Advanced coaching skills for working with attachment wounds

Girl with a banjo, 1894 by Mary Cassatt

attunement: 'is a kinesthetic and emotional sensing of others knowing their rhythm, affect and experience by metaphorically being in their skin, and going beyond empathy to create a two-person experience of unbroken feeling connectedness by providing a reciprocal affect and/or resonating response'.

---

As coaches we need to understand how attachment wounds show up in our client sessions so that we can work with them effectively. We need to know how to help clients see these wounds for what they are, understand the neuro-biology underneath the wound, and put the pieces together in terms of how to heal them.

The client can then move forward, unencumbered by the vague and distressing feelings that can accompany lack of mirroring and validation and attunement in their early life. When clients come into the coaching space, its our job to set up a safe environment (the container), attune ourselves to the client's affect (mirroring) and articulate the client's neuro-biology (tracking).

In somatic therapies, tracking refers to helping the client notice the sensations going on in his or her body, tuning into them, and thereby creating a greater sense of calm and containment which is physiological regulation. As coaches, its our job to co-regulate with the client until the client can learn to self-regulate.

Co-regulation happens through the development of body awareness. The coach and the client can develop a capacity to notice, in each moment, physiological cues--tightness in the chest, feelings of fatigue, foot tapping, quickened breathing, heart beating faster, etc. As coach and client come to know each other better, the coach can pay close attention to these subtle shifts in the client's physiology.

This tunes us in as coaches to the emotional issues that are at the heart of what the client is wanting or experiencing. Its in slowing down and attending to these subtle sensations that we can ask deeper questions, and ask our clients to connect with those somatic sensations. Our calm and safe presence as coaches allows our clients the experience of being safely contained, noticed, attended to, and shepherded through an experience they may never have brought to consciousness before.

When we connect in this way with clients, we will often find that defenses fall, connection becomes stronger, and the coaching conversation becomes transformational.