Our hearts yearn for it. We long for a sense of emotional safety with God, with others, but also within ourselves. Yet for many of us, there’s a war going on within us over our sense of emotional safety, and there can be a lot of confusion as to what it even means.
It is important to note that the majority of our battlegrounds often stem from a place where love has been compromised or distorted, so our sense of relational safety is shaky. But restoring emotional safety is not just about chasing a feeling or trying to feel good all the time. It’s about creating an environment within yourself and in your connection with others, where you can genuinely be present, where you can heal and you can mature.
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Understanding Emotional Safety
When we talk about emotional safety, we’re looking at our ability to connect to healthy relationship and love. Mental health is emotional health, and emotional health gets brought about through relational experiences and relational health. Healthy relationships create relational safety.
Emotional safety is where you’re relationally embraced. Connection is felt. You feel like you can be yourself without having to put on a bunch of different roles or added layers. You can just show up. But within that, you’re able to grow—you’re encouraged to grow, empowered to heal, to experience freedom, to mature.
Safety is a basic need for human relationship. When we don’t feel safe, a lot of things begin to erupt. Relationships become really challenging, and our mental and emotional state will struggle.
What Emotional Safety Is NOT
Before we dive deeper into what emotional safety is, let’s clarify what it’s not:
- The absence of negative emotions – You can still feel sadness, anger, anxiety, or discomfort. True safety means learning to experience these emotions and respond in new ways over time.
- Emotional suppression or avoidance – Many have been taught to suppress their emotional world, but true emotional safety involves acknowledging and learning to process through them.
- The absence of bad days – Jesus said, “In this world, you’re gonna have trouble.” God’s promise is not to remove all problems, but to walk with us through it all.
- A lack of conflict – Even healthy relationships will have disagreements. Emotional safety allows for conflict to be navigated respectfully and constructively.
- Perfection or bulletproof living – It’s not about being flawless or immune. It’s about developing resilience and learning how to recover from emotional wounds.
- Broadcasting safety demands to everyone – Out of deep pain, some can develop an intense demand that everyone around them be a certain way, or they’ll cut you off.
- Having to constantly be happy – It’s about authentically allowing the full spectrum of human emotion to have its work.
- Isolation or self-protection at all costs – While boundaries are important, emotional safety is ultimately about still being able to learn to connect.
As I often say, there can be a pattern in our brokenness of creating an intense wall of self-protection, and that can, over time, become a wall of imprisonment.
What Emotional Safety IS
In preparing for this teaching, I asked AI to evaluate all my materials and tell me what it saw regarding emotional safety. Here’s what came back:
“Emotional safety is the cultivated ability to authentically engage with one’s full spectrum of emotions—both comfortable and uncomfortable—within oneself and in relationships, grounded in the understanding of God’s nurture and grace. It’s about developing an internal capacity to process emotional experiences without self-abandonment or becoming a hostile enemy to oneself, even when faced with the inherent difficulties, disappointments, and traumas of life.”
Not bad AI.
When we talk about emotional safety, it includes:
1. Experiencing the Loving Connection of God
Learning to experience His loving nurture and comfort as a loving Father. For many, this is a journey because relating to the image of father can be foreign and uncomfortable.
2. Compassionate Grace Toward Yourself
Learning to practice patience, kindness, and relating to yourself as God relates to you. Within that, as love is cultivated, there’s a belief system that gets built up where you start to realize: “I have what it takes to overcome. I can do this. I can take steps forward.”
3. Healthy Emotional Processing
Moving beyond dismissing yourself or ignoring your emotions or suppressing them. We’re moving into more of shepherding your heart—noticing emotions, processing them, not reacting to them the same way we always do.
4. Loving Connection with Others
As one quote says (slightly modified): “Safety isn’t just about the absence of threat or danger, but it’s about the presence of connection.” This gives us a sense of somebody having our back—when push comes to shove, when it’s a good day or an awful day, who’s there for you?
5. Healthy Vulnerability
The ability to be embraced where you are in your journey, to let open your heart about some of the struggles, where you can feel heard and seen. It’s a no condemnation zone where you can look at what you’re going through with the eyes of grace.
6. Trust
When trust is in place, the relationship can flow in amazing ways. When it’s not, or it’s been absent, or betrayals are there, it makes relationships really difficult. Trust is actually rooted in being able to have some foundational interactions that build a sense of trust that you’re okay.
How Emotional Safety Gets Lost
1. In Our Foundational Relationships
This goes back to our home life and upbringing—our family culture. When emotional safety is not in the home, we develop attachment problems. We struggle in attaching in healthy ways in future relationships.
2. Our Faith Grid
While the church should be the safest place on earth, for many this has become a place of deep pain and struggle. How you were raised and taught in the faith impacts how you see God and relate to Him.
For me growing up, there were certain aspects where my viewpoint of God was frightening, terrifying. Therefore I had to constantly put myself through a compulsive car wash to even feel like I could talk to God. I could tell you He loved me because that was theologically accurate, but I was disconnected from it in my life.
