Emotional Safety

What is Emotional Safety

In the early 1990s when I began my work in this field of therapy, I worked exclusively with women. Many of these women had been through horrific trauma and abuse. We discussed physical safety a tremendous amount. We discussed the abuse cycle and how to get out of it and pick non abusive partners. However, we never really delved into what it meant to have emotional safety. 

With the creation of first email, text and then social media in all of its forms, emotional safety merits discussion. These forms of impersonal communication have led to mal treatment of individuals, abuse and bullying. It seems once we do not have live face to face communication people feel free to say whatever they want to or about others regardless of how cruel. 

The result is fights and cruel behavior starts virtually but can transcend to face to face. Either way significant damage is done and sometimes repairing the damage is almost if not impossible. And even when the intentions are not bad, there is so much lost in translation and miscommunicated in any of these formats. 

What do we do?

A good rule of thumb is to think about empathy and compassion. In general, when we are face to face with another person, we are more respectful and consider our words. We should think about that when using other forms of communication. Consider 'would I say this if we were face to face?' Also, choose your form of communication based on what needs to be discussed. Highly charged or emotional topics should not be covered in a text.