When we think about emotional safety, many of us imagine a very natural, warm and grounded feeling. It’s like something we trust will just be there. But for people whose early childhood was shaped by unpredictable caregivers, neglect, or harm, emotional safety can feel very foreign. Early trauma doesn’t just leave memories. It leaves marks on the nervous system, on relationships, and on the internal sense of safety. Understanding why emotional safety feels unfamiliar and learning how that pattern can shift invites compassion, curiosity, and psychologically-informed healing.
When the Nervous System Learns Danger First
Trauma is not just something that happens to a person, but is something the body remembers. Peter A. Levine, a trauma expert and author of Waking the Tiger, argues that trauma is “a life experience that overwhelms the nervous system” (Levine, 1997). In early life, when a caregiver is meant to be a safe source of comfort but instead is unpredictable, harsh, or absent, the nervous system doesn’t get the stable responses that it so needs to learn safety.
The nervous system learns through experience. When a baby cries and is consistently soothed, the nervous system learns how to calm down. When a child is afraid and left alone or punished for distress, the nervous system can learn that safety is unreliable. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory helps us make sense of this. Porges describes how the autonomic nervous system shifts between different states of regulation, such as safety, mobilisation (fight or flight), and shutdown (freeze), depending on cues of danger or safety in the environment (Porges, 2011). Early trauma makes the nervous system act with vigilance and defence, even in safe settings.
In practical terms, this means that someone who experienced trauma might perceive social cues differently. A neutral expression might feel cold, a gentle correction might feel threatening, a sigh might feel pointed, and silence might feel like rejection. Here, the nervous system is not malfunctioning, but is doing exactly what it learned to do, which is to protect you from further threat.
Emotional Safety: A Learned Sense, Not a Born One
We often talk about emotional safety as though it is something innate. But emotional safety is more like a language learned in early life, a language of connection, soothing, and attunement. Daniel J. Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry and author of The Developing Mind, emphasises that secure attachment in childhood fosters a coherent sense of self and mind (Siegel, 1999). Secure attachment emerges not just from care, but from attuned care, when the caregiver has the capacity to notice, respond, and regulate the child’s emotional states, in a balanced and healthy way.
If early experiences taught someone that emotional signals are unpredictable or unsafe, an internal capacity to be open and vulnerable may not have formed. Emotional safety in relationships might feel foreign, but this doesn’t mean that the person is incapable of emotional safety. It just means that their internal roadmap was never fully drafted.
Boundaries as a Bridge to Safety
When emotional safety feels unfamiliar, healthy boundaries can feel confusing, too. Boundaries are often misunderstood as rigid walls, but at their core, boundaries help us communicate our needs and protect our well-being. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, illustrates how trauma affects not only the mind but the body’s sense of agency, and the ability to feel that “I am in control of my actions and responses” (van der Kolk, 2014). Boundaries are an expression of that agency.
For someone whose early life lacked consistent safety, boundaries may at first feel like selfishness or rejection. That’s because the nervous system learned to equate self-protection with danger. If keeping the peace was once necessary to stay safe or loved, saying “no” can feel less like self-care and more like risking abandonment. Healing involves teaching the nervous system to recognise that setting limits can stabilise, not threaten, connection. Over time, practising boundaries in safe relationships (not necessarily romantic ones) teaches the body that limits are signals of respect, not abandonment.
Healing Happens Through Regulation, Not Just Reflection
Talking through past experiences can help make sense of them, but healing from early trauma is not just an intellectual exercise. It involves retraining the nervous system to perceive safety differently. Somatic therapies emphasise exactly that by working with the body’s felt sense rather than only with thoughts. This principle is central to approaches like Somatic Experiencing (Peter A. Levine) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden). These approaches help people notice physical sensations, become aware of internal reactions, and develop new patterns of regulation.
Nervous system regulation doesn’t mean suppressing emotion. Regulation means having the capacity to tolerate, process, and recover from emotional states. Porges’ Polyvagal Theory offers tools for this by helping people understand how different states of the nervous system show up in the body, for example, shallow breathing when anxious or numbness when overwhelmed, and how intentional practices like breath work, slow movement, and social engagement cues can shift states toward felt safety.
A regulated nervous system creates internal space. In that space, reflection becomes grounded. What once felt like chaos can become a sequence of sensations to observe and respond to. This creates the foundation for emotional safety that feels familiar rather than foreign.
Relationships as Repair
Healing from early trauma doesn’t happen in isolation. Secure, attuned relationships, where someone listens, responds, and can return to connection after tension, create healing experiences. This idea comes from attachment theory and is supported by decades of research showing that relational experiences shape the brain throughout life.
For many people, therapy is one of the first environments where consistent attunement happens. Therapists trained in relational and trauma-informed approaches understand that emotional safety is built gradually. The therapist’s consistent presence, empathic responses, and patience teach the nervous system what safety feels like in real time.
Beyond therapy, supportive friendships and partnerships help reinforce these patterns. When others respect boundaries, respond to distress without judgment, and communicate openly, the nervous system receives repeated messages that emotional safety isn’t a mirage, but is something that can exist here and now.
The Path from Unfamiliar to Familiar
If emotional safety feels unfamiliar, it’s important to understand that this is not a personal failure. It is the echo of early systems that were doing their best with limited resources. The nervous system adapted to protect, and those adaptations served a purpose. Healing does not require erasing these adaptations but integrating them into a larger sense of safety, agency, and connection.
Emotional safety becomes familiar through repeated experience, not just through thinking about it. It develops in relationships that are consistent and through boundaries that reinforce self-worth. Practising strategies for nervous system regulation teaches the body and mind how to move from survival into presence. Crucially, it also builds a compassionate understanding that progress is not linear. There will be setbacks, but with repetition and support, lasting change is possible.
Trauma changes the internal landscape, but it does not determine the entire terrain. With patience, support, and intentional practices, the nervous system can learn new patterns. Emotional safety can transition from something we can only imagine to something we recognise in our bodies, our relationships, and our everyday lives.
References
Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books. https://archive.org/details/wakingtigerheali00levi
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company. https://archive.org/details/polyvagaltheoryn0000porg
Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press. https://archive.org/details/developingmindho0000sieg
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. https://ia601604.us.archive.org/35/items/the-body-keeps-the-score-pdf/The-Body-Keeps-the-Score-PDF.pdf
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company. https://archive.org/details/traumabodysensor0000ogde
