It is our next episode from the Lessons from the Playroom podcast and we are talking about attunement. I’m going to talk about attunement, both for us when we are in the playroom, but I also want to give a little bit of insight into how you might even go about explaining attunement to a parent or caregiver. Attunement is such an important part of the therapeutic relationship.
I mean, if we really just want to simplify, why do our clients come to see us? Or what are they looking for? Yes, a huge part is that they’re trying to heal the parts of themselves that have been wounded in some way or things that feel challenging in some way. But as far as the relationship with us goes, they want to be felt right. They want to feel heard.
They want to feel energetically and emotionally met by us. The same thing is true in the parent child dynamic. So we can do all the right things, whatever that means.
Follow the script, say the words, all of the things go down the checklist. But if we are not attuned, our client will walk away likely feeling not seen and not felt not met by us. So attunement is really the heart of the therapeutic exchange that happens between us and our clients.
So let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about what it is and how we might even be able to develop it at a little bit of a deeper level. And then if we were to explain it to a parent, how might we go about that? So there’s, I think, many different ways of thinking about attunement, lots of different descriptions of attunement.
I’m going to share with you a couple that I really appreciate. One, if we really just want to simply say it is empathy. So our ability to feel and empathize with another person’s experience, that is attunement.
Another way to think about it is being able to feel what’s often referred to as the resonance, the resonance between you and your client. There’s a resonance state. I’m going to get into that a little bit more here in a moment.
The ability to hold someone else’s mind in your mind, which you might have heard the word mentalization that’s a word that’s being explored and talked a lot about these days. And it’s an important word. And it is it’s this ability to hold others mind in our mind.
These are all different ways of talking about attunement. A great definition from Dr. Dan Siegel the way we take in the internal world of another and allow them to shape who we are in the I think that’s really beautiful.
Or how we focus our attention on another and take their essence into our inner world. That’s just beautiful. We just pause and just again feel into that how we take in another.
I love that because it’s not saying how we think about another. It’s how do we take them in? Right? How do we feel them, how do we allow the essence of who they are, the felt sense of who they are, the resonance of their activation, how do we allow that to enter into our inner worlds? And how do we become conscious about that and the possibility of what that might mean for the person that we are interacting with? So let’s just play around with that a little bit. Let’s just keep going with this idea of our ability to take in another, which really is our ability to feel we’re talking about attuning to other.
But we really need to understand that the ability to attune to another is a byproduct of our ability to attune to ourselves in any given moment. In fact, you can’t actually attune to someone else unless you are attuned to yourself first. So attuning to yourself.
What does that mean? Well, let’s just practice right now as you’re listening to me talk about this. You’ve got different experiences that are occurring right now in your own body. There are sensations in your body.
You might label some of those sensations with different feeling words. There are different thoughts that you have in your mind. And the question is, can you become aware of them? Are you able to feel what is arising in you, in your body and also in your own mind? As you are able to cultivate that at deeper and deeper levels, then you’re able to take that level of mindfulness, if you will, into relationship for attunement.
So it works kind of like this. Your child client comes in and your client begins to create some play. And let’s say that the play in this particular session involves a doll house.
You know what? It’s an empty doll house. In fact, there’s no furniture at all in this doll house except for a tiny little bed in one of the rooms upstairs. And let’s say that your client takes a little baby and puts the baby in the little bed alone in the room, alone in the doll house.
So I just want you to pause as you heard me tell that story, which, by the way, more accurately is as you imagined that story unfolding in your mind. Because as I told you the story, you actually imagined sitting there watching this happen in the session. You’re feeling something.
So what is it attune to me right now? By attuning to yourself, maybe you felt a wave of sadness. Maybe you felt your energy collapse a little bit. Maybe you had a completely different experience and you went into concern wondering, is the baby okay? Who knows? But whatever it is, you had some shifts that occurred in you.
Now, here’s what’s really cool about what we’re experiencing together right now. The only thing that you are privy to is the tone of my voice. The tone of my voice and the pacing in which I just told that story.
Now imagine that we were in the play therapy session together and I was the client and I was doing this and you were watching. Well, in addition now to my tone of voice or my pacing of my language, if I was talking to you, you would now have a whole other group of nonverbal cues that you’d be picking up on. So you’d be watching my posture.
You’d be watching my movements. You would see the way that I placed the baby into the bed. You would see how I left the baby alone.
And all of these other nonverbal cues would begin to give you information. So it’s your mirror neuron system, by the way, that’s tracking me and tracking the patterns that you’re observing as I’m playing. And as that is happening, you are taking in all of this information.
