What is a Sense of Safety?

A sense of safety is an essential part of mental well-being and a necessary aspect of thriving in life. Many factors can contribute to a lack of safety, including trauma, emotional neglect, and attachment in childhood. If you are dealing with a lack of safety, a therapist can help you build that sense of safety through several strategies.

What is Safety?

Safety is the condition of being protected from harm or danger. It can be thought of in many ways, including physical and emotional. Feeling safe means you do not anticipate either harm or hurt, emotionally or physically. The element of safety allows us to take risks. A sense of safety may not just be about the safety of the situation but also the safety of what happens next. Fear of making mistakes may be an aspect of a lack of a sense of safety because you don’t feel safe enough to make normal human mistakes and that life will be okay afterwards.

Safety can be considered on a continuum from absolute safety to completely unsafe. We are rarely 100% safe. There are many potential threats that are unlikely. There are perceived threats that are not actual threats. Our minds can convince our bodies that we are in danger when we are actually safe. Our brains can see danger in the future, which our bodies feel in the present. These misinterpretations are often due to learned beliefs and past experiences.

The Importance of Safety

A sense of safety is necessary to move with ease in the world, create close relationships, and find connection. A lack of a sense of safety can leave you stuck with a view of the world and others as dangerous. You may tend to see threats where there is relative safety, and the potential threats are unlikely.

Without a sense of safety, you may experience excessive anxiety, worry, dread, and fear.  You may isolate yourself or do other things to protect yourself in ways that prevent connection and leave you with a feeling of emptiness. This state of being can leave you in a state of chronic stress that takes a toll on your body and mental health.

How Your Sense of Safety Develops

Established in Childhood

Your attitudes and beliefs about safety start in childhood. The start of a sense of safety begins with the attachment a child has with their caregiver. A child with a secure attachment to his or her caregiver learns coregulation and what it means to feel safe. Children who don’t have a secure attachment to their caregiver or experience multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) usually will have a reduced sense of safety.

When a sense of safety goes sideways in childhood, the world can seem dangerous and threatening, and you may have difficulty developing a sense of safety. It often results in having trouble trusting others or ourselves. You may end up questioning your intuition and doubting your instincts. You may live in a perpetual state of anxiety and learn to believe that people can’t be trusted.

Experiences After Childhood

Your experiences since childhood can strengthen/confirm those beliefs or weaken/disconfirm them. Further traumatic events can further reduce your sense of safety and trust in the world. If you end up having relationships with people who show you they can be trusted and you are safe in their presence, you can build a sense of safety. Without the view that the world is mostly a good place, it can cripple the way you move through the world. You have your guard up and end up looking for threats around each corner, including in situations where there is relative safety and authority figures are trustworthy.

Influence of Trust

When a sense of trust is shattered, so is safety. You are not going to feel safe anywhere if you can’t trust a situation or the people in it. When a child can’t rely on the people they are supposed to, it can damage their ability to trust others later in life. You may also have trouble trusting yourself. Betrayals can further erode your trust in others and the world in general and, ultimately, reduce your sense of safety.

Sense of Safety and the Nervous System

A sense of safety is stored within the nervous system. It is established through co-regulation with a parent when you are younger and continues to develop as you grow older. If you had a childhood that lacked safety and included threats and danger to yourself, your nervous system will probably be on the lookout for threats and be extra reactive to possible threats.

Your nervous system can become used to perceiving threats and more prone to perceiving situations as threatening. When your nervous system is not used to sensing safety and returning to a calm state after perceiving a threat or danger, it can leave you in a state of threat or shut down that doesn’t leave or leaves more slowly than normal.

How Your Sense of Safety Can Be Damaged

Trauma

Trauma can affect your sense of safety. It can make you more sensitive to perceiving threats or danger and less sensitive to safety messages. Hypervigilance, a common symptom of trauma, is hyperalertness to potential threats. Trauma can also affect your sense of control, which can affect your sense of safety. Trauma can challenge how we see the world as safe.

Threats aren’t only confined to physical threats, but psychological threats like verbal abuse are also a threat to safety. Psychological threats can harm our sense of safety in a lack of self-acceptance, self-worth, and self-esteem. Additionally, they can create fears to engage in the world with the aspects of being human, like making mistakes and learning from them. Ultimately, psychological threats can harm our sense of self and safety in being who we are.

Learned Beliefs Associated with a Lack of a Sense of Safety

These beliefs may have been established due to the environment you grew up in, things people said to you, how you tried to process trauma or other adverse circumstances. Your sense of safety can involve beliefs about:

• I can’t protect myself.
• I am at risk.
• I can’t rely on others to protect me.
• Other people can’t be trusted.
• I can’t protect myself from danger.
• If I go out, I will be hurt.
• When I feel fear, that means I am in danger.
• The world is dangerous.
• People will try to harm me.
• There is nowhere safe to be.
• If I make a mistake, something bad will happen.
• Life is out of control.
• I’m helpless.

Signs of a Lack of a Sense of Safety

Fear

Fear is a natural progression of a lack of a sense of safety and struggles with trust. If you can’t trust others or the world, there is a lot more to be fearful about.

Overgeneralized fears may lead you to avoid entire groups of people based on your traumatic experiences. For example, some rape victims may avoid all men, and Vietnam veterans may avoid Asian people.

Inaccurate Danger/Threat Assessments

When you don’t start with a firm foundation of a sense of safety, it is easy to make inaccurate danger and threat assessments. You may see no difference between low-probability events and high-probability events. You may perceive danger that can trigger your body’s fear response when you are actually relatively safe. Any possibility of harm may be too much to tolerate. You may interpret danger or threat in the absence of cues of safety. Ultimately, you may perceive neutral objects or people as threatening.

