I go on and on about emotional safety all of the time. The more I study neuro biology, the more I understand the importance of emotional safety. Right now in this chaotic world I believe emotional safety is more important than ever.
Emotional safety is a neurobiological drive we have. From birth, we are driven to connect with our primary care givers for survival. As we grow, mature and age, emotional safety still remains one of our strongest directives as human beings. Research can show us how emotionally safe individuals feel like they belong with a family, friends, colleagues, and in peer groups. An individual who feels emotionally safe has better health outcomes, less anxiety, more joy and increased enjoyment in life.
How do we understand emotional safety? If we feel emotionally safe with someone, we can show up as our authentic selves and not feel that we will be abandoned, discarded or shamed for who we are. In an emotionally safe relationship we bring all of our trauma, our lived experience and our shadow self to the relationship and feel that there is space for us to learn, grow and thrive.
A lot of adults I work with tell me that they don’t know how to be in a relationship that is emotionally safe- and this is not uncommon. Many now adults were parented in very authoritarian families and may have been subjected to unhealthy enmeshment, were not allowed to have boundaries and actually grew up afraid of their parents. This can make it very hard to understand what you are deserving of- love, physical and emotional safety and a relationship in which you have the experience of feeling safe, seen, secure and soothed. This lived experience will depend on the attachment style you adopted as a child and how you view and live out your attachment as an adult.
A lot of the couples I work with in my emotionally focused couples coaching work struggle with feeling emotionally safe in their relationships. That is because the way we felt that we were viewed as children can cause us to develop patterns of being in the world that we bring into adulthood. Some adults struggle to emotionally connect because their emotions were not validated as children. Some adults struggle with trust issues and communication because of their experiences in their families of origin.
Dr. Jonice Webb is an expert on childhood emotional neglect and both works with and researches the impact of a lack of emotional safety in a child’s life and the type of affect that has on an adult. Her research has come up with anecdotal and empirical evidence that shows that those with CEN suffer from feeling emptiness frequently. There can be a lack of feeling, an almost void like feeling in their lives and she hypothesizes that the inability to express emotion in any way, or a lack of regard for a person’s emotional states contribute to this feeling or emptiness and not really belonging.
We are all worthy of unconditional love and belonging. Our neurobiological drives seek out love and belonging to survive. We can move from surviving to thriving when we can understand that through boundaries, self compassion and self acceptance we are more than capable of having the felt experience of emotional safety. It does take work and thanks to neuroplasticity we can heal from the trauma of what we did not receive and establish these connections we were born to forge.
If you want to have a free 15 minute coaching call on emotional safety or any other relationship or parent coaching or compassion coaching topic, please feel free to contact me at
kilty67@sympatico.ca and we can schedule a call.
With much love,
Carol xo