How to create emotional safety in your life
Sometimes we all experience that nervous, anxious, uncomfortable feeling running through our bodies. When feel anxious, worried, or tense, we naturally begin to pay closer attention to what’s happening around us. We’re subcosciously looking for the cause of those uncomfortable sensations. We might even start analysing the past events or imagining different things that could go wrong. Does that sound familiar to you?
What’s behind all those experiences is the feeling of being unsafe. The lack of emotional safety is the reason we can feel anxious, fearful or worried for no apparent reason.
The challenge is that when we don’t feel safe, it’s difficult to heal and many of us go through lives never feeling fully safe.
Unless we feel safe, we cannot “come home to ourselves”, “reconnect with our bodies”, or “explore our emotional wounds”, because if we were to do it, it would overwhelm our nervous system.
When we don’t feel safe our nervous system keeps telling us that danger is just around the corner and that something “bad” might happen any moment. Being in this state means that we unconsciously try to do everything we can do to protect our safety. Rather than being authentic and vulnerable with others, we feel the need to hide parts of ourselves. Instead of allowing ourselves to feel our feelings and work through painful memories, we try to push it away, or deny it to stay strong and prepared for the worst.
For this reason, when we don’t feel emotionally safe, it’s very hard to:
- admit that we don’t know the answer,
- or that we made a mistake,
- to be open, and honest about what we feel and think,
- to allow ourselves to feel hard feelings,
- or to be fully present in our bodies.
Safety is the first step on our healing journey
This is why the first step on our healing journey is to establish the feeling of safety. It can take days, months and even years. It requires work, commitment, and often support from other people such as partners, family or a therapist.
If we don’t feel safe, practices such as yoga, meditation, therapy or massages simply won’t work the way we want them to. It would be hard for us to relax, drop into our bodies, open up and allow the feelings to come to the surface if our nervous system felt threatened.
How to begin establishing emotional safety
Feeling safe means feeling that it’s OK to be fully you, to share your opinions and thoughts, to feel your emotions and trust your gut feelings.
We can begin to establish that emotional safety by focusing on our physical health:
- changing our daily routine by incorporating things that nourish our bodies (good food, water, sleep, movement),
- and reducing behaviours that don’t serve us well, such as eating loads of junk food, drinking too much alcohol or coffee, avoiding exercise etc.
When we try new strategies to look after our bodies, we begin to recognize what it feels like when we feel safe as opposed to what it’s like when our nervous system is activated. We develop new skills and techniques that help us to calm the nervous system and return back to safety. It’s a slow process of self-discovery and there is no need to rush it.
Psychotherapy as a path to emotional safety
Establishing the feeling of internal safety can be quite challenging for many of us. This is true especially for those of us who lived in a state of fear, stress or tension for an extended period of time. If that sounds true to you, congarulate yourself for a big step of recignizing that you don’t feel fully safe in your body. That’s a big thing!
On the other hand, if it’s hard for you to relax and feel peaceful, or to be present, if you become easily activated, or find yourself feeling overwhelmed by emotions, working with a therapist can give you support and guidance you may need on this journey.
According to the latest research, the nervous system can be regulated through a safe relationship. Your therapist can help to regulate your system simply by being present with you, actively listening to you and creating safe, holding therapeutic space.
If you’d like to find a therapist in Ireland, but don’t know where to start, check out this blog post with some suggestions.