Experiencing emotional safety - being able to swim in icy water

Emotional safety is embedded within you. When it’s missing, it can create an unidentifiable feeling of uncertainty, anxiety, danger, and threat.

Emotional safety has two strands:

• To feel like you can be your true self, regardless of where you are or who you're with.
• To be able to experience both positive and negative emotions.

I have had clients express that they don’t feel safe within themselves but can’t identify why, as they have no obvious external threat. They feel their childhood was okay; they haven’t had significant traumatic events or experienced an abusive relationship. Yet, they feel anxious, fearful, and ‘unsafe.’

Some have lost their ‘safe person,’ the one they felt able to be themselves with and talk about their worries, issues, and struggles. They can’t imagine feeling safe again without that special person in their life.

Many can’t allow themselves to feel anything and are emotionally shut off, some believing they have dissociated from themselves. The idea of talking about their feelings in therapy can be overwhelming and scary because they imagine being flooded with emotions they can’t handle.

How can a lack of emotional safety happen?

Most often, the inability to feel safe within oneself happens as a result of traumatic experiences. This doesn’t necessarily have to be one single event, but can be the cumulative effect of many smaller, seemingly insignificant events that have a similar overall impact emotionally.

Childhood experiences are usually the root cause. Again, it doesn’t have to be abusive, violent, or extreme. The messages we receive about ourselves from our parents or caregivers are foundational in how we process our feelings later in life.

There may also be a sensible option for a child to shut down in response to parents or caregivers being neglectful, dysregulated emotionally, or detached, in order to lessen the pain this causes. It can feel safer to not feel than to feel.

Some children don’t have the ability, or fail to develop the capacity, to express their sorrows, frustrations, distress, joy, and anger. As a result, they learn to keep everything bottled up inside, and their emotions remain stuck and unprocessed. Without an outlet, feelings and emotions start to feel overwhelming and scary.

A child can be rejected, told off, or even punished for having ‘emotional outbursts’ and accused of being dysregulated. But emotional outbursts are healthy for children. Some children fear negative emotions, such as anger, because they have witnessed how it can develop into physical or emotional harm within the family. They learn that it’s not safe to express emotions for themselves or others.

The child adapts to this lesson and hides their feelings. When the child grows into an adult, they are expected to be ‘emotionally mature,’ to handle stressful situations, and to navigate challenges and difficult experiences. However, the adult eventually realises they lack the tools for ‘life’ and may turn to numbness, depression, high anxiety, burnout, and a host of other mental and physical symptoms.

The nervous system quickly adapts and learns that it is not safe to feel, becoming stuck in past experiences that were unresolved at the time. As a result, without the means to express these emotions, the nervous system is constantly switched on to fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode. Physically, this can manifest as a racing heart, body tension, breathing difficulties, nervousness, fatigue, body pain, panic, and fear. You desperately want to feel, but your life experience has taught you that you mustn’t.

Being in this state is exhausting and debilitating. You just want to feel ‘normal,’ but it is important to recognise that your mind and body are trying to protect you. They are preparing you for perceived danger, whether that’s an external threat or internal exposure to emotions that were learned as scary and intolerable by others.

How do I embody emotional safety?

As I mentioned before, many clients come to me with a fear of feeling. They don’t know how to embrace their emotions and are not even sure if they want to. But an innate driving force directs them to seek help. Deep inside, their core self is saying, “We need to feel something.”

My aim as a counsellor is to help you avoid becoming overwhelmed by your feelings and emotions because overwhelm can reinforce your existing fear of them. The approach needed is to help reduce your fear of emotions. Therapy requires a gentle approach to establish a sense of safety. When you identify a place of safety, you can tentatively dip your toe into a scary emotion, but easily and quickly retreat to the ‘safe place’ of the counselling room and the counsellor.

