#selfhealersdiaries
Lack of emotional safety leads to a lack of emotional connection
Why your partner might shut down or react in your relationship.
Both the insecure attached and secure attached people have a need for safety in relationships. Physical safety means they are in a safe environment, which includes how their body is treated in the relationship.
2. Emotional safety means their needs and yours are met in this container. It means the way we manage triggers and how much we are triggered and how much our partner holds space in the relationship.
3. Emotional safety means the way you both communicate with each other, how you express your needs in the relationship.
4. Where someone feels challenged, confronted, accused, blamed or someone is demanding and therefore they feel controlled, they do not feel safe to express themselves, or to open up in the relationship.
Remember, how you shut down when your parents shouted. How you became anxious and fearful when you were physically punished and criticised. That is what your partner will do if you are treating them in this way you were treated, or that children fear.
Additionally, if you budge in and just start shouting, saying what you want or criticising without asking for permission to speak, or asking if they are ready to discuss this with you, they do not feel safe, because there are no boundaries, and you act entitled. Like you own them and the place. So they need to listen. You might be in victim mode and blaming, which again makes intimacy difficult.
You are better off being vulnerable. That comes from self-parenting, where you sign up to the internal locus of control, do not treat any situation as a life and death situation, and you allow passage of time for your partner to step into their role.
Regulate yourself when you feel activated, and increase your window of tolerance when you are aroused. How you talk to your partner has nothing to do with what your partner is doing. How you treat your partner has nothing to do with what they are doing. It is about how regulated and self-controlled you are in yourself.. Your partner might therefore feel unsafe if you are hyper aroused and space out, numb, zone out, and shut down. Or they might also be anxious, out of control, overwhelmed ad angry and therefore fight or flee.
If you have porous boundaries, your partner cannot find a safe container to share with you their deepest fears and desires, because there is no doorway to get in, and no standard to adhere to. It feels like a trap and manipulation, so they fear falling as well as how far they might fall. They do not know where to start, and where to stop.
They feel like you have no filter. You also overshare or under-share, and this makes intimacy difficult.
When this becomes habitual , none of you is holding space. The result is that you are constantly at war. Your partner is not going to be free to open up to you and be vulnerable, because you are not opening up or vulnerable. You are in fight mode.
So, until you SIFTSEM; sit with your trigger , and not rush to act like what young people do, sit with your discomfort , soothe and parent and then express yourself with feeling statements, when your partner is ready, you are unlikely to make progress in your relationship.
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