Transcription
Have you ever heard, "I don't feel safe with you." Now, if you're anything like me or any of the other people that have been in my program, when they've heard that phrase by their partner, it's like a gut punch. And it's met with a ton of misunderstanding. They tell me things like, "I've never hurt my partner. I provide. I try. I apologize. I care." And yet, my partner doesn't feel safe with me. What the heck does that even mean?
Your initial reaction to that phrase might be, "What are you talking about? I'm not abusive. I'm not cruel. I'm trying. I do anything for you. What do you mean you don't feel safe with me?" The reality is is that emotional safety has almost nothing to do with what you intend. And it has everything to do with how you react. Your reactions when you feel angry, hurt, criticized, misunderstood, when you're not getting what you want, on and on and on. When you act in ways that are dismissive, invalidating, minimizing, or ways that put your partner down for having normal reactions to your hurtful behavior, you make them feel unsafe.
Today, we're going to talk about what emotional safety is and what it's not, and I'm going to give you four tips on how to start solidifying that foundation of safety and security in your relationship. If you're new to my channel, welcome. If you're somebody who's returning, welcome back. I'm Dr. Scott Sims and I run the program Breaking Reactive Patterns: The Blueprint for Building a Safe and Healthy Relationship. My mission is to help you wake up to how dysfunctional patterns are sabotaging your fulfillment, happiness, and relationships. If you're interested in my program, the links are right below this video or in my bio on my YouTube page. I encourage you to schedule a discovery call if you are interested in joining the program, or you can go to drscotssims.com to find out more information. Make sure you hit the subscribe button and turn on the bell for notifications for when I post a new video weekly.
Okay, let's begin with what emotional safety is and what it's not. I like to define this clearly. In my program, BRP, we define a safe relationship as one that is free from fear and pain. Now, let's be honest, that doesn't mean that you're not going to get upset or angry with each other or have any kind of conflict. But in my program, I teach my students that we have to create a safe environment or culture within the relationship that allows us to bring up our feelings, opinions, and topics without fear. And we have to be that for our partners. We work hard to manage our reactions so that trust can become our foundation. And trust doesn't mean just freedom from betrayal. Trust means that I feel emotionally safe with you, that I can bring things up with you, I can talk to you, and you don't turn against me.
When we do this, we can hear one another. We can validate each other. We can listen to understand, and we don't feel afraid of each other's reactions. A safe relationship is one that protects one another from our reactivity. That means I can bring you my pain without being punished for telling you how you're making me feel. I can express hurt to you without you falling apart or attempting to make me feel guilty for bringing it up. I can disagree with you without you retaliating against me. I don't lose connection with you for being honest. In fact, honesty is celebrated in our relationship even when it's hard. And when I'm struggling with something, it's seen. It's acknowledged. It's not taken personally. And you actually offer to help.
A safe relationship is one that is self-reflective, self-monitoring, self-disiplined enough to put the safety of the relationship ahead of our own self-p protection and ego. That's it. It's not about ever fighting. It's not about always agreeing. It's not about being perfectly calm or overly nice. It's about what's happening in you when you're experiencing something that's uncomfortable and your reactions to it.
So, the program breaking reactive patterns is about reactivity. It's about understanding that your reactivity is causing damage to your relationships and how to control that. The earliest signal of reactivity is in our body, our physical sensations. So, I'll ask you the question, when your partner brings something up that is uncomfortable, what happens inside of your body? Does your chest tighten? Does your jaw clench? Do you immediately start to feel the need to escape, to get away or shut down? Does your mind say things like, "This isn't fair," or "Here we go again." Do you start to mentally build a defense or a mentality that's attacking your partner before they're even done talking?
That physiological signal inside of your body is your body assessing and identifying threat. It's adrenaline and cortisol. We use adrenaline and cortisol to protect ourselves. And sometimes when we have lived in environments where reactivity was normal or there was a lot of conflict or we were attacked, criticized, put down, shame, humiliated by our parents in one way or another or we felt like we could never meet their expectations. Nothing we did was good enough. Then little things in our environment now start activating those old memories and we have the same types of reactions and that all becomes defensiveness. And we use our defensiveness as a way to protect ourselves, but it's at the expense of our current relationship because we're not children anymore. We're not teenagers. We're adults. And adults want a partner in life, not an opponent.
