Attunement Lab: Healing from chronic emotional mis-attunement
T -- Tend to your emotional needs (self-soothing and emotion regulation strategies)
“Better keep yourself clean and bright. You are the window through which you must see the world.” – George Bernard Shaw.
Access Your Own Inner Calm & Tend to Your Emotions
It is helpful to prioritize your own inner wellbeing and equanimity. Consider your body, mind, psyche and being like an instrument. You want to keep it tuned and unobstructed so you can play it well. Therefore you want to reset to your your inner calm as much as you can, so that you are operating from a tuned instrument. What is your optimal inner state? Clear thinking, vital, heartful, energized, calm, engaged are some words. But you can decide for yourself what you’d like your inner state to feel like. What you’d like to prioritize and reset to. Then at any moment, you can check in with yourself and take your internal temperature on this -10 to +10 scale.
+10 = extremely distressed
+5 = moderately stressed, thoughts are agitated
0 = your best state of calm, energized, heartful, open, engaged
-5 = moderately numbed out or disengaged
-10 = totally shut down, comotose, or dissociated
If you are feeling an +/- 8-10 out of 10 – use distraction to calm your fight flight response down. Truly disegnage your mind from thinking about the stressful topic. Take a shower, talk to someone, watch a super engaging show, exercise hard. Something to take your mind off what is bothering you so you can reset your nervous system. Here are more distress tolderance skills. If dissociated, you want to do grounding exercises.
If you are feeling +/- 4-7 out of 10 – bring presence and kindness to your inner experience. Allow and make space for the energy of the emotions. These emotion regulation and self-compassion practices will help. For thoughts, you want to mindfully shift your attention off of them or reframe them to be more helpful. Here are exercises for working with your thoughts.
Accept Today's Reality of the Difficult Person
By acknowledging the reality of the person's social and emotional capacity today, you will waste less of your energy fighting life. You don't need to resign yourself to their behavior forever. But by aligning with how reality actually is today, you will be able to think more clearly and operate from a more resourced place.
3 Steps to Accepting a Difficult Person
Your Needs
When we've been chronically misattuned to and coped with self-sufficiency, often our needs are totally buried. We pride ourselves on not having needs. But you do need belonging. You do need to reset. Go ahead and start tuning into your needs. It's Ok to have them.