Emotional Safety is the Key to Cultivating Meaningful Relationships

Unless you’ve been in therapy, you probably haven’t heard the term emotional safety before, but it is the cornerstone for how we build meaningful relationships. And this applies across the board to all relationships including parenting, marriage or partnerships, friendships, and professional relationships. It blows my mind that is so pertinent and omnipotent yet not common knowledge. It’s generally not something we talk about, but it without a doubt has a significant impact on your life, making it one of those valuable meaningful bits of life.

Since emotional safety is already impacting your life, let’s do some learning about it so you have the option to get intention about how you cultivate it. Let’s dive in to what emotional safety is, why it matters, how it develops, and how to build emotional safety in your relationships.

What is Emotional Safety?

Emotional safety is the feeling that we are fully accepted and valued for our authentic self. It is essential for emotional connection in relationships, especially our closest relationships with family and friends.

When we talk about safety, we often focus on physical safety. We teach kids not to run with scissors, to tie their shoes so they don’t trip, and to look both ways before crossing the street. We schedule fire drills, tornado drills, and active shooter drills. We talk about wearing our seat belts in the car, we listen to flight attendants always directing us to identify the nearest exits on the airplane in case of emergency, and we purchase home, car, health, and life insurance. It can be easier to manage these more tangible aspects of life, which makes sense when he hold in mind the values of capitalism and materialism in our society.

Taking care of our bodies is absolutely important, and so is taking care of our hearts. When we build emotional safety in our relationships, we’re able to experience trust and vulnerability, and we can express ourselves freely without fear of judgement or being taking advantage of. Emotional safety isn’t quite so tangible like physical safety. It’s created through what people say and how they say it, through body language, through how we connect with others and a felt sense of security. Also unlike physical safety, emotional safety is reciprocal- it’s a quality of relationships, not of individual people, although individual people can offer emotional safety.

Why Emotional Safety Matters

The quality of our relationships with others has far-reaching implications for our lives. Relationships impact your mental health, physical health, resilience, capacity for empathy, self-esteem, your understanding of yourself, and your understanding of the world. Interestingly, we often leave this important aspect of our lives up to chance since most of our learning about relationships is implicit and experiential in our earliest days as babies with our caregivers. These patterns for interaction then become wired into our brains and nervous systems, so we blindly reinforce them with other people as we move throughout life. This works out well for some people, while it leaves others feeling lonely, inadequate, and inferior, like they’re always on the outside looking in.

Parenting

Regardless of where you are in your life journey, surely you know that parents receive no formal or intentional training on how to build a relationship with their children. The “training” they do receive comes from how they were parented and how relationships were modeled for them by their own parents. Most parents parent the way they were raised.

I once heard a wonderful metaphor for this from Lisa Ferentz: Parenting is like running a relay race on a track. Each adult carries the baton for their lap and then passes it on to the next person. The next person takes it and starts their lap. This keeps happening until one parent stops running, opens their hand, and looks at the baton, which is what happens when a parent enters therapy. The baton represents all of the implicit learning about relationships that has been passed down from parent to child within a family.

Our earliest experiences with our caregivers set the stage for how we understand the world and understand ourselves. This is based on the concept of attachment theory which includes four different patterns created by how parents show up for their children. I’ll cover attachment theory in-depth in the future, but for now, it’s important to know that young children learn implicitly about trust versus mistrust in the first 18 months of life based on how parents meet their needs and how consistently they do it. What they experience from their caregivers becomes what they expect about the world (things like “I can count on others to meet my needs/”My needs aren’t met consistently”/”My parent isn’t emotionally present when I have a need”/”It’s scary to have needs”) and about themselves (“I am safe in the world”/”I am not safe in the world”/”I shouldn’t express my needs”). Over time, those beliefs become ingrained patterns of shame, fear, lack of trust, intimidation, self-doubt, and self-loathing.

As we grow up, we then expect these same patterns in the world, which causes them to often be reinforced because we’re looking for them. These patterns become wired into our brains, nervous systems, and psyches so we seek them because they bring comfort since this is all we’ve known in the past. This works beautifully when someone has developed patterns of secure attachment. When that’s not the case, it can be disastrous and leave us unknowingly searching relentlessly for something we can’t quite put our finger on.

