Missing Each Other: How to Cultivate Meaningful Connections

The ability to connect with another person and truly be in tune with their physical and emotional state is one of the most elusive interpersonal skills to develop. This book shows you how.
In our daily tech-obsessed lives, we don't really pay attention to each other. We're stressed and preoccupied with our own thoughts and worries, unable to really listen to each other for long. Often, we seem to somehow "miss" each other, misunderstand each other, or talk past each other. Our ability to tune in to ourselves and to others seems to be withering. This alienates us from both our own inner life and from others.

In Missing Each Other, researchers Ted Brodkin and Ashley Pallathra argue that we must find the ability to be in tune with each other again, and they show us how. Based on years of research conducted with the National Institutes of Mental Health, the authors take a wide-ranging and surprising journey through fields as diverse as social neuroscience and autism research, music performance, pro basketball, and tai chi. They use these stories to introduce the four principal components of attunement: Relaxed Awareness, Listening, Understanding, and Mutual Responsiveness-explaining the science, research, and biology underlying these pillars of human connection, but also providing readers with exercises through which they can improve their own skills and abilities in each.

The ability to connect with another person's physical and emotional state is one of the most elusive interpersonal skills to develop, but this book shows you just how approachable it can be.
In our fast-paced, tech-obsessed lives, rarely do we pay genuine, close attention to one another. With all that's going on in the world and the never-ending demands of our daily lives, most of us are too stressed and preoccupied to be able to really listen to each other. Often, we misunderstand or talk past each other. Many of us are left wishing that the people in our lives could really listen, understand, and genuinely connect with us. Based on cutting-edge neuroscience research and years of clinical work, psychiatrist Edward Brodkin and therapist Ashley Pallathra take us on a wide-ranging and surprising journey through fields as diverse as social neuroscience and autism research, music performance, pro basketball, and tai chi. They use these stories to introduce the four pillars of human connection: Relaxed Awareness, Listening, Understanding, and Mutual Responsiveness. Accessible and engaging, Missing Each Other explains the science, research, and biology underlying these pillars of human connection and provides exercises through which readers can improve their own skills and abilities in each.