The Importance of Soothing and Attunement

Soothing and Attunement

The importance of helping each other soothe, attune, and regulate can be overlooked.

Consider the following example, where one partner is dysregulated, and the other refuses to help:

Mary and Sam were arguing. Sam worried about her working long hours, and he felt lonely and forgotten. Mary didn’t look at him; her eyes shifted downward, her body language was silent and cold, and her heart was pulling away. She said in a harsh tone, “It’s not my job to soothe your anxiety.”

Why This Is Important

Relationships are hard. Helping a couple navigate through counseling is difficult. One of the most beautiful pursuits can be the most challenging: coming back to each other without hurting one another further. Everyone in a relationship has experienced this moment: the tightening in their stomach, the felt sense of a sinking heart weighed down and caving in after a rupture, a disagreement, a pulling away.

We care. We love. We risk. And sometimes we break each other’s hearts.

Differences Are To Be Expected

Since we are human, we are bound to have differences, and sometimes these differences lead to anxieties and behaviors that aren’t helpful in our pursuit of reconnection.

I’d like to introduce a perspective on a misunderstood word: soothe.

According to attachment theorists, research shows that children gain confidence in the world when they experience stable, reliable attachments. Theorists call this developing a secure base. Children were more likely to engage their curiosity about the world when they had a felt sense of safety and healthy attachment to their caregiver, to their home base. Therefore, we call this a “secure base.”

Repeatedly, children gain confidence in experiencing the world around them by having this secure base, this sense of “home” in life. What do we mean by home? Let’s take a quick minute to define our term.

A felt sense of “home” could be in a house, but we’ve all come to know that “home” is truly found in the people we love and who love us. Home reminds us not only who we are, but also who we could be. People who are “home” give us the benefit of the doubt; we sense that they are “for us” and seek our ultimate good.

Home is a “place” — sometimes an emotional, mental place — where people experience love, safety, being known, feeling seen, and accepted for who they are.

When I was a wedding and portrait photographer, I facilitated sessions so couples moved as I photographed them. In one of the games I’d play, I’d eventually have the woman come from behind her fiancé, hug them, and with their eyes closed, say, “You’re the softest blanket in the world…”

For good reason, each woman would close her eyes and wrap her arms around “her man.”

Then, like a sunrise, all the lines, colors, and shadows of a smile would gently appear. It was as if love was awakened once more.

“Home.”

In that moment, she felt secure. She felt loved. She’s safe.

She’s as close to “home” as she can get.

His presence in her life soothes.

Attachment therapists would contend that soothing is not solely an experience infants or children need, but also adults.

What Does It Mean To Soothe?

Let’s crystallize what we mean when we soothe.

Soothing is the act of calming, quieting, or bringing peace to a situation or person.

Let’s look at a few ancient proverbs that provide what soothing could look like:

• A soft answer turns away rage, but a harsh word stirs up anger.
• A soothing tongue is a living tree, but stubbornness breaks the spirit.
• Sweet words are as honeycomb to the soul, and health to the bones.
• Healing words are as sweet as honey; they warm the coldest of moments, they calm anger, they lead to life.

Put another way, gentle, kind, soft words can soothe and heal. But soothing isn’t always verbal. Silence has a place when words are unhelpful and unnecessary. Simply being a calm presence in someone’s life can bring peace to their circumstance. We will all have moments of internal distress; it’s a part of life. At the same time, Dr. Siegel and Dr. Bryson highlight that negative experiences can shift into positive ones through an interaction with someone who attunes and cares for them. Soothing is not the removal of suffering; that seems to overestimate a human’s capabilities. Soothing implies that the sufferer is not alone.

Soothing is an opportunity to communicate to those we love that when suffering disrupts life, there is something uniquely secure about the person who is standing in it with them.

Soothing is not a job; it’s an opportunity to gift someone your presence amid internal chaos. In The Power of Showing Up, Siegel and Bryson offer practical ways parents can soothe their children. However, I believe this tool can also benefit adult relationships that have never learned what showing up can look like.

Soothing is about being human, and helping those we love feel cared for and supported. It’s about helping them find and feel peace.

John Bautista, LPC-A, works in our Uptown and North Dallas locations and is also available for virtual sessions.