Finding Home Healing
I believe you were born with a light that guides you to your higher self and most passionate life. But for many of us, it's been extinguished or lost.
My mission with this podcast is to help you find your way back home to that light so that you can love deeper, live in your power, and truly thrive.
For those lost or lonely souls, welcome home.
Finding Home Healing
EP 20: If Your Relationship Is Missing Emotional Safety, It Could Be Toxic
What if the key to thriving relationships lies in the intangible realm of emotional safety? Today, I share a personal journey through a past relationship filled with fear and anxiety, which acted as a catalyst for my understanding of emotional safety. Discover how the fear of judgment and self-blame can erode self-esteem and hinder genuine connection, and learn how to transform these dynamics into opportunities for growth and healing in your own relationships.
This episode promises to unravel the transformative power of emotional safety across all types of relationships—romantic, professional, or familial. By harnessing self-awareness and personal boundaries, we can create a foundation of trust and security, allowing us to be our authentic selves without fear of judgment or rejection. Explore with me:
✔️ My personal story that exemplifies the impact of anxiety and fear in a relationship
✔️ Definition of emotional safety and its significance in relationships
✔️ Importance of emotional intelligence in fostering authentic connection
✔️ Practical strategies for conscious communication and conflict resolution
✔️ Insight for healing personal wounds that impact relationships
✔️ The reciprocity required for creating emotional safety
✔️ How to set boundaries
✔️ Encouragement for fostering an environment of openness and healing
Through real-life anecdotes and insights, learn how to overcome defensiveness and criticism to pave the way for deeper intimacy and compassion.
Join me as we explore the intricate dance of healthy conflict and its role in emotional safety. Recognize the importance of understanding emotional wounds and patterns that influence our behavior, and acquire tools to build emotionally safe relationships. This episode encourages listeners to reflect on their own emotional intelligence and meaning-making processes, offering a roadmap to nurturing harmonious connections. Together, let's embark on this journey of understanding and cultivating emotional safety, ultimately contributing to a more loving and compassionate world.
Follow me
- IG: @findinghomehealing
- TikTok: @findinghomehealing
- YT Channel: Finding Home Healing
Schedule 1:1 / Contact me
- Website: findinghomehealing.com
- Email: sadie@findinghomehealing.com
Thanks for listening and be well!
Welcome to Finding Home Healing. I'm your host, sadie. I believe you were born with a light that guides you to your higher self and most passionate life, but for many of us it's been extinguished or lost. My mission is to help you find your way back home to that light, so that you can love deeper, live in your power and truly thrive. For those lost or lonely souls, welcome home. If you can relate to the story that I'm about to share, this episode is going to be really, really helpful for you.
Speaker 1:I was in a relationship quite a while ago early 20s is when it started and this relationship I was in and out of it for about four years. It was very interesting. I felt very uneasy in it. A majority of the time there was a dynamic where I felt afraid. I didn't always feel very safe. I felt a lot of anxiety and I was questioning so much of my experience being in this relationship. I was sad a lot. I was crying a lot, like it wasn't always super happy. Again, I was questioning what was going on Like is this abuse? Is this normal? Is this what I should be expecting?
Speaker 1:At that point in time, I had had a couple I think maybe two significant relationships and this one was obviously the next closest, most significant relationship that I'd had up until that point, and so I just didn't know what I was experiencing. I was really unsure of his feelings for me and mine for him. So, again, a lot of questioning going on and I was really afraid to bring up my needs. I was afraid to even have needs. I didn't know exactly how to access that part of myself, and when I would try to bring up needs I was afraid. And when I say bring up needs, I mean like I would try to ask for more time together or for us to be more connected or have deeper conversations about our feelings and where we're at. And I think that, looking back, I was really unsure if, like what we both really wanted, we both were really attracted to each other and there was a lot of love there, for sure, but there was something missing, like this lack, this foundational, important piece of this relationship that I'm going to get into later, but that kept manifesting for me as fear of judgment and fear of criticism, and thinking that if I brought up any conversations about really anything, that I would trigger anger and it would lead to conflict, and there were even certain moments in time that I can distinctly remember, that I would feel shattered, like we would have conflict and we'd argue and we'd get into a fight, and I felt so unsafe that I literally felt energetically, mentally, emotionally that my beingness just shattered into pieces and at the time my way of coping with that was to just run away and escape and be by myself.
Speaker 1:That never felt very good to me, as you can imagine. I didn't feel like who I was was okay. I didn't feel like my needs or requests or anything that I really wanted to bring forward was valid or safe. I would feel gaslit a lot and the defensiveness that I would be met with then made me feel very rejected and like I didn't have a right to have a feeling or thought or a request, and I blamed myself a lot for this dynamic and this behavior of his um he. I'm not saying this as a victim. I'm not blaming myself now or him. I'm not saying that he's a bad person. I still have so much love in my heart for him because I've gone through a lot of my forgiveness and healing work, but at the time I blamed myself for so much of what I was going through and why he was behaving certain ways Like I thought it was all my fault and that ended up really lowering my self-esteem and making me feel like I was a worthless piece of crap and I was not valuable and I wasn't really worth anything.
Speaker 1:That then translated to even more conflict, where we were on such different pages that we could not communicate, we couldn't see eye to eye, we couldn't step into each other's worlds or realities, and that kind of conflict or fighting led to me feeling even more shut down and distant and rejected, unheard and afraid. I'm sure that he didn't feel great either. I mean, it takes two to tango and both people get very impacted by these types of dynamics, so I'm not the only one. That, I believe, probably had a negative impact. I don't know for sure, but I know for sure for me, I felt scared to be myself a majority of the time. I felt like I couldn't be myself, like it wasn't accepted, it wasn't loved, it wasn't okay, and that was just really, really hard on me, because I am a person who wants to own who I am and loves and actually needed to feel that way in order to heal Right. So we didn't communicate well without ending up in a fight. I never really felt very safe in that relationship Perhaps he didn't either and that fundamental experience was really really hard to build a relationship without having.
Speaker 1:So can you relate to any of this? So can you relate to any of this? Can you imagine any of this happening in any of your relationships? If you can and you want a different dynamic, you want a different experience in your relationships, whether that's personal, professional, family, friends, platonic, romantic, like whatever it is. If you want a different experience in different dynamic, then you're going to want to keep listening. If you feel like having emotional safety or feeling emotionally safe in your life and in your relationships is important to you, you're going to want to keep listening. If you feel like fighting has plagued your relationships in the past and maybe in the present, you're going to want to keep listening.
Speaker 1:I'm going to teach you today about something called emotional safety, and I'm going to get into what exactly it is in a minute, but it's something that's so fundamentally important, in my opinion, to every single relationship that you're in, and I try my best to not use extreme languaging except for when it's appropriate, and this is one of those times when it's genuinely and generally one of the most important things to ensure that you have and that you contribute to in your relationships. What it really does is help you create the conditions for you to love your loved ones and for your loved ones to love you, for you to feel happy and to be yourself and to thrive in your life, rather than just survive or settle. So trust me, your current and or future children will definitely thank you for this. This is something that, in in my belief system, is like coming up in the consciousness of humanity, because it's time to clear all of this old baggage and all of these like generationally past wounds and trauma and behaviors and things that we've done to each other that have kept us in a fear loop and have kept us in a low vibrational state that keeps the fear fed. This is something that is counteracting that.
