One of the most important building blocks of human connection is attunement, a non verbal expression of nurture and care. I have another article just on attunement over here. This is another word, like resonance, that has links to music. (I actually draw on my years as a classical singer when I accompany my clients in therapy. Accompanying a person’s life story is remarkably similar to being an ensemble musician).
How often do you hear someone say “that really resonated for me?” The saying calls back to the way violin resonates: the wooden body of the violin vibrates sympathetically as the bow draws across the strings. Resonance is a big part of the body and richness of the sound. A violin also gets tuned: the violinist turns the pegs that tighten or loosen the strings of the violin, changing their pitch until the note matches up with other instruments.
When it comes to resonance in therapy, being human is essential, and our bodies are our instruments. When I attune to my clients, I focus my attention and harness my embodied empathy to match or “sing along with” their experience. This is a craft honed over many years, and it works on a number of levels. I notice what’s happening in my body, which indicates my own memories and emotions. I am trained to focus on the client’s experience while feeling those feelings, and sometimes I need to bracket feelings that are not going to be helpful in serving the client. I attend to my posture, because it influences my feeling of being “aligned” (not good to be curled up in shame or rigid with fear, as a therapist!) I pay exquisite attention to the tone of the client’s voice, modulating my own voice: I soften my voice to increase their feelings of safety, or I strengthen my tone to ensure they feel heard in a powerful emotion. I attune to the client visually by noticing small changes in facial expression, movements of their breathing, a tear falling down their cheek, their eyes drifting as they think.
I use all of that information to choose my responses (like a violinist tunes the strings). If I weren’t attuned, the relationship would feel off, or dissonant. We would clash. My client would not feel ok being vulnerable with me.
And, crucially, sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes I choose the wrong response. Sometimes there is a rupture, or conflict, with a client as a result. That’s when one of the greatest healing miracles of therapy happens: I can repair. I can take responsibility for my mistake. That is a huge opportunity, because repairing the relationship always means the relationship gets stronger, and the therapy levels up several notches. It’s an incredible honour to go through rupture and repair with a client. (For my article on rupture, look here).
It’s also true that some clients find the experience of attunement uncomfortable or even painful, usually if they had parents who were neglectful or emotionally abusive. But that’s also why attunement is such a powerful, and essential, vehicle for healing. Attunement says “I see you, I accept you for who you are, I am focused on you, I like you”. That’s a lot, for a person who hasn’t experienced it. In those cases, I use attunement to create a kind of microdosing plan: so that the person can slowly become capable of receiving the care they needed, but never got.
And I do care. A lot. I genuinely like my clients. I think of them between sessions. I work on clinical planning, and I sometimes worry about them. This human-ness can be confusing for some people since therapy is a paid service. But it’s still a real human relationship. And it’s that reality, and its attendant fragility, that is exactly what makes therapy effective.
Fragility and vulnerability are important. Talking to an AI is low stakes: you’re less likely to feel shame and embarrassment at opening up. That should be good, right? But if the stakes are so low, you also don’t get the healing experience of being accepted despite your messiness. In therapy, that scary, confronting feeling of opening up to a person who could judge you can actually resolve: the therapist simply doesn’t judge you, and your expectation gets turned on its head. But experiences like that reversal of expectation are also how strength and resilience are built. That’s how we begin to learn that there is nothing fundamentally unacceptable about us. That we won’t always be rejected. That we are worthy of love. These lessons can only be learned experientially, with another person who cares.
My initial hope, when I learned about people turning to AI for therapy, was that it would open some doors. That people would begin the process of self-exploration and get excited to take it further with a person who was an expert, trained and regulated to safely care for them. Maybe they would work with AI on cognitive skills, or goal setting, or getting organized, but they would still want a real therapist to help them heal from their trauma.
I want to still be hopeful. But there are worries, too: that people will fall so deep into their AI-enforced isolation that they won’t learn about the benefits of being challenged by a real-life therapist. That instead of undoing our aloneness, too many of us will isolate ourselves even further. That a snapshot of one kind of “intelligence” will be seen as a substitute for the whole big messy complexity of what it is to be human, and that we will lose out on connection and healing as a result. But I still want to hope. I’m ready to be proven wrong. And in the meantime, I’ll continue to take the deepest joy in my work. It’s like playing music.