What you will learn from this blog:
- Emotional safety does not mean your partner does not do anything to trigger you; it means a commitment to self-awareness
- How to create safety in yourself to feel safe in a relationship
- How to communicate difficult emotions in a relationship in a safe way
Emotional safety is essential in a healthy relationship. Without it, a relationship can go down a negative spiral of disconnection.
When we feel unsafe, we protect ourselves by attacking the other, blaming, putting our walls up and withholding our true feelings from each other, giving silent treatment, etc., and partners start to think more about preserving the ‘I’ than about building the ‘we’.
What is Safety?
Safety is more than the ability to trust that someone will not harm or hurt you. We all have our traumas, and it is unrealistic to expect someone to never trigger you.
What differentiates a safe relationship from an unsafe one is a commitment to self-awareness.
Safety in a relationship does not mean that our partner will never feel or express anger or other intense emotions. Rather, you start to feel safe in the relationship when both partners make consistent efforts to strengthen awareness of their emotions, and to process and express their emotions in a conscious way.
In other words, unconscious partners create unsafety; conscious partners create safety.
Safety is the responsibility of both partners. As long as you are human, you will experience negative emotions. As long as you experience negative emotions, you have the potential to create unsafe situations. You can overcome these emotions through our online therapy services in Singapore.
The nature of negative emotions such as pain and anger is narcissistic:
- Your pain will only see its own perspective and dismiss any version of the event that does not support its narrative; this will make your partner feel gaslighted, invalidated, and unheard.
- Your pain is self-preserving and wants to be right and the other to be wrong; this will make your partner feel blamed, criticised, and not good enough.
Here are 3 ways we advise couples at Intracresco through our mental health therapy sessions on how partners can consciously deal with their negative emotions and create safety in your relationship…
1. Create safety in yourself
You learn how to create safety in a relationship by first learning how to create it in yourself. To feel safe within yourself means to accept all your parts unconditionally.
Every time you judge yourself or your emotions and push them away, you create an unsafe environment within yourself – where you cannot be authentic within yourself.
To feel safe within yourself means to address the needs of your inner child—the part of you that feels insecure because of past experiences.
One thing we tell our clients during mental health therapy is that you cannot guarantee that people around you will never hurt you; but, the more aware part of you can assure your inner child that you will always be there for them. This sometimes means drawing boundaries and speaking up for yourself.
With greater self-acceptance and your inner child’s needs addressed, you would be less sensitive to judgement and criticism from others. This creates a positive cycle in your relationship:
- You feel less triggered when your partner is emotional
- You respond from a space of awareness and empathy
- Your partner feels more comfortable sharing their true feelings
- You feel more connected and safe in the relationship
As long as you feel unsafe in yourself and your defences are up, all your partner’s efforts to make you feel safe will never be enough.
2. Develop self-awareness
Self-awareness is being conscious of what you are thinking and feeling before or while the thoughts and emotions are coming up in you, not after you have reacted emotionally.
Self-awareness is not something you can just decide to have. You do not become more aware by saying, “Okay, next time, I will be more aware.”
Awareness is like a muscle; the more you use it, the stronger it gets. Exercises that help develop your muscle of awareness include mindfulness exercises and self-reflection. We tell our clients during mental health therapy at Intracresco that it is important to practice this consistently to see results.
What do you do with your emotions after you are aware? See our blog, ‘What to do when you are triggered’.
3. Conscious communication
Once you have processed your emotions, learn how to communicate them to your partner in a conscious way.
Unconscious Communication
“Can’t you do it yourself? I have to do everything around here!”
Unconscious communication is where your pain and emotions hijack your reactions.
Conscious Communication
“A part of me was triggered when you asked me to wash the dishes; it brought up feelings of being used and exploited, and giving so much to others but not getting anything in return.”
Conscious communication means REVEALING what is going on inside you from a space of awareness and vulnerability. The more deeply and vulnerably you are able to express your feelings, the more you create safety in your relationship.
Conclusion:
The intention of this blog is to demystify and clarify what emotional safety actually is in relationships.
Oftentimes, when we do things that hurt others, we apologise and say, “I will never do it again.” But then it happens again. This creates more distrust and “unsafety”.
Creating safety is not something that we decide to do. Rather, it is the result of consistent practice in developing self-awareness, emotional regulation, and conscious communication. Get in touch with us for online therapy in Singapore to learn more about how you can build safety in relationships.
Learn more about working with us through mental health therapy at Intracresco.