Speaker 1:So, again, I want to put a disclaimer out there that this isn't about blaming anybody. This isn't about making anybody wrong, yourself included, any of your partners, current or past, any of your family, parents like significant others, whatever Like. This is not about blaming anybody. This is about you taking responsibility for what you didn't know and couldn't do then and taking action to change it now yourself. Okay, that's my whole. Shtick is like we have the power to change our circumstances. We have the power to change our dynamics and relationships. We have all of the power. It is up to us. What we see as a reflection outside of us is really what's going on inside of us. So if you're hearing this story that I just shared and relating to me, and or feeling called to learn more about this, you're in the right place.
Speaker 1:All right, so what is emotional safety? Emotional safety, like I've said, is the foundation of a relationship. It does not matter if it's romantic, if it's platonic, if it's family, friends, colleagues, bosses, neighbors, doesn't matter. This is a foundation of any relationship that you choose to be a part of. Emotional safety means that you have a sense of trust, of comfort and security. You don't need to have those things, like 10 out of 10, perfect, in order to have emotional safety, but those things need to be present to the extent that you can know that you feel safe.
Speaker 1:Okay, everyone has different tolerance levels. Everyone has different um ratios, like um, a zone of tolerance for what they really need, and you need to know for you what your zone of tolerance is. What is your um? Where is your boundary of like this is too much for me or this is fine for me. I can't define that for you, nor can anybody no therapist, no person on the planet can define that for you except for you. So that's something I'm going to get into a little bit later. That's important for you to do in order to have emotional safety.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the emotional safety in a relationship means that you get to be yourself, you get to be fully yourself, express yourself and you get to become more of yourself freely. Not no judgment, no fear, no feeling of rejection, no retaliation. It's just a loving connection with another person where you feel like you get to be yourself and you get to become more of yourself. Okay, that's like the crux of how you can know if, if you have this right and again, I'm going to answer that question later what are the benefits that you can get from emotional safety? Like why does this even matter? Why would I want to have this or why would I care about this? It sounds like a lot of work or maybe it's triggering for you at this exact moment, but that's okay, just stay with me.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of benefits that you can get from emotional safety. I would say some of the biggest ones that I've seen people go from not having to having myself included is feeling loved and accepted for who you are in every moment. That, like I said, you get to be loved and accepted, embraced, honored, cherished in every moment, regardless of who you really are. We wear so many masks in our lives because we're afraid of hurt, we're afraid of feeling the experiences of our wounds we're. There's a lot of fear that drives a lot of our behaviors and our motivations, and that fear really gets in the way of relationships like that's a really big area that fear comes forward and so when you have emotional safety, a huge benefit that you get from that is that you can drop your mask, that fake personality or that fake persona or that fake part of yourself that you're putting forward to just protect yourself. You might not know that you have a mask or that you're wearing a mask, so I'm going to help you understand what that is a little bit later on, but if you already have an idea of the concept of what it's like to wear a mask, or to really not be authentic or to like show up in your full self, that's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:When you have emotional safety, you can show up. Without that, you can be vulnerable. You can reveal your wounds and ultimately heal them rather than worsen them. Right, you can feel validated, heard and valued, reassured, vulnerable, supported and empowered, which is the opposite of, like what I shared in my first story, of what I experienced. Right, it's the contrast of what it feels like when those things are absent and what it feels like when those things are present. It's a wild, wild difference and your experience of life will dramatically change if you've been experiencing that first scenario, like that first story that I shared, versus if you can and or are experiencing the second scenario. So, even if you are feeling, like so far, you have emotional safety in your relationships, allow this to be validation that, like, you're doing things right and you're teaching people around you right, you're being a model, you're being a role model. You'll you know, if you have kids or you decide you want kids, one day you'll be able to teach them those skills and what you're doing is literally breeding more people on this planet that are full of more love than they are fear and and full of more love than they are fear, and full of more compassion than they are hate and full of more understanding than they are.
Speaker 1:Conflict, right, and I'm not saying that conflict and fear and all of those things are inherently totally evil and bad. I do believe that those things are necessary in order for us to feel the other things, because if you don't know one thing, you can't know its opposite. Opposite, right. You can't know something is hot unless you know it's cold. However, the the idea is that when we live in one aspect of the contrast, aka the fear and the anxiety and the sadness and all of that, we have a desire to get out of it right.
Speaker 1:So the other benefits of emotional safety, I would say, are feeling like a deeper intimacy. When you feel safe, you want to go closer right. When you feel afraid or you feel fear, you want to go further. So it's a difference of like a closer connection and a distant connection. Emotional safety can really foster a stronger connection, deeper intimacy, if that's something that you desire. It also obviously helps build unbreakable trust. I have not ever seen a relationship that was fully trusting that didn't already first have emotional safety. It's like you can't have trust without emotional safety. You must have safety emotionally in order to even think about building trust.
Speaker 1:There's also this absence of fear of harm. If you don't have emotional safety, there's this primal part of your brain that's constantly scanning for danger and for alerts like you're going to be harmed or you are being harmed. Danger and for alerts like you're going to be harmed or you are being harmed. And even though our current society and the way that we are as humans and how we operate has really diminished those warning signs in us, we just, you know, think that oh well, I have anxiety, that's just normal. No, that's your body being like whoa. We have an alert system and alarm going off. We don't feel safe, we feel like there's threats everywhere. We're overwhelmed.
Speaker 1:You're in your sympathetic nervous system like literally constantly and that's just not healthy. You will develop dis-ease in your body. You don't feel easy, you feel uneasy, you don't feel like vibrant and happy and full of life. You'll feel broken and like diminished and just dead. Maybe not that extreme, but when you have an absence of fear of harm with emotional safety, like emotional safety, the benefit of that is the absence of fear of harm. You don't have that alert system going off all the time, so you're more allowed to sink into your parasympathetic, your rest and digest your peaceful state from a nervous system perspective, which not only allows your body to heal, it allows your body to restore, it prevents illnesses and sicknesses and disease and all of these different things like the crux and the root of that happening is literally if you have emotional safety or not. Right, so it's.
Speaker 1:It's a secure space for you to grow and, like I said earlier, to become more of yourself, to become more of who you are, to discover that, like we're on this planet and we're in the human form and it's so interesting to be here, why would you not want to explore what that experience is like? Like, unless your passion is to suffer, that's totally your prerogative. But if you would like a cool and fun, exciting space to explore your humanity, emotional safety is a place to start. Okay, so how do I know if I have emotional safety or not? How would I know that? I thought about this for a while. Everybody has a different experience, so what I'm about to say is, through my filter and my lens, this might not be how you will know if you have emotional safety, so I just want to put that out there. You might have emotional safety and you might know that you have it in very, very different ways than what I'm about to share.
