Do You Feel Emotionally Safe?

As you allow your heart to open and receive from another, do you feel emotionally safe?

Do you feel you can express your deepest thoughts and feelings without judgement, criticism or rejection?

These are the basic signs that the person you are sharing time with respects your boundaries and your emotions. 

Recognising how you act around others is a good indication of whether you feel emotionally safe in that relationship. If you notice you’re becoming closed off, or not sharing your full self, that's a key sign that you don’t feel comfortable to be yourself in the relationship.

Our nervous system won’t allow us to relax and feel safe if we’re afraid of being rejected. Being safe means we are relaxed enough to be vulnerable. This can only happen when we know we are fully accepted.

Once we feel emotionally safe it allows us to let down the walls we build around our heart for safety, so we can connect on a deeper level.

This is something many of us don’t even realise we’re doing. We feel we’re open hearted, and perhaps we are with most people we interact with. But when it comes to those few souls we choose to allow into our close intimate space, do you feel comfortable to be completely vulnerable? Can you share your most intimate, vulnerable feelings openly without reservation? That is pure emotional safety. 

So if you ever notice the person you share an intimate connection with being distant, perhaps you need to look within and ask yourself if you have created a space for them to feel completely safe and loved unconditionally, no matter how they feel or act. 

5 CORE FEELINGS OF EMOTIONAL SAFETY 

Trust

The feeling of insecurity is incredibly harmful to our nervous system, it spins us into fight and flight and activates our sympathetic nervous system and prepares us for uncertainty. This ultimately causes anxiety and stress, which harms our physical and mental health. 

So to create an emotionally safe relationship, TRUST is crucial to its wellbeing. 

Trust is knowing that the other person has your best interest at heart, not just their own.

It’s knowing that your partner wants to invest their time, energy and resources into making sure you know you are celebrated.

Trust is knowing they consider and love you as much as they should honour and love themselves. 

Shared Values

I don't mean you need to like the same things and share the same interests, I’m referring to your core beliefs and morals.

This reflects what your desires in life are, and what is truly important to you deep down. How you want to live your life and how you want to interact and share your life with others.

True respect is required to connect on this level.

Core beliefs and values are indicative of the life you have lived so far, and also the lifestyle you desire and the way you choose to BE.

Acceptance

When we create a space of acceptance, we create an atmosphere that allows us to be completely transparent. Knowing we can be ourselves and be completely accepted.

Acceptance allows our nervous system to relax and live in a state of homeostasis and our parasympathetic nervous system can exist without the feeling of rejection. When we know we are accepted it removes the underlying fear of being abandoned emotionally.

Acceptance is knowing we’re not perfect, but feeling understood and loved for who we are. 

Acceptance doesn’t mean our partner likes all the decisions we make, or everything we do. It simply means they love us unconditionally and would never do anything intentionally to hurt us.

Empathy

Allowing empathy to live in your relationship allows the ability to feel what the other person is feeling. To identify with their emotions, their inner world to connect in such a way that you feel their conflict, hurt and pain.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from their perspective, until you climb into their skin and feel what they feel. 

An easy way of looking at it is: Empathy isn’t feeling FOR them; it’s feeling WITH them.

Creating a connection from this space, establishes a bond that is not easily broken.

Empathy helps create emotional safety by affirming that our struggles are valid and it’s okay – not necessarily right or wrong, but okay.  This helps by dropping any judgment. 

Empathy can exist even when we disagree. It has nothing to do with agreement; and has everything to do with understanding.

You might not agree with how a person responds to a situation. But you can put yourself in their shoes and see how they might be feeling.

When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it.

Feeling Chosen

This is one of the biggest factors in emotional safety: feeling seen for who we are and chosen.

I’m sure we can all relate to a situation in our life when we were not chosen.

Rejection is the reason we close off and retreat within.

That sense of not being chosen eats away at our sense of identity.

It takes away our feelings of confidence, security and even our sense of identity.

We should feel celebrated, not tolerated.

When we feel celebrated as a person, it validates our feeling of worthiness. 

Knowing we are special to that person above anyone else.

Does your partner know…really know…they are chosen by you above all others?

What can you do to ensure that your partner feels emotionally safe with you?

CREATE A SET POINT FOR FEELING SAFE IN A RELATIONSHIP

This can be done by feeling into your emotions and traversing your timeline to a space in time when you knew you truly felt seen, heard, understood and safe. A time when you knew the person or people around you truly accepted you for who you were. 

When you feel safe in a relationship, you can express your emotional needs, knowing no matter what your needs or desires are, you are met with understanding, compassion and acceptance. This allows your nervous system to feel safe, which ultimately allows you to be true to your emotional needs. That's true emotional safety, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Do you feel accepted in your relationship?

Do you know you are loved without reservation?

Do you feel you can be transparent with your partner or the person you hold dear to your heart?

These are important questions we all need to ask ourselves.

Emotional safety allows us true freedom. 

It allows our inner child to play without the fear of judgement or feeling suffocated.

So make some time for yourself and create a space that allows you to feel comfortable:

Start with closing your eyes and letting yourself know that this process can take as long as you need, you have all the time in the world.

No one is more safe than you are right here, right now.

It’s like taking the hand of yourself as a child (the child within) and reassuring them that you are here to protect them, and you are here with them every step of the way. 

This is a way of calming your nervous system so you feel protected which will allow you to go to the space in time that you felt completely accepted to be yourself. A time before you felt betrayed and condemned. 

You can feel the love and acceptance all around you. This is the moment you need to immerse yourself in. This is the feeling that you need to embody and allow it to soak into every cell in your body. 

Soak in this energy for as long as you can. 

Breathe it in, feel the acceptance like a warm hug. 

And if you don’t feel you have ever felt that before, immerse yourself in that feeling with every sense.

Allow yourself to image how wonderful it is to feel so truly loved and safe. 

This is the feeling we need to bring back with us to the present moment in time.

Stay in this space for as long as you need. I want this feeling to feel as natural as breathing. 

Before you allow yourself to return back to this space, I want you to create a set point. 

An energetic moment in time that you can come back to quickly and easily without having to go back in time. 

This new set point will allow you to recognise if your energy or emotions are being challenged and tested. When you recognise that feeling, I want you to come back to this set point and bathe in that energy again. 

That way no matter how much somebody tries to pull you away from feeling safe, you're only a few deep breaths away from coming back to yourself. 

It’s also very helpful to recognise that the way you may have been responding before was from an advanced coping mechanism, from years of not being accepted.

Now that you have the awareness and therefore the capacity to lead from a more conscious space, you can calm your nervous system even when you notice yourself feeling unsafe. 

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