So if your nervous system is reading relational discomfort as danger, and your reactivity is automatic, then you need to learn the skills on how to manage and control that. And let me tell you, nothing good happens on the other side of reactivity. Research on couples shows that defensiveness is one of the strongest predictors of divorce. Not anger, not conflict frequency, but defensiveness. Why? Because defensiveness tells our partner that your experience is a threat to me. Your feelings, your opinions, your experience, your perspective feels threatening and intolerable. And the research on perceived partner responsiveness shows something even more important. People don't stay in a relationship because they feel loved. They stay because they feel understood and connected. That's the difference. You may feel that you deeply love your partner, but if your partner doesn't feel understood or connected when it matters the most, their nervous system will code you as unsafe.
So, let's break this down practically. Here are five hidden behaviors that create emotional unsafety.
Number one, defensiveness gets disguised as explaining. You react with a sharp, dismissive tone of voice, or you have the habit of talking down to your partner, which is contempt. You may say things like, "You know, that's not what I meant. Why can't you understand anything? You clearly don't even listen or even try to see my point of view." You believe that you're being reasonable and you're trying to get your point across, but what your partner experiences is, "My opinions and feelings don't matter." When we're prioritizing accuracy over connection and getting overly focused on debating points of view and details rather than staying connected to work out the problem, the relationship starts to become unsafe. Defensiveness treats your partner like an opponent. Defensiveness says that it's you against me when solving a problem. Healthy relationships operate it's us against the problem. Defensiveness protects us and our ego more than it protects the relationship. And when you do that over time, it just slowly erodess the trust down.
Number two, invalidation that you just simply don't realize is invalidation. In conflict or disagreements, you might say things like, "You're overreacting. It's not like that. That's not fair. you always do this, you're too sensitive." Even if you believe that those statements are true, even if part of them is true, invalidation activates that attachment threat system in the brain to your partner. So your partner doesn't register that that's logic. They register it as I can't be myself. I can't be authentic. I can't express my feelings. Everything I feel is wrong. And they build up their walls to you because they don't feel safe with you. And you have to remember that you cannot build emotional safety and connection while you're arguing your partner out of their own feelings.
Number three, tone shifts under stress. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. There's a sigh, there's an edge, there's a sarcasm, there's an eye roll. Tone shifts and other non-verbals are part of implicit learning. It's what your partner makes these things mean that matters because you start to get defined by these. Your tone and your other non-verbals are hurtful. Contempt and negative affect are some of the strongest predictors of relational breakdown. And tone communicates faster than content. Your words might be neutral, but your tone is not. Your partner feels that before they process anything you say. And if you have teenagers, believe me, you can certainly appreciate what I'm saying. Here's the example. You tell your teenager that you need them to do something and their response is, "Yeah, I'm going to do that." versus, "Yeah, I'm going to do that." Tone matters.
Number four, emotional withdrawal. You shut down. You go quiet. You need space, but you don't return regulated. You give all the messages that you're annoyed, irritated, and you're sending your partner the message that you should stay away from me. Avoidant coping strategies are very strongly associated with a partner's distress and their attachment insecurity. So when you pull away, it makes your partner more insecure. To your partner, withdrawal says, "When things get hard, you leave me alone in it. That makes them feel abandoned or not important. And that does not feel safe. It makes them think that I can't depend on you to stick around when things get hard or be my partner when I need you."
And number five, accountability that comes far too late. You realize it and then you regret it later. You apologize later. You make promises to work on it later. But during the moment, you're defended. You minimize. You counterattack. Safety is not built on remorse. It's built on predictability and dependability. If your partner never knows which version of you they're going to get when you're under stress, they cannot relax with you. And if they cannot relax, they cannot securely attach. And this is where our relationships start to nose dive. We don't want to be intimate with somebody that we can't relax with. Closeness feels awkward. I often say it's like cuddling up next to a porcupine.
The hard truth is that you can be a loving person and still be an emotionally unsafe partner because love is a feeling. Safety is a pattern and patterns are automatic. And this is where people make a critical mistake where they try to think their way out of this. They read more. They try to work on understanding their childhood. They gain insight, but that insight doesn't rewire automatic reactions. If your nervous system still interprets and reads conflict as a threat, you will continue to defend yourself automatically in those old ways, those old patterns. Those schema beliefs are where you actually have to make your changes because once you get a hold of those and you understand how they're controlling you unconsciously and in that reactivity, then you can start to actually make real change.
Now, let's move on to what actually works. So, here are some things that you can do to start building emotional safety.
