Befriending yourself - The self-support and validation system for emotional attunement
How to safely feel your feelings, reduce stress, calm anxiety and develop secure inner attachment.
One of the most common things I see when really intelligent people come to Somatic Psychotherapy is that they have high awareness of their feelings – they can identify and name them and sometimes even know ‘why’ they’re having them - but they don’t have any effective skills about what to ‘do’ with them like how to change them, resolve them or stop having them.
Take the example of being able to identify that you’re experiencing ‘anxiety’ e.g. you can notice and name your body symptoms like increased heart rate or racing thoughts but even though you can see and feel this happening, you’re not able to stop the symptoms from occurring or increasing using tools like mindfulness, breathing or positive self-talk.
Here’s WHY: The reason these interventions don’t work that well is that there’s often a small but important step missing between awareness and solution. That step is emotional attunement.
Emotional attunement can be thought of as ‘meeting the feeling where it’s at’ - in a compassionate and supportive way. Kind of like you might show up for a friend you care about who calls you in distress – with interest, presence and compassion. That’s why it’s sometimes called ‘befriending yourself.
Secure Attachment is a skill that can be learned
Because we’re not formally taught emotional regulation skills, we usually learn them through what we’re exposed to when we’re quite young – so if you had someone in your life who was really good at emotional attunement, you might naturally be really good at looking after your own emotions and able to tolerate and care for others in their big emotions without losing yourself or moving away. This is known as secure attachment. It’s a relational skill and luckily, thanks to the neuroplasticity of our brains, just like any physical skill it can be broken down into steps, practiced and learned.
When we learn by doing, we engage both body and mind in our experience so logic and feeling both gain a sense of what can be achieved by practicing the skill. This kind of experiential learning is central to Somatic Psychotherapy. Through the therapeutic container we help the gatekeeper of the mind feel safe to participate in the skill by being clear and structured in the What, Why and How and we let the body experience what’s possible when we practice the skill. This is the process of Embodiment.
We can only change at the pace our nervous system feels SAFE to
When we judge, criticise, dismiss or suppress our feelings they tend to temporarily go away and then come back later, louder and sometimes with more intensity! I’ve always loved the saying: ‘at first your body will whisper its messages to you. If you don’t listen then it will ask more loudly again, and if you continue to ignore it, it will yell. And if it feels perpetually like it cannot get your attention it might eventually completely shut down in resignation or desperation’.
This is anecdote is reflected in the natural biological nervous system responses we’re all born with – we function best and thrive in safety, when threat is perceived we enter sympathetic arousal often known as ‘fight or flight’ mode which is designed to protect us but becomes deeply draining to remain in for extended periods. If a solution can’t be found in safety, retreat or defence – the only other solution is to shut down (known as ‘freeze’).
Three steps to connection and relief
It doesn’t matter where you find yourself in these three ranges, this simple 3 step process helps change that way you interact with your feelings so instead of experiencing being alone, silenced, abandoned, shamed or misunderstood, they instead feel ‘heard’, seen, supported and justified.
Feelings after all, are just messengers…they have something to tell us about our values, beliefs or safety and in the moment, they are FACTS from the perspective of your nervous system (whether or not they are ‘logical’ to your mind!).
Building your internal secure attachment through befriending yourself is like establishing any other relationship – it requires an investment of time, attention, patience, care, presence and genuine interest and curiosity until trust is established and reliable. It’s the combination of words and actions that create tangible change.
Without mastering this important phase first, the likelihood of successfully making long term change is low. Once you get the hang of it though, you’re on the path to living a life of alignment, freedom, peace and positive progress in the direction of your dreams!
Remember – therapy isn’t about stopping feeling – it’s about developing new and more effective ways to live in the lane of life you find yourself in right now while setting course for the direction of your future and being able to move there with purpose and ease!
If these steps resonate with you I’d love to support you to help learn them experientially. Book online for a 90 minute discovery session today!
Why we do it:
- To build conscious awareness. Once we have awareness of something (feeling, memory, thought), we can begin interacting with what we've noticed using the formula below and see what happens when we do.
- The purpose of these steps is to create connection, build trust and inner safety.
- In healing you can only go at the pace your nervous system feels safe to. So the more we resource safety, the more progress we are likely to make.
- Once connection and trust have been established and reaffirmed as reliable, we have more likelihood of successfully recruiting our parts or feelings into a possible solution, or listening to us by respecting boundaries essential to our progress.
How to do it:
While holding an energy and intention of compassionate curiosity towards yourself, speak to yourself as if you were speaking with someone you care about. This style of inner relating is called ‘parts work’, where you get to know the different characters of your inner world and learn about them one by one.
Step 1) Acknowledge: Notice what you are feeling/thinking and name it. This helps acknowledge that in this moment, your feelings are facts and that you are present and available to listen to them.
Step 2) Validate: This step is letting the feeling you've identified be normalised, justified or helping it make sense by giving it context and giving it permission that it's allowed to exist. Validating statements therefore start with statements like: 'It's normal to feel that way when (+add reason/circumstances)'…, 'It makes sense you feel that way because (+add reason)…', ‘You're allowed to feel like that...’etc.
Step 3) Reassure: Reassuring statements create connection as a foundation for building trust. They commit you to being with the feeling for the period of your practice. They can sound like anything that helps the feeling experience a sense of support, care, kindness, togetherness etc. e.g. 'It's ok that you don't know the answer right now, I'm happy to be with you until that feeling subsides a little'.
How you know it’s working:
Because this is an experiential process, you’ll know it’s working when you notice a change in your acknowledged feeling. You could consider tracking this with a before and after intensity scale (e.g. before anxiety of 8/10, after it was 6/10) but it’s not essential.
Generally you can expect to feel more soothed, calmed, relaxed, and less anxious, confused, alone than your initial starting point if you’re working with something you’ve identified as a ‘negative emotion’.
Learning to recognise these subtle changes is why it’s called attunement – you become not just aware, but connected to your somatic experience.
When to do it:
Either anytime you remember or as a daily practice where you set aside 2-5 minutes to have this style of conversation with yourself.
There doesn't necessarily have to be an active problem for you to practice this. It also doesn't only have to be about negative things - you can use it to reaffirm doing what you love also e.g.:
'I notice that you always feel relaxed out in nature’
‘That makes sense because it feels like you can be 100% yourself out here with no one around to judge you’
‘It's so nice enjoying this feeling, I'm grateful for our time out here’
The benefit of practicing when you’re NOT stressed is that it helps build trust and you have more capacity for emotional attunement when your nervous system is in its safe state.
Just like riding a bike, you practice where it's flat, free of hazards and maybe even with training wheels when you begin, and progressively increase difficulty as your skill mastery and confidence increase. And it’s even better if you have a teacher who can offer you a safe space and specific instructions while you learn (hint – that’s me!), give you tips and congratulate you on your progress – because learning new things can be safe, easy and fun, and in fact, the brain learns best in PLAY!
When a skill is reliable in safe conditions, then it's time to take it to the next level and apply it in another setting like after experiencing something stressful and eventually in real time when you’re in a stressful situation.
So I encourage you to give it a try or reach out for some support if you’d like it! Either way I wish you well on your learning journey and have full confidence that with the right support and skills you can befriend yourself and change your life! Have fun!
