Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In

Image by Sarah Richter from Pixabay

Making the world a better place starts with making my personal world better.

I was listening to an interview with Dr Tiffany Jana this week, whose passion is teaching about embracing diversity, and she said “The idea that anyone has to edit themselves to conform to some kind of system or social construct is harmful. It is harmful to the collective because if you can’t be everything you were sent here to be then the entire human narrative is missing an essential piece.”

While Dr Jana was being asked about healing racism, she was recognising that any part of us that we have to shape in order to conform creates a disservice to the human race.   

And she reiterates advice I’d heard previously from Sean Korne about facing our own shadows before diving in to others’ shadows,. The best way we can help anyone is from a point of loving acceptance of who we are embodied authentically.

Herein lies the challenge, as far as I can see, most people don’t even recognise how their own hurts beget more hurt (no matter how long ago, how forgotten - or more accurately, buried - or how unintentional); I certainly didn’t.

If someone had asked me thirty years ago how tuned in I was to my own feelings, how did I value my own needs and desires, I’d have responded that I am very tuned in. Yet after decades my life did not seem to be joyful, even with traditional successes under my belt, I did not seem to feel healthy or fulfilled. So how tuned in was I really?

I was reading more this week about attunement, a developmental phase in humans that I first came across when reading Dr Gabor Mate’s work on the effects and causes of early childhood development on our lives. He says:

“Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional regulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain him/herself in a relatively non-stressed, non-anxious, non-depressed state of mind.”

If you are a parent you will likely know that this can be a huge ask. I am the first to admit that – if I was never aware of my shadows before – they certainly became rather obvious with young children to challenge me. Of all my relationships, the one with my children is the most intense, followed by the relationship with my partner.

And guess what lies at the heart of our relationships?  Attunement.

“Attunement is the process by which we form relationships” Dr Dan Siegel says. “When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

As Teal Swan points out, “We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us. Ask yourself the following questions...Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me? Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not? Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way? How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

I would imagine as most people read this, they would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

She says “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience:

1. We learned that our survival depended on disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience. Or
2. We learned that our survival depended on being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm.”

I certainly feel the truth of this in my own life, in hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings and co-dependent in my relationships. It’s no surprise that each of these coping styles tend to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs, neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own.

Again this resonates with what I see and experience in life, most people are not good at taking care of their own needs. Even, says Teal, the narcissists who are “so busy resisting everyone else’s that, instead of experiencing strong authentic emotions, they are experiencing emotions related to suppression, avoidance, denial or defensiveness.”

So the bottom line is that, unless I learn how to attune (to myself being that I am hyper vigilant to others, but to my own and to others if I had gone into a narcissistic bubble) my relationships will be riddled with conflict and painful for everyone.

This isn’t something I find easy, and particularly when it is an ingrained pattern within existing relationships which, as mentioned above, are already imbued with painful associations on many levels.  True change is intrinsic though, is has to be self driven and nothing changes by following the same old patterns.

That is why I have been doing so much work on recognising and healing my own needs and boundaries, but it still requires practice and more practice.

Wanting to feel good about myself, and wanting to present that goodness to the world is the old defence mechanism, and it’s a strong one. Like everyone else I can fall into the trap of blaming others and my circumstances when, really, I’m no longer the trapped child, I’m a grown adult who can make her own decisions.

And, being hyper attuned to others more so than myself, I also have to watch out for the guilt trap. Those who have got themselves ensconced in a narcissistic bubble know how to play the blame game just as well as I do, but being sensitive to others means I can feel guilty just because someone else is feeling bad.

When Dr Tiffany Jana talks about people editing themselves to conform, the lack of attunement and the dynamics that arise from it are, I believe, one of the most pervasive and insidious among us edited humans. The worst thing about it is the lack of conscious awareness about this root cause issue.

Because, as Teal Swan remarks, “You cannot be attuned to someone and drop a bomb on them or shoot them. You cannot be attuned to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot be attuned to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality”.

This is our work, becoming attuned to our own authentic needs, and those of others. This will not only improve your own life significantly, but together we can make this world a better place.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances and Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.