Speaker 1:You might also reject the idea of emotional safety, for whatever reason. There's probably a plethora of reasons. Maybe it's like you feel like you can't get it, or it's too far away. I mean like literally it overwhelms me to even think about all the possibilities that could be happening there. So what I want to say is that, as I answer this question of like how do I know if I have emotional safety or not, I want you to reflect on your own experiences and really tune into yourself, your own intuition. Like, do I have this or not? I'm not here to tell you whether you do or not. I am here to help you, to help point out different things and to empower you with knowledge, but ultimately, at the end of the day, you're the one who makes the decisions in your life right. So the way that I was processing, how I can tell if I have emotional safety or not is the way that I and the other person I'm in relationship feel, communicate and show up in the relationship. I'll give you an example If I feel like I have something to say and I'm a little bit vulnerable with that something to say, and if I have this like huge spin out about feeling fear about what it's going to do and how it's going to impact the other person and that other person might not receive it very well, um, that's a breach of emotional safety. In that moment it might not mean about the whole relationship, but in that moment it might not mean about the whole relationship, but in that moment I don't have emotional safety.
Speaker 1:I was working with a client once who we weren't talking about this exact topic specifically, but it was very apparent to me that this specific client did not have emotional safety due to how I could feel them living inside of their body. Their body was very closed off, their emotions were very locked down, they were kind of going off topic and like spinning out about different things. They weren't very grounded and especially when I would ask specific questions about their family life or their dynamic and their relationship with their parents and you know, some of their loved ones and their close ones, like close friends, their, their body and their energy field would immediately like close up and I could tell that there just wasn't a feeling of like calmness and easiness inside of them, that potentially certain thoughts they were having which I don't know, but sometimes I can hear thoughts that they were like I can't reveal this, it's too scary, it's too deep, I don't know what will happen if I do. I might get retaliation, they might hurt me or get mad at me or whatever. It is Like there was just such a constriction and a restriction of themselves and my heart broke for them. But I also was so excited.
Speaker 1:I know that sounds weird, but when I work with somebody and I can feel or notice these things in them, it excites me because I know that that can change. They have to believe that it can change and that they can heal. But I know that it's possible and I'm always holding that pole for everybody that this doesn't have to be this way forever. It does not have to be this way forever. It does not have to be this way forever. It is very possible to shift out of an emotionally unsafe circumstance, environment, relationship, whatever, and into a safe one. It might feel like it's impossible, or it can't be done, or you're already too far in, or you already have these habits, or you don't want to do it. Literally, there's so many excuses. But I'm here to hold the pole that like it is absolutely possible.
Speaker 1:So that person obviously did not have this emotional safety, but as we worked together they started to open up more and they started to feel more safe. Because any time that they shared anything, I was not judging them, I was not ridiculing them, I wasn't getting mad at them, I was just validating and listening and hearing, able to provide an environment and a container for them to unwind that constriction and restriction that was their body was very obviously telling me they had and like, slowly and gently, like a little flower that's opening up in the spring, that started opening up and it was just a beautiful, beautiful experience for me to witness and that's what can be possible in relationship for you, and that's what can be possible in relationship for you. You don't have to have somebody like me to do that. I mean, it can help for sure. But that is the experience of what it's like when you have more emotional safety.
Speaker 1:And this isn't just for for females, or for women or the feminine energy in the dynamic. This is for both people, because I will tell you what the relationship that I'm in now. When he doesn't feel emotionally safe, he does that same exact thing. He just clenches up, he, you know, roots down into his avoidance and his little like withdrawer, which I have been learning to love more and more, and I can tell when he doesn't feel like he's safe to open up and that he doesn't share himself with me. Men will do very, very similar behaviors, but maybe in with their own flair and their own style, depending on what kind of wounds they might still be believing they're holding on to. But this shows up in both genders and in both energetic dynamics in relationships. So, going back to how do I know if I have emotional safety or not?
Speaker 1:You would also have, like I said earlier, an absence of fear of harm. So that means the absence of the fear of emotional harm, the fear of mental harm, the fear of physical harm, the fear of even if you're very, very sensitive, like spiritual or energetic harm. Feeling the absence of harm is, it sounds so obvious, like well, duh, you need to have the absence of fear of harm. But you would be surprised, like a lot of people that I talk to and work with, they actually have a fear inside of them that their partner might do something or act a certain way and that's not the partner's fault per se. That might be fear from that person due to past experiences and wounds they're carrying, but it's there in a lot of people. So if you have it, you're not alone. You're not a weirdo, you're not like the, the. You know one little sheep off in the way, that's the black sheep. A lot of people experience that.
Speaker 1:So if you do feel that way, I would say that you probably don't have as much emotional safety in your relationships as you might need. Um, another way that you might know if you have emotional safety or not uh, do you generally genuinely believe in your partner? Do you believe that they're a good human, that they're looking out for your best good and your highest interest, or your, your highest good and your best interest? Do you believe that they have your back, that they're, even if they make mistakes and they might not always be perfect. That in a general sense, they're acting in a way that is not to harm you, or, said in a positive way, that they're acting in a way that's looking out for you? Do you believe that about your partner? If you don't, you might not be providing emotional safety for them, right?
Speaker 1:So this goes both ways. You have to think about how am I showing up in the dynamic, like, how am I showing up in the dynamic and how are they showing up in the dynamic? Because it takes two to tango. You both need to have a commitment and have agreements around like this is something that's fundamental and foundational to our relationship. We must have this in order for our relationship to thrive, or even have the potential opportunity to thrive, and not just settle into some dynamic where we both feel like crap, a lot right. So it takes two. I would also add to that that it's important for you to have a belief that your partner has a belief that you are a good person, that they believe that you're looking out for their best interest, that they believe that you're acting in a way again, you don't have to be perfect, and, yes, we all make mistakes but that, in a general sense, they believe that you are acting in such a way that you're looking out for their best interest and getting having their back as well. So, again, again, two-way street here and then, finally, the last thing that I came up with when I was sitting with this question how do we know if we have emotional safety is what is your communication like?
Speaker 1:Communication is really the tipping point, in my opinion, uh, and in my observation of if you have happiness or if you're sitting in the seat of hell. Honestly and I don't say that lightly, I truly, truly mean that Because I am connected to a lot of things outside of just the human form. I understand what it's like to not be able to understand a language or a certain intention and to have a lot of fuzziness and lack of clarity in a certain type of communication. What I mean by that is, like English is really dense. Our words, our vibration through our mouth and the sound that we emit in different ways and we make words mean different things. That's a very, very archaic, very dense level of communication. Something like telepathy is much higher vibration. It's a lot less prone to misunderstandings and to not being on the same page, essentially because there's so much more information and energy than there is in a word, right, a word itself when spoken out loud and I know I'm really kind of drilling into this, but if this interests you, I like really want to make this clear that when a word is just spoken out loud, it has like 20% if anything, of like the meaning of what that communication really is. That's why when you text, you don't really get a lot of information from that kind of communication.
Speaker 1:Something else that adds to the layer of understanding a communication is the tonality. What's the tonality coming through? The sound of the word? What is the body language? That's another layer, right? So it's like we have just the word, like in a text, then we have tonality, like in a voice note, then we have, um, the body language, which would be like in a video note. What is the body language saying? That is all communicating so much to your conscious and unconscious mind that you might not even be fully aware of more than just the word being said.
