Attuning Toward Integration
Part II: Attachment foundations for Attunement
Hey loves! Thanks for being on this ride with us. We’re so glad you’re here. As we’ve shared, we’re diving into attachment theory foundations with this five part series. Each post explores one of the five components of healthy attachment: safety, attunement, soothing & comfort, support & encouragement, and delight. Last time, we shared more about safety. Today, attunement.
We want to take the time to do this foundation work because our own attachment blueprint guides how we approach rearing humans. Whether you’re a parent, educator, or caregiver taking on the sacred work of rearing humans, the work of raising young people is deeply relational. That means that doing our own inner work in understanding how we approach relationships is fundamental to anyone tending to young people.
A note: This is not medical advice or therapy. It’s intended for people who currently have access to relative physical and emotional safety. If you need medical or professional support, please contact your primary care provider or therapist.
Lastly, this is a reader supported publication. If you appreciate our work, please consider supporting by becoming a paid subscriber. It makes a huge difference for us and we’re thankful for it!
What is more deeply joyful and satisfying than when someone just gets you? When your inner experience is so clearly seen and reflected by another? When you don’t have to do anything to bridge the gap of understanding, and your inner experience is so clearly mirrored outside of you? When you can just relish in being known clearly?
In our youngest, most formative years as humans, it is a profound gift when the person who gets you happens to be your caregiver, the one who wields the vast majority of power over you as a vulnerable, young human, shaping your neural pathways for future relationships.
Think of a time in childhood when you were mildly distressed because you were hurt (in mind, body, or spirit), experiencing obstacles in forming your identity, or perhaps encountered a small calamity that was embarrassing, confounding, or otherwise deeply uncomfortable.
Now imagine if in that scenario your caregiver came down to your level, listening for as long as it takes. Imagine if they put effort into understanding your feelings, and really got it—got you. Imagine if they sought to understand what you needed, intuiting it even when you yourself might not have yet known, responding with a grounded compassion while holding your best interest in mind.
That is what we call attunement. That extended bridge between self and other—that deep seeing and reflecting and holding, that container of connection. At its best, it is transformative—life changing. Attunement is beautiful in and of itself, but when done well, it also is what opens the door to co-create strategies that help a child become their most integrated self.
Attunement is one of the five components of secure attachment. We humans are born with an expectant attachment system; our mammalian systems expect a nurturing primary caregiver. What that means is that we humans, as babies, are born primed for connection. When babies receive the connection we’re all innately wired for, that’s called secure attachment. Secure attachment, when done right, looks like wiring our brains with “good enough” parenting across the five components of attachment: safety, attunement, soothing & comfort, support & encouragement, and delight.
Many of us don’t receive the connection we’re wired for in our formative years, so we become insecurely attached to one or more of our caregivers. These insecure attachment patterns, formed primarily in our first three years of life, create a wobbly internal blueprint for how we navigate all our relationships throughout our lifetimes.
But an insecure attachment doesn’t mean individuals can’t form healthy adult attachments later in life. Our brains are magnificently malleable, and we can retrain them to build healthier, more secure internal blueprints. We can train them to become more securely attached.
In insecure attachments, caregivers seem not to understand what might be going on beneath the surface of their child’s distress. They are either unable to regulate themselves emotionally, or have learned to hide their own distress and could therefore not see the distress in their children. They actually may be a source of distress and alarm to their own children. They are not able to weave an integrated narrative about how their own childhoods impact the way they show up as parents, either distancing from the impact of childhood or remaining stuck in a trauma cycle from childhood. They play out the misattunement they received themselves in childhood, without awareness of ways to break those cycles.
Because of our own upbringing, many of us are very much in our various stages of learning and unlearning our patterns—or how to deeply attune to ourselves and those in our care, and that’s okay. Being human is messy, and parenting in this society so much more so.
We need to give ourselves some grace in this journey, and know that for our children, watching their caregiver learn to do things better is itself the thing that may carry the deepest impact.
Part of our journey is recognizing how much our own childhoods impact our capacities to fully attune to the children in our care. If you have spaciousness, pause and take a moment to reflect on the following questions about childhood:
How well did your caregiver/s or parent/s attune to you? In what ways did they see and reflect you? In what ways did they miss seeing and reflecting you?
How much capacity did they have to sit with your hurts and mistakes?
How did they show up in emotionally charged situations?
How much capacity did they have to regulate their own emotions?
How much space did they make for your own emotions and self-expression?
What might have gotten in the way of them fully seeing and reflecting you?
If we’re never really seen, or we never “feel felt”, then over time we start to believe we’re apparitions. If we are gaslit in childhood, we gaslight ourselves in adulthood. If we act undisturbed, we start to believe our own hype. Left unchecked, we then gaslight others in our life. We start to forget what the living earth feels like underfoot, we lose touch with our innate wisdom, we drop the connection with the parts of us that could help us rewrite our story. When we deal with chronic misattunement by cleaving ourselves from our emotional experience, our values, our truth, and our body, the only result is to become detached or cling desperately to something external to ourselves to fill in our solidity.
Being a kid in the Western, post-industrial context also means navigating lots of external expectations and an incessant drive toward performance that can enable and even demand this fundamental disconnection. This soup we’re in is ruggedly individualistic but paradoxically only supports individual expression to the extent that the machine doesn’t get jammed—as long as that individual expression is packagable, sellable. Sometimes it leaves no room for attunement at all. Which is to say: our society can benefit from our lack of attunement, wielding it to further extract our productivity.
Those on the track to performing in a way the society rewards (a constantly shifting bar, mind you) may end up getting those rewards in the form of money and a measure of security later in life, avoiding the long fall through a mostly nonexistent social safety net. Of course, the access to and volume of these rewards is dramatically increased as a person edges nearer the epicenter of privilege. The pressure to get on a track that produces and will create security down the line is massive, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for the kid or adult who doesn’t thrive within these rigid bounds. Often, the less we thrive, the more pressure the system applies. The more anxious a caregiver is about the proverbial bottom falling out, the lower the barometer drops. The personal and the political feed on each other in either positive or negative feedback loops.
Noticing and holding all the things about our internal and wider context might feel daunting, but it also gives us so much clarity. We are able to see clearly where we are in time and space, and slowly work to repattern our relationship to attunement—attuning first to ourselves so we can then attune more clearly to others.
One way we support that work is through our inner child reparenting meditation on attunement. The attunement meditation was one of our favorites to create because reclaiming this reality for the inner child—having an internal sense of self that is deeply seen and allowed—is so deeply radical and joyful. The meditation itself guides you to use your powerful imagination to rewire these new possibilities of feeling felt, being seen and understood, creating generous space to fumble and struggle and just be.
Our goal, as two humans also in the rewiring process, is to give ample space to relax into a safe, expansive container you may never have been given, and build a new blueprint for how to really listen to ourselves. The accompanying integration journal takes that deep inner work and helps explicitly integrate it, so that you can work toward answering this critical question with clarity:
“How did your childhood experiences impact your development in adulthood and the way you parent (or wish to parent)?”
As that question is answered in increasing clarity, we can start to see and celebrate the shifts we make in our daily life. If you have children or other dependents in your life, you can celebrate showing up for them in a more connected and grounded way, because you are able to show up first and foremost with more compassion and attunement for yourself.
Okay that’s all for now. Let us know how this lands for you!
Em & Sara