entrainment
The healing conversation rests on in-built individual and cultural mechanisms that entrain us to each other.
focus
Awareness and memory fixate on an immediate person or place and sideline the rest. For instance when we enter another room to get something, our short term working memory adopts this new frame of reference and we may be surprised to have forgotten what we went for. The previous room and everything associated with it suddenly becomes vague. If we return to it we recall what we went looking for. Doorways are the switches. Similarly shifting from being with one person to another.
synchronising
When people are together in close proximity their body rhythms and thinking synchronise. Heart and other rhythms come to synchronise just as pendulums in a room eventually swing in unison. We tune into each other's minds and emotions through our heart and brain rhythms.
empathy
Like other social animals we are hard wired in our “mirror neuron” areas to internalise the voice, posture, gestures, expressions of others. This network is integrated into sensory, motor, emotional and decision-making areas of the brain. It mostly tracks the movements of others but also their emotions and intentions and runs the scenario of what it feels like to be them.
The experiences of others are felt almost as if they are one's own. We experience the feeling of what it is to be them. Someone else's habits moods and scenarios come alive and run their course inside us as we build a model of them inside ourselves.
When we try to ignore these we still experience them even if below the level of conscious awareness. Yawning and laughing for instance are contagious and outside of conscious control.
These mechanisms work from a few months after birth unless they have been over-ridden by abuse or starved through neglect. Even the sound of movement in the dark sets them going.
This empathy dissolves barriers and stimulates interaction.
mimicry
Higher animals educate their offspring by demonstrating. They rely on the natural Impulse of their young to mimic them. Our clients mimic our feelings, our demeanor and especially our responses to the scenarios they bring to us.
We allow clients to be themselves when we model being true to ourselves. Modeling unconditional accepting and attending shows how to care for others.
common culture
Even before therapy begins ideas and feelings are aligned by cultural beliefs and common values. Roles and mutual expectations have already begun to take shape.
who we are
Most knowledge and skills are learned more easily and naturally by tuning into someone than following their theories or instructions.
While clients process the therapeutic conversation they absorb their therapist's way of thinking, feeling and responding. A therapist is not only communicating, they are also the communication. Who we are can be more important than what we say or do.
copyright (C) John Brasted 2008
updated 22. Dec. 2011