And this information is beginning to create, we’ll call them subcortical shifts. That means below the cortex, right? So lower regions of the brain not necessarily conscious. So your physiology will begin to have some subtle and maybe not so subtle shifts in response to what you are observing me doing and picking up on.
And you’re also beginning to pick up on my emotional state. This information, by the way, is then going to make its way up into the insula of my brain, which sometimes is referred to as the seat of empathy, the seat of mindfulness, because it is here where we now have the potential of the possibility of becoming aware of these shifts that just occurred inside of us. So let’s pause and regroup here so that we can go into the next layer.
So as you were listening to me tell the story, you started to feel some things in your body. As those shifts started to occur, information went into your insula and in that moment. So maybe even just pause right now and go into your body.
As you have this moment of mindful awareness, you are starting to tune into yourself. Isn’t that kind of cool attunement, right, tune in. So you’re tuning into yourself.
You’re becoming aware of what is happening in your body as you took in the world of me and how that then impacts your inner world. The reason why this is the place of empathy is because it’s really at this point that then we can become curious about what’s happening with other. So let’s say that as I shared that story, and I’ll just say a piece again so you can once again tune in so that there’s no furniture in the house.
It’s an incredibly empty house, and there’s a tiny little bed. And in this bed, in this room, it’s the only furniture in the room. There’s a little baby.
And the little baby is just lying there alone in the bed, in the empty room, in the empty house. So tune into yourself. What do you notice? Let’s go with there’s a slight wave of sadness.
Now that this information has become available to you in your conscious awareness, you now get to become curious about whether or not I feel sad. And that is attunement. Attunement is not thinking, oh, I bet Lisa is sad.
Attunement is feeling into your own body, and then from that information becoming curious, I wonder if Lisa is feeling sad. It’s a very, very different approach. One is very left brain, one is very embodied, very right brain.
So let’s just pause. So in order to become aware of this information, we need to be present. So let’s talk for a second about what gets in the way of attunement.
Well, one of the biggest ways or things that gets in the way of attunement is being lost in thought. So as someone is telling us something, or as someone, let’s say the child is playing something, we’re one step ahead. Oh, I bet I know what they’re going to do.
Or maybe we’re seeing a dilemma unfold. Or we’re hearing about a dilemma and we’re problem solving. We’re not feeling the impact of the story.
We’re not feeling right. We’re not taking in this person. We’re in our own world trying to brainstorm problem solve.
Again, one step ahead. The word distracted comes to mind. Distracted by our own mental activity.
And then sometimes we are just literally distracted. Like we’re thinking about other stuff. We’re not even thinking about what’s going on with them.
Or we’re trying to do five things at one time. Or our mind is wandering when we are not available in the moment, we’re not going to feel the information in the moment, which means we are likely not going to be able to attune to ourselves, to be able to attune to someone else. Now, I think it’s always important that we embrace our humanness and recognize that we’re not going to be attuned even the majority of the time.
In fact, most of the time, we are walking through the world a bit disconnected from ourselves and from other people. Edtronic’s work has helped us understand that an attuned caregiver, by the way, is only attuned a little around 30% of the time. That means that there’s a lot of misattunement that happens in relationship.
So let’s have realistic expectations on ourself. Attunement is a practice of coming back to the present moment and coming back to allowing ourselves to feel whatever it is that we are feeling in the moment. Because we have taken in the world of other, right? We have brought in the mind of other.
And I suppose the question here then is how in the world would we explain this to a parent or caregiver? Now, I know that I just have spent the last, I don’t know, 15 minutes or so explaining it to you, but did you notice that in my explanation, I gave you an experience, I told you a story and then in that story I helped you become curious. We can’t explain attunement to someone else. Attunement is a felt sense experience.
And for many individuals, if they’ve never really had someone deeply attuned to them, they may just not even have an orientation towards what does it even feel like. So when we’re working with parents and caregivers to deeply attune to them and give them that felt sense, that’s the first step. If you are wanting to help them understand what attunement can look or feel like with their child, give them an experience, role play, do something that is more embodied.
Maybe tell them a story and help them feel what that story felt like in their body. And then you can have a dialogue of curiosity about the resonance that took place between the two of you as you were telling the story and they were feeling you tell the story. And in a sense in those moments being able to engage in mentalization as they were holding you as they were hearing the story.
That’s I think the most important piece is that it’s not something you can just explain because it’s right brain. You have to provide an experience of some great role plays. You could have the caregiver or parent be in a challenging situation pretending to be their child.
