Hello and welcome to my channel Akasha Love.
I recently did a video about feeling invisible in the world.
What this feeling is,
Why you might feel invisible and also some tips for healing this in yourself,
For understanding it and for healing it.
So today I wanted to talk about the emotional safety.
So what is emotional safety?
What happens if you grow up in a family environment where it's not an emotionally safe place for you to really be yourself and express your feelings,
Express your emotions.
So an emotional safe environment in your childhood,
So when you're growing up and this also is the same for in a workplace as an adult,
It's an environment where it's safe for you to express yourself.
So it's safe for you to be unhappy about something and express it.
It's safe for you to be angry about something and express that.
It's safe for you to be sad and express that without being suppressed by other people,
Without being shut down by other people,
Without being bullied as a result of your own emotional expression.
So it's an environment where it feels safe for you to express yourself,
To be yourself,
To share your feelings and know that you will not be attacked or shut down or called any kind of names for insulted let's say for your emotional expression.
The other possibility of an unsafe emotional environment is if you do express your feelings and you get no response.
So if there's a silence response or a zero response this is also unsafe,
Emotionally unsafe.
So this can happen in childhood with emotionally immature parents or caregivers and that can also happen in adulthood at a workplace with emotionally immature people who are not able to manage their own feelings and therefore they are threatened by your emotional expression.
So the results of this are really long-term and damaging because if you have been growing up in an environment like this then that's say 20 years of programming where you are you are being subconsciously programmed by that environment so that you learn that it's really not safe to be fully yourself.
It's really not safe to express your full range of emotions because you might be judged,
Shut down,
Criticized,
Bullied,
Insulted and it's that basically does not feel safe.
So as a result of this you may actually grow up into adulthood really not even knowing what your feelings are because you've as a result of this unsafe emotional environment you have trained yourself to suppress your own feelings and probably to tune in to the feelings of others.
So probably to tune in to the feelings of your parents or caregivers whom it was not safe for you to share your feelings with but if you tuned into their feelings and made sure you took care of their emotional state as much as you could then this created extra safety for you.
So you might end up an adult who is good at tuning into the feelings of others in order to stay safe but is really bad at knowing what you actually feel yourself and if you don't actually know what you feel it's really hard to even honor that feeling so it's really hard to take the steps that you need to take in order to honor your own feelings let alone to express yourself.
So you might find that you're as a result of growing up in an unsafe emotional environment you may find that you certain emotions are really suppressed in you such as anger this is a very common one that many people do not feel able or safe to express.
So anger,
Sadness,
Anything that may be called negative emotion but particularly really strong emotions like anger and rage they might be really suppressed within you and it might be very hard for you to get angry in a healthy way and of course there is healthy anger because if if you don't express your anger when you are angry to the people around you then that's vital information about you that those people are missing out on and if they're missing out that you are angry with them or with a with some kind of aspect of the relationship then that's not also it's not a true relationship because you're not truly showing up.
So there are many aspects to this question of emotional safety and of emotional repression as a result of growing up in an environment where you did not feel emotionally safe.
And how do we deal with this now in adulthood if we recognize this within ourselves?
Really the first step I think is to take the time to really check in with yourself regularly throughout the day and ask yourself how are you feeling and wait until you have a really clear response from your inner self from your physical emotional body to know what it is that you're feeling in that moment.
And then the next step once you start getting to be really fluent in knowing your own feelings naming them also is a good way of knowing really exactly what you feel name the feeling is it anger is it rage is it shame is it sadness is it guilt is it anxiety whatever it is name it.
As you get really good at knowing your own feelings then you the next step is to be brave and express those feelings to the people in your life in your current life and of course we need these people to be safe people for us to express our feelings to and you will learn if they're safe or unsafe people very quickly.
If for example you do express some anger or some sadness as a result of some interaction in that emotion and they are open to you and listen to you and willing to take on board what you're expressing that's a healthy and emotionally safe environment.
If on the other hand they either try and shut you down straight away or they go into silence silent treatment or they ignore you or they immediately start to judge and criticize you for your emotional expression that is an unsafe environment.
So that's what I wanted to speak about today just a short video on emotional safety.
