Want to feel (emotionally) safe, always?

Here are the 4 magic words you need to know

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

We all want to be ourselves. We all want to feel safe being ourselves. But sometimes we create warped ideas about what that actually means. We think being myself: is being my best self always. You know the part of us that we like posting on instagram. Or that would show up for an interview at a tv show and make everyone fall in love with us.

That's but one part of ourselves. We all of course know the other part. The one that sometimes doesn't want to get out of bed, or binges out on bad food and gets angry, frightened and sad. The one that feels alone, maybe anxious or the one that doesn't feel safe.

There is a secret here that only a few know.

In order to feel safe being yourself you need to make all parts of yourself feel welcome first. It requires self awareness and intimacy and the refusal to punish yourself with thoughts of: I'm not good enough because….

What does that actually look like? It's simple.

Next time you feel anything other than your 'best self’, when you notice yourself contracting because you feel uncomfortable in any way or form, rather than trying to get out of that feeling, acknowledge it first. Have that conversation with that part the way you would speak to a little child.

Oh, darling, you are feeling frightened. I totally get it.

Or

it's a little bit too much for you right now, I get it. You feel sad that you can't fully show up the way you would like to? Oh, sweetheart, come here, let me just give you a hug.

Just paying attention to that little one inside and really loving her/him is the biggest game changer there is. Really. I'm not exaggerating. Underneath all our behavioural patterns and bravado, us trying to be all adult and grown up, there is a soft centre that's very sensitive inside each one of us. So sensitive in fact that it can give rise to the biggest armouring that you can imagine. In fact, it seems that the bigger the armouring, the softer the core.

Try to remember that next time you meet a bully :).

The only reason we ever feel unsafe is because we are not in a mature and grown up relationship with our inner child, which simply means we don't understand why we feel the way we feel, but instead judge our feelings and experiences.

The inner child, our emotional body, longs for connection and harmony as well as for self-expression. When those needs aren't being met we try all sorts of strategies to get them met and if that doesn't work, we get upset and we start protecting our heart.

That protection of our soft centre eventually becomes our survival strategy and personality pattern. It becomes our identity often to the degree that we ourselves don't remember our tenderness inside.

Look around the world right now: all the cynicism, judgment, hate and ‘othering’, come from that fear of having our inner softness being abused and misunderstood, of simply being hurt, regardless of the mind claiming it to be otherwise.

Once we start paying close attention to how we are actually feeling inside underneath all the stories that our mind might be telling us (usually about the other person) we get one step closer to healing our relationship with our inner child.

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So let me give you a down to earth real life example:

I was recently visiting family that I love but who have very different values than I do. I started noticing my mind going into a lot of judgments about them: They are watching too much tv, and look at them eating so much processed food and omg they are so in their head and disconnected from their feelings etc.

Needless to say that what was coming out of my mouth towards them was being taken as criticism and they felt rejected by me. The energy we were all swimming in was closed and icky, the type you want to run away from. But I had booked a whole week stay with them, so I was stuck. Life had arranged it perfectly for me to not run away from the discomfort but to help me move through it.

It took me a couple of days to catch myself and acknowledge what I was actually feeling underneath all those stories:

I was longing for more connection. I felt powerless because I didn't know how to make that connection happen, which made me feel sad and then angry. I also felt judged for my needs of silence and just not seen for who I am but projected upon. I felt unsafe to be fully me.

Once I paid attention to my feelings, to my inner child, I was able to ask it the four magic words, which are:

What do you need?

Turns out I was already meeting my first need: I wanted to be seen and felt and the first person to give that to myself was myself. As soon as I noticed my very natural human longing for more connection and depth and I was able to acknowledge that it was indeed tricky to get there (because most of the time it is!) I was able to soften towards myself and my family as well.

I was able to see my judgments for what they are: an attempt to protect myself from feeling my tenderness and with that the pain of disconnection. I was able to tune into the tragedy of human relating with compassion: we all want the same and yet we are so confused and lost that at times it becomes very awkward and painful. We often just don't know how to do it any better. That awareness changed everything.

See, it's not about whether our needs get met or not that makes the difference. It's about the intimacy that comes with presence to what is. That intimacy is what makes us feel safe. And it starts within ourselves and with ourselves.

What happened next, you may ask?

Well, my needs didn't get met in a way that all of a sudden we were all able to drop in together and have a deep and meaningful share, possibly with some tears and laughter that comes with deeper connection, no. But because I was able to hold those tender parts of me with loving awareness, because I was intimate with myself, I was able to soften and with that softness I was able to move in a completely different way. And it changed our whole time together.

Rather than allowing my critic to speak unintentionally I allowed my empathy to lead the way instead. I was able to listen deeper and in between the lines to the needs of the other, even if they were not aware of them themselves. I was able to ask questions intentionally taking the conversations in the direction that I preferred, which took me out of: ‘I feel unsafe and therefore powerless' to ‘I have something of value to contribute here’.

I was also able to take risks and be more vulnerable than maybe I had thought possible before. Because I ‘held the hand of my inner child’ so to speak, I could allow myself to open up regardless of the outcome.

And that's exactly the point I'm trying to make here: feeling safe and therefore taking risks in vulnerability comes from our relationship with ourselves first. Not from the circumstances we are in or the outcome we may be able to achieve.

Let's face it, how many times do we use that excuse: I can't be vulnerable and open because it's not safe, because the circumstances are less than perfect?

I hear it from my clients all the time: I can't be vulnerable with them because they are not safe. So? I get it, of course, but:

The uncomfortable truth is, the circumstances will almost always not be perfect. The world is an unsafe place and other people are often unsafe, too.

If we wait for that to change in order to open up we might be waiting a long time. So the only choice we have is to open up not for the other or to achieve an outcome (like getting our needs met) but to open up for our own sake. And that's where the magic is.

The more we practice to attune to our inner self, our inner child, and to acknowledge its needs and longings and to possibly take those risks of expressing them (with discernment of course) regardless of the other, the more resilient we become.

The more we grow in maturity, which says: it might not be comfortable, I might not get what I need but I will be ok no matter what because I got myself.

Emotional maturity is about accepting life the way it is and not the way we would like it to be. Like a good parent to a child, we are able to show understanding and empathy to ourselves, possibly soothe our hurt feelings and then learn to accept things and people the way they are. And that means some people will never able to meet us emotionally the way we would like to be met. That's just life.

Like a good parent we teach our inner child to do our own part, however: staying open, inviting others to join us in our vulnerability without pressure, not harbouring resentment, judgments and hurts and taking good care of our own needs, i.e. when it's too painful for us to be around someone who is closed, we honour our capacity and create healthy boundaries by maybe moving a little further away. Until we feel strong enough to come closer, or not.

Like a muscle that we train we can learn how to stay open in our heart even in the face of closed-ness. We can learn to stay in our centre and love even if it's painful.

And staying in love is the only thing that will make us feel safe no matter what.