What Every Therapy Client Should Know 06 - Build Internal Emotional Safety or Self Compassion

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and this is the sixth video in a series where I share information that I think EVERY therapy client should know.  In this video, I’ll talk about how to build internal emotional safety or self compassion that will help to widen your window of tolerance.

In the last video, we talked about how widening your window of tolerance requires you to take small, anxiety-producing, growth-oriented steps and apply a lot of emotional safety like WD-40 to help ease the discomfort.  Of the two kinds of emotional safety, in the last video we covered external emotional safety -- or feeling safe and trusting someone else to help regulate your emotions.  

So, let's say you have some people in your life who you trust and can usually help you to co-regulate your emotions.  But at the same time, you have this harsh, mean-spirited, critical inner voice that taunts you and makes you feel small, incapable, and unworthy. It might say -- “Why do you even try?  You know you’ll fail.” or “No one even cares about you, so don’t get your hopes up.” or “They like you now, but wait until they find out who you really are.”

Well, it’s going to be hard to feel safe with all of that going on inside your head!  How can you expect to make difficult changes, when you don't feel safe with yourself?  That voice is telling you that you can't do it, so why even bother trying?  It’s telling you are worthless, unloveable, or not good enough.  Looks like it's time to build some internal emotional safety.  

So, how do we counter this voice and start to feel more emotionally safe inside?  Well, here’s the thing.  We are talking about EMOTIONAL safety.  Which means we have to talk to the emotional brain.  Remember that mammal brain -- the thumb in our hand model that we talked about in Video 1 of this series?  That's who we need to talk to.  

Making the Mammal Brain Feel Safe

I like to think of the mammal brain as a scared puppy.  He might have had a lot of negative experiences in his life.  He's afraid to trust you.  He tends to overreact to harmless situations and has threat responses like trembling, aggression, or total shut down.  Does this sound familiar?  This is exactly how our mammal brains react with fight, flight, and freeze.  So, how do you make this puppy feel safe?  Well, I can tell you, he's not going to respond well to yelling, criticism, or a 40 minute rational dissertation about why he should be feeling safe.  Instead, you are going to have to show him. Here’s how to do that.  First, give him

• Time - slow WAY down.  Let him know that he has space and time -- space to retreat if things get hard, space to regress, space to take risks.  Progress is not linear, so give your emotional brain time and space to experience a full range of emotions and slow things way down for yourself.  Lower your expectations about how quickly things may go. Next,
• Reliability - check in regularly, show that scared puppy that you aren't going to leave.  Be steady and reliable for yourself.  Show up for yourself consistently and ask the questions “How am I doing? Am I okay?” You are the only person in your life who will always show up for yourself, so make sure you are your own best caretaker.
• Acceptance -  This is the concept of meeting your scared puppy exactly where he is.  If he is scared -- that’s okay.  If he’s not coming out from under the bed -- that’s okay too. Get down on his level!  Don't tower over him. Whatever you are feeling, wherever you are -- allow that just to be and accept it without judgment or blame.
• Compassion - Do you think yelling and screaming at this puppy is going to make him trust you?  Absolutely not.  Instead -- keep him safe, but treat him with love and compassion.  Scared puppies need to be gently encouraged to open up and trust you, not to be yelled at or criticized.  You may not be able to shut down the critical voice, but you can add a compassionate, loving voice to counter it. 
• Touch/Soothing - this might not happen right away, but eventually, you want to be able to sit close to your puppy.  Pet him, cuddle with him.  These are the ways that he will be able to calm down with you and feel protected and safe.  He also might feel safer when swaddled in a thunder shirt.  Your nervous system needs this too!  And there are lots of ways for you to use physical touch, holds, and body-based calming on yourself to feel emotionally safe in the moment, which I’ll go into more in subsequent videos.

For those of you saying, I need to be hard on myself.  If I use this soft approach, I will never get anything done! So that is your critical inner voice, and you may notice that it is not cooperating with this new compassionate attitude.  It's not going to happen overnight.  If you have a critical inner voice, you have developed it for a reason.  It is trying to protect you from making mistakes, being unacceptable, and feeling stupid.  But all of that criticism and contempt might make you safer, but it won't help you to grow and take risks.  So, thank that voice for its service over the years and start talking to yourself in a more compassionate way.   And remember, compassion is different than indulgence.   Indulgence allows you to sleep in, eat Bon-Bon's, and scroll social media endlessly.  But compassion wants the best for you and wants you to achieve your goals.  Compassion allows you to fall down as long as you keep trying.

I like to think of the analogy of a coach.  We’ve all had good coaches and bad coaches, right?  Bad coaches scream at you, berate you, and make you feel worthless.  They use scare tactics and fear to get any kind of motivation out of you.  And it may work -- temporarily.  But good coaches encourage you, build you up, make you try again even after you’ve screwed up.  They believe in you and your ability to perform and grow.  Which one did you play better for?  That’s what I thought.  Be your own good coach.  

Once you start to feel more emotionally safe, you will be more comfortable taking some risks to change your behavior patterns even if it makes you feel a little anxious or uncomfortable.  

So, that is internal emotional safety -- in the next video, I’ll talk about convincing your mammal brain to try to change your behavior patterns.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!