Imagine being on a beach and deciding to take a dip in the icy sea. Some people plunge right in, while others need to gradually acclimatise themselves to the cold by paddling. Your safety is always the soft, familiar towel waiting for you on the warm sand, offering comfort, warmth, and reassurance. Or perhaps a person is holding the towel for you, wrapping you up in it while you stop shivering before getting ready to go back in. There is no rush; the tide won’t be in for hours.

Positive memories, like the towel, can also hold warmth, comfort, and reassurance. Whether this is a person, place, or experience, tapping into the physical sensations associated with this memory can help create a sense of safety. It offers a lifeline of safe retreat when venturing into the icy water and is always available to you, wherever you are.

The therapeutic relationship with the counsellor, once again like the towel, should offer a sense of safety, trust, warmth, reassurance, acceptance, and unconditional positive regard. In the counselling room, you can truly be yourself without fear of danger, criticism, judgment, or rejection. This will help build confidence and, ultimately, the self-ease to be yourself in the outside world too. For some, the counselling relationship is the first time they experience that level of safety.

Experiencing emotions safely

Alongside the key therapeutic relationship of talking, the counsellor can introduce you to many resources, such as activating positive sensations associated with memories, breathing techniques, grounding exercises, releasing bodily (somatic) tension, and movement.

Once you’ve developed these resources, you’re ready to acclimatise to the icy water. You’ve dipped your toes into the sea of emotions, but now it’s time to go a little further. Using the skills you’ve learned, you can venture in deeper. It might start to feel overwhelming, but you know you can always return to your lovely, warm, dry towel waiting for you on the beach. Even when your shoulders are submerged or your feet lose their footing, the option to (safely/temporarily) retreat is always there.

When you start opening yourself up to your emotions, this is what it can feel like. Exploring their origin and meaning will cause a level of discomfort, but this can be carefully navigated, much like submerging yourself in the hostile, icy sea and returning to the safe, soft towel on the warm sand. Trying anything new feels alien and vulnerable. But after a while, your ability and confidence will improve. You’ll realise you can swim back to shore at any time.

The key moment for my clients is when they return to their comforting towel and realise that nothing bad has happened. They didn’t drown, they weren’t injured, they didn’t drift out to sea, and no shark attacked them. This revelation is the turning point in therapy, and the client begins to learn that experiencing feelings and emotions that once seemed intolerable or detached is achievable.

Your swim wasn’t as scary as your mind and body led you to believe all your life.

Once you’ve got used to the cold, your nervous system and muscles relax, and inside, you start to feel a new sensation of warmth associated with those positive resources you’ve utilised. Your mind and body realise it is safe. You experienced the ebb and flow of emotions through your body. Eventually, you might not even need those resources, but it’s good to know you have safety just in case you need it.

Moving forward with curiosity 

Once you’ve experienced how to feel safe with your emotions, it can help to explore them with confidence and curiosity. This enables you to identify what changes you may need to make in your life to move forward in a meaningful way.

In sessions, this may require connecting with internal parts of yourself, such as your inner child, teenage self, or creating a nurturing parent self to help navigate responses to people or situations. Some people need to install clear boundaries or let go of unhealthy relationships or behaviours. Finding a way to love yourself, forgive yourself, and treat yourself with compassion and acceptance are essential aspects of personal growth, which enables positive and negative emotions to coexist. We all have positive and negative emotions within us.

You will hold emotions in different parts of your body and, through counselling, you can learn to recognise how they connect to thoughts, memories, triggers, and past events. You can lean into those sensations instead of shying away from them, so you can understand what you are feeling and then respond in a way that continues your personal growth.

When triggered by current events, instead of being transported back to past trauma, you now have a resource of safety as a lifeline back to the present. You can acknowledge the emotions, sensations, thoughts, and memories that may have been activated, but not get tangled up in them like a rogue fishing net. You remind yourself of the internal warmth radiating from within while in the icy water, and you know you are going to be okay. Your warm, soft towel is waiting for you if you need it.