Discover What Happens When Clients Feel Seen And Heard
Becoming attuned with your clients is instinctive when the focus is on helping people with diabetes feel seen and heard.
Feeling Seen and Heard
Attunement, the process of bringing into tune, is a crucial element in inclusive diabetes care. This article delves into its profound impact and connection with being seen and heard, a vital aspect of inclusive care.
How the mind works continues to be a mystery, which is why, studying the brain's physical structure, we see it is divided into three brain regions. The first is the primitive “lizard” brain, the second is the limbic area, the emotional processing center, and the third is the prefrontal cerebral cortex, where complex thought happens. Information is meant to flow from the brain stem into the limbic system and then pass to the prefrontal cortex.
Welcome to Inclusive Diabetes Care.
The IDC Pyramid is a powerful tool that can help dismantle stigma in diabetes care. This visual representation and transformative tool empowers healthcare professionals to see the benefits of inclusion in diabetes care. For a comprehensive understanding, we recommend reading the article Diabetes and Belonging, which provides an overview of the IDC Pyramid.
How emotions hijack thoughts.
Without attunement or the sense of being seen and heard, the limbic area quickly becomes flooded, creating emotional confusion that disengages the rational and thinking part of the brain. Calming the limbic re-engages the thinking part of the brain. One way to calm the limbic is to be attuned, and/or feel seen and heard. Dan Siegel, MD, demonstrated this by asking a group of strangers to sing a childhood song. Without any practice, five random people were able to sing in harmony. Dan Siegel, MD, explains that this unrehearsed ability exemplifies attunement. Attunement is something that a person does instinctively, without thinking or practice. It is an innate skill that fosters the sense of feeling seen and heard.
The power of attunement is hard to grasp because it is woefully undervalued. Listening fully is a lost art that is only made harder by busy schedules and technology. Everything and everyone is trying to get our attention. Being distracted can make the people we serve feel invisible, reduced to a task or a number.
In the Inclusive Diabetes Care pyramid, the sense of feeling seen and heard is the third experience needed for clients to engage in wholesome, sustainable self-care. The sense of feeling seen and heard is created when clients feel like they belong and that there is some aspect of ease. These basic needs of inclusion are often missing from diabetes care due to health inequity, stigma, and diabetes distress.
Ways to foster being seen and heard
There are many ways to help clients feel seen and heard. One concrete way is to evaluate the language used in diabetes care. Words like control, test, sugar, and diabetic are easier to spot, but weight-centric words like obese, normal weight, overweight, healthy, junk food, must, only, not allowed, can’t have, can’t eat, and avoid are often missed. These, too, are judgmental and imply that food, eating, or the body must be controlled. Rarely, if ever, will a client feel seen and heard if the language used at a session is judgmental or controlling.
Replacing these words with inclusive language such as in-charge, check, glucose, diabetes, BMI>X, average weight, higher weight, nutrient-rich, low nutrient, choice, consider, and choose decreases judgment and fosters autonomy. Reducing the use of stigmatizing language in diabetes care is one way to help our clients feel seen and heard.
If you are a health care professional, Inclusive Diabetes Care provides 14 continuing education programs to help you understand how stigma makes providing diabetes care harder. Enroll for our free course, Connecting the Dots.