This post is Part 1 of a series.
For years, clinicians and researchers have encouraged trauma survivors to cultivate self-compassion as part of healing. The evidence is compelling: People who can relate to themselves with kindness experience lower anxiety, less depression, and greater overall mental and physical health. Yet, for many survivors, the idea of self-compassion can feel not only elusive but also triggering.
Navigating life as both clinician and survivor, I have learned that semantics matter. Self-compassion is not attainable for many of us, especially in the messy injury of trauma. As a concept, it is beautiful. We truly want to attain it. Yet, in the early stages of post-trauma, and especially complex trauma, it is often not a possibility. We try to understand and grow it, but many of us cannot. This is not because we are damaged or less than. It is because our body feels unsafe. This is especially true for self-kindness, which is one of the domains of self-compassion. Offering ourselves kindness when our internal systems feel stretched out, out of control, and unworthy is simply not a possibility for most of us at this stage.
This is why I propose a reframe: shifting from self-compassion to intentional self-attunement.
This language better reflects what is both possible and effective for trauma survivors, especially in early stages of trauma intervention. It moves away from a vague emotional ideal and toward a grounded practice rooted in neuroscience, attachment theory, and trauma integration.
Understanding the Nervous System After Trauma: The 3-2-1 Brain
To understand why self-compassion often feels impossible for trauma survivors, we need to examine what happens in the brain after trauma. During a traumatic event, survival mechanisms take over. The fight, flight, or freeze response is activated automatically; this is the brain’s way of preserving life.
When the traumatic event passes, the trigger often remains. Survivors can easily be re-triggered by things that look, sound, smell, or feel like elements of the original trauma. This chronic sense of danger activates what I call the withdrawal, a secondary defense mechanism that emerges after fight, flight, or freeze.
I describe the brain’s response to trauma using the metaphor of 3-2-1 versus 1-2-3:
- In routine situations, a healthy nervous system operates in 1-2-3 order: The upper part of the brain, the neocortex (thinking brain), leads, supported by the limbic system (emotional brain), and grounded by the reptilian brain (survival brain). We observe, notice, then respond with intention.
- Under stress or trauma, this order reverses to 3-2-1: The lower parts of the brain (responsible for defense and survival) overtake the higher reasoning centers. We react first, notice too late, and observe only in hindsight, if at all.
For trauma survivors living in chronic hypervigilance, the reactive 3-2-1 pattern becomes the default, sustained by the ongoing cyclical impact of withdrawal. The parts of the brain responsible for conscious choice, moral judgment, gratitude, and responsive thinking, the upper brain, are often underactivated, overridden, or temporarily offline.
Beyond Fight, Flight, and Freeze: Understanding Withdrawal
Included in the ETI trauma integration roadmap, withdrawal is a useful, life-preserving response that reduces vulnerability to further injury immediately after trauma. It causes people to seek safety, rest, and recuperation after a shocking experience. However, at some point, this protective response can turn into a cycle of misery.
In withdrawal, survivors remove themselves from active engagement with life and other people. They cycle through intense emotions: shock, fear, anger, denial, and rumination. Later, more complex emotions emerge: shame (“Something is wrong with me”), guilt (“I did something wrong”), and a sense of moral injury. These often show up as endless “shoulda/coulda/woulda” thoughts.
For those who experience severe stress or trauma at a young age, withdrawal becomes so much a part of their experience that it seems like a given reality. Young children depend on adults to survive and tend to blame themselves for their pain. It is natural for them to feel “Something must be wrong with me.”
These defenses serve a protective purpose: By directing blame inward, survivors create the illusion of control. If I am at fault, then the world feels less chaotic, even though this belief is devastating. Over time, shame and guilt become organizing principles of identity.
This is why encouraging survivors to “practice self-compassion” often fails. They cannot overlay kindness on top of defenses built for survival. When compassion feels inaccessible, it risks reinforcing shame: “I can’t even do this right.”
Trying to change how we feel creates a signal that something needs to be changed or fixed in us. This signal is itself so stressful that it can activate the survival mechanism and put us right back into withdrawal. The key is not to try to change how you feel but to expand your capacity to endure it.
What Is Attunement?
In attachment theory, attunement refers to the caregiver‘s ability to perceive a child’s signals, interpret them accurately, and respond in ways that meet the child’s needs. Secure attunement lays the foundation for emotional regulation, trust, and resilience.
Attunement is the verb: the mindful action that leads to attachment.
Attachment is the result: the enduring sense of security formed through repeated, safe, and reliable attunement. Attunement, by contrast, is the process: the moment-to-moment ability to tune in to another’s internal state and respond appropriately.
Attunement is managed by the structures of the right brain and emerges from largely nonverbal interaction: eye contact, vocalization, body language. When a caregiver attunes to a child, they mirror and regulate the child’s emotional world, demonstrating that distress can be met and contained.
Parents are never able to anticipate all of a child’s needs, so misattunement inevitably occurs. Well-functioning parents respond appropriately to soothe the baby—what I call reattunement. Through repeated cycles of attunement, misattunement, and reattunement, children internalize the ability to cope with both rewarding and frustrating experiences. From this emerges a sense of self and the ability to regulate emotions.
Self-attunement is the internalization of that same process. It is the ability to look inward and identify, from a place of curiosity and reason, “What do I need right now to feel safe or to get safe?” and take action to connect to a sense of safety.
Attunement, therefore, is not a feeling; it is a mindful act of attention and responsiveness. Through repeated experiences of attunement, attachment becomes secure.
In Part II, I will explore how attunement shifts from external to internal, the framework for building secure attunement, and what it means to be intentional in trauma recovery.