Felt safety

There are days when life goes along quite nicely and then all of a sudden, a child tips over the edge for one reason or another. When that happens, the repair work is often a matter of hours. This was what I was doing between dinner and finally sitting down here to write. I'll give you the short version of all of this right now. Good parenting just takes a lot of time. There is nothing quick or easy or fast because people and relationships are messy and complicated.

The idea of felt safety is a very important one in connected parenting. Felt safety means that not only is a child actually safe in their current situation with their current caregivers, but that a child feels safe as well. I can tell you, a person can be 100% safe with people who care about them while that person doesn't actually feel safe. This often is the result of traumatic experiences in the past where the people who were supposed to keep them safe failed in their responsibility. It's a once bitten, twice shy thing. Without felt safety, a person can never let down their guard enough to really enter into a relationship; something is always being held back, kept safe, because people let you down. 

It takes a very, very long time to help a child hurt by trauma to trust you enough to feel truly safe. And by long time, I don't mean months, I mean years, possibly decades. 

It takes years and years of responding to a child's needs in a way that don't match their behavior so that they start to trust you. It takes years and years of searching for the why and not reacting to the presenting behavior which is often fairly ugly. (Fear and feeling unloved is ugly, it shouldn't be surprising these emotions elicit ugly behavior.) It takes hundreds and thousands of times of reassuring your child that you love them no matter what.... even if you think they should have caught on by now. It just takes time.

Without felt safety your child won't believe that you actually love them. Without felt safety, they won't feel comfortable making a mistake. Without felt safety, they will always feel the need to take care of themselves. Without felt safety, truth and honesty are expendable commodities. 

The whole thing stinks, frankly, but then so would never feeling truly safe. That would stink more. 

And so we take the hours to slowly tease out what is behind the negative behavior that has appeared... slowly teasing out, not in a confrontational way, but a compassionate, caring way. Gently asking questions when questions are perceived as a trap laid in order to get the child in trouble. Offering assurances of love and care as the real concern is softly mumbled. Then holding the child while they sob in your arms and are not even sure what all they are feeling. To even be able to get to the point where a cause can be hesitantly verbalized is itself a major success. 

Calmness is restored, for now... until the next time. But every time big emotions and less than spectacular behavior are met with kindness and gentleness and love, a tiny bit more of felt safety is created. 

Little by little by little.