Felt Safety: What Is It and How Does It Help Shame Recovery?
What if you know you are safe, but your body does not seem to believe you?
You may be with someone you trust and still find yourself watching their expression for signs that something is wrong. You might know that a difficult relationship has ended, yet notice yourself bracing when somebody sounds irritated. Perhaps you understand that you are allowed to say no, but the moment you try, your chest tightens and you feel an almost automatic urge to explain, apologise or change your mind.
This is where the idea of felt safety can be helpful. Felt safety is the experience of safety being registered by your nervous system, rather than simply knowing intellectually that you are safe. It is the difference between being able to tell yourself there is no danger here and your body beginning to respond as though that is true.
For people who have experienced trauma, emotional neglect, unpredictable relationships or chronic shame, those two things do not always happen at the same time.
Knowing you are safe is not always the same as feeling safe
You can know a great deal without necessarily feeling it. You may know that you are no longer in the home where you learnt to keep quiet, that your current partner is not the person who hurt you, or that making a mistake does not mean you will be rejected.
Something in you stays alert anyway.
This makes sense when we think about the nervous system as something that learns through experience. If earlier relationships taught you that affection could disappear, emotions might be criticised, mistakes brought consequences or another person's mood needed careful monitoring, you may have adapted by becoming very good at noticing what was happening around you. Staying quiet, anticipating what other people needed or making yourself less noticeable may once have helped relationships feel more manageable.
You scan a room before you have decided to.
These responses do not necessarily disappear when the circumstances change. The thinking part of you may recognise that life is different now, while another part is still asking, am I really safe here?
Felt safety does not mean being completely relaxed, or reaching a point where nothing unsettles you. Often it is much less dramatic. It might be noticing that your breathing is easier around a particular person, being able to say what you think without immediately checking their reaction, or allowing yourself to feel upset without needing to hide it.
You say what you think and do not immediately check their face for damage.
Perhaps you can say I don't know and tolerate the silence afterwards. Or you say no without softening it into something closer to a yes.
These moments matter because when less of your attention is being used to scan for threat, there is more room for curiosity, reflection and choice. You can begin to notice what you actually feel and need, rather than automatically responding to what you think will keep the relationship safe.
Shame, relationships and the need to stay safe
Shame can complicate this because it rarely stays confined to the thought I did something wrong. It can become something much more personal: there is something wrong with me.
When that belief sits underneath your relationships, ordinary moments take on far greater significance. A pause might feel like rejection. Someone else's disappointment can feel like evidence that you have failed. A disagreement can carry more threat than the situation itself seems to warrant. You may start monitoring your words, your expression, your needs or even how much space you take up.
You rehearse an apology before you know what you are apologising for.
This is also why people-pleasing is not always simply a problem with boundaries. Sometimes it has been a way of maintaining safety. If another person's approval helped relationships feel predictable, keeping people happy may have become a way of reducing the possibility of criticism, anger or withdrawal.
You agree before you have checked what you actually want.
You notice the change in somebody else's voice before you notice the tension gathering in your own body. You find yourself explaining a boundary until it barely resembles a boundary anymore. From the outside this can look like being accommodating. Internally, something far more urgent may be happening: if they are okay with me, then I can be okay.
Simply being told to become more assertive, or to just say no, can miss something important here. The difficulty may not be knowing how to say the word. It may be what your nervous system has learnt to expect will happen afterwards.
When understanding is not enough
Therapy can help you understand where these patterns came from, and that understanding can be enormously valuable. Many people recognise the frustrating gap between knowing something and experiencing it differently. You can know that what happened was not your fault and still carry shame. You can understand that your current relationship is different and still brace for rejection. You can know that rest is allowed and still feel guilty when you stop.
That gap does not mean the insight has failed. Some of what you have learnt is reflected not only in the stories you tell yourself, but also in your emotional and bodily responses.
For some people, therapy therefore involves becoming curious about what happens alongside the words. There might be tension when you talk about a particular relationship, an urge to withdraw when somebody disagrees with you, or a tendency to smile while describing something painful.
You reassure the therapist when you are the person who is upset.
None of these responses needs to be judged or immediately changed. They can help you understand what your system has learnt about relationships, vulnerability and safety.
Perhaps you've noticed this outside therapy too, in a friendship where being wrong never once cost you anything. Perhaps you've also noticed the opposite, a relationship where kindness never quite reached the part of you that was still checking the exits.
The therapeutic relationship itself can offer opportunities for something different to happen. You might expect to be judged and instead be met with curiosity. You become upset and discover that you do not have to apologise for it. You disagree and find the relationship remains intact. You say that something does not feel right and there is room to talk about it.
These can sound like very ordinary moments, and often they are. Repeated experiences of being listened to, having choices respected and remaining connected during difficult emotions can gradually challenge what you have come to expect from relationships.
Safety is not something a therapist can simply declare on your behalf. “You're safe here” may be well intended, but your nervous system gets its own vote. Trust tends to develop through what happens next.
Making a little more room for yourself
As felt safety develops, you may also begin to notice how much permission you give yourself to exist as you are. People who have spent years adapting to other people's needs can become very skilled at disappearing without physically leaving the room. You minimise what hurts. You say you do not mind when you do. You laugh while describing something painful. You rest only once everything else has been done.
You notice you are hungry before you realise you have been putting it off.
Taking up more space does not necessarily mean becoming louder or suddenly assertive. It may be much more ordinary than that: noticing that you are tired before you push through, pausing before agreeing to something, acknowledging that a comment hurt, or allowing a need to exist before deciding whether it is reasonable enough to deserve attention.
It can help to notice where felt safety already exists, rather than turning it into something else you have to achieve. You might think of the people around whom your breathing naturally eases, or the places where you feel less guarded, or the relationships in which you can be uncertain, emotional or imperfect without immediately managing the other person's response.
None of this is a test of whether you are doing safety correctly. It is a way of becoming curious about the conditions in which your nervous system does not have to work quite so hard to protect you.
Safe enough
Felt safety is not the absence of difficult emotion. You can feel grief and still be safe. You can be angry without being in danger. You can disagree with somebody and remain connected to yourself. You can experience uncertainty without needing an immediate answer.
Perhaps that is the important distinction. Felt safety is not a life without discomfort. It is having enough internal and relational steadiness that discomfort does not automatically become danger.
For someone who has lived with shame, that can gradually create room for something different. Less monitoring of the self. Less automatic responsibility for other people's reactions. A little more freedom to respond to what is happening now rather than continually protecting against what happened before.
A fuller breath.
A boundary without an apology.
A difficult feeling, allowed to stay a moment longer than usual.
Or perhaps just the quiet, slightly surprised recognition.
I feel safe enough to be here.
Kay Parkinson, MBACP (Accred), is a psychotherapist at Place to Talk Therapies, specialising in trauma, emotional neglect and the impact of shame on identity and self-worth. She works in Bournemouth and online across the UK. www.placetotalktherapies.co.uk
Related resource
A space to notice
If this article has left you curious about the moments when you feel more settled, more yourself, or a little less guarded, A Space to Notice is a five-week reflective journal designed to help you slow down and pay attention to what is happening within and around you, without needing to fix or change it.
References
Fisher, J. (2017) Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. New York: Routledge.
Porges, S.W. (2011) The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
