How Therapists Can Heal Our Attention

"Therapists are practitioners of attention. Our craft requires a kind of sustained, attuned, unhurried attention that holds, safely, the inner lives of our clients-to support their emotional and behavioral growth. While we are specialists, the art of professional psychotherapeutic attention is actually a refinement of something far more ordinary. In therapy, clients can be inspired to develop a similar quality of attention to their own experiences (the attention of the"

"But our entire discipline is in danger. And serious risks have emerged that present an authentic threat to our profession: Our attention-human attention generally, our attentive capacities as practitioners, and the attentional lives of our patients-is being eroded by forces conspiring to exploit its essence for financial gains. On an incalculable scale, our attention is being incrementally deformed-exploited and transformed under our very noses-by a trillion-dollar tech industry that operates in what is often called the attention economy."

Human attention is a finite, foundational resource essential for emotional and social well-being. Psychotherapists practice sustained, attuned, unhurried attention that supports clients' emotional and behavioral growth and models compassionate self-observation. Therapy can teach clients to bring that attentive stance to their inner lives and relationships. A trillion-dollar attention economy slices, prices, and sells human attention for profit, deforming attentional capacities and contributing to anxiety, isolation, addiction, and political polarization. Those forces erode practitioners' capacities and patients' attentional lives. Therapists are well positioned to counteract these harms through attention activism that promotes psychological and social well-being.

Read at Psychology Today