What is attunement?
A supposedly natural way of relating that is actually learned
Something that isn’t talked about much in all the chat about attachment theory is attunement. The most you generally hear about it is that securely attached kids had parents who responded in an attuned way to their needs. The other instance that pops up a lot is its opposite, misattunement, which trauma-informed leftists use to describe a moment of disagreement or strife in their relationships. (It’s me, I’m the trauma-informed leftist. We don’t have arguments anymore, only misattunements.)
All kidding aside, misattunement is a truly useful word that I use all the time and not actually a euphemism for yelling at each other. It’s that feel when your partner says something serious and you laugh, then see the horrified look on their face. When a friend needs something from you and you’re half-in, half-out of texting with them because something else is going on in your life, so you can’t pay close enough attention to tell how bad it really is and you say something insensitive. Or even when you’re on a date and it’s going really well, so you start effusively oversharing until you see that what was previously keen interest in their eyes has turned to boredom or panic.
All of these are examples of responses between two people that were not attuned, thus, misattunements. Misattunements aren’t (necessarily) severe conflicts, arguments, disagreements, or even mistakes. Often, they’re simply moments when the quality of one person’s attention did not match the other person’s emotional state.
Attunement, then, is simply this: matching your emotional and affective (that is, how you express your emotions outwardly) behavior to the person who is attempting to connect with you.
Attunement points to secure attachment
Securely attached people do this with each other in casual situations all the time. You could fill a Tumblr’s worth of discourse with memes, made and shared by insecurely attached and often neurodivergent people, about the terror of doing small talk. Small talk isn’t itself a terrible thing, nor is being able to do it successfully the only mark of successful attunement. But people who find it easy and comfortable to do small talk tend to be good at attuning with others: matching their moods, facial expressions, general energy, and level of friendliness. And people who can do that probably got a lot of that sort of thing as little kids, from at least one of their parents.
The more advanced version of this is the person who can attune that way with someone who’s in a bad mood, and bring them a little bit out of it. We all know that person who’s super positive all the time, and if you approach them sad or stressed or pissed off, they start, to use the vernacular, blowing sunshine up your ass. I’m not talking about that person. The advanced attuner is the one who meets you where you are, mirrors some of your mood back to you, but doesn’t fall into it. Such a person can often be there for you, listen, and then make you feel better not by hucking bromides at you, but through their steadiness, patience, and kindness.
I once was walking into an REI, one of the big outdoorsy supply places in New England, when a dad came out through the automatic doors, carrying a howling 3-year-old like Frankenstein’s Monster carrying the fainted Bride. The kid’s screams sounded (as kid’s screams so often do) like she was being murdered, and the dad looked tired but was calm, cool, and kind. “Yup,” he said in a normal tone of voice as he walked with her out of the loud and overwhelming store. “I get it. It’s rough in there. Let’s go home and get some dinner.”
To go back to the “types of parenting” post I made back in the fall, this was a dad who was both feeling and dealing. Lots of big feelings there, kid, I see you there. Not gonna scream with you, but I see the big feelings. How about we go do something else, and you can tell me all about it?
Feeling and Dealing
Last time, I introduced attachment theory, first through what I called the “trauma-Insta” lens that a lot of folks have largely seen it through, then with a little of the historical backing from psychology.
What those feeling and dealing parents — the ones whose kids end up securely attached — are doing is attunement. They’re responsive, not reactive. They’re meeting the kid where they are, giving their emotions space, and doing something calmly to address the issue and comfort the kid.
You might also see such a parent attuning with their kid when the kid’s in a good mood. These are the parents who engage with their kids in play, talk with them or ask questions, mirror their animated expressions of joy and curiosity, and encourage their enthusiasms and exploration. The earliest and simplest forms of attunement tend to happen naturally when caregivers have their own basic needs met and are caring for a wanted infant. You’ll see it (and hear it) in the cooing and smiling baby-talk, eye contact, and simple movement play that such caregivers seem to just fall into with their babies. In doing so, brain scans have shown that these caregivers are literally syncing up their brains with their kids’, helping with their growth and development.
What about the rest of us?
When adults attune with one another, it can light up those same circuits. It’s what makes you feel seen in a good conversation with a friend. It’s what makes you feel heard when you tell your partner something that’s bothering you, and they really listen. It’s what makes your body relax and you feel like you can really be yourself when you sit down next to your favorite person, or get a really good hug. It’s what happens when you breathe together with a lover, laugh with friends spontaneously, dance in a particularly magical crowd, play a good game with a team or a good show with a band. Attunement is everywhere that people link up their nervous systems with one another, and feel themselves together with them.
Here’s the thing about how it works between two individuals, though. A lot of times, people think that being there with and for someone means either taking their problems on, or solving them for them. Especially if we ourselves didn’t receive the kind of attunement I’m talking about, then we didn’t necessarily develop that “natural” sense of what it looks like to just be present with another. (Note the “natural” in scare-quotes: it feels natural when we have been taught it from very young. And in societies where emotional repression is the norm, a lot of us don’t really know what to do when someone gets emotional near us.
Between peers, like spouses, partners or friends, less-attuned responses can look like the “helper” getting emotionally drained as they take on the other person’s negative emotional states. Or, it can look like the helper leaping to solutions and racing to fix, while the other person feels unheard. Another version can have the helper minimizing the other person’s concerns, because they’re not comfortable facing the problems or talking about them.
When it’s a question of attunement between a therapist or other healing professional and a client, these dynamics can also show up. The professional may take on a client’s problems, feel overburdened, and head toward burnout. Or, feeling an inflated obligation to be effective as a healer, may rush to fix the client’s problems and find that’s not what the client actually needs right now. (The minimization can happen too, though unintentionally, if the healer and client are truly misaligned.)
In a future post, I’ll continue this by talking about another lesson from my training that used the wisdom of the body to find the most balanced and attuned way to receive a client. For now though, I’m going to close this instead of waiting for another 5,000-word essay to feel complete enough to post. After a long, tough winter, I hope to bring you more frequent thoughts, and hello new subscribers!