"I'm Scared" ~ The Importance of Emotional Safety.

When I was about 9 years old, I was playing outside with a friend near to her house, and we found a young cat roaming around the road.  It looked too young to be out, and my friend recognised it as her neighbours’ cat, so we carried it back to her house. 

When we knocked on the door, after a long pause, the woman who lived there opened her door a crack.  She saw that we had her cat which we were trying to hand over to her so she opened the door wider, and at that point we could both see that she was crying.  In fact, she’d been crying so much that she could barely open her eyes which were red raw.  She took the cat, thanked us and swiftly closed the door.  Neither of us spoke for a moment, then we looked at each other, and some sort of unspoken agreement passed between us that we needed to tell someone. Which we did.  We told my friends mother who came back to the house with us, she knew this lady by name and when she opened the door a second time, my friend’s mother asked her, sympathetically, what was wrong.  The woman broke down and said, very simply, ‘I’m scared’. 

My friend’s mother sent us both back home, so we never found out exactly what this woman was scared about.  She didn’t look sick, but she may have been.  She didn’t look battered or abused, but she may have been.  You can’t always tell from appearances what someone may be dealing with.  She did look exactly how she felt though - very scared. 

I remember the image of her, how she’d withdrawn into herself and her body was arched inwards as though it was protecting the soft centre of herself.  She was crouched a little bit, as though she was trying not to be noticed.   I remember what she was wearing, she hadn’t dressed, she was still in her nightclothes, and she was wearing a dressing gown which she was clutching to her.  I remember her hair, it was blonde and curly and shoulder length, the ends around her face were wet from her tears.  I remember the freckles on her face and thinking that her face, on other occasions, was probably one that looked quite jolly.

For some reason, this memory has stuck in my mind whilst I’ve lost many others that may have been more relevant to me, such as particular milestones I’ve reached in life or nostalgic anecdotes…personal memories lost to time.  And I’ve often wondered why that is.  But as I’ve aged and seen more of life, I’ve begun to understand why that memory is lodged there and why that woman put the cause of her tears so simply that day – she didn’t feel safe.  Whatever may have been happening to her, whether she was sick, whether she was abused, whether it was due to grief, whatever the case may be, she didn’t feel safe. 

Emotional Safety as a Basic Human Need.

Emotional Safety is a basic human need.  This is mentioned if you search it via a mental health and wellbeing site or a psychology forum.   And yet so many of us live without it.  It’s one of the building blocks of being able to create a healthy and happy life.  It should be one of the things we factor into every decision that we make, we should ask that question before we do anything, ‘is this going to be a threat to how emotionally safe I feel?’ and somehow it doesn't seem to be number one on our list of priorities to be considered.

I know there are examples where we do think about it in the moment, such as ‘is this a safe path for me to walk down at night when it’s not well lit and near a main road?’ or, ‘should I really eat that burrito I’ve been saving in the fridge for over a week? But when it comes to the emotional aspects of safety it’s rarely a question we ponder on for any length of time.

Big Brother Safety.

We live in a time when the factor of safety is assessed by the sort of big brother mentality that relies upon security cameras, work place standards and a variety of other legal measures and whilst I’m not disputing that these are also important, there aren’t many reports you can access online that show the quality of emotional safety we feel and how this may rank in the world today.  At least not those that show up on the first couple of pages of any internet search.  It’s equally as important as our physical safety, in fact the two are analogous with each other.

(W.W.Y.D?) What Would You Do?

In my job, I’m asked questions on a regular basis people about their future prospects and how the impact of some of the decisions they want to make might affect them, and it’s given me a lot of food for thought because I can see how unsafe some of their choices may end up being which has made me reflect on some of my own choices and decisions made in the past. Some of them had such a dramatic impact on my ability to feel safe that I’m still reeling from them many years down the line. It's glaringly obvious to me now how unsafe they were in retrospect, yet it's always easier to see how unsafe something might be prior to the event for someone else isn’t it?   

How Safe Are You?

Ask yourself the question, how safe am I or how safe will this be for me, as one of the first questions when you’re considering areas of your life that are going to affect how you feel.  In your friendships:  Does the friend who you go on holiday with who dumps you on the beach whilst they go off to toot round the local bars and bring randomers back to your apartment for a quick hook-up, make you feel safe?  Does the lover who keeps ghosting you before swooping back into your life for a quick fix, ‘make you feel safe?’  Does the family member who trashes your reputation behind your back, make you feel safe?  Does the person you’re about to commit the rest of your life to, make you feel safe? 

Whenever there’s a situation where a negative emotion is likely to be stored and become part of the fabric of your future nervous system – you’ll absolutely know and be able to predict this before it goes so far that it causes that damage.   Judge it by how safe it makes you feel now, then make some adjustments to either encourage a change, leave something behind or pursue it into the future.

Emotional insecurity is not something that’s recovered from quickly.  It has a lasting impact.   It damages our ability to trust, therefore potentially causing a glitch in our ability to feel secure in other relationships and we’re social beings so we need this sense of belonging.   We begin to rely on ourselves and our own judgement increasingly, rather than allowing someone else to help steer us.  We stop asking for help.  We become a one-man-band.  We start to feel scared.  In a world so densely populated it’s surprising how many people feel so scared and so alone at times.

I don't know what happened to the lady we met that day, though I do know that afterwards her neighbours regularly checked up on her so I'm hopeful that she overcame whatever was affecting her. I'm pleased that my friend and I found her and said something to someone who was able to help. I like to think that because of that, we might have prevented a lot of pain for her in the future. I can't honestly say that back in the 70's we'd have used terms like emotional safety but there was a sense of community in the neighbourhood and that helped her to pick up the pieces. It's just a pity they fell in the first place.

Gina X