This week in session, a compelling theme for some of you was the concept of attunement. Sitting together, I watched your eyes soften, your hand go to your heart, and a quiet, full sadness come when you named that you did not always receive the attunement you needed as a child.
Attunement is an attachment concept. It’s the way a person feels another person’s experience and needs — even non-verbally, without being told — in order to meet those needs. Attunement is our ability to sense another human, to help them “feel felt”, as Dan Siegel puts it. It is an essential gesture of “being with” from one person to another, an accompaniment that helps us feel we can hold ourselves better because of how well they are holding us. Attunement from a caregiver, a partner, or a friend will often allow us to feel: “I matter. I am safe. This person will be there for me.” Attunement creates healthy attachment.
The funny thing is, when our caregivers lack attunement when we are children, we don’t always catch it or understand what’s happening. It’s easier as an adult — on a date, or in the therapy room, or at work — to get a sense that the person we are with may not be attuning to us well, and to take some space as a result. But as a child, we often don’t know what’s happening. We know that we feel bad, but we assume it’s because we haven’t done something right, and that love and attunement from our caregiver is coming, just around the corner, if we can get it right. Because we are dependent on our caregivers, we try to make it work, or pretend that it’s working, or become the caregiver ourselves so that things will feel better. We may carry with us both a sense that things are “off”, and also a sense that we have to fix it.
Lack of attunement from caregivers can be subtle. Lack of attunement can show up as someone talking too much, as a forced positivity that requires us to feel better, as constant worrying about how we are instead of hearing how we are. All of these things, though subtle, erase our experience instead of attuning to it, and require us to attune to the caregiver instead of the other way around.
This week, some of you were reckoning with the results of lack of attunement in childhood. All of us usually have some of this work to do, because even quite good parents will usually have large areas of lack of attunement. Certainly neglect and abuse is a big experience of lack of attunement. But whatever created it, it can be helpful to name: “oh, it matters when I don’t feel felt. It matters now that I choose people who can feel me and respond to me. It matters. I matter.” This is how we heal lack of attunement, by attuning to ourselves first, by recognizing how very difficult it was when we were children and didn’t feel felt. It can be quite lonely.
Here’s an invitation to slow down, to hear into whatever you are experiencing right now, to listen for the subtle undercurrent of your experience, and to make it matter. Let it blossom into something you can hold. You might find it helpful to place your hand on your heart, and actually rub your heart a bit. Here we are, little one. You matter. I’m here.
Resources: Sarah Peyton, Dan Siegel
