What is Attunement – and Why is it Vital for Your Mental Health?
Image by Jonathan Borba/Unsplash
Take a look at this picture – what do you see? Notice how mum and baby seem completely in sync, both joyful and laughing, gazing into each other’s eyes, happy and shining with love. Lucky baby. Because this is what secure attachment looks like, when caregiver and infant are so close, so intimately connected that psychologists call it ‘attachment bliss’. And lucky baby because, if you experience secure attachment like this when you are small, you will develop a secure attachment style, which means your adult relationships will mostly be close, warm, loving and easy to navigate, because you feel calm and confident in your bones, trusting that people like and love you as much as your mother did.
One of the key elements of secure attachment – and a crucial part of healthy child development – is the concept of attunement. This is so important I often speak about it with my clients, because having parents, like the mum in this photo, who were attuned to you is essential for your physical and mental health. And the lack of attunement – even from well-meaning parents, who are doing the best they can with what they have – can be extremely painful, traumatic even, for highly sensitive little boys and girls.
What is attunement?
As a baby, having an attuned mother means that she gets you, with all your unique needs and characteristics as a small, developing human. She can figure out when you’re wet and need changing, hungry and need food, bored and need stimulating play, tired and need a nap, or overstimulated and need some quiet time (babies often get overstimulated and will turn their heads away to signal they have had enough play, enough eye contact, enough hyping up). For most infants their primary caregiver is mum, but of course dad is hugely important too, as are aunts and uncles, grandparents, siblings, teachers and so on.
Attunement is especially important if you are a sensitive child, because your needs will be a little different than most other kids. Let’s look at this through the lens of Tom, an eight-year-old boy, and his older sister Sara, who is 12. Sara is one of those kids who loves being the centre of attention. She is joyful, loud and boisterous, likes playing pranks, team sports and roughhousing with her dad. Tom is not like his sister. He is a quiet, introverted, highly sensitive kid, who prefers time alone, or playing quiet games with one or two friends. He hates being the centre of attention and team sports are both boring and stressful for Tom.
Because their mum is also highly sensitive, she is very good at being attuned to Tom and his needs for quiet, to retreat to his room when it all gets a bit much. This attunement helps Tom flourish, because – unlike many sensitive kids – his sensitivity is prized and respected, not criticised or demeaned. In fact, their mum struggles more to attune to Sara, because her extrovert, robust temperament is harder for her to understand. So even though Tom is, on paper, a kid who might struggle more, in fact it’s Sara who finds her relationship with mum a bit unsatisfying, feels unseen and misunderstood a lot of the time.
These books will help
If you are a parent – and especially if your kids are more on the sensitive side – I highly recommend a new book by my brilliant supervisee, Dr Aoife Durcan. Your Highly Sensitive Child: Helping Your Child Flourish in an Overwhelming World, is written by and for sensitive people, and for their parents, who might struggle to know what they need to navigate the swirling currents of school, family, friendships and the wider world. As a schema therapist, Dr Durcan puts attunement front and centre of what parents need to raise happy, flourishing, sensitive kids.
Another book I often recommend to my clients is Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, by Dr Jonice Webb. This is an excellent book to help you understand emotional neglect, which is often the product of a lack of attunement by your parents. You may have had parents who were downright cruel, heavily abusing substances, extremely narcissistic or going through a high-conflict divorce – if so, I’m sorry, because growing up in a family like that leaves deep wounds. But many of my clients had well-meaning, essentially decent parents who were doing their best, but just lacked the emotional skills to give a child what they needed. If that sounds familiar to you, do read this book – hundreds of my clients have found it illuminating and extremely helpful.
I hope that all helps you understand this key psychological concept – because understanding is a key step on the road to healing your wounds, if you did experience a lack of attunement and neglect as a child, for any reason.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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