Think about the last time you interacted with your spouse or partner. Did you think about how events in your partner’s day affected their current emotions? Were you able to acknowledge and understand their emotional state, and then use your own emotions to sooth them? Or did you stay inside of yourself, unable to use emotional expression to sooth your partner? In every interaction with our partner, and in every other social interaction, we have an opportunity to engage in one of the simplest and most powerful forms of relationship enhancement: Emotional Attunement.

Remember Plasma Balls? When you touch the orb, the purple or blue bolts of electricity pull away from the center and gather at the tip of your finger.

Emotional Attunement is like a Plasma Ball. Your partner’s emotional orb would be boring and unfulfilled if left sitting on a shelf, untouched. Instead, they need us to place our emotional fingers on the orb and connect with their emotions; to pull their emotions toward us, and ours toward them. When we can do that, we are practicing Emotional Attunement.

Emotional Attunement is an essential relationship skill in which we recognize, understand, and engage with our partner’s emotional state. And research on relationship health consistently finds that when we fail to remain emotionally attuned to our partners our relationships experience a loss of trust, resentment, and eventual breakdown.

WHAT CAUSES LACK OF EMOTIONAL ATTUNEMENT?

Attachment During Infancy

Emotional Attunement is an essential skill that we learn as infants. When our primary caregiver consistently recognizes, understands, and meets the needs expressed by our emotional state, we begin to develop a belief, that persists into adulthood, that emotional expression is a good thing; it helps those around us to better understand and meet our needs.   

However, if something gets in the way of our primary giver’s ability to consistently respond to our emotions, due alcoholism, severe depression or anxiety, excessive work stress, or even marital distress, then we develop a persistent belief that our emotions have no value; that we should not express them because they are likely to fall on deaf ears.

To make this more challenging, it is often the case that when a primary caregiver is unable to respond appropriately to their infant’s emotional messaging, they are more likely to value their children for their ability to sooth the parent’s emotional state. When that happens, those infants develop a persisting worldview that their emotional needs are not important and that there is no value in emotional expression.

Instead, they believe that their job in life is to say and do whatever is needed to keep important people close to them. They learn that their worth is only to give to others. They learn to give away compliments, emotions, and physical energy in an emotionless, inauthentic, and draining effort to sustain the relationship. Or they give nothing, instead waiting for a mother figure to meet their emotional and physical needs (i.e., “I’m your wife, not your mother!”). Those with insecure attachment styles as a result of misattunement often first consider a partner’s behavior in terms of what it means for them, their needs, and the overall security in the relationship.

Life Stressors