Speaker 1:So, like, I work with a lot of people who you know. They have texts back and forth with their partner or the person they're dating and they're like always trying to decode what they meant, and I I love that they're so interested in wanting to know what's going on, but at the end of the day, like you can't know what that person meant by just their words until you actually have a conversation, either with tonality and your voice and or in person, where you can feel the energy, you can read the body language. That's all part of language, it's not just the words that are spoken. Okay, so this is like so important. When we start talking about building emotional safety which I'm going to get into in two questions from now like what can I do to have emotional safety, I'm going to tell you exactly what to do. But before we get into that, I'm just like really drilling into this, because communication is such an important part of the whole picture. Not only is that going to help you build emotional safety, it's going to help you work through healthy conflict, it's going to help you learn more about yourself and who you really are, it's going to help you express who you are to the world. Like I really feel like if you want to even start trying to develop other forms of communication, like telepathy, if that feels crazy and woo-woo to you, then just ignore what I'm saying right now. But if that's like something that interests you, like telepathy is so freaking cool.
Speaker 1:I have been practicing with my dogs of all creatures, and I swear to you my dog Rhea, she communicates with me telepathically. I can receive pictures from her. Like when I used to fly on the airplane with her. I would send a picture to her letting her know, like in my mind, I would send a picture to her and I would let her know like, hey, we're going to go on an airplane in three days. This is what it's going to look like. I would send her a movie or picture of like us going onto the airplane and us taking off and us landing and us going through the airport. And I swear to you, when I started doing that which was a suggestion by one of my intuitive healers for myself I started doing that and her anxiety dropped like 50 to 70%. She was way less anxious. She seemed like she was actually having a good time. She was not like drooling as much in the mouth, like she had physical responses that I noticed were different. She would sleep better when we were on the plane. She just wasn't like trying to rush to the airport as much. She had a lot of really, really beautiful benefits from that.
Speaker 1:So, like I know I'm going down a totally weird rabbit hole, but my point is that communication whether you want to work on the telepathy part, even with another partner, like just doing fun exercises where you send pictures back and forth oh my God. That reminds me there was this really, really freaking cool experience that I had with my partner a couple of weeks ago. He was taking me on a date and, um, we were at the restaurant and I didn't know what we were doing next after dinner and I was like, send me a picture. And so he, like you know, settles down and he breathes and he sends me a picture. Well, actually I should say that before this I tried guessing. I was like, are we going on a sleigh ride? Are we like going on motorcycles? Are we going on four-wheeler? Like I kept seeing like wheels or something, even before he had sent me the picture, and he, uh, I was just guessing and I wasn't really getting it. So I was like I tell you what, send me a picture and I'll see if I can get it from your telepathic picture. So he sends me a picture, just like telepathically, and, uh, I think this might be dramatic, but like within 30 seconds to a minute, I was like, oh my God, we're going ice skating. And he was like, yep, I was like, yes, because I saw the picture in his mind that had. At first I thought it was a wheel, which is partly why I kept guessing like four wheelers, bikes, like what's going on? Cause I could see the little curve of the arch of the ice skate. And um, when he sent me the picture. He was like, yeah, I sent the picture of looking down at the ice skates and you could see the little curve of the the base of the ice skate. And I was like, oh my God, this is so cool. So anyway, I digress, that's just like a fun little antidote or anecdote there, um, about telepathic communication.
Speaker 1:But back to what we were talking about Communication, communication, communication. It is the root of what can help you in your relationships. Okay, okay, I'm going to come back to that. What happens when emotional safety breaks down or it didn't even exist in the first place? Well, there's a lot of things Relationships can become, and or they might already be toxic, be distant, feel defensive, unhealthy and, to the extreme degree, even abusive. What happens when emotional safety breaks down is that you might feel bad about yourself. You might, like I said earlier in the beginning with my story, you might experience like your self-esteem get chipped away slowly, piece by piece over time, or maybe big honking chunks of it are like gone and then you got to do a lot of work to go get those parts of you back. There's this an experience. There's an experience that, um, it feels like you're being torn down or that you are maybe tearing your own self down or just in general, like you're torn down rather than being built up, or building up, tearing down rather than building up, right, um, the?
Speaker 1:The last significant part I think personally of like what can happen or what is happening or what does happen, uh, when there's a breakdown and emotional safety, or when it doesn't exist, is that it worsens your wounds. It does not help heal them. It gets you spinning in the cycle of your wound over and over and over again, and you just have the same thing happen time and time again, even if it's different people. If you jump from relationship to relationship and each one lacks this emotional safety trait, then your wounds, you're literally just living inside of your wound. You're not ever getting perspective outside of what it's like to live and exist without having your wound. It's worsening it, not making it better, not healing it. And if you want to live there, that's totally your prerogative, but I find that most people don't.
Speaker 1:So, all right, let's move into what you can do to have emotional safety. This is like if you're somebody who, now that you've listened to this information, if you feel like you have emotional safety but it might not be enough for you, then I'm going to help you refine it and know what to do to make that higher, or like get more emotional safety. Uh, higher or like get more emotional safety. Um, I, if you are the type of person who doesn't even know what emotional safety would feel like, then the fact that you're listening to this is a great step. Um, if you're the type of person who, um, you have emotional safety and you're not really too worried about it and you're just listening to this because you find it interesting and you think I'm super cool, which is awesome, thanks, awesome thanks. Um, then this is just going to help reinforce the things that you're already doing, to help validate that. Keep doing those things. And if you find that your partner or you go through a slump or something happens, then you can have the tools and know, like, oh, when we do this, that's really good, because that's building emotional safety and I want to know that that's really good and we can. It just gives you more of that validation and power to know that what you're doing is great and to keep doing it. Okay, so I'm going to start from like ground level zero. If you're one of the people who does not have emotional safety, do not know what that would even feel like in relationship.
Speaker 1:The first step is to be aware that you need it, and listening to this podcast episode is doing that for you. So congratulations. You've already completed the first step. The next step is to be aware that you either do or do not have it, which this podcast should also help you identify. So congratulations. There's two steps in yeah. The next step is to check in on your own emotional intelligence. What I mean by that is how aware are you of yourself? How aware are you of the way that you communicate, the way that you show up? Have you ever gotten feedback from people in your life? Have you taken that seriously, or did you just think that they were a crap head or that they were?
Speaker 1:You know, there's this culture nowadays where everyone's like calling everyone and their mother out to be a narcissist, and I appreciate that. I totally respect when that's actually the dynamic that's happening, but I feel like it's been really blown out of proportion and not everybody's a narcissist right Like um. I love and have compassion for everyone's experience. So if you're going through narcissistic abuse right now and you're listening to this and it's like really hard to hear or whatever, or maybe it's really not hard to hear and you're like this is exactly what I needed to hear. That's amazing and I don't want you to like just placate yourself by just going straight to like oh well, he's a narcissist, she's a narcissist. Placate yourself by just going straight to like oh well, he's a narcissist, she's a narcissist. You know, she's an R and R, he's an R and R. Everyone is an R and R. Who is, you know, behaving in certain ways that you just don't want them to behave in, right? So I'm just I like to like reel that back in and get really, really, um, curious and inquisitive about what's really going on. Okay, so your own emotional intelligence means that you're checking in on yourself. How are you making meaning of what's going on in your world, what's being communicated to you, what you're communicating to others?
Speaker 1:When I say meaning making which hopefully I'll have a whole episode about just meaning making specifically, meaning making is a concept where, in our language, words have definitions. Every word has to have a definition. However, because of our perception as human beings, we are only receiving or picking up on the meaning of that word based off of how we've chosen to define it through our own past experiences, through our own intelligence, our own knowledge, how we've experienced that word in real life. And so, like, somebody's definition of safety might be totally different than another person's definition of safety. Right, this just happened recently in my experience with my partner that we had different definitions of what agreement meant, which you might not think that that's something that you would have a different definition of, but, uh, we did and we had to clarify, like, oh, you meant this when you met agreement and I thought it meant this when you said agreement. And let's like, check in on the fact that our two worlds are totally different because we have different definitions of these words. And let's come to a place in the middle, right? So, meaning making is happening all over the place.
