Safety is Key
Part 1
Safety is Key
Safety is a cornerstone of mental and emotional wellbeing. I am referring to not only physical safety but also emotional safety. I believe that it is important to bring awareness to how we achieve safety and where in our lives we experience a lack of physical and/or emotional safety. By being aware of where we do or don’t feel safe, we can then explore strategies to work towards increasing our experience of safety in our lives, which can contribute to a better sense of security and freedom.
Acknowledging What Threatens Us
In my experience, a lot of people have a hard time identifying or acknowledging areas in their life where they feel unsafe or threatened. Some people actually may not know when they feel safe and when they don’t. For some, acknowledging fear or vulnerability brings about feelings of shame or discomfort. In American culture and in different sub-cultures, ethnic cultures, and communities, it may be seen as weakness to acknowledge a lack of emotional safety or threat in a person’s experience.
In the early stages of work with clients, I often notice that they have many self-protective strategies that they use to achieve a sense of safety on a regular basis. However, it usually isn’t perceived as self-protective. A lot of the time clients will say things like, “It’s just the way I am,” or, “It’s how I was raised.” When I ask them how they achieve safety for themselves, they may not be able to answer the question clearly. Some will say that they aren’t scared of anything, which in and of itself is usually self-protective. Others will tell me that they really don’t know what emotional safety looks like or feels like. Many people feel like achieving a felt sense of safety and stability in their lives is unattainable for them, or at they don’t have a sense of how to establish and build on their sense of emotional safety.
To me, the importance of bringing awareness, empowerment, and agency to a person’s ability to achieve safety in their lives cannot be overstated. Safety is at the center of most of the work that happens in therapy—whether it be emotional safety in romantic or familial relationships, actual physical safety for someone who has experienced physical, medical, or emotional trauma, or the emotional safety that is necessary for a person to feel enough freedom to explore and understand their own identity and authenticity. I want to support people in bringing awareness and intentionality to their experience of safety. By doing that, we can then work on building skills and strategies for achieving a sense of safety in specific or general areas of a person’s life.
What is Emotional Safety?
In the therapy world, emotional safety is often defined within the context of attachment relationships, which essentially includes parent/child and romantic relationships. In my opinion, this definition is oversimplified and too narrow. I find the concept to be relevant and important in all areas of a person’s life experience. To break it down, emotional safety is experiencing a felt sense of physical and emotional safety, security, and comfort in a given situation. Let’s now look at a few examples of feeling emotionally safe and unsafe.
Do you remember the first day of high school? I do—it was terrifying. The other students looked like adults, guys had facial hair. I was convinced I was going to get harassed and thrown in the trashcan by the end of the first day. At the very least I was afraid people would think I was weird, that my clothes were uncool, or that people wouldn’t want to hang out with me. None of that happened, but this is an example of an instance when I felt a lack of emotional safety. As humorous and relatable as this example may be, my intention in sharing it is to acknowledge that emotional safety is not only experienced in more obvious situations like being attacked, but can also be important when we feel nervous or uncomfortable in a normal situation.
As a person of color, I often experience discomfort or a lack of emotional safety when encountering certain aspects of the dominant culture (white culture). I often feel unsafe and uncomfortable when encountering authority. When I was younger this included teachers and school faculty. As I got older it included encounters with the police, getting pulled over for no reason, being harassed and bullied without cause or provocation, or being treated like a criminal for having a tail light out. When I go to a predominantly white neighborhood or into a place like a health food store, for whatever reason, I often get looks like I am dangerous or suspicious. At times, I can see people making an effort to avoid making eye contact with me or even changing their route to not walk past me. People react to me as though I am a danger or a threat. In these situations, I feel like I have to protect myself, and I am hyper-aware of my behavior and how I am being perceived. In these experiences, I do not feel safe or comfortable or like I am free to be myself without worrying about the possible consequences. These are some examples of a lack of emotional safety and in some instances, even a concern for my physical safety.
Now I will share a couple of examples where I do feel safe. One example that comes to mind is when I visit my grandparents. My grandmother usually stubbornly insists on cooking for me when I visit. Sometimes I even wake up to the smell of breakfast being cooked, and she also likes to sing old-school gospel songs while she does it. This experience makes me feel safe and comfortable. In this situation, I do not feel threatened, I feel I can be myself, and that I am with people that I love and that love me.
The second example I will use for emotional safety for myself is being in nature. When I am in nature I feel like I’m home. Whether it’s being in the ocean surfing or hiking through the forest, I feel alive, I feel present, and I feel a sense of freedom that is hard for me to find in the artificial human environment.
These are a few examples of experiencing safety or a lack of safety that might be relatable. Other examples of a lack of safety or emotional safety could include being in an abusive relationship, being at a job with a toxic work environment, or being a woman in a sexist cultural environment, just to name a few. Emotional safety is always important and always relevant. In the next post, I will focus more specifically on the importance of safety in relationships, safety in healing from trauma, and safety in cultivating a strong sense of identity.
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