Building Emotional Safety
Building upon last week’s post; you were introduced to the safety-trust-confidence cycle. This is a cycle that is imperative to relationship repair when there has been a significant breach or relational trauma. While each part of the cycle was spoken about in part, over the next three weeks I’m going to be dismantling each part of this cycle and walking through how each part is built.
Let’s dig in to building emotional safety!
I have found that this is the stage of the cycle that most often gets overlooked. People tend to operate under the way their relationship used to feel and push right into trying to build trust. Often people then find that building trust is supremely difficult and they feel like they’re hitting a wall. You cannot skip over building emotional safety. Safety is the foundation from which trust can be built.
There are three components to building emotional safety:
1. Taking responsibility
2. Vulnerability
3. Reassurance
Starting with taking responsibility. When a relational trauma has occurred, there is often a great deal of shame wrapped up in the breach for both the partner who engaged in the breach and the partner who later learned of the breach. Shame is such a powerful experience that it can create a space where taking responsibility is very difficult. Think about a time that you have behaved badly, when you think back to the aftermath of that experience it is likely that your feeling at that time was a strong desire to move past it or to deny it. Many people believe themselves to be “good” and when they behave badly it does not align with their view of who they are. Taking responsibility for your behavior in these instances is pivotal for setting the stage for safety.
Once responsibility has been taken, the next direction to go in is to risk being vulnerable. As anyone who has heard of Brene Brown or read Brene Brown or watched Brene Brown’s Netflix special can tell you, vulnerability and connection is the antidote to shame. As we talked about yesterday, there is so much shame wrapped up in relational trauma and infidelity and shame and safety do not/cannot coexist. In building emotional safety, vulnerability may look like talking openly about fears and concerns that you have, talking about dynamics in your relationship that may have led to areas of your partnership that were vulnerable to these breaches.
The next part of building safety is providing reassurance. Part of reassurance is a response to vulnerability. When someone shares something vulnerable with you, part of responding in a way that is caring and appropriate can be reassuring them that their greatest fears won’t happen or that you’re in this together as a team, or even connecting over the reality that you’re both experiencing. In the case of infidelity, reassurance may also, as I noted last week, include sharing phone passwords, social media accounts, phone records, and overcommunicating where you will be and with whom. Parts of this are intended to be short term and strictly to rebuild safety. You do not want a relationship where you will forever be checking one another’s phone. Other parts, like connecting with empathy and validation are things that you will want to turn into ongoing dynamics of your relationship.
You may move through these three steps over and over and over again to establish a sense of emotional safety. Do not be surprised if you feel like you’re moving toward establishing this safety and one or both of you have moments where you do not feel safe or you feel like you need to disconnect from one another. It is very normal to have moments where you feel like you have to protect yourself after a breach in your relationship and establishing emotional safety asking you to fight that impulse.
Building emotional safety is not always an easy experience. If you find that you’re having a hard time with this and you continue feeling like you have to put up walls to protect yourself, I’d be happy to work with you to work through that to build safety and put you on the road to relationship recovery.