Speaker 1:You're a meaning making magician and you, like I was just working with a client a couple of clients, actually that I have to check in with them over and over and over again because they've been ingrained in the culture that we've had where when people act a certain way, it means something, right? So, like, if a guy that you're dating, like, doesn't text you for three days, it means he's moved on and he's dating other people. Like that just is. That blows my mind, because it's like who gave anybody permission to say that this very specific behavior meant this one thing across every single human being, across every male person, like it's just. It's so inappropriate in my opinion. So I'm always really wanting to check in on, on people that I work with and I want to bring this information to you that it's inappropriate to just blanket statement meaning make out of everything. That's where we get into trouble with making assumptions and having expectations that are unmet and thinking that you're thinking a certain way and if you're not communicating it or helping make clear, like, what do you mean by what you say, the other person is not going to receive it and it is not going to be pretty.
Speaker 1:That happened a lot in that relationship that I was telling you about in the beginning of this episode, that we were making meaning out of one thing and making it mean different things. Like I think there was a couple of times, if I can remember right, where we would talk about the word suffering, we would talk about the word sacrifice, we would talk about a couple others in there, and we had different definitions of what those things were and we would just constantly butt heads and we would fight so much and, at the end of the day, we just had different meanings of what those concepts were to us and how they showed up and what they meant and how, why they were important or not important, and like if you are living in a world where you have totally different definitions of things or you're making things mean something that they're not, then you're not living in a world that's going to play nice with others, right? So the step that I'm talking about, like checking in on your own emotional intelligence you need to be aware of the things that you're making mean things Like. Again, I'll give you another example. For instance, if your partner is working late and you've been suspicious of him working late like three or four days in a row because that's not like him, your immediate instinct if you've, if you have, an abandonment wound or rejection wound, might go to like oh, he might be cheating on me or he's hiding something from me like, or he doesn't want to spend time with me, there's something that I did wrong, he's mad at me. But lo and behold, he just has had a busy, ass freaking couple of days and has needed more time to work. If you don't check in about that, or if you start spinning out, making meaning out of the situation, then you're going to be in a situation where you live in a reality and live in a world that's not actually happening, and that's how I find a lot of people have anxiety, right? They're making worlds out of the meaning that they are taking that's not actually based in truth of what's really going on, right? So if you are somebody who struggles with anxiety and maybe that's what's preventing you from having emotional safety, I would really love to encourage you to stop it. Stop making imaginary worlds about what you think is going on or what you're assuming is happening, or what he or she is doing and what that means, and instead get curious, Ask questions, regulate yourself, or what he or she is doing and what that means, and instead get curious, ask questions, regulate yourself, come back down to the earth plane, ground your feet into the earth. If you can come back into your body and recognize that you've just been meaning making all over the place and you don't actually know what the truth is, ask questions, okay. Questions, questions, questions are going to be your lifesaver. I'm gonna to have a whole episode, hopefully, about that, so I'm going to move on.
Speaker 1:Um, also within emotional intelligence, is having awareness of your own wounds. So what I mean by that is, just like how you're aware of how you're making meaning of things. It's important to have awareness of if you're living in a wound and or with a mask or not, like are you fully present or are you in pattern. When I refer to wounds, we can also call those patterns, because certain wounds can create certain patterns of behavior and of thoughts and feelings and actions inside of us. So, these wounds and these patterns there's a lot of different theory out there, so I don't claim to have like the truth yet, but I think a pretty solid framework that I've come up to in the present time is the fact that there's five main wounds and there's masks that we wear with each of those wounds, right? So, um, there's rejection, abandonment, uh, humiliation, betrayal and injustice, and with each of those five wounds we also wear masks. Um, hopefully, I can remember off the top of my head the rejection wound.
Speaker 1:Um, the mask that we would wear, for that is a withdrawer, meaning that we put that personality or that part of us forward. We withdraw when we're too afraid to feel the effects or the experiences of the rejection wound For abandonment. It's the dependent. So we become dependent so that we don't feel the pain of the abandonment wound. I believe the betrayal wound, the mask is control, um meaning like you are wanting to control your environment and other people and everything so that you protect yourself from feeling the pain of the betrayal, or a betrayal, humiliation, which I did, those two backwards um humiliation. I believe the mask that we would wear is masochism, both mentally, emotionally, aka meaning like we beat ourselves up, um, we are really hard on ourselves, we just kind of take it and um, there's a whole lot of other behaviors that go with that.
Speaker 1:And then the fifth one, injustice. The mask that you would wear is rigidity. So rigidity meaning like I kind of think of like type A people having a little bit more rigidity than other people. That might be from a whole host of things. I'm not saying that type A people have an injustice wound and wear the mask of rigidity, but that's kind of like the archetype, if you will.
Speaker 1:The other framework that kind of correlates with this kind of not it's similar is the idea of the five personality patterns, which is leaving, merging, enduring, aggressive and rigid. So the leaving pattern very much has to do with, like rejection, leaving your body. There's a whole book on this called the five personality patterns by steven kessler, if you're interested in reading and learning about it. The merging pattern is very much that like abandonment, dependent type of dynamic within the self. Um, the enduring pattern is that like masochism type of dynamic, the aggressive is the betrayal dynamic and the um the betrayal control and the uh rigid pattern is the injustice rigidity pattern type of archetype playing out. So I don't bring those forward to like bore you, but if they're interesting to you, please like go look them up.
Speaker 1:One of the books that's really helpful, like I said, is the five personality patterns by step Stephen Kessler. The other one is Heal your Wounds and Be your True Self, I believe, by Lise Bordeaux. So those are really really great resources. But Awareness of your Own Wounds really really helpful with emotional intelligence. What that does for you is helps you in the dynamic, in the relationship that you're in, be able to understand, like, oh, when I'm having this experience or this person's upsetting me or I'm triggered, it's not your fault and I'm not going to yell at you or get mad at you or be aggressive with you or blame you. I'm going to take ownership and responsibility for the fact that I'm having this experience, and it's probably due to one of the wounds I'm carrying or a mask that I'm wearing and I'm not present with myself. I'm not loving and accepting myself in this moment, I'm not forgiving myself, and that's a big root of the problem. Okay, so, um, having this emotional intelligence and awareness of yourself really takes the pressure off of your partner to be a perfect person.
Speaker 1:Right, there's another book, brene not Brene Brown, I like her books too but Byron Katie same beat. Byron Katie I Need your Love. Is that True? That's really helpful. She's basically saying like we can question our own thoughts and take the responsibility off of another person or situation to be responsible for how we feel and actually take the responsibility responsibility on ourselves. That's a like. This is a whole world of work, so I'm not going to be able to go into it with like crazy intense depth right now, but the main point is that your awareness of your own self takes the pressure off of your partner to be perfect, and that then gives breathing room for you both to be more yourselves, which helps build the emotional safety. Okay, so this is all like a trickle down effect.
