What does it mean to create emotional safety in your life?
What comes to mind when you hear the word Safety?
There’s a good chance that your mind is flooded with memories, experiences or situations where you found yourself or others in a state of UNSAFETY or danger of physical harm. This article seeks to expand that definition to include emotional and mental safety.
While emotional safety is mostly understood in the context of a relationship with others, the simplest version of emotional safety is having at least one person or relationship in your life where you can truly be yourself.
John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth refer to this in their theory on emotional safety in the context of a relationship between a child and a primary caregiver and how it unfolds later on in life as the child grows into an adult and experiences adult relationships. In describing this secure attachment or sense of emotional safety, Bowlby and Ainsworth note how a child shows an affinity towards their primary caregiver, exhibits distress when separated and then receives relief and comfort when reunited again.
Sue Johnson the developer of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) further extended this to adult relationships and in particular, partnered couples.
She discusses two gut-level beliefs.
The first belief is that “people closest to me care enough to care for me” and secondly that “I am worthy of their attention and love”.
Much of these belief systems start with early childhood experiences. At the heart of being human is our dependency on each other. We see this from the day a child is born and well into various seasons of adulthood. You can imagine how this brings our fragility even more to the surface as we interact with people around us in various contexts.
This fragility and dependence on each other means that we have the potential to be hurt intentionally or unintentionally as we engage with the people all resulting in the creation of our emotional safety.
There could be a range of triggers - verbal, nonverbal or para verbal (sounds that you make like sighs or “uh-huh”) for an individual that results in the formation or distortion of our sense of emotional safety. These gut feelings of feeling emotional unsafe could validate itself in emotions like “feeling judged” or “feeling disrespected”.
The irony, in a sense, of emotional safety, is that as much as people in our lives can contribute to that sense of safety, they can threaten it as well.
In my work with survivors of childhood sexual abuse, working to understand emotional insecurity forms the foundational work of trauma treatment and the basis for emotional recovery. When I ask clients to describe or express their sense of emotional fears and insecurity, there is an overwhelming response that revolves around an early childhood memory.
I often use art therapy to successfully allow the client to form a medium of expression. The art expression is usually a dark and negative image of a child in relationship to significant adults. This is followed by discussions about their understanding of emotional unsafety and what triggers it in their present lives.
As we work through creating a picture of emotional unsafety inception, at the clients pace we start to outline the steps to creating that emotional safety they desire. Usually, this process begins by creating an idealistic realism that may not be real but is a place of emotional safety that the individual might be able to imagine figuratively.
An example would be asking someone to imagine the emotional safety that comes from living alone on a mountain; the scenario is not real but is ideal. Further, the artwork and imaginative realism helps to define boundaries (physical, emotional, social or sexual) that helps form the basis for creating that sense of emotional safety in their present lives.
To begin to create your circle of emotional safety here are a few steps that I would encourage to reflect on and/or work with a therapist.
Take inventory of relationships around you and the degree to which you feel emotionally safe with each of them.
List and understand your own triggers especially with people you interact with and spend the most time with.
Evaluate learning tools to manage or regulate your own emotions when triggered.
Reflect on the boundaries that define your emotional safety.
Create an Anchor:
As you start to create your sense of emotional safety it is crucial to remember that people will inevitably hurt us.
With each experience, our goal is to build emotional resiliency and the strength to move forward. While developing your sense of emotional security it is important to understand and develop an anchor that holds you firm in this river of life. That anchor looks very different for each of us and could range from religion, faith, friendships to self-care. What is your anchor?
If you would like help in creating a circle of emotional safety, processing the ways that you have felt unsafe in various relationships or learning what emotional safety looks like for you, please reach out to us at Vitality Collective. We have a number of therapists who are Clinical Counsellors and Social Workers. We are passionate about helping people build emotional safety in their own lives and relationships and are able to serve you through online therapy or in person. Reach out through our Contact page to find a therapist that is the best fit for you.
The author of this article, Mahima Jacob, is a Canadian Certified Counsellor who works out of the Vitality Collective offices on Saturdays. Her goal is to help you live a fulfilled life and see that there is always hope. Over the years she has helped individuals and couples work through past trauma, abuse, mental health challenges and relationship management. You can find more about her here.