What Every Therapy Client Should Know 05 - Find External Emotional Safety (Trust or Co-regulation)

In this video, I’ll talk about how to find external emotional safety, otherwise known as trust or co-regulation, to help you widen your window of tolerance.

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Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and this is the fifth video in a series where I share information that I think EVERY therapy client should know. In this video, I’ll talk about how to find external emotional safety, otherwise known as trust or co-regulation, to help you widen your window of tolerance.

External Emotional Safety - Co-regulation/trust
As humans, we are built to connect. It's the first tool we are programmed to try when our nervous system starts to ramp up -- connecting with another human being. In this way, we can borrow some of that other person’s nervous system calm to counter OUR freaking out. This is called co-regulation -- regulating your emotions by connecting with someone else. But we all know that not everyone makes us feel calmer. In fact, some people just push our buttons and make us feel worse. I'm sure just saying this brings to mind some people in your life who fall into this category -- they quickly blame you, criticize you, compete with you, minimize your experience, talk over you, or invalidate your feelings. Or -- they might try to fix things or over-intellectualize before you are ready to think about solutions or explanations. You walk away from these encounters not feeling better, but feeling worse.

You know who is a great source of external safety? A therapist. In fact, that's what I think their main job is. Sure you also want someone who can challenge you, make you see things differently, and reframe your experience with insight and wisdom -- but not if you can't feel emotionally safe with them. That means you can tell them exactly who you are and what you’ve done -- all of the good, the bad, and the ugly. And you can trust them to listen and not run away from you, dismiss you, invalidate you, or try to fix you. They won't deflect your feelings or say a bunch of trite phrases that don't make you feel any better. They have the strength and capacity to sit with you and hold your most powerful and difficult emotions right alongside you. They also believe in your ability to get through it and come out the other side a stronger and more resilient person. That's what external emotional safety is and it is the WD-40 that greases your window of tolerance so that you can be strong enough make those small developmental changes towards growth. And if your therapist isn't doing this for you -- you probably need to get a new one.

In addition, start looking for people in your life who provide emotional safety. One way to know that you were with someone who is emotionally safe is that you feel better about yourself when you are around them. You may already have one or two of these kinds of people in your life. Here’s the thing -- people don’t DESERVE to hear your truth -- they EARN that right by being trustworthy and emotionally strong. Choose wisely who you decide to tell your truth to -- not everyone deserves to hear it.

So, that is external emotional safety -- in the next video, I’ll talk about how to build internal emotional safety otherwise known as self-compassion. Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!