Speaker 1:Um, again, along with that is that the awareness that your partner may be the trigger to certain things that you experience, but they are not the source of them. You are and I know that's really hard to hear and it's hard to soak it in, but it's not that you are hurting yourself. You have wounds that you've come into this life to heal. You have certain patterns and behaviors that you do and that you are and those aren't wrong. You do and that you are and those aren't wrong, and there's a evolution to us as a human to learn to forgive, accept and love everything that we are and everything we have and everything we do. And I truly believe that when we get to that point, then we do get to have that experience of life, that we're just exploring it and living in this reality, and it can be a lot more fun and light and enjoyable, even when there's contrast. It doesn't mean that negativity goes away or that fear resides or dissipates completely, but there's a greater appreciation and gratitude for the contrast and, uh, an ability to take the negative and turn it into positive, right, and that's all very empowering stuff.
Speaker 1:So, um, the next step. I want to make sure that I'm kind of moving along here. So, uh, the next step in having emotional safety is committing to healing your wounds and doing your own inner work. So it's not just the awareness. We can't just stop there. We have to actually commit to working on them, improving them and healing them so that you become more in alignment with a state of love and acceptance and forgiveness of self and others, which then fosters a deeper state of love, acceptance and forgiveness of the others you're in relationship with. Because, like I said, we are fallible creatures. We are going to miss the mark. We aren't going to be perfect, we don't know what we're doing here. We're just kind of like flailing around, like these little things and creatures that don't know what's going on here, and we're doing the best that we can can. A majority of us are always doing the best we can with everything we have in every moment. So the ability to step into love and acceptance and forgiveness for yourself then provides that to the other person, which builds emotional safety, which again gives you all the benefits of what emotional safety gives you.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then I have a couple other things on here of like what you can do, and they're really really big topics so I'm gonna move through them, not totally briefly, but you can look for future episodes of these topics from me. The first one is having healthy conflict. A lot of people have a bad taste in their mouth about conflict and they think that if you have conflict with your partner that you're in the wrong relationship and it's not good. And there's this you know cultural idea that, like once you get married, then that's when the work really starts and if you are not like having the quote-unquote honeymoon phase forever, that there's something wrong and that's just quite simply not true, at least in my experience and opinion. You can have your own opinion. That's cool, but I do believe that there is a way to have healthy conflict that helps you grow and become better. Right, like the till in the soil is a conflict for the soil because it's getting moved around, it's getting shaken up, but at the end of the day it helps enrich the soil so that it can grow more crop, it can produce more. I think of ourselves in the same way. That conflict is kind of like the till. That's like stirring us up and moving different things around and making us feel uncomfortable. But at the end of the day, if it's done in a healthy, productive manner, it's actually helping you be a better person and closer to who you really are. That opinion has become a little bit more popular in our culture, but maybe hasn't been in your sphere yet, so I'm happy to bring that to you.
Speaker 1:Healthy conflict is absolutely possible. It's totally a thing. The ways to foster healthy conflict are a lot of what I'm talking about having emotional safety. You don't even necessarily have to have like a full-on commitment in a relationship if we're talking about like romantic relationship, but the underlying base is that you have emotional safety, and having emotional safety means you're having healthy conflict. So it's kind of like what comes first the chicken or the egg. If you have healthy conflict, you build emotional safety, and if you build emotional safety, you have healthier conflict right, so they feed each other. Um, the other things that can help you have healthy conflict, so that you can have emotional safety, is having conscious communication.
Speaker 1:I want to give you a couple examples. I have a whole teaching on this in my course, the highly sensitive person course called HSPSOS. So if you are a highly sensitive person and you want to get better at communication and build emotional safety, please check out that course it's on my website, findinghomehealingcom calm. It has, like all of these different scripts of, like every situation you could imagine. It's got like um, let's see what to say when you want to set a boundary. What to say when you want to make a general request uh, make a specific request for what you need. When you want to say no to something. How to kindly and respectfully disagree with someone? Um, how to check in with your partner or someone? Um, if you want to resolve conflict that you already had in order to get back to a place of peace and harmony if you're having a disagreement, right? So in all of these situations, I literally have like word for word how to communicate and what conscious communication would be like and look like In a.
Speaker 1:Um, you want to make sure that you know the intention behind what you're communicating. That's like bar none, like the most important thing, like what? What are you communicating and why? What's your intention behind it? Do you have a negative energy, like I want to blame you and I want to hurt you and you hurt me, so I'm going to give it back to you and I'm going to use really cutting, hurtful words Like that's not a good place to communicate from. That's not a great intention. So, checking in on your intention, like have you processed your raw feelings? Have you gone through the emotional digestion process which is for free on my website? If you go to findinghomehealingcom, scroll to the bottom, it's there. Go through the emotional digestion process first, so that you can clear yourself of, like really charged emotions and then come at a communication prospect with a positive intention where you're really wanting to share how you're feeling, what happened or what you're needing, and be met with a similar feeling of, like, acceptance and safety. Right, so make sure that you have that intention set.
Speaker 1:You want to always ask for permission, always, always, always, always, always ask somebody for permission unless you have some type of agreement around the contrary being okay, aka like where you just get to say whatever you want to say, whenever you want to say it, however you want to say it. That's cool, but more often than not, people appreciate being asked for permission Like hey, I'd like to talk to you about something. Is now a good time, or would a different time be better for you? Right, perfect, great, you're already setting up the conversation so that the other person is able to meet you, they're able to say yes, they're not just getting dumped on, they're not, you know, being coerced or manipulated into having a conversation Like it's just such a smoother experience.
Speaker 1:And you always want to start with positives too, like I'm not saying that you have to gas that other person up, but like, start with positives, start with things that you appreciate the goals that you have for the share that you're about to express, the intention that you came to conclusion of and why you're really wanting to communicate. So the other person has an idea of like where you're at, where you're coming from, why you're wanting to talk. Like you have to remember that when you communicate with somebody, they literally have no idea what's on your mind. They do not know where you're coming from, they don't know what you're going to say. They might be having their own experience where they're having a lot of anxiety and they're spinning out about certain things, depending on what their relationship with communication is, and you just never know.
Speaker 1:So I always like to err on the side of caution, that starting gently, being positive, having an intention, being, you know, in a grateful state, is usually the best way to go. And when you state that that's your intention and all these things you also want to check in with them in the conversation, like are you with me? Does that make sense? When you do that, it helps engage them into the conversation so that they're not just sitting there like going off on their mind on all these crazy tangents. I mean, sometimes people can listen, but a lot of people aren't trained in active listening, which is actually something that is going to help build emotional safety also. But you want to check in with them so that they're like engaged in the conversation. You're not just talking for ages and ages and ages.
Speaker 1:Um, you want to pre-frame objections most of the time, like if they think that you're going to say something hurtful, or you know if they if you could imagine certain what I call stories are happening for them. Like they're just confused, they don't know what's going on. Maybe they do, but in this scenario where they don't know what's going on, you want to like pre-frame any potential objections that they might have. An example of this would be like I'd like to handle some things up front to keep us focused. If you're starting to like share a boundary, or if that's what the intention is behind the communication, you can say something like I know that you love me with all your heart. I know you would never intentionally do something to hurt me or make me feel unsafe, unloved or disrespected.
