What is Felt Safety
Felt safety is the subjective experience of safety that is determined from scanning for cues of safety or danger from the person’s internal world (inside), their environment (outside, and the relationship (between).
***Note: The language inside, outside, between is based on the work of psychotherapist and polyvagal expert, Deb Dana, LCSW***
Felt Safety Misconceptions
There are some common misconceptions about felt safety that may unintentionally leave parents feeling blamed and shamed. These misconceptions may also leave us minimizing someone else’s experience or pursuing the wrong interventions.
Felt safety is NOT
- Only about relational safety
- Only about physical safety
- Always related to what’s happening in the environment
- Always easy to identify (why the person is feeling safe- or not)
The Science of Felt Safety
I explore in depth the science of felt safety, including how we all are always creating our own reality, in a previous podcast episode titled Connection or Protection, which you can find HERE.
You can always pick up a copy of Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors to explore the science of felt safety in depth.
Cues of Safety from the Outside
In part 2 of this series on felt safety, we are going to explore the types of things that might be happening in a person’s internal world that could be impacting their experience of felt safety (or not).
- The environment
- Obviously, objectively unsafe environments are experienced as cues of danger
- Environmental cues that are danger memory triggers
- If I was in a car accident with a red car, I might experience red cars as ‘cues of danger’
- The sensory world
- The five external senses are sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste
- Sometimes there are sensory experiences that are danger memory triggers
- For example, in the red car example above, the red car is something you see
- Sensory experiences can also be ‘unsafe’ if they are too much or too little based in the individual’s sensory threshold
- Structure & Predictability
- The brain is concerned with what’s going to happen next, almost above all else
- Lack of structure or predictability could be considered a cue of danger
- Environmental demands
- Ironically, for some folks, too much structure could be interpreted as a demand and be a cue of danger
Varies in Every Individual
If you haven’t revisited the podcast Connection or Protection recently, or read Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors, it’s worth reviewing how we are all always creating our own reality based on what’s objectively happening in the here and now and everything that has happened in the past.
Since none of us have identical pasts, none of us have the same ‘cues of safety’ or ‘cues of danger.’
It is so easy to project our own experience of safety onto others! This is normal and very human.
The science of safety invites us to keep a curious stance when considering the felt safety of our kids (and other folks we are in relationship with, including ourselves).
What Do We Do With This Information?
I realize I haven’t given you any tools in this podcast series. If you’ve read Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors you know that I consider understanding the neurobiological processes to be a tool. This information makes it possible for us to reinterpret our children’s behaviors, and changing how we see people changes people.
Understanding the neurobiology also invites our own owl brains to stick around a bit longer, which then helps us brainstorm tools that might be appropriate for our unique child.
I also think that understanding the neurobiology relieves parents of the burden of somehow attempting to control our children’s sense of safety, while also empowering us to see all the ways we can influence our children’s sense of safety.
Actually, I have a podcast episode all about influence as opposed to control! You can find it by CLICKING HERE.
Next Week!
Next week, I will air part 2 of this three part series on felt safety, and we will take a deep dive into how the environment offers cues of safety or danger.
Resources Mentioned on the Podcast
Listen on the Podcast
This blog is a short summary of a longer episode on The Baffling Behavior Show podcast.
Find The Baffling Behavior Show podcast on Apple Podcast, Google, Spotify, or in your favorite podcast app.
Or, you can read the entire transcript of the episode by scrolling down and clicking ‘transcript.’
Robyn
