Social Work Commons^™

Attuning To Need: Reconceptualizing “Help” In Poor Rural Areas, Jennifer M. Frank, Laura Brierton Granruth, Brittany Leffler, Rachel Preibisch, Dawn Watson, Heather Girvin, Mary Glazier

Contemporary Rural Social Work Journal

Social isolation is closely linked to overall health and well-being and is a serious concern for those in rural areas. Our research seeks insights into the needs experienced in poor rural areas by utilizing letter writing between students and community agency participants as a research methodology. In the letters, we observed that community participants relied upon friend and family style relationships and even viewed their agency relationships as such. This suggests that transforming "professional helping relationships" into alliances that are less impersonal might be in order. Such relationships and connections seemed conducive to the development of empowering self-efficacy. This finding …

Attune With Baby: An Innovative Attunement Program For Parents And Families With Integrated Evaluation, Sara Beth Lohre

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Infants speak in their own language; sounds, screeches, cries, and howls that help them to communicate their caregiving needs. Unaware, parents may develop a checklist of caregiving approaches to the baby. The infant tells the adult directly what they need, and waits for the parent to respond. Infant talk may change from soft and quiet to loud and aggressive; coos and cries become crying and screams as the infant’s caregiver—communicating the intensity of emotion, urgency of their request, or their frustration with varied and sometimes inadequate, failed, or missing caregiving patterns the infant has no choice but to accept. When …

Generating Therapeutic Attunement Through Mindfulness Practice, Kestrel Feiner-Homer

Master of Social Work Clinical Research Papers

Therapeutic attunement refers to the non-linear process in which therapists track the moment-to-moment changes in the somatic, emotional and energetic rhythms of the client, themselves and the intersubjective relationship that exists between them. Literature on this topic suggests that therapeutic attunement is imperative for creating empathic alliances that foster reparative neural growth and result in positive treatment outcomes. This study uses Scholarly Personal Narrative and single system design to explore the impact that integrating forty minutes of mindfulness meditation into my daily routine had on my ability to cultivate therapeutic attunement in my work with clients. Over the course of …

Mentoring Attunement: An Approach To Successful School-Based Mentoring Relationships, Julia Pryce

Julia Pryce