How to Give Effective Safety Messages to Yourself

Safety messages are important to help us cope in a world that often seems dangerous. Safety messages are important to helping overcome a number of conditions like PTSD, anxiety, and chronic pain.

What are Safety Messages?

A safety message is what you tell yourself, or someone tells you to help increase a sense of safety, remind you that you are safe, or reduce fear. A safety message can be a simple phrase like “I am safe right now” or something more complicated with evidence about why you are safe or why the perceived threat or fear is not accurate.

It’s not just the words you say but also how you say it and the ease in your body at the time. The tone of safety messages should be similar to what you would have when talking to a scared child or a dog frightened of thunderstorms. Every part of the messaging should induce a feeling of safety or reassurance. Engaging the vagus nerve with deep breathing or other somatic techniques can also communicate safety and relaxation. This communication is often contrary to the perceived threats that your brain is interpreting.

Why are Safety Messages Important?

Safety messages are important because we have often created a world of fear and threat around or within ourselves because of trauma, chronic pain, or other experiences. Safety message can help you get to a more accurate level of safety or threat when your brain is prone to perceiving threat or danger.

Steps to Effective Safety Messages

Step 1: Recognizing that You are Dealing with a Fear or Concern

Awareness is always the first step. It may start with physical sensations (racing heart, tension in your shoulders, hollowness in your chest, etc.) or certain emotions (fear, annoyance, frustration, anxiety, etc.). Some fears will tend to have consistent physical sensations attached to them. For example, you may have a quenching in your gut whenever a fear of failure is triggered.

Some questions you may ask yourself in this step include:

• What am I feeling?
• What am I noticing?
• Where is it in my body?
• What are the qualities of the sensations (throbbing, sharp, tense, etc.), if any?

Step 2: Figuring Out What the Fear or Concern Is

Part of figuring out the concern is identifying whether the safety need is internal or external. Are you concerned about something happening to you, or are you making a mistake and feeling ashamed? Is it coming from a past experience, or is it entirely about the present? Does it feel similar to something you’ve felt before? What emotions are coming up?

Step 3: Addressing that Concern

When you have identified the root of your concern or fear, you need to give a message to yourself that addresses it. If it is a missing needs, see if you can give yourself that need. If it is a fear, can you gently challenge that fear by remembering a time when the opposite was true.

You don’t just address the concern with words but also with tone of communication and somatic messaging. Every part of the messaging should bring you closer to a sense of safety.

Step 4: Adding Evidence

It can be beneficial to add evidence to your safety message. Have you been through something similar and made it out okay? Are there reasons that your pain doesn’t make sense structurally? If you feel that you have lost control, is there something you can do or have done that shows agency in a similar situation?

Step 5: Giving a Message that is Accurate and Helps you Feel Safer or Reduces the Fear

It is essential that the message you give yourself is believable to your nervous system and helps you feel safer. It may not be appropriate if you feel tension in your body from the message you are giving it. If it feels like you are lying to yourself, you need to take it back and find a message that feels honest.

Step 6: Using Safety Messages in Good and Bad Times

You don’t want to just use safety messages when you are interpreting danger. In order to instill a greater sense of safety in your nervous system, you want to train it to feel safer in good times so that it can more easily interpret safety when your nervous system is perceiving threats or danger.

Safety Messages for Certain Issues

Safety messages can be an effective tool to use with certain issues and conditions.

Chronic Pain

Somatic tracking from Pain Reprocessing Therapy has safety re-appraisals as a critical component of the technique. It involves using mindfulness, safety re-appraisals and induced positive affect to change a person’s relationship with their pain, which results in a reduction of pain over time (you are re-training your brain to have less fear associated with pain).

Sometimes, with chronic pain, it is your nervous system interpreting something as dangerous or harmful. The safety messaging is focused on the danger the nervous system is interpreting and providing evidence that the interpretation is inaccurate.

Complex Trauma

With Complex Trauma, you are often dealing with fears and scared child parts that are connected to trauma you experienced when you were young. Present events can trigger past emotions, thoughts, and body sensations. When dealing with this type of perceived threat you may want to:

1. Identify the past experience
2. Recognize that the feelings are coming from the past and separate the past from the present. Identify what you were needing in the past that you weren’t getting.
3. Give yourself or the child part what it needed in that moment that it wasn’t getting (be age-appropriate)
4. Give a safety message that includes how things are different now.

Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse can rob you of your security or identity. It can make you question your reality and instincts. It can be really hard to feel safe when you don’t trust your own version of what happened, your instinct, and worth.

Safety messages can be targeted towards restoring self-trust and self-value. You can reassure yourself with evidence of when your instincts were right and the positive qualities you have. Reminding yourself that a lot of the emotional abuse was about controlling or manipulating you, rather than being an accurate appraisal of you and different experiences or situations.

Emotional Neglect

Often with emotional neglect you don’t have the foundation of feeling good enough or accepted. A lack of a sense of safety could be because you don’t recognize your true worth or value. Safety messages can be aimed at rebuilding that foundation. Some of the messageing may be around:

1. Your value, worth, or good qualities
2. What others see in you (positive)
3. Countering falsehoods or unhealthy beliefs
4. That you are human and __________________________ is normal

Trauma

Trauma can trap you in the past. When you are triggered, the past invades the present. It can take the form of behaviours, emotions, thoughts, physical symptoms, or other symptoms. Safety messages can help you ground yourself in the present and calm the nervous system.

Anxiety

Anxiety often deals with consistent worries or fears. Safety messages can help you calm the worries and fears. Safety messages can be focused on the temporary nature of the worries (if applicable), calming the anxiety, or addressing the root of the worry or fear.

Phobias

Phobias are oversized fears when you consider the realistic level of danger. You can use safety messages to address the fear. With phobias, it is best to address lower intensity fears before addressing more intense ones.

Conclusion

Safety messages are an important tool for coping and retraining your brain to view the world in a less dangerous light. They can be part of a plan to reduce symptoms and live with more ease.