Daniel Siegel does a lot of linking up of mindfulness and biopsychology. He explains that mindfulness and mindful attunement is so hard because, when we truly perceive another person's emotional state, it activates the parts of the brain associated with that state in our own heads; if you see someone in pain and empathize with them, you feel that pain too. And in an effort to ease your own pain, you try to fix the other person's. (Recent demonstration: Rats find altruism tastier than chocolate)
As a therapist, one of the hardest and best skills I'm developing is the ability to open up attunement both ways, so the client can see that I'm empathizing with them, and begin resonating back; so if they can experience me experiencing that emotion but being able to tolerate it, they can begin to tolerate it in themselves. It's about to be my no. 1 concern, since I'm working with kids as young as 3, who have very little ability to talk about their emotions--they might not ever be aware that we're doing more than playing, but we're counting on the actual physical experience of empathic attunement to regulate and repair their brains' emotional regulation systems. Which, in my mind, is wild: having an empathetic adult who can validate and contain the child's emotions heals their brains. No advice necessary.
But even with all that training, I struggle a lot to be empathetic to my friends. It's tiring and hard and itchy and hurts sometimes. It's a lot of why I've been so hermity lately; I feel so agitated to begin with that opening up to anyone else agitates me more, because I expect to have to be the person doing the empathizing and reaching out (thanks for that, trauma!). It's really weird and hard in new ways to not run my normal self-censoring subroutines that make sure I'm talking about things that are interesting and relevant, or that I'm displaying the right social signals, because I'm too tired to run them, and to try reaching out to people anyway. I have a lot of experience with that failing utterly, which is really discouraging. I'm still surprised every time friends reach out and catch me.
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Date: 2013-07-21 06:03 am (UTC)As a therapist, one of the hardest and best skills I'm developing is the ability to open up attunement both ways, so the client can see that I'm empathizing with them, and begin resonating back; so if they can experience me experiencing that emotion but being able to tolerate it, they can begin to tolerate it in themselves. It's about to be my no. 1 concern, since I'm working with kids as young as 3, who have very little ability to talk about their emotions--they might not ever be aware that we're doing more than playing, but we're counting on the actual physical experience of empathic attunement to regulate and repair their brains' emotional regulation systems. Which, in my mind, is wild: having an empathetic adult who can validate and contain the child's emotions heals their brains. No advice necessary.
But even with all that training, I struggle a lot to be empathetic to my friends. It's tiring and hard and itchy and hurts sometimes. It's a lot of why I've been so hermity lately; I feel so agitated to begin with that opening up to anyone else agitates me more, because I expect to have to be the person doing the empathizing and reaching out (thanks for that, trauma!). It's really weird and hard in new ways to not run my normal self-censoring subroutines that make sure I'm talking about things that are interesting and relevant, or that I'm displaying the right social signals, because I'm too tired to run them, and to try reaching out to people anyway. I have a lot of experience with that failing utterly, which is really discouraging. I'm still surprised every time friends reach out and catch me.