Feeling safe about expressing your feelings and thoughts in your own home is important for every parent and child. Within a home or family, it can be seen as creating a space where parents as well as children are able to be themselves without experiencing ridicule, shame or embarrassment. Such safe spaces encourage everyone to engage, connect, change and learn.
When does a person feel psychologically safe?
It is when they feel calm, secure and unthreatened to speak up or ask questions. For a child in a family environment, this could mean that he/she feels supported and confident to share what’s on their mind or how they are feeling.
Does your home feel ‘unsafe’?
The feeling of fear is an important indicator to determine how psychologically safe your home/family is. Here are a few signs that your home could have a ‘fear environment’. This applies to both the parent and child.
- You fear the repercussions of making mistakes
- You don’t feel like speaking up
- You change your behaviours unwillingly in order to be accepted
- Your contributions aren’t seen, valued or heard
If you sense these signs in your home environment, understanding about psychological safety can help you make incremental changes to improve your way of living as a family.
Do you feel safe with yourself?
The way we deal with our own actions and flaws can indicate whether we are offering psychological safety to ourselves or not. In an ecosystem like a home or family, it could always start from the self. This is the foundation for offering psychological safety for each other. By doing this, we
- learn to trust ourselves more
- let go of unhealthy criticism towards self
- become more confident of our capabilities
- be kind to ourselves
When we identify areas or situations where we don’t feel safe with ourselves, we can acknowledge them and compassionately hold space to improve in the future.
Psychological safety is hard to build and easy to destroy. So, we need to build safe listening spaces without the need for fixing anyone’s (and our own) feelings, and instead cultivate trust and bonding with each other.
If you would like to share your thoughts on creating a psychologically safe space in your home and the challenges you face in doing so, go ahead and engage with the posts we did around this topic on my Instagram page:
Building safe spaces – https://www.instagram.com/p/CdLSHvGp-lt/
Identifying fear environment – https://www.instagram.com/p/CdYJpPxJWRL/
Feeling unsafe? – https://www.instagram.com/p/CdItjIbJnNY/
Feel safe with yourself first – https://www.instagram.com/p/Cdf01kmJnUd/