Lack of Emotional Safety

When we find ourselves in relationships with a lack of emotional safety, we’re not going to feel seen and heard. We might have learned to function through patterns of codependency or people pleasing in relationships from an enmeshed relationship with our caregivers in childhood; neither of these relational patterns allow for someone to show up authentically in relationships. Anxiety is another pattern that develops from lack of emotional security. If we’re always on alert trying to prepare for every possible scenario, we’re expending so much energy to try to feel safe. It might also show up as perfectionism where we try to overachieve to feel seen and heard, believing that somehow, if we can just do enough then we will matter. A lack of emotional safety is inherently present in physical and emotional abuse, which can lead a person to show up defensive, guarded, and ready to attack at any hint of vulnerability.

In terms of how a lack of emotional safety impacts us physically, research shows that relationships that are considered stressful, full of conflict, or leave people feeling isolated are connected to high levels of inflammation and hypertension, as well as early death.

At Work

Emotional safety and psychological safety are sometimes used interchangeably. Just in case you’re not familiar with Brene Brown and her research on the importance of vulnerability in the workplace, I want to share that there’s a body of research demonstrating the importance of psychological safety going back to the 1990s. Basically, if employees don’t feel safe enough to ask questions, share ideas, make mistakes, celebrate successes, trust their colleagues, and feel like their voice is heard, that’s going to lead to an unhealthy culture where people are disengaged, disconnected, unmotivated, and feel as if they don’t matter. That kind of mindset will limit the quantity and quality of work produced.

How to Build Emotional Safety

It’s so interesting to me that more people have Googled “How to create a following on social media” than how to create emotional safety. I feel like that’s a great example of what I’m talking about in this post in fact, because the focus gets put on those tangible pieces of life that we can influence, like the number of followers we have, instead of the depth and quality of our real life relationships. No matter how many or how few followers you have, it won’t make up for a lack of emotional safety in your relationships. On that note, here are three things to do in your relationships with family including children, friends, coworkers, and anyone important to you:

Be Present

No matter what kind of relationship you’re thinking about right now, being present can make a big difference. And I’m talking the whole nine yards- turn off the tv, put your phone down and on silent, close your laptop- and just be present. Really listen to what the other person says, and listen without planning your response in your head. To send them cues of safety, make eye contact and turn your body towards the person you’re interacting with. When you do these things, you’re sending the implicit messaging that you value the other person. This is how we increase quality of relationships- by engaging others with our presence.

Be Respectful

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered how it became so common and acceptable to dismiss other’s feelings and boundaries. I see no reason to ever tell someone they’re fine, or start a sentence with, “Well, at least…” or even worse, “Calm down.” I think those are three of the most invalidating things you can say to a person, and they hardly ever make someone feel better. When someone tells you how they feel, listen. Most of the time, people aren’t looking for you to fix them because they’re not broken, but responding to their feelings by really hearing them and empathizing can deepen the emotional safety in your relationships. Try saying something like, “Wow, that sounds really challenging/overwhelming,” or “Gosh, you’ve got so much on your plate right now.”

And the boundaries piece of this… When someone tells you what they want, listen. Asking someone “Are you sure?” is one of the most invalidating things you can do. Also, no means no. Be respectful of the boundaries people set with you. Boundaries aren’t set to be mean or difficult; on the contrary, we set boundaries to care for ourselves. Respecting someone’s boundaries communicates that we see another person and want to honor their wishes.

Check Yourself

It’s pretty common to project unwanted and uncomfortable parts of ourselves onto other people, especially children, but it moves us farther from building emotional safety in our relationship. In the Circle of Security theory, there’s this idea of how “shark music” gets in the way of being with others. The shark music is our uncomfortable feelings and beliefs left over from the past that get pulled into the present moment, even when they have nothing to do with what’s going on in front of us. Here’s the video I often share with parents to explain this concept:

It’s also helpful to check yourself in terms of your nonverbal communication. A whopping 70-93% of communication is nonverbal. That’s significant. Slow down in your interactions and consider your tone of voice, the prosody of your speech, the speed of your speech, your facial expressions, your posture and stance, your proximity and your gestures. Whether you intend to or not, all of these factors are communicating information to the people you’re interacting with about who you are, how you’re receiving the other person, and how you’re processing content of the conversation.

Emotional safety is an important part of building and deepening relationships, and we know that stable, supportive relationships are an essential part of building a meaningful life. I’d love to hear your thoughts on emotional safety and how you incorporate it into your life!