From loved children to attuned adults
The cases of self-affirming versus lonely children
“The roots of resilience … are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.”
- Diana Fosha
To be present, is to be in tune with the moment. To know that the self exists in the here and now, not in the past, not in the future. To be aware of the sensations one is feeling - in body, heart and mind.
In this post, I will speak of “being present” as a psychological concept. “Being present” has a term in the psychological realm: attunement.
Attunement is ‘the ability to feel the body as the place where the psyche lives’. (1)
For the rest of this post, when we speak of attunement, we speak of presence. When we speak of ‘being attuned’ or ‘in tune’, we also mean ‘being present’.
Being attuned to ourself and others can determine our life quality in adulthood.
Being attuned to oneself means a person can notice and respond to their inner sensations - whether bodily, emotionally or mentally. It could be as simple as eating when one is hungry, stopping when one is satiated; or as intricate as noticing sadness, anger, joy, satisfaction, and respond accordingly.
Being attuned to others means that a person can take social cues - can notice other people’s behavior, tone, voice, facial expression - and adapt socially. A person attuned to others can competently live within a community and develop bonds with others.
Essentially, being attuned means connecting to the self, and to others.
As simple and self-explanatory as this may sound, attunement is rather difficult in practice:
Do we always rest when we’re tired?
Do we always eat when we’re hungry, and stop when we’re full?
Do we always notice our joy?
Do we always feel our sadness?
The path to being attuned is complex, and took seed in early childhood. As no one’s childhood is ever the same, we grow up to be adults with varying ability to be attuned. Life experiences in adulthood also affect our ability to be attuned - but in this post, we will cover childhood first - the starting point of our path to attunement.
Attunement in childhood
Children becomes attached to whoever functions as their primary caregiver - whether mother, father, or a certain caregiver. Fundamentally, the first relationship infants and children experience is an attachment bond with a primary caregiver. (2) (3)
The nature of this attachment - whether secured or not - makes a huge difference in how the child’s life will manifest over childhood, and into adulthood. The make-or-break of whether a secure attachment will be form, is the emotional attunement provided for the child by their primary caregiver.
Whether the child will grow into an attuned, self-possessed, self-regulated adult depends on whether their primary caregiver is an attuned, self-possessed and self-regulated adult themself.
But the difficult thing is, sometimes the caregiver does not consciously know whether they are attuned or not. This is because attunement starts in the subconscious.
Attunement starts in the subconscious
The path to attunement is not linear. This is because a sense of well-rounded attunement starts in the subconscious.
In the early months of infancy, the right hemisphere of the parents’ brain - where subconscious emotions reside - programs the infants’ right hemisphere. Communications in which subtle, subconscious emotions are exchanged are the most important communication that form the basis for an infant’s brain development. (2)
In early childhood, infants are not able to decipher the meanings of words - so they receive messages that are purely emotional - via tone, voice, facial expression, physical actions. Babies smile or laugh when their parents make funny faces. They receive the emotions their caregiver elicits, and return them.
Then, in turn, if the caregiver is attuned with the infants’ emotions - a complete cycle of electrical wiring is complete. This full-circle, in-sync exchange forms the basis for the infants’ well-rounded brain development.
Emotionally attuned exchanges consequentially lead to a full-circle wiring where the infants learn to be attuned with their emotions and their caregivers, they then develop this ability in later childhood and in adulthood - having been prepped for it in early infancy.
Children whose infancy and childhood are filled with emotionally attuned interactions with their caregivers are equipped with a psychological and physiological foundation of security and attunement.
This is because the parent’s emotional attunement to the infant informs the infant that they are being understood, that they are being met where they’re at.
This also means that, anything that threatens the caregiver’s emotional attunement with themself can make them incapable of being in tune with the infants’ emotions. These threats could be:
The stress that caregivers have to deal with themselves - i.e. financial stress, pressure in work, a busy schedule
Medical conditions or illnesses that prevent caregivers to connect with themself - i.e. (maternal) depression, anxiety, narcissism (in which the interest is not primarily placed in the child)
Anything that takes away from the caregivers’ ability to primarily be in tune with themself
The key here is, before the caregiver can become attuned to the child, they need to first be attuned with themself.
