What comes to mind when you hear the word “safety”? Seatbelts, first-aid kits, or earthquakes? Most people seem aware of issues related to physical safety. As they drive children to school, carefully handle that hot cup of coffee, or consume global news, they are bombarded with physical safety concerns on a daily basis.
Emotional safety, however, is a concept that fewer are aware of or concerned about, at least on a conscious level. Yet, emotional safety impacts every person in the world every day within the realm of interpersonal interactions.
We typically categorize our interactions with others as positive or negative. For example, you might say that you had an amazing conversation with one person or mention that interacting with another person was extremely difficult.
However, in terms of emotional safety, an outwardly positive interaction may harbor emotional danger beneath the surface. Conversely, a negative or “difficult” interaction may be tough in the moment but emotionally safe, leading to greater trust between two people.
Everyone encounters emotionally safe and unsafe situations with people on a daily basis. Although guarding against physical danger seems obvious, it is also important to become aware of and address areas of emotional hazards. Your emotional and psychological well-being often depends on it!
SHORT EXERCISE – IDENTIFY TWO PEOPLE
To personalize the concept of emotional safety, think of two people in your life:
- Someone with whom you have difficulty being your REAL self (i.e., need to have your guard up)
- Someone with whom you can truly be yourself (i.e., can let your guard down)
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Continue reading only after you have identified two such people in your life.
The first person you identified may be emotionally unsafe for you, while the second person may be emotionally safe. Keep these two people in mind as you read the rest of this article.
EMOTIONALLY UNSAFE PEOPLE
At the core, emotionally unsafe people do not accept you as you are. Their words, body language, and behaviors lead you to believe that they are not concerned about you and may reject you. It becomes difficult to be the real you, and you end up doubting yourself. You may respond by shutting down inside, hiding or escaping, or even fighting back!
Emotionally unsafe people may exhibit the following behaviors:
- Minimizing or dismissing your feelings, concerns, thoughts, or experience. They may say, “You don’t or shouldn’t feel the way you are feeling.”
- Not allowing you to know their REAL selves. You may know facts about them but lack a fuller sense of the kind of people they really are inside — their hurts, hopes, and dreams.
- Refusing to talk when they have problems with you. When this happens, you have no way to respond to their grievances (e.g., clarify, explain, apologize, attempt amends).
- Punishing you for not meeting their expectations and harboring hidden resentments. They may behave in passive-aggressive ways, expressing resentment in an indirect manner.
- Acting in ways that are completely unexpected in a negative sense. You may have believed that you knew someone, but as facts emerge that don’t fit with what you knew of that person, you may no longer feel safe around this person.
- Not taking responsibility for themselves, their feelings, thoughts, or behaviors. According to them, someone else should be blamed.
AROUND AN EMOTIONALLY UNSAFE PERSON
When around an emotionally unsafe person, you may pretend or put on a facade (e.g., act like everything is perfect and that you don’t have any problems or feelings). You may feel crazy or doubt yourself. You may feel hypervigilant and on guard. You may ruminate and spin your wheels, wasting mind space and energy. You usually do not feel free to be your true self around this person.
The resulting stress and fears may impact you and those around you negatively as the toxicity leaks into other areas of your life. Ultimately, you may end up shutting down completely, running away and hiding (either with physically or unhealthy behaviors), or getting ANGRY and fighting!
Over the long run, it is exhausting to be around an emotionally unsafe person because it impacts your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health, not to mention the negative impact on those same areas for your family.
EMOTIONALLY SAFE PEOPLE
In complete contrast, emotionally safe people often accept you just as you are. They want you to be a better person and are cheering for you! You can relax and truly be yourself around them. Because they accept you as you are, you become more accepting of yourself. In addition, because they support you despite your shortcomings, they help you want to be a better person.
Emotionally safe people will often validate your feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and experiences while taking ownership of these same things for themselves. They may say, “I see how you might be feeling the way you are feeling.” They are honest with you about their hurts, hopes, and dreams. They may be disappointed or disagree with you, but they will let you know and invite you to respond to the issue directly, saying something like, “I am feeling disappointed over how you treated me, and I need a change in your behavior in the future.”
Amazingly, emotionally safe people often see your good, bad, and ugly parts and still accept and love you! These emotionally safe people offer support and help you process what you are going through in a non-advice-giving or “non-judgey” way. They do not try to take over and solve your problems for you. Instead, they help you figure out your next steps. Finally, the way emotionally safe people portray themselves on the outside is consistent with who they are inside. Their actions and behaviors match the person you know.
AROUND AN EMOTIONALLY SAFE PERSON
When around an emotionally safe person, you often feel accepted and loved for who you are, and it feels okay to be vulnerable and real with that person. You feel sane, not crazy. You feel calm, relaxed, open, free, joyful, and nourished (and many other positive feelings!) You become motivated to make healthy adjustments in your life.
