Contributing to Emotional Safety vs. Giving Up Honesty
Contributing to emotional safety does not have to be in conflict with honest expression and authenticity. These are separate things. Imagining that you have to take care of someone’s tender heart by becoming small or giving up your needs is called enmeshment. This is a tragic strategy for relating. Enmeshment is encouraged in systems of oppression in which the person with less power is pressured to not rock the boat, in return sacrificing their authenticity, so that those with more power can stay comfortable. When you are not grounded in your power, attempts to create emotional safety can devolve into giving up your needs and smoothing things over.
It's important to remember that contributing to emotional safety can only come from the autonomous generosity of your heart. And it requires groundedness and skill. When you are truly attuning to emotional safety, you come forward from a consciousness that trusts that creating a particular quality of connection is the best strategy to honor and meet all needs present. You are willing to take the time needed to create that quality of connection because you know it will mean greater efficiency and collaboration moving forward: Each consecutive conflict will become easier to resolve.
From the consciousness that prioritizes quality of connection, you naturally want to offer reassurance, provide clarity about your intention, make space for mutuality, and use words that contribute to connection. It's essential to remember, however, that even when you do your best to contribute to emotional safety, it doesn't mean the other person has the ability to access a sense of safety. You can only offer. You cannot control their reactivity or their lack of access to emotional safety. Thus, in some cases, a quality of connection that supports needs may be very difficult to create.
When you have not yet learned the skills to contribute to emotional safety or you are caught in reactivity, it may seem like you have to sacrifice honesty to create emotional safety. For you, honesty and emotional safety seem to be at odds.
In this case, it is likely easier to make these things distinct steps in a process. The first step is to check in with yourself and notice if reactivity is present and, if it is, use your tools and skills to manage that reactivity. This doesn't mean you have to be perfectly nonreactive to speak. It simply means that you need enough groundedness that reactivity isn't rushing you through a process and into old habits of “power over.”
The second step is to support emotional safety by clarifying your intention and your caring for the other person, as well as reassuring them that you would like to hear their needs and then take action that considers you both. It's also helpful to name aloud that some reactivity is present if it is. This lets the other person know that you are self-aware and doing your best to manage your reactivity.
When reactivity is present, you will want to rush through this step. You may feel fearful or have a sense of urgency that you have to say what's on your mind right now. Urgency is a form of reactivity that reveals a sense of threat, but unless there is a physical crisis, it is not helpful. From a state of reactivity, you imagine that if you don't share your judgments and opinions you are not being honest. You forget that judgments and opinions are tragic strategies for expressing feelings, needs, and requests. They don't allow you to take responsibility for your needs and are a form of blaming others for what didn't work while not saying anything about what could work.
True honesty requires the courage to reveal what you care about and propose a way forward. It means checking in with yourself and finding groundedness in your own honor and care for your needs regardless of how the other person responds. And it means a willingness to feel grief if their response to your needs isn't what you want.
The world is saturated with the strategy of getting louder and bigger, more critical and judgemental in order to get needs met. In the moment, you can be fooled into using this strategy because people stop to look at you and seem to be listening. Because you have their attention, you imagine that finally they will hear you and take action to meet your needs. But there is an abundance of research to show that, while this kind of behavior may result in immediate attention and action, the long-term result is that needs actually go more deeply unmet.
Making these kinds of distinctions is a nuanced process. It is easy to get distracted by appearances. What's more important is to stay grounded in the consciousness of connection, to know what that feels like in your body, heart, and mind. When you know this and can recognize it, you can trust yourself to offer emotional safety without becoming enmeshed and to stand in your honesty without sliding into strategies to gain power over another. Practice asking yourself again and again, “What is happening in my heart? What is my intention in this moment?” The more people can stay dedicated to this courageously honest self-examination, the more we can help guide our global community to a place of love and creative collaboration.
Practice
Take a moment now review a time when offering emotional safety and expressing honesty seemed to be in conflict. What would have helped you hold both in that moment with confidence and patience?