A study at the University of Washington, Seattle compared the brain activity of 2 groups of infants during playful interactions with their mothers (3):
Group 1: Infants whose mothers had symptoms of postpartum depression
Group 2: Infants whose mothers did not
The findings are as below:
During playful interactions with the mothers, infants of non-depressed mothers showed greater left than right frontal brain activations
The infants of depressed mothers failed to show difference in activity in their left and right brain
A background knowledge to know here is: the left frontal brain is where positive, joyful emotions are anticipated. Linking back to the findings, this mean:
During playful interactions, the infants of non-depressed mothers expected and returned emotions of joy and happiness
In contrast, the infants of depressed mothers showed no difference - they did not anticipate joyful emotions - despite the mother’s best effort
We then ask: how can children know that their mothers are depressed?
Imagine how we can tell between a genuine smile and a forced smile.
While smiling physically involves the same muscle, the signals that set the smile do not come from the same region in the brain. Therefore, the smile muscles respond differently to these signal - thereby eliciting our subconscious emotions. (2)
Children’s instinct to pick on their caregivers’ emotions have an evolutionary purpose - as their well-being depends on their caregivers’ well-being. Humans are the most vulnerable animal in infancy. A human baby needs to be entirely taken care of - from eating, drinking, going outside, to even sleeping. So their ability to meet these needs depend on their caregivers’ ability to accommodate them. Therefore, they develop an instinct to pick on the signals that the caregivers are subconsciously sending.
This is also what makes genuine, well-rounded attunement difficult:
Attunement cannot be mechanically imitated. It has to be grounded in attunement with oneself, and offered to others from a place of emotional availability.
Fundamentally, attunement gives us the feeling of being understood, of being met where we’re at - whether as infants or adults.
So, what happens when as children, we are met, or not met with attunement?
The case of self-affirming children
Children whose caregivers are attuned with their emotions grow into self-affirming adults, who are able to both share their feelings with others and meet their own needs.
We learn to care for ourselves from the way we are cared for.
Children who had attuned parents, learn to be in tune with themselves.
They can meet their own needs - having learned how to be attuned with their inner sensations. They can also share their inner world with others - having built up a hopeful anticipation of being understood, of being safe to express their emotions - whether these emotions are pleasant or unpleasant.
These children turn into attuned, caring and emotionally available adults themselves.
The case of lonely children
On the other hand, children whose caregivers were too stressed - for whatever reason - to accommodate this attunement relationship will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions. They feel like no one can really “understand” them. They feel like no one can meet them where they are at - a feeling they have encountered repeatedly in adulthood, not having had their emotions perceived.
Once again,
we learn to care for ourselves from the way we are cared for.
Children whose caregivers were not in tune learn to discount their inner sensations, and therefore never understanding them. These children tend to be oblivious to their own needs, and disconnected from their emotions.
They also tend to be disconnected to the feelings and needs of others, or hypersensitive with them. These manifest into avoidant or anxious attachment styles - which we will cover in another post.
Recap
To end this post, let’s recap the process via which loved children becomes attuned adults:
(1) A child’s primary caregiver is emotionally in tune with themself and with the child.
→ (2) The child’s emotions are perceived and responded to.
→ (3) The child learns to connect with and understand their emotions, which forms the psychological and physiological basis for the development of their ability for emotional attunement.
→ (4) The child learns to be emotionally attuned to themself and to others.
→ (5) This ability to be in tune develops further as the child moves through childhood and into adulthood.
Fundamenatally, we learn to care for ourselves and others from the way we are cared for.
ttunement is the basis for the quality of life we have as adults, and is a part in the bigger processes of how an attachment relationship is formed between the child and their caregivers. This relationship later manifests into anxious, avoidant or secure attachment in adulthood. We will cover this in another post.
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Sources:
D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Psychology Press, 1971).
Gabor Mate. Chapter 9: Attunement and Attachment (1999). In Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder. (pp. 69-76).
Bessel van der Kolk. Chapter 7: Getting on the Same Wavelength: Attachment and Attunement (2014). In The Body Keeps The Score: Mind, Brain and Body in The Transformation of Trauma. (pp. 125-146).