**🔼 Up:** [[✦ Attunement]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychology > **🌱 Planted:** Sat 22 February 2025 --- When we attune to others empathically, we're getting to know another person while at the same time being known by them. Intersubjective relationships highlight our ability to relate to others in mutual recognition, which allows each person to feel seen, heard, loved and valued for who they are. Through this mutual recognition, we're able to meet someone's [[We all have normal developmental needs|normal developmental needs]] and validate their personal subjectivity while validating ours at the same time. This quality of connection is called **empathic attunement**, which is our capacity to understand and experience what someone else is going through. It is "putting ourselves in their shoes", though it is more than this too. More deeply, it is our moment-to-moment presence, responsiveness and ability to feel into, align with, mirror and validate the inner world of the other person we're interacting with. [[Heinz Kohut]], while conceptualising this in context of Self Psychology and the therapeutic setting, believed empathic attunement was not just a therapeutic technique but a fundamental human capacity that forms the basis of all meaningful human connection and psychological development, which when absent, leads to a [[When our normal developmental needs go unmet, we are left deeply wounded|deep psychological wounding]]. This mode of attunement requires what Kohut called an "experience-near" orientation where we're able to feel our way into and understand another's emotional reality without imposing our own judgements or biases. This is about tuning into not just the words that someone is saying, but the [[When we name what's true in our interiority, we experience a felt shift|truth of the felt sense that's happening underneath it all]]. When we do this, we meet the other person exactly where they are in that very moment. From this place, we can then hold space for someone else's emotions and feelings—whether that be joy, grief, anger, fear or sadness—while still maintaining our own centre and boundaries (because we're attuned to the other person's experience and not influenced as such by our own). This process doesn't mean we need to be perfectly responsive or emotionally available 100% of the time, because as Kohut pointed out, little moments of misatttunement allows for the healthy distance and boundaries which helps to build resilience and autonomy in the other person. Whilst empathic attunement might so far seem like an experience that is one-directional, it's not. It's really an intersubjective process—a dance of mutual recognition where both people are actively engaging with each other's subjective experience. As one person tunes into the inner world of the other, the one who is experiencing this attunement has the experience of being understood which creates a deeper quality of connection that simultaneously validates both people's right to exist as separate and unique people. --- **➡️ Next:** [[]] **⬅️ Back:** [[We all have normal developmental needs]] --- **🈁 See Also:** - This is what [[人 Donald Winnicott]] calls [[Our caregivers don't need to be perfect, they just need to be good enough|Good Enough Mothering]]. [^1]: [[Empathic Attunement by Crayton Rowe & David Mac Isaac]]