Home > Work > The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration
1 " Presence depends upon a sense of safety. The "
― Daniel J. Siegel , The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician's Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration
2 " attachment figure—someone who provides a safe haven where the other can be deeply seen and feel safe and secure. At other times we are the expert on the mind, and perhaps on the brain and relationships too, and on the notion of health and unhealth, ease and disease. Yet our patients are also experts in their own right, deeply knowledgeable in other domains. Our patients are certainly expert in being themselves. "
3 " noticing not just their words but also their nonverbal patterns of energy and information flow. These signals are the familiar primarily right-hemisphere sent and received elements of eye contact, facial expression, and tone of voice, posture, gesture, and the timing and intensity of response. The "
4 " Attunement requires presence but is a process of focused attention and clear perception. We "
5 " To state this more succinctly, awareness of the body’s state influences how we organize our lives. Knowing your body strengthens your mind. "
6 " The key to clinical attunement is to be willing to say “I don’t know” and “tell me more. "
7 " With an increased need to connect, missed moments of joining can quickly turn from misunderstandings to painful withdrawal into a shame state. While this is possible for anyone, those of us with difficult early histories filled with shame may be at highest risk of feeling the pain of missed connection and amplifying our reactions. "
8 " When such resonance is enacted with positive regard, a deep feeling of coherence emerges with the subjective sensation of harmony. When "
9 " simultaneously we need to get continual feedback about how our clinical evaluation and interventions are going and be open to letting go of considered specifics, of moving back from the peaks of activation and plateaus of probability into the plane of possibility. Such feedback is a key element of effective psychotherapy of all sorts (see "
10 " As we join in this moment in the physical realm—making appointments to be in the same space at a given interval of the clock—our nervous systems align their firing patterns as two sets of electrochemical entities phase shift "
11 " On the subjective side of reality, resonance can be detected internally as we look to the other and recognize evidence that the other is changed because of our own internal world. We see a tear forming at the edge of the other’s eyes as we have just told a sad story. We "
12 " sense of danger, we cannot activate what Porges calls the social engagement system. And we don’t access what I’ve called a self-engagement system either (see "
13 " Whatever the focus of attention, each of these mindful awareness practices involves an aiming of our awareness on two basic dimensions: Awareness of awareness and attention to intention. Such "
14 " focus of attention becomes distracted, when you notice you are no longer aware of the sensations of the breath, lovingly and gently bring your attention back to the breath (or body part or image). Getting distracted is just what our minds do. As we’ve seen, if you think of this mindfulness training as being similar to toning a muscle, we need to have both the contraction and the relaxation to achieve muscle growth. "
15 " Contraction is our concentration—the activation of the muscle of the mind’s attention—while relaxation is our becoming distracted as attention is deactivated. We activate intentionally, deactivate unintentionally—inadvertently, unavoidably and repeatedly—and then reactivate the directing of attention to refocus on our chosen subject of attention. See "
16 " This is the way we can keep our selves well: with regular exercising of our attunement to ourselves through mindfulness practices. "
17 " If the sponge (mirror) neurons are our receiver, then our subcortical areas are the amplifier. These subcortical shifts are what changes in us when we attune to someone else. "
18 " this posterior firing of maps of the body represents a primary cortical representation and may involve the parietal lobe—a region that may turn out to play an important role in self-awareness and a sense of identity (for further "
19 " prefrontally mediated, in which we attribute these shifts to what we’ve seen in the other person. Naturally, such a complex pathway can be bogged down by rigid valenced plateaus of probability, which skew accurate interpretations of the meaning of sensations. "
20 " The key to clinical attunement is to be willing to say “I don’t know” and “tell me more.” Your intention to help, a neural stance of positive regard likely involving the social engagement system and having a desire to connect and to assist, is woven together with an interest in supporting another with kindness and "