When you are around an emotionally safe person, you become creative in your thinking and problem-solving abilities. You feel empowered and experience a surge of COURAGE that you need to face your life. There are multiple benefits to being around a safe person! It’s enriching, life-saving, and wonderful to have as many of these emotionally safe people in your life as possible!
IT’S COMPLICATED: EMOTIONALLY SAFE AND UNSAFE PARTS OF PEOPLE
Now that you know how to recognize these two types of people, all that’s needed is to simply avoid the emotionally unsafe people and only keep the emotionally safe people around.
Wait a minute…not so fast. Actually, it is often much more complicated.
Both emotionally safe and unsafe PARTS often exist in the SAME person. Yes, that’s right. Some parts of a person may be emotionally safe while other parts may be emotionally unsafe. You typically have ambivalent feelings toward this type of person — maybe intensely mixed feelings. At times, you may feel frustrated and exhausted around this person. At other times though, you may feel okay. It is difficult to predict which way it will go. As a result, you may easily become confused about how to behave around this person. It can be painful and stressful trying to figure out how to be, act, behave, feel, or think when you need to interact with this type of person.
Even more challenging is when a person with whom you MUST interact has unsafe parts. This person could be someone close to you, someone you love, someone related to you, or someone who lives or works with you. How do you deal with him or her? Worst of all, what if (gasp!) you discover that YOU have unsafe parts? How do you deal with yourself?
WHAT TO DO?
The good news is that in many cases, there are plenty of things YOU can do to address having emotionally unsafe people or unsafe parts of people in your life. With hard work and commitment, you can better insulate and protect yourself from the dangers and injuries stemming from emotional hazards. At the very least, you can improve your sense of well-being! Two important starting points are described in this article.
YOUR INNER EMOTIONAL BAROMETER
First, consider becoming an emotionally safer person yourself. This task involves increasing your ability to identify and address your own or other’s unsafe parts.
How do you know which people and parts are emotionally unsafe? You can begin by developing your emotional barometer. Just as a Geiger counter detects radiation, an emotional barometer detects elements related to emotional safety. Everyone has a built-in inner emotional barometer, but not everyone is aware of its presence or how to use it.
If you participated in the short exercise at the beginning of this article, you already began using your emotional barometer by identifying the emotionally safe and unsafe people in your life. Perhaps you became aware of your negative experiences around a challenging person. Maybe you recalled that when you are with this person, your mind races; you feel fearful; you are uncomfortable physically (e.g., hot, tightness); and you shut down and want to hide, escape, or lash out in anger.
Recognizing these elements of your experience as emotional clues can help you become aware of future situations that involve emotionally unsafe people or their parts.
Developing your emotional barometer requires doing the hard and important work of reflection and processing your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors — on your own or with the help of a safe person in your life (e.g., a trusted friend, family member, counselor, clergy person, or life coach). The process is not easy, but it is well worth the effort and investment of time and resources.
HEALTHY INTERPERSONAL BOUNDARIES
Second, another step to becoming an emotional safer person is to intentionally set healthy interpersonal boundaries. Generally speaking, healthy flexible boundaries keep bad things out of your life while inviting nourishing elements to enrich your life.
A human body’s skin is an example of a physical boundary; it does a wonderful job of keeping out germs and keeping in the vital organs. Likewise, healthy emotional boundaries keep emotionally unsafe people or unsafe parts people outside so that your vulnerable psychological self is protected from harm.
At the same time, healthy interpersonal boundaries need to let emotionally safe people or safe parts of people enter your personal emotional zone. Healthy boundaries should also be flexible — able to change with varying circumstances.
When you set healthy boundaries, you say what you will or will not do. You can control your own behaviors and actions; you cannot control the other person. Healthy boundaries let others know how their actions are impacting you, positively or negatively. Furthermore, healthy boundaries mean that you say what is or is not acceptable to you. They let the other person make their own decision in response.
Emotionally safe people continually develop their abilities to set healthy interpersonal boundaries. If you do, you will be on your way to being happier, less stressed, and stronger in life. When your boundaries are healthy, you can find the courage to let the small things in life slide and put up a good fight for things worth fighting for. If you become emotionally safe, you will also impact everyone around you for the better, including your family, friends, and coworkers!!
TAKEAWAYS
This article introduced and described the concept of emotional safety. It also discussed how to recognize emotionally safe and unsafe people and their common characteristics. It also acknowledged the complexity of situations when a person possesses both safe and unsafe parts. Finally, it proposed two strategies for responding to this issue and increasing emotional safety and well-being:
- Develop an inner emotional barometer.
- Set ongoing healthy interpersonal boundaries.