Grief allows you to let go of something you have lost only when you begin to accept what you now have in its place. As our mind clings to the familiar, to our established expectations, we can become trapped in feelings of disappointment, confusion, anger, that create our own internal worlds of suffering.

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)

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!

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."

Early experience shapes the structure and function of the brain. This reveals the fundamental way in which gene expression is determined by experience.

While the days of parenting may seem so long, the years are so short.

At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.