Number one, emotional regulation before your responses. Earlier in the video when I was talking about your physiology, that's what I'm saying is that understanding how those reactivity signals are happening inside of your body and tuning into them so that you can take care of those before they start coming out. Increased heart rate, flush in the face, urgency to interrupt, tense in your shoulders, ch tense in your jaw, this desire to escape. If you respond from there, you're going to be defensive. Pause. slow down. Lower the arousal that you're feeling before you talk. This is not about suppressing yourself. This is about trying to prevent escalation. This is about prioritizing safety and connection with your partner over being right over feeling justified. So, this might sound like, "Hold on a second. I I'm starting to feel defensive. I want to take care of this. I don't want to take anything out on you. So, I need like five or 10 minutes to just kind of calm myself down." When you go to another room or you detach for those five or ten minutes, you work on reminding yourself, "This is the person I love. We're just having an argument. It's okay. I have to be a stable, safe person in this space with her." It's intentional, and you keep intentionally coming back to who you want to be, not what your programming tells you to do.
Number two, validation before accuracy. I think that this is kind of hard for intelligent people, especially people who value logic and fairness. They're used to dismissing their own emotions. So, it makes it very hard for them to value and validate other people's emotions. So, here's the rule. Understanding comes before explanation. Instead of that's not what I meant, try I can see how that hurt you. You're not arguing with their interpretation. You're acknowledging the impact. And that builds safety. Especially when you have a history with this person where you've acted in certain ways that haven't been safe. So they remember you from those patterns. So you might not be doing it right this second, but you've done this hundreds or maybe thousands of times before. That requires acknowledgement that I'm I have done this to you, so I understand why you're having this kind of reaction. That's validation. Just because you haven't done it right this second doesn't mean it takes away from every other time you've done it.
Number three, radical ownership without collapse. Ownership does not mean shame spiraling. It does not mean self-attack. It means I see how my reaction affected you and that's on me. No justification, no butts, no counter complaint. When you remove the self-defense, you remove threat from the room. Shame spiraling is very self-indulgent. It's you're upset about something that I've done. Oh, I'm just a terrible husband. I'm the worst person ever. Why don't you just leave me then? Do you hear it? It's I'm feeling so bad about myself that I'm just the worst person ever. And it's manipulative to try to get your your partner to forgive you, to say, "Oh, it's not that bad. You're a really good person." It's very manipulative and it's actually self-destructive because it leaves no room for your partner's complaints. It makes them feel like, "I don't I can't really tell you how I feel because you just make it out to be all about yourself."
And number four, faster repair cycles. You're going to get reactive sometimes. We are trying to get our hand on the dial of your reactivity. Meaning that we're trying to manage your reaction. So if you're kind of ticking up from zero up to three or four, that should be your danger signal that says that hold on a second. You better calm this down before you go any higher. That's reality. The question is how fast can you catch it? Sometimes you're going to catch it before you say anything, but sometimes you're going to say something and then you need to make a repair. That repair needs to happen in minutes, not days, not weeks later or at all. Trust can be rebuilt in the moments right after a conflict when someone is taking responsibility for how they've messed up or how they've made their partner feel. Even if you're saying that it's just 5% of my responsibility, I was using a sharp tone of voice or I was talking down to you or I think I was minimizing how you were feeling and invalidating you. Just the process of acknowledgement to your partner makes repair happen much faster, makes trust feel a little bit easier. But when you hurt somebody's feelings, like your partner, and then you ignore it and you walk away and you say nothing about it or you maybe apologize a day or two later, the damage is already set in. So, you're not going to be perfect at this, but at least be consistent. Do the best that you can to try to be that consistent partner that can acknowledge what they're doing. Take responsibility for your own behavior and how you're making your partner feel. Because consistency builds safety, not perfection.
Maybe you found this video because your partner has threatened to leave or they've stopped opening up or sex has become non-existent. Maybe your arguments are escalating or they've simply said, "I don't feel safe with you." If that's triggered some degree of shame or guilt, good. Not because shame is useful in the long term, but because it means you care. Here's what's not helpful. Defending your intentions, minimizing their experience, waiting for them to change first. If you can look back in your history and you can see a common pattern with your reactivity and you know it's causing problems, then it's time to clean up your side of the street. Ownership is power. To own this pattern and to develop the insight that you need, you have to have a pattern interruption. You need nervous system retraining, accountability under stress, behavioral repetition, and structured repair processes. Because emotional safety is not built on some big grand gesture. It's built on small moments under pressure.
That's the work that I teach in breaking reactive patterns, the blueprint for building a safe and healthy relationship. This is about education. It's about behavioral transformation. I often say that you have to become a safe person for yourself first. That means that you have to trust that your reactivity is under your control. It also means that you learn how to become a more authentic person, more in touch with your emotions, a better ability to communicate how you feel, safe in your interactions with your partner, protecting the relationship over your own ego. So, if you're interested in learning more about my program, schedule a discovery call with me. There is no obligation. The link is right below this video or it's in the bio section of my YouTube page where you can also find some links to free training. The fact that you're watching this video means that you already know that something needs to change. And that's where real strength begins.