Speaker 1:That truth is coming from that other nugget that I told you earlier that, like to have emotional safety, you have to genuinely, truly believe that your partner or the person that you're in relationship with is in it for your best interest, that they have your best interest at heart. So you can genuinely say, like I know that you would never intentionally do something to hurt me and going along more with this, like handling potential objections, you can say to them something like I'm sure that there's some reasonable explanation for why this is happening or why this did happen and the way that it is. I'm not trying to attack you. I'm not trying to accuse you or criticize you for doing anything wrong. I know that you're always doing the very best that you can.
Speaker 1:I know sometimes I am sensitive to things and don't always fully understand what's going on and why it's happening. Okay, what that does is diffuse them. Okay, this isn't to manipulate anybody or to make them feel that way, but when you handle these objections upfront, you are totally diffusing all of the defensive things that are already coming up for them. Okay. So this is just like how to communicate one on one, oh one. You want to make sure that they can feel safe so that they're open to receiving what you have to say. If you shut them down and you don't give them the ability to feel safe while you communicate, then the both of you are going to shut down and then you're going to turn up in the type of experience and dynamic that I explained at the very beginning of this episode.
Speaker 1:Okay, um, you can like give a compliment with aspects of what you're saying. Again, you're not trying to gas them up, to like manipulate them, but it's for the intention of keeping a positive tone right, like keeping um focused on what the goal is, not digging into, like what happened that was so negative and terrible, and all of that. Um, in this example I'm walking you through, this is like to to, to state a boundary. So, um, you know, in this compliment scenario, you can say something like I do think in most situations, you do a great job of supporting me and giving me positive reinforcement. Okay, so, again, diffuse all the way down and they're like wow, she's actually complimenting me, that's kind of cool. Or he's complimenting me, I am, that's. That's really nice to hear. Okay, I'm totally open to receiving and hearing this right.
Speaker 1:Then you state your boundary, whatever it is, whatever you're not okay with. Perhaps a boundary was crossed or you're trying to express what doesn't work for you, what's unacceptable, what you need to avoid, whatever. So in that type of situation, be very specific. Like I said earlier, our communication, even when we're so tactful and we're so in line with, like wanting it to just go a certain way, we can fumble and our words are not always going to mean the same thing to everyone else. I'll read you this as an example I have a boundary specifically with our communication.
Speaker 1:It doesn't work for me when you lecture me, disapprove of my relationships, speak negatively about the people I love. I specifically heard you say in one of our last conversations that you think that these people are not good for me, that I should leave and get out of relationship with them and find people that are better, and I sometimes hear you insult and bash these people to other people too. I don't feel supported, encouraged, loved or respected when you say things like this or use language like this. It doesn't work for me, right? So you're hearing. It doesn't work for me it doesn't work for me when I feel like what you say is belittling my choices in life. Okay, that's just an example.
Speaker 1:Um, you can take that however you want, but then what you'd want to do is like offer an alternative. So you're stating what doesn't work for you in this specific scenario and then offering an alternative what are you okay with? What are you okay with? How can this person succeed with you in this relationship? How can you help them win or make it work right? So you can say something like I'm not saying that you can't have an opinion or be honest with me. I always want to hear your truth. What would work for me instead is for you to share your opinion with more kind language, like I love you and I want what's best for you. I don't feel like this. These relationships are going to make you happy in the long term. And tell me why you think that. Give some data points like real examples and justification for why you have this opinion right.
Speaker 1:So this allows you to offer an alternative for them to consider. This allows you to offer an alternative for them to consider and, in order to like really drive the point home, you can state specifically why having this boundary is important for you. You can say literally like this will help me feel, this will help me do this, will help me have. If this happens, it will help me in some way that automatically enrolls that other person to be like oh, I get why this is important to them. I get why this matters to them. If they genuinely truly do love you and have your best interests at heart, they will want to help you feel the ways that you'd want to feel or do the things you want to do or have the things you want to have Right. So this will help me feel more supported, more open to listening to what you have to say and actually take it into consideration.
Speaker 1:When I am spoken to kindly and honestly, I feel loved, looked after and important. When I am spoken to with harsh, negative language, I feel shut down, criticized, like I don't want to talk at all. I would like to maintain a relationship with you, so it feels important for me to share this boundary. Okay, there's a bunch of different nuggets. You can also give reasonable consequences if the boundary is not honored. Say something like if this boundary is not honored or taken seriously, I will have to step back from our relationship and only communicate once in a while for quick check-ins, right, like, depending on the type of relationship dynamic that you have.
Speaker 1:This is like this was. This example was written as a very specific example to help you get what these different steps are, um, but these can change and will change depending on what situation you're in to communicate. But my hope is that this is giving you a framework and an idea of what a conscious conversation or type of communication would look like, sound like and feel like you would ask them if they agree to act and fill this boundary or fulfill this boundary Like are you willing and able to agree to respecting this boundary? Do you need any more information or guidance to respect this boundary? And you know, have the dialogue, whatever, and then wrap up with positives and gratitude, say like I love you so much. I want to continue having a healthy, loving relationship with you. Thank you for listening, being willing to adapt your communications to support our relationship, and that helps leave on a positive note.
Speaker 1:You can also ask if there was anywhere that you crossed their boundaries, which is definitely a tougher part. At times. We really have to drop our defenses and and really step into like have I done this to you. If I'm coming to you because you've crossed one of my boundaries, have I crossed one of yours? You can say is there anywhere? I crossed your boundaries and have a similar dialogue, right? So that's an example of what a conscious conversation would look like and a format for if you're talking about a boundary specifically. Again, I have a whole document. I don't even know it's like so many. It's like 23 pages of just straight up, like examples of different types of conversations and how to structure conscious communication. That's in the HSP SOS course on my website.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, so the conscious communication is really important to come from a place of kindness, respect, nonjudgment and a lot of validation. Um, hopefully I'll also have episodes in the future which you can look out for about more conscious communication, tips and tools, setting agreements, having boundaries, what to do when those boundaries get crossed, how to have an agreement, how to know what you even need in an agreement, those types of things. When you focus on that in relationship, then you build emotional safety. Okay, if you're going about your life and you're not having boundaries, you're not speaking about agreements and how you're interacting with each other in a dynamic, then you're just kind of like being taken to the wind and you're just at the whim of whatever's going to happen, which probably is. I don't want to say probably, but it might take you down a road you don't want to go down, okay, so the last thing that I'll say is emotional safety, with communication specifically, it's important to have emotionally safe communication. Right Again, it's kind of like what comes first, chicken or the egg. Do I have emotionally safe communication that builds emotional safety in the relationship? Yes, and does emotional safety in a relationship help foster emotionally safe communication? Yes, I also have a really helpful guide for emotionally safe communication in that same course, um course.
Speaker 1:But I want to give you some tidbits here today. Asking for permission to talk is a huge one. That's like number one on there. Acknowledging the other's feelings, saying things like I appreciate that you feel that way, I respect where you're coming from, I hear you, I see you, I see how you could experience it that way. That's really helping the other person feel like their experience is valid and it happened for them and that's real, even if you disagree with it. It's important to allow that person to have that experience so that they feel more safe and not like they have to be on the defense and they have to for lack of a better term like prove that that's what they experienced because that was their experience. That's totally valid for them, even if it wasn't your experience. That helps completely diffuse their anger.
