Part 2 - The Magic Ingredient in Personal Growth and Change: Emotional Safety

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share more about what I think is the magic ingredient in personal growth and change -- emotional safety.  This is the second of a 2-part series.

In the first video in this series, I talk about what I mean by emotional fear or safety and how we acquire our emotional fear levels.  Now let's talk about the

Problems with Emotional Fear

Aside from what I've already said, which is bad enough, why else does it matter that we don't feel emotionally safe?  Because unless you feel safe, your threat system is constantly activated.  You are in hiding in a closet from an active shooter, constantly worried that he will fling the door open and find you.  Your alarms are constantly sounding and you are hunkered down in full protection mode.  If you make a sound, he might hear you, so you don't move a muscle and you wait for the threat to pass -- but it never does.  If you show any emotion, you fear you will not be able to recover, so you need to protect yourself from ever probing anything that feels emotionally uncomfortable.  Protect and avoid.  Protect and avoid. 

So, that's problematic.  Why?  Well, for a couple of reasons. 

• Tunnel vision - For one thing, being emotionally fearful means that you can't see beyond this single moment in time that is happening right now.  Fear makes you have tunnel vision and hunker down.  You can make choices, but since you can't see the full picture, you are making choices with very limited information. 
• No feedback - Without emotional safetly, you also can't receive constructive feedback.  Everything feels like a threat and so you protect and defend -- shutting out any notion that you aren't behaving, thinking, or feeling in the absolute perfect way.  You are afraid of how accepting that feedback might make you feel, so you never even entertain it.  And you know what?  Feedback is important for growth.  If your best friend tells you that you are hurting her feelings -- how do you take that information?  Do you listen fully and validate her feelings?  Do you take her request and think about how you can do better?  Or do you get defensive, tell her she is wrong, and carry on righteously?  That reaction is fear acting out.  Without being able to consider any feedback, we stop ourselves from being able to grow into better people.  One note on this -- I absolutely believe you should consider your source.  If you are receiving criticism from someone you don't respect or don't believe is making good life choices, you don't have to take their feedback on board.  You just don't.  But if someone you care about and respect is giving you constructive feedback, you owe it to yourself to listen without rejecting it out of hand.
• No risks - Another problem is that fear prevents you from taking chances.  You absolutely cannot risk rejection, vulnerability, or failure because of the emotions that might bring up, so you just don't try.  All of those uncomfortable emotions have to be avoided at all costs, so the answer is to just not take the risk at all or sabotage your chances so you have an excuse.  Unfortunately, everything that is worth having in life requires taking a chance, so you end up stuck in that closet, paralyzed by fear. 

Two Types of Emotional Safety

There are two kind of emotional safety and they both involve facing your fear of emotions.  You have to feel it to heal it, so get ready to feel uncomfortable. 

• External - Relational Trust - The first type of emotional safety is social or feeling safe in relationships with others -- I call this external emotional safety. Somewhere along the way, either in your childhood or beyond, you might have lost your ability to feel emotionally safe with others.  You became afraid of saying what you think, feel, or want because you couldn't trust that other people could hold that with you without judgement, rebuke, fear, or dismissal.  But sometimes in life, we luck out.  We meet someone wonderful -- a friend, a significant other, a pastor, a mentor, or a therapist who believes in us, is there for us, and holds us in unconditional positive regard.  We see our best selves and our strengths reflected back to us in their eyes.  We feel safe to have emotions -- even uncomfortable ones -- with this person and we let ourselves be fully seen in all of our messy, uncomfortable, emotional glory.  With them, we are able to feel things strongly and experience their calm reassurance and their strong belief that we can get through it and we can put ourselves back together afterwards.  Their words, their kindness, their support, and their love, hold us together and help us learn that emotions come and go and that we can ride the wave together without going under.   That relationship allows us to begin to trust again.  Trust that there may be others out there who can make us feel emotionally safe.  Trust that we are deserving and worthy of that compassion and love.  Trust that we can make it through to the other side of that emotional pain and be strong enough to do it again and again and again.   We learn to heal in relationship.  But there is another type of emotional safety and I think it's the most important one
• Internal - Self-compassion - Sometimes we have that relationship, that person who believes in us fully and allows us to be entirely and completely ourselves, but we are still stuck, we are still wary and still unable to take chances or make changes.  At this point, I would be willing to say that the threat is coming from inside the house.  What is the voice inside your head saying?  Is it kind?  Or -- as is more likely -- is it harsh, and critical, and cruel?  Does it say things to you that you would NEVER say to a friend?  Does it berate you and criticize you and call you names?  Whose voice does it sound like?  Did it start out sounding like your mom's voice and then gradually morph into just your voice yelling at you?  And let me guess -- you feel like you need this cruel, heartless voice screaming at you because otherwise you'd be too lazy and unmotivated to get anything done or achieve anything?  Well -- allow me to disagree.  Anyone yelling at you, including your own inner voice activates your threat system and you go into full bunker mode.  You can't take chances or risks because what would that horrible inner voice say to you?  "I knew you couldn't do it.  You are an idiot.  You thought you were such big stuff, but I knew it all along -- you are just a failure."  Yikes.  The thing is, self-compassion is a FAR better motivator than self-criticism since it comes from a place of love rather than fear.  Self criticism asks what is wrong with you -- whereas self-compassion asks what is BEST for you.  Rather than only being able to see just what's in front of us, self-compassion allows us to give ourselves the love and support and encouragement to see the other possibilities, entertain feedback, even when it is negative, and to trust our own sense of what might be right for us.  It's nice to be able to heal in relationship, but it is essential that we feel safe from ourselves.   And we have all of the tools to give ourselves emotional safety.  We just have to believe in ourselves enough to stop yelling and starting loving. 

How do external and internal emotional safety work with each other?  Well, they can be reciprocal.  Having good trusting relationships and support can provide a model that can teach YOU to begin providing that safety to yourself.  On the other hand, if you don't have a great track record of having trusting relationships, building that safety WITHIN can help you to understand what you need from others and help you to choose supportive and compassionate friends and partners. 

So the next question is how?  How you become someone who has external and internal emotional safety?   Join me in my next video, where I unpack how to become emotionally safe internally -- how to gain self compassion.   Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!