What Does It Actually Mean to Feel Safe?
What does it actually mean to feel safe?
Lately, I've been reflecting on the concept of sense of safety after reading a research article through the lens of trauma (Lynch et al., 2025).
For people who have experienced trauma, feeling safe can be a foreign concept.
Whether that's feeling safe in your body, within yourself, within relationships, or even in the world around you, it can all have an impact.
A significant part of trauma recovery is getting yourself to a place where you feel more safe.
I think it can be helpful to look at the different layers of safety that are part of the human experience. The Sense of Safety framework suggests that safety can (or cannot) be experienced through physical, emotional, relational, psychological, cultural, and spiritual safety.
While healing can feel overwhelming at times, it's important to remember that safety is often built slowly through small, repeated experiences.
Below are a few gentle and practical examples of what it can look like to begin cultivating safety within these different areas of life.
✨ Physical Safety
Physical safety involves feeling safe in your environment and within your body.
This might look like:
Doing a gentle nightly stretching routine.
Taking slow, deep breaths when you notice tension in your body.
Eating regular meals.
Creating a small corner in your home that feels calm and comforting.
For many trauma survivors, reconnecting with the body can feel uncomfortable at first.
Sometimes safety begins by slowly teaching your nervous system that your body is no longer a dangerous place to be.
✨ Emotional Safety
Emotional safety is the experience of feeling like your emotions are allowed to exist without shame, punishment, or rejection.
This might look like:
Naming what you feel instead of suppressing it.
Journalling honestly without judging yourself.
Letting yourself cry without apologising for it.
Spending time with people who don't make you feel "too much."
Emotional safety often begins when we stop abandoning ourselves emotionally.
✨ Relational Safety
Relational safety is about feeling safe within relationships and around other people.
This might look like:
Noticing who drains you versus who grounds you.
Practising saying "no" in small ways.
Allowing yourself to take space when needed.
Reminding yourself that healthy relationships don't require you to perform in order to earn love.
Many trauma survivors learned that relationships were unpredictable, inconsistent, or unsafe.
As a result, relational safety can take time.
Sometimes relational safety can also begin within the therapy room itself. Through consistency, attunement, trust, and the experience of being able to show up as yourself without fear of judgement, people often begin discovering what safe connection can feel like.
✨ Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is feeling safe to be yourself, have thoughts, opinions, needs, and boundaries.
This might look like:
Speaking up, even in small ways.
Trusting your own perspective a little more.
Making a decision without excessive reassurance.
Reminding yourself that disagreeing doesn't make you a bad person.
For many trauma survivors, safety and self-expression became disconnected somewhere along the way.
Part of healing is slowly reconnecting the two.
✨ Cultural Safety
Cultural safety involves feeling accepted, respected, and safe to be who you are without fear of judgement, exclusion, or shame.
This might look like:
Spending time with people who honour your identity and lived experience.
Allowing yourself to reconnect with parts of your culture or background you once felt disconnected from.
Unfollowing spaces online that make you feel small or ashamed.
Finding communities where you don't have to constantly explain or defend yourself.
We were never meant to heal in environments where we have to hide parts of ourselves in order to belong.
✨ Spiritual Safety
Spiritual safety is feeling safe to explore meaning, hope, faith, purpose, or even uncertainty.
This might look like:
Giving yourself permission to question things.
Spending time in nature.
Reconnecting with what gives you hope.
Allowing your spirituality to become something grounded in peace instead of fear.
Spiritual safety can be especially important for those healing from religious trauma or shame-based environments.
Healing Isn't About Becoming Fearless
The thing I keep coming back to is this:
Healing isn't always about becoming fearless.
Sometimes it's about slowly teaching your mind and body that safety is possible again.
One small moment at a time.
One boundary at a time.
One safe relationship at a time.
One act of self-compassion at a time.
If you've experienced trauma, emotional neglect, people-pleasing, shame, or religious trauma, safety may not feel natural yet.
That's okay.
Safety is not something you either have or don't have.
Often, it's something that is built gradually through repeated experiences that show your nervous system, your mind, and your heart that the world is not as dangerous as it once needed to believe.
And sometimes, that journey begins with simply asking yourself:
"What would help me feel a little safer today?"
Reference:
Lynch JM, Stange KC, Dowrick C, Getz L, Meredith PJ, Van Driel ML, Harris MG, Tillack K and Tapp C (2025) The sense of safety theoretical framework: a trauma-informed and healing-oriented approach for whole person care. Front. Psychol. 15:1441493. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1441493