Speaker 1:Like I had a conversation with with my man I think it was even last night, and he felt so angry. He was so angry he wasn't taking it out on me, but internally like he was so angry and when I, when he made it clear to me that like what he needed in that moment was for me to hear him and listen and understand and get his world, then immediately I knew exactly what I needed to do and I put everything aside that I was feeling, thinking any of my own defenses, and heard his whole reality, asked if there was anything more that he needed to share and I he specifically needed to hear me say like I get why you would feel that way and I get how you experience that. Like he just needed that bit of validation. And once that happened and he ate some food, then that anger dropped by like 25 and then the more that I let him know that it's okay that he was feeling those ways and that I could understand why he felt those ways. The anger dissolved and it disappeared and it the dynamic shifted so much to the point that we could have a conversation that I could then feel supported in expressing my side of it and sometimes the way I am, I'm like super connected to my tears and my emotions and I was like bawling, you know, sharing my world and my reality. But he was in a calm, grounded state in order to receive that, so I had to show up in a calm, grounded state to receive him, and that allowed him to be in a calm, grounded state to receive that. So I had to show up in a calm, grounded state to receive him, and that allowed him to be in a calm, grounded state to receive me, and what that did was foster the ability for us to have a productive conversation and to understand the shortcomings and what he didn't understand about my world and what I didn't understand about his world, and be able to meet in the middle and be like. This is what we need to work on. This is the the shortcoming that we had or have, and this is how we're going to make a plan or make agreements to approach it differently in the future and now we have a couple different agreements set up and we have, um, we did some idea generation of like what could we do to make this better? And that then helped bring us closer together again.
Speaker 1:Another tip for spotting emotionally safe communication is if you're able to actively listen and respond and reflect emotions or thoughts that are being shared in a calm, centered and grounded way. So what that would look like or sound like is I hear that you're feeling really upset and angry with the way that you felt I was treating you, and I can appreciate that that felt really upsetting for you and I can understand and see why you would feel so angry about it now, and what I'm hearing is that you're pretty frustrated right now and are needing to express that this is happening and that you would like it to stop happening. Am I hearing that correctly? Okay, so that's an example of actively listening and reflecting what you're hearing, so that they know that you're actually receiving what it is that you're saying or what they're saying. You're receiving what they're saying.
Speaker 1:There's quite a few other tips to spot emotionally safe communication, but I want to also share some things to spot that indicate that you're not communicating with emotional safety, and that would look like getting defensive, aggressive or making the other person wrong, whether you're doing it or they're doing it. This would look like or sound like, I didn't say or do that. No, that's not right. You're not right. You don't remember that right, you have it wrong. Why are you telling me this? Why are you acting this way? Stop talking so much. Those are very, very hurtful and defensive types of communications. Very hurtful and defensive types of communications.
Speaker 1:Another thing to look for is making up excuses for acting a certain way, like oh well, I didn't do what you asked me because I just got busy with something. That's very much putting the other person off and not owning that you did something, or act a certain way Like you're just totally putting off responsibility and blaming it on something else. The next one there's quite a few here, but another one that I feel like is really important is when you turn the behavior back onto the other person. So what that means is like you're evading responsibility for creating a certain circumstance and you maybe behaved a certain way, and then you say well, I did that because you did this and I'll be totally honest. I do catch myself doing this sometimes because in my world. I think that I'm behaving a certain way because I'm responding to a different behavior. That's that the other person did. Uh, but when you communicate this way, it breaks the safety of the communication. An example of this would be like well, I raised my voice at you because you were yelling at me first. You started it.
Speaker 1:Now I don't say things like that aggressively, but it comes in lots of different flavors and different forms. So you just want to check yourself if you're saying things like this or trying to deflect, not taking responsibility, not validating the other person's world, if you're getting defensive, if you're having like a negative or harsh or mean tone in the way that you're talking. And the last one I'll say is actually this happens with a lot of people is interrupting when the other person is trying to share how they feel. Again, this is one I'm totally guilty of that I do on occasion when I'm like really emotional. But when you interrupt somebody and you're cutting off their train of thought, it just completely obliterates the feeling of safety, like that you're listening and that you have care and compassion and you know the interruption urge is really a defense. Like you're trying to make whatever they're saying stop because it's not comfortable or you don't like hearing it or you disagree with it, and you have to learn to regulate and breathe and be like finish your whole share and then I'll respond. Finish your whole share and then I'll respond.
Speaker 1:Don't interrupt with emotion or to discount what they're saying or, you know, to hype up the energy of anger. It's just, it's not going to help anybody. So these are signs to look for with emotionally safe communication on top of what is being said. So, like what I said earlier, the way that you communicate, it's not just the words you're saying which those matter, but it's how you're saying it, with what tone you're saying it, what's your body language, what are the things that you're you're truly communicating and truly feeling in those moments. If you feel like you're in a place where you are defensive and you do feel heightened emotion and you can't do this emotionally safe, communicating type of behaviors, then I would say double check yourself through emotional digestion. Do whatever you need to do to come back to earth and release that emotion and ground yourself, center yourself.
Speaker 1:Okay, the rest of all of these tips for emotionally safe communication are available inside of my HSPSOS course, which is on my website, findinghomehealingcom. On the course tab. You can find it all there and there's a whole lot more that we dive into in that course with relationships specifically for highly sensitive people. But if you're not a highly sensitive person, it can also still very much help you. So I'm saying this not only from personal experience and not only from people who I've taught these things to and it's deeply, deeply helped them in their relationship. I'm teaching this to you because I think that this is such a fundamental part of what's important in our relating to each other and just relating to each other and just relating to ourselves actually in in general and that if we were to foster more of these attitudes, more of these ideas and behaviors and actions and actually knew what to do and how to do them, then we would have a better life, and that's what I crave so much to express, like, my purpose on this planet if you haven't listened to many other episodes before is to help people become more of who they are, live a life that they feel aligned with and fulfilled with, and that they are thriving, that they are having deep, beautiful experiences of love and of whatever it is that they think is like the fullest expression of themselves, right? So we've covered a lot today.
Speaker 1:I actually didn't expect that we would go this long, but apparently I had a lot to say. So let's sum up everything that we've talked about. We went into a little bit of my past and learned about some experiences that I used to have when I did not feel emotionally safe and did not have emotional safety in a relationship, what that felt like, what it looked like, what you might be able to relate to. I answered a bunch of questions around like what is emotional safety in relationship, the benefits that you can get from emotional safety, how do you know if you have it or not, what happens when it breaks down or it didn't even exist in the first place, and what you can do to have it or to foster it and to get more of it. So I I'm really praying and hoping that this was supportive for you.
Speaker 1:Again, if you'd like to get some of that support with the relationship stuff, with conscious communication, with emotionally safe communication, feel free to go to findinghomehealingcom. Click on the course tab. You'll see HSPSOS there and those teachings are all contained within that course, and otherwise you can also book a one-on-one session with me. I would love to support you in any way that I can. Thank you so very much for co-creating this experience with me, and I will see you in the next one. If you loved this episode and or maybe others that you've listened to, please leave a review. Wherever you're listening to this, share it with somebody that you think it could help. That's the biggest way you can help me help even more people like us, and if you want one-on-one support, feel free to go to findinghomehealingcom and schedule an intro session with me there. Thank you so much for tuning in today and we'll see you in the next one.