My guests this week are Dr. Ted Brodkin and Ashley Pallathra, authors of the recent book Missing Each Other (affiliate link), which is about finding social attunement. I really enjoyed this discussion, where we explored the benefits of greater connection during our interactions with others, and how we can cultivate that connection. Some of the topics we touched on included:

• The striking quality of connection that the Dalai Lama evokes
• What attunement is and how we know when we’re experiencing it
• The spiritual element of social attunement
• Prayer as a profound attunement to the spirit of nature, or to another person
• Attunement in psychotherapy
• The connection between attunement and emotional healing
• Bonding with our earliest caretakers
• Finding attunement in brief encounters and with relative strangers
• How attunement applies to our political discourse
• Whether we need to agree with others to be attuned
• Finding attunement even when angry
• The experience of relaxed awareness
• Moving in and out of attunement
• The overlap between attunement and mindful awareness
• How the intention of mindfulness often gets lost
• The connection between attunement and tai chi
• Listening to others and also to ourselves during an interaction
• Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory (affiliate link), and the role of the vagus in social connection
• The Push Hands exercise in the context of mutual responsiveness
• The joy and beauty of experiencing or seeing people move together in physical attunement

Edward S. (Ted) Brodkin, MD, is Associate Professor of Psychiatry with tenure at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ted is the Founder and Director of the Adult Autism Spectrum Program at Penn Medicine. He has been honored by Philadelphia Magazine as a Top Doctor in the Philadelphia region for 14 years, and has been honored as one of America’s Top Doctors by Castle Connolly Medical for the past 13 years.

He received his AB Magna Cum Laude from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School.

Ted did his residency in psychiatry and a fellowship in neuroscience research at the Yale University School of Medicine, as well as a fellowship in genetics research at Princeton University.

His research lab and clinical program at the University of Pennsylvania focus on social neuroscience and the autism spectrum in adults. I’ve known Ted for nearly two decades now. We collaborated on a few research studies many years ago, and have a few publications together from the work I did as a grad student. He was very instrumental in the genotyping work I did for my doctorate.

Follow Ted on Twitter and explore their book at this website.

Ashley A. Pallathra, MA, is a clinical researcher and therapist.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree with Distinction in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania, she received a Master’s degree in Psychology and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

Ashley is the author of numerous published research articles and a book chapter in the fields of resilience and social-emotional functioning in youth, autism research, and social neuroscience.

Her current research and clinical work center around strengthening social competence and building resilience in children and adolescents from diverse community settings.

Follow Ashley on Twitter and read the “Missing Each Other” blog on Psychology Today.