geoff Steurer for being our support team and excellent assistants, with an additional thank you to Karen for all of her incredible photos!
The couples explored their negative cycles and emotional dances, they dove into their raw spots, learned how to have the HMT conversations, experienced forgiveness, touched on their intimacy issues, and ended with an evening of ritual and dance. We all witnessed how incredibly inspiring and life changing this work can be.
Once again, I am feeling immense gratitude to Sue Johnson who embarked on this journey of figuring out couples relationships, and broke the code for ‘what it is to love.’
One major area we explore in our Hold Me Tight® retreats and workshops is why couples fight. Fights and conflict can often be major obstacles to closeness and intimacy. A partner’s desire to fight for the relationship can often be misinterpreted as an attack.
According to Dr. Sue Johnson in Hold Me Tight, couples fight because they are experiencing a perceived threat to their emotional safety and connection not just over surface-level issues like money, sex, children, or chores.
These fights are, often unconscious, protests against disconnection:
- Protest Against Disconnection: Most fights are panic responses to feeling emotionally detached or abandoned, rooted in our primal need for attachment.
- The “Demon Dialogues” (Negative Cycles): Fights become repetitive cycles where partners trigger each other. These cycles are often “pursue-withdraw” (one partner demands closeness while the other pulls away) or “attack-attack” (both blaming).
- Unspoken Attachment Needs: Underneath anger is fear. Couples fight because they cannot easily express their need for comfort or reassurance, leading to blame.
- Loss of Safe Connection: When the feeling of safe, accessible, and responsive love is lost, partners go into “fight or flight” mode
- Raw Spots: Minor arguments over topics like “tone of voice” are often triggered by “raw spots”—sensitive, past attachment wounds that create disproportionate pain, such as fear of not being good enough.
The 3 Types of Relationship Fights You Keep Having—and What To Do About Them, an article on couples therapist, mentor, and inspirational speaker Esther Perel’s sub stack Entire Nous, states that there are three categories of fights and conflict in relationships:
- “Power and Control: Fights over decision-making, whose priorities matter more, and who holds the influence in the relationship…
- Care and Closeness: Arguments centered on trust, reliability, and emotional safety. The underlying question is usually…
- Respect and Recognition: Frustrations stemming from feeling unappreciated, dismissed, or invisible…”
When I read these categories, they bring me back to the foundational questions; Can I trust you, and do you have my back? and Do I matter? And they also bring to mind a favorite quote by Esther Perel, “It’s not what you’re fighting about, it is what you’re fighting for.”
It is a known cliche that couples fights about Money, Sex, and Kids (not always in this order), but in my experience being a couples therapist for more then 20+ years, couples fight because they want to know that they matter, that their partner has their back and will be there for them, and because they want to be seen and heard.
As many of you know, I have been a psychologist and therapist on the CIT TEAM at Burning Man, colloquially known as Psyches on Bikes.
This art installation on the playa from 2015 called LOVE is a sculpture by Ukrainian artist Alexandr Milov. It demonstrates a conflict between a couple, as well as the outer and inner expression of human nature. The figures of the protagonists are made in the form of big metal cages, where their inner selves are captives. Their inner selves take the form of transparent children holding out their hands through the cage to each other.
In this powerful image we can see the inner conflicts of relationship. While the two adult figures turn away in sorrow, the inner selves are longing for the connection. When we are in conflict with our loved one, we turn away from each other in panic, hurt, rage, anger, and pain. We do not know how to reach out and be vulnerable with each other, but the inner self, that part of us that is longing for the connection, does.
We fear that if we show our deep primary vulnerable emotions, and talk about our feelings, hurts, and needs, we will be looked at as weak, or we will be dismissed or ridiculed, or worst of all, we will be abandoned and rejected by the person we turned to. That’s why it may feel ‘safer’ to close ourselves off in ‘metal cages’ and turn away.
So how do we re-pair, heal, and re-connect from fights and conflicts. We just spent a week in Imiloa with 15 couples, exploring the way back to each other. I’ll be writing about the journey back to connection in my next post as well.
Upcoming Event
Hold Me Tight® Workshop
Nevada City, CA | August 22-23, 2026
More Info & to Register
In gratitude and love to all of you,
~Dalia
Hold Me Tight® is a registered trademark of Sue Johnson, founder and originator of Emotionally Focused Therapy.