So maybe they pretend to fall and scrape their knee or maybe they pretend to come home from school mad and they walk through the door and they slam the door and they’re yelling and screaming and today was the worst day ever and whatever it is. And actually finding a scenario that’s a scenario that this parent or caregiver does have to deal with. And then as the parent imagines being the child in that role play.
How do you then respond in an attuned way? Do you model attunement through dismissing the emotion oh, you’re fine. Do you model the attunement by just simply ignoring the child? These are all things that you can role play. And then ask the parent or caregiver, what was that like for you? What was that like for you when I told you you were fine? Or I dismissed your emotions in some way versus responding with wow, I’m feeling you as you tell the story and it sounds like you had a really hard day.
In fact, it sounds really painful. The day that you’ve had sounds frustrating, sounds sad. Am I getting it? Is that what it was like for you? Again, when we can provide an experience and then we can become curious together in that experience, then we can begin to practice what the attunement language could look like from there.
The last piece that I’m going to mention in this podcast is how do we develop attunement? Well, if we’re going to go off this idea that it requires us first to feel what’s happening in our bodies, then anything we can do to continue to develop a relationship with our bodies. There are many episodes in this podcast series where we get into the body. We’ve got episodes on the nervous system.
We’ve got episodes where we talk about the importance of having a relationship with your body, attuning to the feedback and signals of your body, to the development of interoception, or interoception, however you say the word. Lots of different practices, but anything that you can do to help you get into your body. I want to provide a final story about something that happened last weekend to me.
I was keynoting the New York Association for Play Therapy conference and I did a role play and it was a really profound role play in many ways. And I have since spoken with the person that did the demonstration with me and they have given me permission to be talking about this and sharing this right now on this podcast. But she was role playing an experience that she was having with her client.
So she was the client and I was facilitating as if she were the client to help her get insight into how to navigate the play experience that she was having with her client. And as the play unfolded, there was a lot of confusion as a theme in the play. A lot of confusion, a lot of not sure who I am, I’m not sure what to think, a lot of disorienting going on.
And there was a moment where I was attuning to her, attuning to me, and we were going moment to moment in the play. And then all of a sudden I felt a subtle shift in energy and I felt almost like a blip, like a blip of energy where I felt in my own body almost like a quick moment of dissociation, right? Like what just happened there. And that attuning to myself and tracking, because that was different.
As I was attuning to myself, I was able to pick up on the incongruency that just happened. Here I am and then there’s a blip. And it became a really significant moment because I was able to pause and I was able to check in with the individual that was doing the role play.
And I asked her what just happened for her. And what she had explained was that as she was role playing, she actually got insight into how her client dissociates. So I want you to get this piece.
Her client playing through or not playing through her client struggles at times with dissociation when she goes into the trauma play the individual that was role playing the therapist, that was role playing with me in embodying her, attuning to her as she was then role playing with me simultaneously. Got that Blip, that dissociative experience. And because I was attuning in this scenario, I felt it.
So not only did I feel the therapist quick moment of dissociation, but I then was able to get curious about, is that what happens in your client? All because of attunement? And what we discovered was that was actually the missing piece, was that this therapist hadn’t connected yet, that what was going on, or a part of what was going on for her client was that her client is dissociative really significant. So why did I share that story? Because had I been in my head trying to figure out what was happening? Had I been in my head, lost in the play and trying to track and not feeling the confusion and not feeling the disorientation and not feeling those shifts that were arising in my body and then holding this therapist experience in mind, and I would have missed a really critical piece of the play therapy experience. It was the attunement to myself and to this therapist that allowed me to feel that subtle shift when the dissociation occurred.
It allowed me to feel the incongruence in the environment, the incongruence that happened in me. And then it allowed me to become curious about, what was that? What just happened in me? I wonder what just happened in the therapist? Let’s now get curious about and is that what happens inside of the client? So I’ll take a breath together, another moment of attunement inside. Thank you for being on the receiving end of this conversation today.
Thank you for feeling with me today, for being with me in the exploration, the curiosity, for allowing yourself to feel as I was telling the story, so we could practice attunement. Let yourself continue to deepen your own curiosity about what’s going on inside of your own body and allow yourself to keep deepening then, the curiosity about and might that be what’s going on in the individual that you are connecting with in a particular moment? And then how do you respond to them in a way where they can then feel deeply seen, deeply met, and deeply heard by you? Until next time, everyone. Remember you’re the most important toy in that playroom.
