How to Create and Maintain Emotional Safety (Trauma Self-Coaching 101)
> Listen to the audio version on my Youtube channel : https://youtu.be/QIW_zfnyX4M
Hello, this is Amandine Mas, an emotional coach. As we discussed in the previous article :
The first part of any emotional coaching session is to create safety in your body, so that you come back to the present. It’s when you become present to your emotions that you’ll stop letting yourself be overwhelmed by them (or being disconnected from them). From this state of presence you’re gonna be able to choose to regulate your difficult feelings or to release them (if the time is right).
Why is it so important to create safety and presence to access your emotional freedom?
Because you can’t release an emotion that you have felt in the past. Only the emotions you feel in the present (even if they are associated with thoughts of what you have experienced in the past). It’s only in the present that you can meet your feelings and help them to be evacuated, to make room for new experiences, in a smooth manner, like water (the liquid state being the healthy state of an emotion in a safe body).
Now, before we move on to today’s practice, let’s clarify what feeling safe is.
It’s important to be clear and honest about this because its opposite, insecurity, is a real issue, an invisible and insidious curse of our modern western society.
Inner safety is like the aliens:
We talk about it, we think we’ve seen it, but for many of us, we don’t really know what we’re talking about, and we’ve never really felt it…
It’s a sad reality but not at all inevitable, since you can strengthen your safety muscle, to avoid falling into chronic anxiety or emotional disconnection (2 states I know well from having spent 30 years of my life there).
Emotional safety is a sensation.
It has nothing to do with what’s happening around you. It’s the feeling of Calm and Confidence even if a change or a threat arises in your life.
You feel Connected to yourself, to your body, to others, to the ground beneath you, and to your environment no matter what.
Feeling safe can also be, depending on the context, feeling Curiosity, Clarity, Creativity, Courage, or Compassion.
And the icing on the cake is that…
When you feel safe, you behave differently in society :
- You don’t need to convince, prove or control anything
2. You don’t need to escape an unpleasant situation
3. You don’t need to disconnect from your emotions to avoid suffering
4. You don’t need to please to be loved or accepted by a group, a family
You are loved, you are safe.
The 4 scenarios I just mentioned (fighting, avoiding, disconnecting from your emotions and pleasing people) are the 4 most common insecurity scenarios. And they are VERY common.
As a society, we very often feel insecure. That’s why it’s important to learn to RETURN to safety and to MAINTAIN it.
How do you know if you feel safe?
It all starts with a window…
The simplest way, based on my experience on my body and my clients’, is to visualise a window (which I call the emotional freedom window)… And a body scan.
Ready to give it a try ?
For that, I’d like to invite you to quickly scan your body, right now, from top to bottom, and bottom to top, using your breath…
And now, answer the following magical question:
How does it feel in your body right now?
- Do you feel rather Calm, Confident and Connected to yourself, to others and to your environment?
- Can you Smile easily? or do you feel your face is tense? (the smile is a very good test…)
These sensations are cues of safety, which means that you are in your emotional freedom window and that you are free to engage with others safely.
But my real question is :
Do you TRULY feel free to engage with the world, with others ? or not really…?
Maybe you rather feel your body hyper-activated, reactive, restless, anxious, tense, hyperactive or defensive?
- You’re like on the go, you need to talk, to move, to think about the pass or to go towards the future?
- Your body is hot like a pressure cooker or boiling water?
- Your breath is rather short, rapid, tense, like your muscles, your jaw, your shoulders, your stomach?
Or maybe you rather feel your body hypo-activated, somewhat passive, empty, frozen, disconnected from the reality around you?
- You feel like stuck in your dreams or in your actions?
- You wait for it to pass, to no longer feel something that hurt you?
- Your feeling are too intense to stay present, so you have to disconnect from others to recharge?
- You need to protect you from a potential new danger?
- Your body is cold, like in a freezer or icy water?
These 2 sensations of insecurity mean that :
- You are out of your emotional freedom window
- You need to create defence mechanisms to engage with the others (like fighting or disconnecting).
CONGRATULATION !
What you just did is the first step of emotional regulation :
Becoming aware of your lack of safety in the present moment (and of your unconscious mechanisms that make you flee, flight, freeze or please)
In other terms, to regain inner safety, you must first become aware that you are no longer safe, that you have exited the window.
It sounds obvious but…
Trust me, most human beings don’t know they feel insecure. They are disconected from their feeelings, can’t self regulate themselves, and that’s why thez need external support like smoking, alcohol, food, social media…
That was my case for 35 years, until the day my anxiety skyrocketed, became chronic, and that I had to learn to come back to safety anytime.
So my message today is that :
Regardless of your emotional state now (hyper-activated or hypo-activated), it’s okay, since you can at any time return to your window of safety. It’s like a muscle, your safety muscle, that you can train in the same way than when you’re at the gym.
The real and serious issue in terms of public health is not leaving the window, it’s not knowing how to return.
Because, in reality….
Your emotional state is constantly changing. You enter and exit the window all the time all day.
But if you haven’t learned how to recover safety, if you grew up in an insecure family, with parents who didn’t know how to regulate their own emotions, you often find yourself stuck outside the window, right ? (like me, for over 30 years).
Let’s learn emotional reglation together shall we ?
In the upcoming article, you’ll know :
- How to travel towards your emotional freedom window
- How to stay there as long as possible
- How to return there as quickly as possible
- How to create new neural pathways of safety, inner calm and self confidence
- How to welcome the messages of your intuition in a body that is safe, calm, confident, connected…
> In the meantime, I invite you to book your free consultation with me below if you are ready to see how trauma informed coaching can help you find your best solutions, which are already there, inside you.
Amandine Mas — Emotions and Writing Coach on https://www.instagram.com/amandine_emotional_freedom
🧚♂️ Discover the 4-Step Emotional Coaching Programm “From Trauma to Love” : https://amandinemas.com/from-trauma-to-love-coaching/
🧚♂️ If you are an Entrepreneur, Coach or Healer discover the Emotional and Creative Coaching Program “From Trauma to Genius : https://amandinemas.com/from-trauma-to-genius-coaching/
🧚♂️ Downlaod for free my book “From Wounded to Empowered — A guide to live better with your emotions, your intuitions and in your relationships using a simple notebook” : https://amandinemas.com/download_from_wounded_to_empowered_book
🧚♂️ Watch my videos and podcasts on Youtybe : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZRwLALL7PnYn5qVfUgmPyw
