Reciprocity, Resonance, and Why a Therapist’s Neutral Affect Can Hurt More Than It Helps
Healing is, at its core, relational.
And while traditional therapy models have long prized neutrality — the blank face, the noncommittal nod — neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and plain human experience suggest something different:
We are wired for reciprocity, and we heal through resonance.
The Science: Neural Expectancy and the Need for Response
Humans are not islands. We are born with a fundamental, biological expectation: When I reach out, something will reach back. This is called neural expectancy — the brain’s natural anticipation that social engagement (a smile, a tear, a hand extended) will be met in some way. It’s how infants learn safety, how trust is built, and how nervous systems co-regulate even before language exists.
When that expectancy is ignored — or worse, met with flat neutrality — the brain and body register it as a mismatch, a threat, or dead-end in the search for connection. And in the face of unmet need, we withdraw. We armor up and we stop reaching out. In EXPANDED terms, we enter the Estrangement Escape. In therapy, that can mean stalled progress, emotional shutdown, or even reinforcing the exact wounds the client came in hoping to heal.
The Traditional Approach of the Neutral Affect
There’s an old-school belief in psychotherapy that therapists should maintain a neutral affect — that withholding emotional response somehow protects the purity of the process.
But what it often protects is a special kind of intimacy and resonance between two people. Humans depend on one another inso many ways. We don’t heal through analysis alone. We heal when we are felt and witnessed. It makes us feel seen and heard, which makes us feel important and like we matter.
When our inner world meets another’s attention, understanding, and — yes — emotion, it increases trust and connection, which can lead to far more significant outcomes and healing. True therapeutic progress doesn’t happen in sterile fields. It happens in the messy, beautiful space where two nervous systems meet and say, “I see you. I’m here with you.”
Reciprocity and Resonance: The Real Medicine
Reciprocity — the basic exchange of attention, warmth, and responsiveness — is not just a social nicety. It’s vital emotional nutrition.
Research shows that affective attunement — the ability of one person to mirror and respond to the emotional states of another — is critical for:
Building (or re-building) secure attachment
Regulating stress responses
Enhancing neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to heal and rewire itself)
Repairing trauma imprints
When a therapist genuinely resonates with a client’s experience — when their voice softens, their eyes shine, their laughter bubbles up authentically — it sends powerful signals to the client’s brain:
“You are safe here.”
“You are real here.”
“The person you trust with your stories and feelings is being real with you.”
“You are worth responding to.”
And that — not analysis, not diagnosis, not neutrality — is the space where clients feel the shift they’ve been searching for.
Healing as a Return to Reciprocal Being
We heal by returning to the relational rhythms that shaped us in the first place.
When I reach, you reach back.
When I cry, you soften.
When I laugh, you smile.
A decade or so ago, some of my professors framed this resonance and attunement as weakness or as unprofessional. Today, I view therapists, doctors and other healers as more professional if they have learned to sit with their patients, attune and reciprocate in a genuine way. These individuals know that this is working with how nervous systems were designed to heal — through warmth, response, and mutual becoming.
So if you’ve ever felt unseen in therapy, if you’ve ever sat across from a blank face and felt smaller, not stronger —it wasn’t you, it was very likely the absence of something essential: Reciprocity. Resonance. Relationship.
Healing is a duet (at the every least), not a solo.
