Safety in Trauma
People who have experienced physical or emotional trauma often struggle with feeling safe. They may be so familiar with feeling threatened and trying to survive literally or emotionally that they may not even know what safety feels like. They may not be able to identify a place in their lives where they feel safe, nor can they create a feeling of safety and security for themselves. When I work with clients who are working through trauma, an important part of my role is helping them identify where they are on the spectrum of threat and safety in any given moment or experience. This can be very challenging and difficult to even talk about. Different people experience safety differently, and different people find comfort in different things. Once we can identify how a person experiences safety and threat, we can then start working on exploring strategies for building on that experience of safety. This helps a person feel more empowerment around achieving safety for themselves and helps them to feel less out of control when they do experience various forms of threat. Essentially, it is important to establish and then build on a sense of agency and control around achieving safety. The more empowered we feel in our ability to take care of our own need for safety, the less likely we are to experience ourselves as being out of control. This may also lead to an overall reduction in anxiety and fear.
Safety in Connection (Relationships)
As humans, we are social creatures and our survival depends on our connections with other humans. That may sound like a dramatic thing to say, but when you consider the inherently traumatizing nature of social isolation, we can see that the opposite of isolation is strong and close connection. When we are with people we love and with whom we feel accepted for who we are, we often feel safe, satisfied, and grounded. Acceptance is often coupled with feelings of safety, love, and joy. When we are in situations where we are unable to trust the people around us, we often feel guarded, anxious, and vigilant.
Just as a thought exercise, try to imagine that you are about to tell someone something about yourself that you think may cause them to reject or judge you. Maybe you’ve been in this situation before and can remember that experience. Now try to identify the emotions that come up when you imagine this situation. Maybe you feel some anxiety or fear, maybe sadness, even anger.
Now imagine that you are bracing for the rejection and judgment, but instead, the person you share this with is able to accept you or even validate you despite your having shared this sensitive information. Now try to identify the emotions that come up as a result of being unexpectedly accepted regarding something you have struggled to accept yourself. Maybe relief comes up, maybe a happy, light feeling, or maybe sadness that you were so afraid of being judged.
These feelings that come up may be a reflection of how safe or unsafe it feels for you to be authentic in a certain situation. We want to be accepted as we are. We want to be loved and valued, in spite of our oddities, shortcomings, or even after we’ve hurt someone we love. When we feel that love and acceptance it is most likely going to enhance the quality of our connection with that person. It’s difficult to feel a strong connection with someone that we feel like we can’t be ourselves with.
When I am working with clients who are wanting to improve their relationships, I like to use the quality and strength of their connection as a guide toward a healthier, more satisfying relationship. We want to work toward a high quality of connection, and also toward a high level of resiliency within that connection. One of the most important components of a high quality of connection is having trust and safety within that relationship, which supports authenticity for everyone involved.
Whether it be in couples counseling or with an individual wanting to work on how they are showing up to their own relationships, one of the most common inner conflicts I hear from clients is the feeling that they have to be a certain version of themselves in order to be loved and/or accepted. This belief indicates that the person feels that there are parts of themselves that are unacceptable or unlovable.
In a relationship, we of course want to be accepted and loved. If certain parts of ourselves are rejected or not accepted by another person, it often becomes that much more difficult to accept those parts of ourselves. If someone is able to accept or even love a part of us that we struggle to accept ourselves, we will often experience that love and acceptance as safety and comfort.
Safety in Relational Boundaries
Boundary setting is an important aspect of healthy and satisfying relationships. One of the biggest challenges that I see my clients struggling with when it comes to setting healthy relational boundaries is how they think others will respond or react to the boundaries they try to set. Clients often fear being abandoned, rejected, or shamed as a result of setting boundaries. These fears often lead to resistance to setting healthy relational boundaries.
The fears of being rejected, shunned, or abandoned commonly run deep in our psychology. People will often sacrifice their own needs or boundaries in an attempt to manage relational dynamics that are harmful to them in order to avoid confronting these types of fears.
In my orientation to these issues, I want to support clients in connecting with the mental and emotional impacts of not setting healthy boundaries. I also want to help them look at the intensity of their fears with self-compassion. As we pay attention to our emotional experiences, the feelings that come up for people when their boundaries are not respected tend to most commonly be frustration, sadness, and anger. What I’ve noticed consistently is that when the discomfort of having one’s boundaries not respected outweighs the fears of rejection or abandonment, change starts to happen and people begin building the skills of setting healthy boundaries. It is not up to me as the therapist to decide when or if this happens. My role, as I see it, is to support people in looking at their overall emotional experience and then helping them build the skills necessary to implement the change they want to see in how they are showing up to their own relationships.
Safety in Identity and Authenticity
In the dominant American culture, we are under constant threat of not living up to what we are supposed to be. This is widely true for people in all kinds of demographics—for men, women, people of color, and people in the LGBTQ+ community. We’re not tough enough, sexy enough, caring enough, straight enough, we’re trying to act too much like a white person, or we’re too ethnic. We’re not big enough, thin enough, too dark, not dark enough, too bossy, too loud, too quiet etc. We’re not enough or too much of these things because someone else thinks that if we were different, we would have more value as a human being. Or at least we believe that other people will see us as having more value if we were different than we are. I think most of us externalize our sense of value in a similar way to some degree.
I am all in favor of taking accountability and responsibility, and reflecting on the feedback we get from others. However, in terms of working with self-concept/identity, I believe that it is important to build the muscle of self-compassion in the way that we look at ourselves: to learn to be the authority on what brings us value as unique individuals, rooted in our own authenticity. This may include finding a sense of acceptance with not being good enough or being too much of whatever in someone else’s eyes. It may include working on shedding cultural biases towards ourselves or others. Acceptance with who we are and what we value in ourselves is an important path to experiencing safety and security within our own self-concept/identity.
Safety and Freedom
It is difficult for us to experience freedom without safety. Those who have endured trauma, particularly at a young age, may be so focused on survival—or stuck in survival mode—that experiencing feelings of freedom may seem like a luxury. People who are working on relationships may not feel the freedom to be authentic to themselves because they are consumed by the fears of being rejected or abandoned. Similarly, it is difficult for a person to feel free to explore different parts of their own authentic identity if they are not able to confront and embrace the possibility that they may be rejected or shunned by someone who thinks that they should fit more neatly into a box.
I think most of us want to feel as much freedom in our lives as possible: freedom to be ourselves, freedom to express what we think or how we really feel, freedom to find a way of identifying that is satisfying and true to us as unique individuals. The obstacle for many of us is how to get there, to that feeling of freedom. In my experience, it serves us to work on building on our ability to meet our own needs for safety in a range of different areas in our lives. The more confidence we gain to feel safe, secure, and stable, the more we are able to engage with life with a sense of freedom, opportunity, and possibility.
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