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 compassionate and engaged observer) and to learn what it feels like to bring this quality of attention to their own relationships. Attention is a foundational but finite human resource, and the therapeutic relationship supports this innate human capacity to be developed in ways that nurture well-being and connection.
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. This attention economy slices, dices, and prices human attention to be sold to the highest bidder.
The tech companies that operate in the attention economy have shown little regard for the individual damage (anxiety, isolation, addiction) or societal damage (political polarization, toxicity,