What is emotional attunement?
Emotional attunement is the ability to know your partner on a deep emotional level, and a vital ingredient for successful relationships. It is being able to hear, see, feel, interpret, and respond to your partner, using both verbal and non-verbal communication.
Emotional attunement is often most noticeable when absent in relationships. It hurts when you take a risk to be vulnerable with your partner and are not met at the place of intimacy you had hoped for. This often leaves couples feeling misunderstood and disconnected. Genuine efforts to be recognized by your partner can start to feel hopeless. Eventually, you may even learn to stop expecting empathy and support from your partner altogether.
The lack of emotional attunement is felt profoundly when couples argue. One person wants an issue or feeling to be acknowledged, while the other person feels blamed, often ensuing in defensiveness. At this point, you both fall out of sync with each other and miss the necessary cues to remain connected during times of conflict—pushing you and your partner even further apart from each other.
How emotional attunement can help your relationship
Emotional attunement allows you to better understand your partner through body language and by assessing what is happening around them. Being able to tune into each other in this way lets you know how and when to engage with your partner. Practicing attunement supports you and your partner’s ability to anticipate each other’s needs, promoting a sense of trust, intimacy, and safety.
These skills are the foundation for which effective communication, conflict management, and intimate connection all grow. Without this foundation, many learned communication skills will fall short of success. Being emotionally attuned in your relationship fosters understanding and feelings of being known by your partner.
Practicing emotional attunement
Understand yourself. Before you can attune to others, you must first attune to yourself. This means reflecting on your own thoughts, feelings, and emotional needs. What are your triggers, and why are they triggering? How do your past experiences influence your expectations, hopes, and fears for the future? What do these things look like in terms of your relationship with your partner? Gaining insight through self-reflection not only allows you to understand your own needs, but also helps you communicate your needs to your partner.
Get curious. Attuned couples are intimately familiar with one another’s worlds—the important things about your life and the experiences that have shaped you today. Couples who are emotionally attuned make space in their minds for their relationship and remember the major events in each other’s histories. Emotionally attuned couples know each other’s aspirations in life, fears, and dreams.
Update your knowledge. Attuned couples also continue to update their information about each other as their partner’s feelings and thoughts change over time. Many people think they know everything there is to know about their partner, especially if you have been with your partner for quite some time. Early relationships are filled with novelty, curiosity, and excitement to better know the person sitting in front of you. Over time, it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking your partner has nothing new to share—that the novelty is gone. This assumption is only true if people never change! Yet, people are continuously changing through experience, reflection, and interactions. Even the person you think you know so well is still somewhat a mystery.
Try answering some of these questions about your partner and see how well you know your partner’s internal world.
Name one of your partner’s current hobbies.
What is your partner currently most stressed about?
What is your partner’s biggest fear?
How does your partner like to be comforted and soothed?
What is your partner’s ideal job?
Who was your partner’s childhood best friend?
What turns your partner on sexually?
What was your partner’s worst childhood experience?
Going over these questions together can help you both develop more details for each other’s internal worlds. However, getting to know each other intimately is an ongoing process. Your knowledge about your partner should be updated regularly by spending time together catching up on what has been happening in each other’s day-to-day.
Couples who share detailed understandings of each other are often better prepared to navigate stress and conflict. When you and your partner are aware of each other’s feelings, thoughts, and motivations, you are both less likely to be thrown off by the changes of life. The more you know about each other, the stronger your connection will feel, which better prepares your relationship to handle future challenges.
If you are interested in exploring emotional attunement in your relationship further, you can schedule a free consultation with me through the link below or via email at amy@reconnectingrelationships.com