By Edward Brodkin & Ashley Pallathra
Attunement is the ability to be aware of your own state of mind and body while also tuning in and connecting to another person. It is the fundamental social skill and the foundation of human relationships, without which we are isolated from others and cut off from our own inner life. Attunement relies not only on spoken language but also on the communication of feeling states through unspoken signals that we exchange, such as facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language. Reciprocal communication is a dance between attention and gesture that flows most effectively when people are in tune with one another. The nonverbal components of communication start to develop almost as soon as we are born, and they are nurtured in our interactions with our parents or caregivers. We continue to develop them over the course of a lifetime. In relationships and interactions of any depth, attunement plays an important role.
Attunement helps us to feel aware of ourselves and connected to another person, and it helps that other person feel just as connected to us. Attunement is a whole-body experience, both kinesthetic and emotional, in which you can sense someone’s rhythm, affect, and experience by essentially feeling like you’re in their skin. Attunement goes one step past empathy by creating a two-person experience of feeling connected, which is accomplished through reciprocal, dynamic responding to one another’s emotional states, needs, and desires.
Attunement should not be viewed as simply fostering a touchy-feely emotional connection with others, but as a unique power—a power that enables us to perceive communications from others, to connect and have our message understood, and to manage conflict. Rather than an abstract, intangible concept, attunement is based on a specific set of skills that, research suggests, can be developed with time and practice. True social-emotional attunement can most easily be identified as those moments in which your attention is completely engrossed in social interaction with someone, whether that someone is your closest confidante or a recent acquaintance.
You can have a quality interaction with someone that includes elements like mindfulness, presence of mind, active listening, empathy, and cognitive understanding, but any one of these skills on their own is not attunement. True attunement is born from all of these elements working in conjunction, which allows you to be in sync and in tune with someone’s expression of their experience.
Think of a time when you’ve comforted someone close to you who is grieving. This is a moment that calls for enhanced empathy and awareness of both your own emotions and those of the other person. A major loss, like a death in the family, can be so shocking that it stops us in our tracks, puts all of our usual distractions on hold, and reminds us of the importance of human-to-human connection. As you provide comfort, you pay greater attention to what the grieving person is saying and the body language they use. This focus helps you try to anticipate their needs, whether it be for a tissue, an embrace, or just being present as you sit and listen. As a result, you become in tune with one another, causing a positive feedback loop in which the grieving person feels connected to you, and you feel connected to their experience. While you can’t bring back the deceased person, your presence and the connection between you are deeply comforting. An attuned connection between you and another person has great power to foster emotional healing.
An important characteristic of attunement is that it has both inner and outer aspects. In other words, attunement involves paying attention inwardly to our own emotional state, thoughts, and feelings, as well as paying attention outwardly to the cues from the person we’re interacting with. When you comfort a person who is sad, it’s helpful to be somewhat aware of (but not completely overwhelmed by) your own feelings as you attend to theirs. Maybe when you’re comforting someone who has just lost a parent, it brings up emotions within you because you’re currently caring for an elderly parent yourself. An interaction like that might make you feel anxious, stressed out, or sad because you are reminded of your own family situation. While that is completely normal and understandable, it takes a certain level of conscious awareness to identify those emotions within yourself. That awareness allows you to regulate your emotions while you maintain a mindful connection with the other person’s experience. Without an awareness that the other person’s loss is stirring up your own feelings about your family situation, you may unknowingly get distracted by your own emotions and experience during the conversation. As a result, you may lose focus on the emotions of the grieving person. So, ironically, some degree of self-awareness can help you to stay aware of the other person. Awareness of both our own state and the other person’s state makes room for the connection between both parties to deepen.
Attunement can be attained in joyful situations as well. It can occur between two people who are deeply in love with one other; between two old friends who know and understand each other inside and out; between a parent and their new baby laughing and cuddling; or among musicians, dancers, or team athletes who perform in close physical, mental, and emotional coordination with each other. These kinds of interactions carry with their beauty.
And people who are highly connected with each other in that way often have a feeling of euphoria during their moments of attuned interaction, which they may miss when the interaction is over. For people in love with each other, for parents with their new babies, or for musicians, dancers, and athletes, those periods of connection are often the moments that they live for and can’t wait to get back to.
The more you learn about attunement, the more you’ll start to notice the diversity and versatility of these skills in your life and in the lives of others. Attunement can be useful in different ways, depending on the situation and type of relationship.
Close relationships are the classic situations in which attunement comes into play, but the attunement can also play an important role in enhancing our ability to function in less intimate interactions, such as with acquaintances or even people who we’ve just encountered for the first time. Generating some degree of attunement with others does not require knowing them well, nor does it require having lengthy, deep, meaningful conversations. An attuned interaction is born from the experience of being present and connected with someone, for however long or short that connection may last. In less intimate situations, attunement skills enhance your ability to stay calm and to keep your eyes and ears open to perceive the other person clearly and accurately. By maintaining some awareness of your own reactions(e.g., becoming overwhelmed, distracted, emotional), you’re often better able to handle anything that arises between you and the other person and to do so much more skillfully.
Although it can enhance your sense of closeness, attunement does not mean becoming so close to another person that you give up your independence of thought and action. Only two individuals who have a clear sense of themselves as separate individuals can be truly attuned to each other. When you give up your sense of individuality and autonomy for someone else—or another person gives up their individuality and autonomy for you—this is merging, or it could mean that one person dominates and controls the other, which is very different from attunement. Attunement involves two or more individuals finding a balance of connection with personal space and freedom, depending on the particular relationship and the context.
Attunement is even helpful for navigating our way through conflicts that seem to inevitably arise between people. While attunement certainly doesn’t quell emotions, heightened attunement skills allow individuals to engage calmly and not get overwhelmed by emotional reactivity. This perspective allows people to hear and understand each other more clearly. It enables each person to respond to what the other person actually did or said, rather than to misperceptions of what was done or said. While it may seem paradoxical, when we’re in conflict with someone, we’re actually much more effective in navigating that conflicted situation if we stay connected with that other person—when we can actually hear and understand that person clearly, and respond to what was really said and meant. If you lose your connection to the other person, your ability to assert yourself in a conflict or situation is diminished. To make a convincing argument or case to the other person, it is crucial that you stay cool, that you listen to and understand what is being said, that you know where the other person is coming from and that you then construct your argument in such a way that the other person will be able to hear it.
It’s not easy to connect with someone who has very different views from your own. When you fundamentally disagree with someone, how can you expect to connect with them? Most people have been hit by a moment in which they realize, or are surprised to learn, that not everyone is interpreting the world the way they are. It can be a tough pill to swallow when we interact with someone who has a different perspective on the same situation, especially when those interactions relate to hot-button topics like racism, religion, politics, or parenting. There can be an almost automatic urge to either react or disengage, either of which usually leads to ineffective communication. But attunement with others does not require agreeing with them, nor does it mean having the same perspective on life that they have. It does require that you keep yourself calm enough to be aware, that you sincerely listen and understand, and that you stay in touch with your own reactions and those of the other person so that the whole interaction can go more smoothly and productively.
Attunement offers up the chance to take the path less traveled, the counterintuitive path—using the connection to navigate conflict—even in moments where throwing up your hands and walking away feels like the easier choice. It’s no magic pill, but the exercises that we offer to develop each component of attunement will allow you to take mindful practices off of your couch at home and turn them into practical strategies that you can bring into your everyday interactions.
