Wonderful!Hold Me Tight blends the best in research findings with practical suggestions from a caring and compassionate clinician. This fabulous book will be of great benefitto couples trying to find their way to better communication and deeper, more fulfilling ways of being with each other. Bravo!

We now know that the way to help a child develop optimally is to help create connections in her brain—her whole brain—that develop skills that lead to better relationships, better mental health, and more meaningful lives. You could call it brain sculpting, or brain nourishing, or brain building. Whatever phrase you prefer, the point is crucial, and thrilling: as a result of the words we use and the actions we take, children’s brains will actually change, and be built, as they undergo new experiences.

Adolescents who are absorbing negative messages about who they are and what is expected of them may sink to that level instead of realizing their true potential. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being."

For "full" emotional communication, one person needs to allow his state of mind to be influenced by that of the other.

When we begin to know ourselves in an open and self-supportive way, we take the first step to encourage our children to know themselves

Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world. (pp. 166-167)

Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn't like.