Four Steps to Create Safety In Attunement
Attunement is a powerful tool to affect experiential change in clients. It’s powerful effect is tempered by its capacity for potential harm. Misattunement can leave clients more injured if we’re not careful. Here’s how to create safety in attunement.
1. Assess Client Capacity
Assess how much the client can move within their distress. Attunement helps us get a sense of the client’s boundaries and distress tolerance. It let’s us know how big their metaphorical space is and the level of engagement they desire and can tolerate. Clients express their comfort and discomfort in many ways, including their body posture, behavior, language, thoughts, and emotions.
2. Respect the Boundaries
Maintain safety as you process their felt distress. Look for signs the process may be too fast, where the client becomes overwhelmed or withdrawn. When we miss their cues, we can reinforce these self-protections. Maintain safety as you gently explore and expand the client’s capacity for vulnerability. Perhaps they need a slower approach or more space (or even silence) when engaging their distress. Perhaps a careful push is needed to move them out of too much comfort and self-protection. Ride the edge of the client’s tolerance. Leverage the attunement to ebb and flow as you manage how much they can do within each moment.
3. Maintain Constant Attunement
Communicating that we are with our client in their experience provides safety, not just verbally but through the emotional resonance of attunement. Attunement is the ‘skill of connection’ that expands people’s felt sense of safety. Reflect and expand their experience, leveraging both the felt sense of connectedness and navigating their evolving edge of tolerance. Through this clients gain confidence to engage their distress and attend what has been abandoned, neglected, or injured within a held, comforting, and connected relationship.
4. Be Prepared for Client Defenses
It can be surprising when clients engage their defenses when we aren’t expecting it. We can react to the sudden change of posture and lose our attunement as our own feelings disrupt our connection to theirs. These moments are a defensive protection from a external or internal cue. They also communicate specific data regarding their area of distress. Take a moment to acknowledge your own feelings within yourself as you help them calm, then return to connect with the client’s felt experience. Attunement helps us connect to both the feeling and the function of the behavior. Compassion for why something happens can help us better manage what to do about it.
5. Validate Experiences and Constructed Meanings
Our connected exploration of the somatic sensations, constructed meanings, and underlying needs and longings held by the client’s felt distress soothes the disconnected and isolating experience of distress. It provides the client with the emotional security to explore their distressed feeling, to acknowledge its significance, and to connect to what is needed for healing. Validating that the construct makes sense to the you within your attunement to the client’s felt experience and context can soothe fears and shame and provide confidence to connect to the distress at deeper levels. As we move deeper, we continually integrate disregarded or excluded data through our attunement to facilitate greater and more resilient healing and repair.