DEFINING ATTUNEMENT
From the moment babies are born they learn from their environment.
By studying early interactions between babies and caregivers researchers can better understand how trauma impacts development.
Babies and children who are deprived of emotional or physical attunement have been taught that their needs are not valid. Often they adjust their needs to fit those of their caregivers. This inability to understand their own needs often causes them to shut down during periods of both positive and negative emotions later in life (Van der Kolk, 2014).
Treating children who suffered from lack of attuned caregivers during their developmental years often requires the creation of very thoughtful treatment plans.
MODALITIES THAT BUILD A BRIDGE BETWEEN BODY AND COGNITION
Mental health professionals have found in recent years that children with these types of histories respond well to treatments like expressive art, dance, music, gymnastics, yoga, meditation. These methods can help those who lack attunement with their body and emotions (Van der Kolk, 2014)
DEFINITION OF ATTUNEMENT
Attunement is a kinesthetic and emotional sensing of others– knowing their rhythm, affect and experience by metaphorically being in their skin, and going beyond empathy to create a two-person experience of unbroken feeling.
It is a sense of connectedness you provide by being reciprocal emotionally. Instead of empty words like, “I am sorry for what you are going through… attunement bridges the distance and joins in a way that feels validating. One’s affect is thoroughly accepted and respected. The most important feature is that you give a resonating response. (Erksine 1998). One could say it is our ability to be present to, and with, another’s expression of their experience.
Attunement can be encompassed in these experiences:
- Empathy
- Mindfulness
- Immediacy
- Active Listening
- Presence
- Mirroring an Experience
UNDERSTANDING BROKEN ATTUNEMENT
When someone is violating empathy and mirroring—the two things that constitute attunement- it is like being stuck in the front row listening to a middle school jazz ensemble. The brass and percussion miss the beat, and then just when you recover from the clanging symbols, a shrill duo of pre-teens playing a trumpet and a bass trombone fold their sounds into the mix. It is painful. You regret the day you were born. You fantasize running down the metal bleachers of the gym to beg them to stop. Or if kindness resurrects inside your wounded brain, you dream of paying each child for six months of lessons.
The pain is in the dissonance. We expect harmony, and we get discord.
Recently I listened to the autobiography of Hannah Gadsby. Most of the time in her autobiography, she would make a joke of the very feeble and cruel quality of her mother’s responses to her needs as a child. When it happened in the audiobook, I would want to cry or scream. Anything to make the abuse stop.
In her writing and stand-up comedy routines, you feel the power differential between a parent and a child. It breaks your heart. I believe Mrs. Gadsby merits the award of the least attuned + attached parent on the planet.
For example, if Hannah at seven said, “Look Mom, I have a gash on my leg and it needs to be looked at because it might need stitches.” Her mother would give this dismissive and curt answer:
“No, it doesn’t.”
End of story.
She lived in total abandonment of her God given longings. It happened daily, sometimes hourly. As you often find — the only recourse she had for her soul to survive was to make a joke of all of the hurts and laugh them off as “paper cuts.” But she does say of her mother, “SHE WOULD EAT YOU ALIVE.”
Listen to a brief role play of Hannah imitating her mother on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
As you listen with your heart to the clip notice the painful moments in the interview. If you are accustomed to accurate empathy it is natural to to compose what you think a loving Mom might say. What is your attuned sentence?
Next, listen to what Hannah actually experienced as the youngest of five children in her family.
Her wounds still cry out for healing decades later. It is heartbreaking to hear how current the put downs are as she sits in the interview chair of the Late Show. Hannah clarifies to Colbert that her mother can’t and won’t attune to basic whispers of emotional content that all children have going on inside.
Therefore, Hannah’s soul walks on the earth in deep exile.
That is the power of dismissal. That is the isolation that is caused by broken attunement. In her family of origin she can’t find a safe harbor. Her father has no emotional landscape and her mother is, in my opinion, the world champion of slamming verbal doors in your face.
As for Hannah… It may or may not be helpful to deftly wield the “loud stick” of being on stage with a microphone. It is a morsel of justice we witness within her comedy routine.