3. Trauma
Trauma occurs when our capacity to cope is overwhelmed. This can include obvious traumas like abuse, but also subtler ones like chronic criticism, never feeling like you’re ever good enough, emotional unavailability, neglect, or spiritual abuse.
An interesting thing about safety and trauma: one of the things that was meant to be built within your system is that when trauma happens, you have a safe place to go to recover. But many people, when asked if they told anyone when trauma happened, say, “No, I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even think to tell anyone. I didn’t feel that I was safe to even share it.”
4. Unsafe Relationship Experiences
People who don’t handle the vulnerable places of our heart in mature ways—through hyper criticism, betrayal, emotional manipulation, gaslighting, constant disrespect, or repeated cycles of unsafe interactions.
5. Chronic Stress and Self-Criticism
Even reading the news and social media can condition you to transpose those events to everyone, saying everyone’s not safe, the world is not safe. Our self-talk and internal compass can be very critical too.
The Impact of Lost Emotional Safety
When we lose emotional safety, we experience:
- Spiritual disengagement or distorted views of God
- Increased mental health struggles like anxiety and depression
- Hyper-vigilance or avoidance behaviors
- Intense busyness, performance-based living, and people pleasing
- Perfectionism and compulsivity
- Emotional numbing or dysregulation
- A lowered window of tolerance (becoming easily triggered)
- Difficulty forming secure attachments
- Social withdrawal and isolation
- Vulnerability to deception
Safety in God
God models perfect emotional safety through His love and embrace of us. Scripture is filled with reminders of His safety:
- Psalm 103:13: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.”
- Psalm 46:1: “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.”
- Isaiah 41:10: “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Truth is: Many times our struggle of feeling safe with God comes down to flawed and broken experiences with humans.
Jesus modeled the sense of safety, establishing it even in the midst of very challenging truths—like with the woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery, where He removed accusation and condemnation from the environment.
The body of Christ is meant to be the safest place on the planet. We’re called to continue meeting with each other, sharpening each other, loving one another, carrying each other’s burdens in healthy ways.
Recovering Emotional Safety
1. Learning to Experience God as a Loving Father
This is going to be a journey, because for many, relating to just the image of father is foreign and uncomfortable. This is the place to start.
2. Practice Being Safe with Yourself
In our pain and hostility, we feel disconnected from God and from ourselves. What we need is self-compassion. If you’re not compassionate towards yourself, then you’re going to demand other people be something that’s unrealistic, and anger is going to come out.
3. Be Aware of Core Beliefs That Keep You Feeling Unsafe
What are the statements that keep coming out, that you keep saying over and over? Maybe it’s “people are unsafe” or “all men are this, all women are that.” These driving statements create a cognitive bias where you keep saying that to yourself, then you look for it and find it.
4. Practice Emotionally Grounding Yourself in the Present
There’s a great amount of safety found not in spinning about the past and not in ruminating about the future, but simply anchoring yourself in the present moment. Jesus taught us, “Don’t worry about tomorrow. For tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
5. Be a Safe Person for Others
We often want safety, but what we need to do is focus on what we can control. You can’t control what everybody’s going to do, but you can be a safe person. Practice being a compassionate witness of grace, practice vulnerability when there’s an opening, be a forgiving person, learn how to establish healthy boundaries.
6. Mark Those Who Are Safe to You and Treasure Them
Thank them. Write them a note, send them an email, take them out for lunch. Show generosity and appreciation. Sometimes we focus so much on what we don’t have, we don’t treasure what we do have.
7. Develop a New Response to Your Emotional World
Many people struggling with emotional safety have learned to disconnect from their feelings and emotions, shove them all down. Recovery is going to involve learning to make room for it, identify it, name it, and allow ourselves to work through it.
8. Physiological Reminders of Safety
Develop practical habits like:
- Slow down
- Create a safe “home base”—a spot that’s special to you
- Practice being fully present in the moment
- Take in your five physical senses
- Practice slow breathing
- Speak affirmations to yourself: “I am safe. I’m safe today.”
What this does is help us develop a resilient heart. Many of us want to stay in the boat, but there’s a beautiful place when we step out and walk on the water. Even though Peter started falling into the water, he stepped out of the boat—he took a step.
A Journey, Not a Destination
This is a journey. It’s a process, not a destination. You’re going to have your ups and downs. You’re going to have your triggered moments. I want to encourage you to celebrate your small victories and keep building on them.
Just as a lack of safety spreads throughout the land, I believe the safe presence of God’s compassionate grace can invade in a healthy way people’s lives to establish a new way of living for all of us.
Remember: you’re safe. Perfect love is doing a work of casting out fear. Your heart can keep growing. You can develop these trust muscles and develop courage to take a step. You can have new relationship opportunities to learn to practice safety in your life.
And we need men and women of God to express that, because so many are hurting, so many are struggling, and they need the beauty of compassionate grace rooted deeply in their hearts.
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