Self-Resonance

“We are all rather like tree rings and shell patterns

in that what has happened to us leaves a permanent record.

The goal of trauma work, therefore, as I see it,

is not to erase or cure but rather to expand and include and

grow larger than whatever has happened to us.”[1]

– Francesca Mason Boring

 

It Feels Good to be Heard

One day when my son, Kai, was six, he and his friend were playing with a balloon at a birthday party. Suddenly, Kai’s friend’s three-year-old sister, let’s call her Gabi, ran crying out of the room.

A few minutes later, I stood up and went to the bedroom, where she sat on the bed crying.

Gabi’s mother was kneeling in front of her, pleading with her to stop crying, and her grandfather was standing in a corner with his guitar, strumming an upbeat song in an attempt to cheer her up.

Meanwhile, Gabi was seemingly oblivious to all their cajoling.

With her mother’s consent, I sat down beside Gabi and asked what was wrong. Between sobs, she told me that the boys had taken her balloon. It wasn’t their balloon. It was her balloon. And they hadn’t asked for it.

I looked Gabi in the eyes and said, “That’s really sad, isn’t it? Are you really sad? Do you really want your balloon back?”

Gabi turned and looked at me with a puzzled expression, as if she was surprised to finally be heard. Then she heaved a huge sigh, put her head on my shoulder, and slowly stopped crying. “Yeah,” she said, seeming relieved that someone had asked her what she needed without trying to convince her to feel differently.

After a moment, we stood up, hand in hand, and went to ask the boys to give her the balloon back.

They promptly did.

What happened between Gabi and me that day was resonance.

What is Resonance

The word resonance comes from the Latin word resonare, meaning to sound back.

Resonance is what happens between two people when one person brings their warm, curious attention to the other in an attempt to understand them, and the second person responds with—Yes, that's it!

When someone shows that they truly get you, and your body relaxes and responds with, Yes! that's resonance. Our human bodies vibrate at different frequencies depending on our emotions, and when we resonate with another person, it’s as though our emotional worlds vibrate together.

Resonance is compassion-plus. Compassion means to suffer with. Self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff identifies three components of self-compassion: 1) mindfulness—an awareness of what’s happening without trying to change it, 2) self-kindness, 3) a recognition of our common humanity and how we are not alone in our pain.[2]

We can feel compassion toward someone else without them even knowing it, but as Sarah Peyton writes in Your Resonant Self, “we cannot be resonant with a person unless we are being relational—resonance is a two-person experience. Someone else can’t simply declare a resonance with us. The receivers are the ones who get to say whether or not someone else’s presence or language feels resonant”[3]

Although I had been deliberately practicing resonance toward myself, my clients, and my loved ones for nearly a decade before discovering Sarah Peyton’s work, I hadn’t been calling it resonance. I’m so grateful to Sarah Peyton for naming the importance of resonance and teaching the neuroscience behind it. This precise language has helped me become even more precise in my practice.

Resonance can happen verbally or nonverbally, and we can receive resonance from a part of ourselves, another person, an animal companion, a song, nature, or any being in the more-than-human realm.

Today, I want to talk about self-resonance, the practice and skill of offering resonance to ourselves.

Rather than practicing self-resonance, when most of us encounter a challenging situation, we ignore, criticize, dismiss, negate, or diminish what they feel; try to fix what’s wrong before truly understanding what’s going on;...