09 Jul A Vital New Approach to Emotional Safety

I learn from clients all the time. I learn from my groups all the time. When a topic comes up repeatedly with my clients and groups, it’s time to pay close attention.

Over the past month, the subject of emotional safety has been uppermost. What is it, really? Is it even possible? How do we cultivate it? When it’s lost, how do we get it back?

These questions are absolutely crucial to anyone seeking healing, well being, satisfying relationships and spiritual growth. In answering them, it’s my aim to sketch a new approach to emotional safety, both within ourselves and between one another.

I believe the first thing about emotional safety we need to acknowledge is that it never exists as an absolute. Just as our own behavior may unpredictably shift from safe to risky, without warning, so, too, may that of a trusted loved one.

That’s not a problem, unless we pretend it’s not true. Everything is always changing, whether we like it or not, no matter how hard we resist this flux or try to lock parts of it into place. Especially in relationships.

Our brains are actually wired to address this. The primitive part of our brain, in its dedication to survival, and in it its constant assessing of our threat level, is both necessary and intractable. When we turn it off temporarily, whether with alcohol, drugs, infatuation, or anything else, it’s always at our peril and it always comes back online more vigilant than before.

But the primitive brain is also, often, inaccurate. It perceives difficult and challenging emotions as life threatening, like footsteps in a dark alley, and it tries to keep us from those emotions until we rewire ourselves for greater intimacy. How we do that is a broader topic, and indeed the subject of all my work. If you’ve been a part of this emotional connection community for any length of time, you’re already on that journey, or at least intrigued by it.

For now, my new and specific focus is on what happens when, rightly or wrongly, our primitive brain perceives an emotional threat or hurt.

When threatened or hurt, we contract. This contraction, in addition to all its physiological and neural components, may include behaviors of fight, flight, freeze, or fixation. This is true no matter how much personal growth we’ve achieved or how spiritually enlightened we’ve become. Every human being on this planet contracts at the perception of threat or hurt. No one, ever, graduates from this condition.

Emotionally, this happens whenever we’re invested in something, and therefore take it personally. Here’s a brief example. If someone insults my intelligence, I don’t contract at all. I don’t doubt how smart I am and therefore in the moment of such an insult no threat or hurt transpires. From a place of neutral discernment I may decide not to remain close to this person, but in such a decision my survival response has no need to engage.

On the other hand, I am invested in being a good and helpful person. So if someone accuses me of doing harm, I instantly and unavoidably contract. If the accusation were true, I would feel shame. My primitive brain doesn’t want me to feel shame because that seems dangerous. So at the very first whiff of shame’s possible presence, my primitive brain kicks into high gear and does whatever it can to keep me shame-free.

What happens next is what matters most. If I’m not aware of my contraction and let it run me, I’m doomed. If I do become aware of it and either fight or feed it, I’m still doomed. But if I can both recognize it and feel my way back open, then I have a chance to marshal all of my resources for the best possible outcome.

Here’s another, simpler way of saying that: If I engage with myself or others while in a contracted state, I almost always make things worse. Things can’t get better, for me or others involved, until I return to a state of expanded presence.

No matter how many books I’ve read, retreats I’ve attended, or hours of meditation and therapy I’ve logged, engaging while contracted doesn’t work.

What each of us takes personally varies greatly, but our basic emotional needs are mostly the same. Key among them are the needs to feel heard, seen, and understood. Likewise, it’s crucial that we feel validated and valued for who we truly are. We need to know that we matter, and that our preferences are taken into account. Whenever these needs are not met, we instantly—you guessed it—contract.

When our most important needs aren’t met, we either attempt to get them met or compensate for their lack of fulfillment. If we do either while still in a contracted state, down the tubes we go. Often, down the tubes go our closest relationships as well.

To sum up, our primitive brains lock us into a state of contraction when it senses emotional hurt or threat. This happens when we’re personally invested, or when our core needs aren’t met.

Addressing this situation successfully requires that we recognize and release our contraction first, before using our best intentions and tools to set things right.

Practically, that means naming and claiming whenever we’re “triggered.” Next, on a feeling level it requires “surfing” the contraction till it opens, which it almost always does. Then, on the mental level, it requires asking ourselves, “What do I need, right now (not for an impossible forever), to restore a sense of emotional safety?

Tip: apply those approaches in the order described—awareness first, feeling second, thinking third—otherwise your thinking may become a sly attempt to keep you from feeling.

Bonus tip: In order to restore emotional safety, you may need to open yourself to related, as-yet unhealed hurts from the past. Your current threat or hurt level may actually have as much or more to do with the past than the present.

If you are not able yet to identify what would restore your sense of emotional safety in the moment, and in the current situation, stay with that inquiry until clear. Short-circuiting the inquiry out of impatience or a desire to shift the focus onto others will prevent you from the renewed and reliable state of expanded presence that you seek.

Easier said than done, right? Yet, think how different all our lives would be, and our whole world for that matter, if we approached our conflicts in this way.

As always, thanks so much for staying curious, and for joining me in the exploration.