 You may have the belief that the world is a dangerous place and people are dangerous. This can lead to self-isolation and avoidance.

Other Symptoms

Some of the other symptoms that can come from a lack of a sense of safety include:

• Chronic and persistent anxiety
• Intrusive thoughts about themes of danger
• Irritability
• Startled responses or physical arousal
• Intense fears related to future victimization.
• Avoidant or phobic responses
• Social withdrawal

How a Therapist Can Help You Build or Restore a Sense of Safety

A therapist can help you figure out where to start and what direction makes the most sense to start. I can help you explore your sense of safety and help you notice little things that make you feel safe. Additionally, I can be a guide, so you don’t try to do too much too fast.

Learning to identify feeling safe while purging feeling threatened or unsafe is a process that takes little steps. Sometimes, you start at a point of not knowing what safety feels like. That’s okay. We’ll just have a further journey to take.

Time alone is necessary to begin healing but avoiding life doesn’t help us heal. It perpetuates the trauma because isolation feeds off itself. The more we isolate out of a need to feel safe, the further down the rabbit hole we go in isolation.

Discover What’s Behind Your Lack of a Sense of Safety

A sense of safety begins with being able to trust ourselves as safe. When we have an internal sense of safety, we can eventually develop a sense of safety while being in the world.

A therapist can help you address any direct sources of insecurity that you may find. By addressing insecurities, you may find more strength within yourself and confidence that you can handle what is in the world.

A therapist can help you problem solve to reduce your exposure to stressors and how to cope better with stressors. By becoming more aware of what makes you feel vulnerable or threatened, you can use different skills to feel more in control of yourself and safer in the world.

A therapist can help you process past experiences that may be interfering with your ability to feel safe. Traumatic experiences often impact our ability to feel safe. When those traumatic experiences are processed, we can make adjustments to our perceptions of the world and ourselves that allow us to feel safer.

Help You to Support a Sense of Safety

A therapist can help you to support a sense of safety by offering ideas on how to encourage your nervous system to feel safe in more situations. This can be done in multiple ways, such as:

• Creating an environment at home to encourage a sense of safety.
• Suggestions on the types of activities that you can do to reduce feelings of danger and increase feelings of safety.
• Helping you establish a daily routine as there’s safety and predictability in a routine. A daily routine is necessary to help us (re)learn who we are and who we were pre-trauma.
• It helps you make priorities and be selective about who you give your time and energy to, especially when you’re actively healing. Having a sense of safety includes boundaries; if we haven’t had solid boundaries before, now is when we typically establish firm ones.
• Working with you to help you get enough sleep, physical activity and connection so that you can increase your sense of safety.
• Working with you to increase your self-soothing skills as it is one of the most important things a person can do to help empower themselves and regain a sense of safety.
• Helping you become more comfortable with self-trust, as when we become more comfortable in making healthier choices for ourselves and conquering our chosen boundaries. Red flags are no longer red flags; they’re deal breakers.
• Help you identify trust and safety through both word and action.
• Helping you to identify when someone is speaking words of safety but not behaving in a way that is safe to you.
• Help to develop rituals, practices, acts of kindness, and consideration that reflect on something bigger than yourself.
• Create ‘pockets of positivity’ moments and experiences that generate positive feelings, especially feelings of safety.

Help You to Change Your Cognitive Thoughts and Perceptions About Safety, Threats, and Danger

A therapist can help you recognize that safety does exist and that you are deserving of it.

When we don’t acknowledge that we are having a danger response, we may feel it’s out of our control. When we name it, we can do something about it. Saying the words “danger” and “safe” gives us the power to clarify the situation and our responses.

A therapist can help you develop perceived safety by pairing it with actual safety.

Help You to Retrain Your Nervous System

Polyvagal Theory and the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP)

A Therapist can help you train your nervous system to use the ventral vagus pathway to restore a sense of safety through polyvagal techniques. We want to spend more time in our ventral vagal (safe) state than in our sympathetic (fight/flight) and dorsal vagal (shutdown) states. A therapist can help you train yourself to do that.

The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) is a listening therapy that can help your journey to finding safety.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness can help to disengage the fear response by focusing on what is happening in the present moment. It can help us reduce the judgments we make in different situations, including fear and danger-based judgments.

Mindfulness in nature, unless you have had a traumatic experience in nature, can help to calm the nervous system and reduce the fear response.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) and EMDR

Evidence-based trauma therapies, like Cognitive Processing Therapy and EMDR, can help you find a sense of safety by helping you process your trauma. These therapies can help you reframe and desensitize your experiences, so life doesn’t feel as threatening or distressing.

Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT)

Pain reprocessing therapy is an effective therapy for neuroplastic (nociplastic) pain that focuses on pain being caused by faulty brain interpretations of neutral body sensations that can be reduced by reducing the fears behind the pain and increasing messages of safety.

Cognitive Therapies

Cognitive therapies like cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) can retrain the brain towards safety by modifying thoughts about safety, threats, danger, and trust.

Conclusion

Having a sense of safety is an important aspect to mental wellness. Even if your childhood didn’t develop a sense of safety, you can still develop it now. You can make changes and find healing that will increase your sense of safety.

References

• Resick, P. A., Monson, C. M., & Chard, K. M. (2017). Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD: A Comprehensive Manual. New York, NY: Guilford Press.