Safe and Sound
What does safety really mean? What does it feel like to be safe? It's a big question—maybe even easier to think about what it feels like to be unsafe. But safety, like so many other emotional experiences, is different for each of us. I was recently part of a meeting with a group of creative therapists, and we were asked to create a sculpture that represented what safety might look like to us. As a group, we found this nearly impossible. Some of us wanted solitude, others wanted to be close to the group, and some needed to be near windows or doors. What felt "safe" to one person didn't feel safe to another.
If adults struggle to define what safety means for them, how can we expect children to understand it, especially if their early experiences were filled with uncertainty or fear? For children who have lived in environments where safety was compromised, the idea of safety may seem foreign or even unattainable.
In therapy, we often talk about creating a "secure base" as an essential part of healing from trauma. But how do we help a child find a secure base if they’ve never known what it feels like to be steady or safe? For some children, feeling “wobbly” or unstable becomes the new normal because it’s what’s familiar to them. One child even described safety to me as an “underground bunker”—a place to hide, away from everything and everyone. But was that really safe? As adults, we know that isolation isn’t true safety. But how do we help children see that the coping strategies they’ve developed—like withdrawing, shutting down, or pushing others away—might feel like safety to them, but actually aren’t?
It can feel like we’re pulling the rug out from under them when we try to challenge these behaviors. For children who have learned to fend for themselves, it’s terrifying to feel like they no longer have control over their environment.
As infants, we start to form pathways in our brains based on repeated experiences. Over time, we begin to predict what will happen next and can develop a sense of control over our world. But if an infant is faced with unpredictable or unsafe situations, they have to create their own strategies to feel some sense of control. These strategies might include hiding, running away, or even acting out through meltdowns or aggression. For them, these behaviors are a way of managing the uncertainty—of saying, "I’ve got this. I know what’s coming next." But is that safety? Is safety really about control and predictability?
What if, for some children, safety feels like spontaneity or excitement? It’s hard to know what “feels safe” to the children in our care because every child is different. But one thing we do know is that when children are feeling unsafe, they need us more than ever. They need our love and acceptance, even when they don’t act in ways that seem "safe" to us. They need to know that we see them, that we hear them, and that we understand how big and overwhelming their feelings can be.
We’ve all experienced what it feels like to be unsafe, and it’s a frightening place to be. In those moments, we operate from a survival mindset. The challenge, then, is to help children move beyond survival mode, to recognise that they are safe with us, even when their behavior might suggest otherwise. When they feel emotionally held, when they feel seen and heard, they start to experience less fear, less chaos. And with that, the sense of safety begins to grow.
