Safety is not the whole story

Exploration is not an afterthought

People, especially online people, now talk about relationship in terms of the nervous system. They reference attachment styles. They talk about triggers. They talk about safety. We want to be regulated, grounded, calm, securely attached, and not triggered. Safe spaces and protections abound, and this is a good thing. It’s a far more specific frame than reenacting all our childhood wounds in the kitchen after dinner and calling it “communication issues.”

This safety is what people come to couple therapy asking for. We want to stop fighting, stop feeling disconnected, stop the endless conflict between us. Stage 1 of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy has the same goal, so therapy at the beginning mostly feels aligned with what the couple came in for. Not fully, as most also seem to want some arbitration of whatever the fights are about, so there’s often a bit of reframing at the beginning to talk about the process (how we talk) instead of the content (what we talk about). But even so, buy-in is there: everyone wants to establish safety.

Wanting to create a safe environment for a loving relationship is an excellent goal, but there’s a reason this phase of therapy is called “Stage 1” and not “Therapy in its entirety.” Often, when we get things de-escalated and things feel calmer, clients start talking about wrapping up. To which I say some variant of “hang on, we’re just getting to the good part!”

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

That moment always feels scary to me, actually. Because by this point, I am deeply invested in these people as individuals, and in their relationship as a system that lives between and around them. To stop here wouldn’t just be premature, it would be a tragedy. Because safety is not a place we arrive. It’s a place we launch from. And this is the part that I feel we’re missing, still.

For the newcomers to this newsletter, this right here is the central premise of What You Wish For, the book I’m writing that led me to create this space we’re sitting in. I write a lot in the book about the conflict cycle and why it’s hard and what to do about it, but there, as in therapy, it’s a preamble to the point.

What do we need all this safety for?

Attachment theory is fundamentally described as both a safe haven (the place we can return from the scary world around us) and a secure base (the place we leave to gain new experiences and become full people). I think the relational discourse has become very good at talking about the safe haven. But what about the secure base?

I wrote in Something Else Instead about ways that we avoid risk in relationships, reasons we ask for things adjacent to our need rather than the need itself, and why that makes sense to do even though it’s fully half of the reason for the conflicts we experience with our partners. But I didn’t really talk about why the risk is a good idea.

It’s a good idea for two reasons.

1. We risk to build real safety

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes about a distinction between “freedom to” and “freedom from.” She says there are two kinds of freedom, one that allows us to expand and grow and seek out new things and do what we want, and one that allows us to be rid of predation and expectation and danger. In couple therapy, Stage 1 (de-escalation) is about building freedom from. It lets us calm down the conflict cycle, cognitively understand the reasons for our defenses, and start to talk in different ways, setting us free from the frustration and exhaustion of conflict.

Stage 2 of EFCT (bond restructuring) is about building freedom to. The risk we encourage in Stage 2 is accessing, and naming, the deep fears and needs that are the real drivers of the conflict cycle. Expressing those fears and needs to your partner, opening up to the possibility of rejection or abandonment, and asking the partner to meet you there. If the partner does, what we get is something called limbic revision, which I’ve mentioned here a few times and will probably some time soon write about in more depth. We learn by experience of the partner showing up for us in that place that it is safe to relax those guards. We build a core sense of safety where, in many cases, there has never been one before.

We teach the body through experience that reaching is safe, this person will respond, this person loves me, this person is someone I can come to with anything. We restructure the bond into a secure one, revising the attachment system (at least with this person) to expect a responsive and attuned other.

This is a level much deeper and more stable than the safety of Stage 1, which is largely intellectual. This is an embodied safety that can hold after therapy ends and change the game going forward.

But — and this is where I diverge into book territory — this is still only the foundation for freedom to, not its full actualization. That comes later.

2. We risk to become more

Photo by Diana Parkhouse on Unsplash

What is the function of the secure base? In childhood, we can see the secure base in action. “Mom! Watch me!” If you’ve ever had kids, or been a kid, you know the refrain well. Let’s say you’re on the beach, watching from your blanket, and you see it play out right in front of you. The child starts out close to the parent, maybe building a sand castle nearby. Then they need a shell to complete the art work, so they start to venture out to get one but as the distance grows, they start to falter a little. They come back to the parent and say, “I need a shell!” The parent gives some encouragement to go find one, and then they venture out with more confidence. They get the shell, add it to the castle, praise arrives for their magnificent creation.

Now what?

Maybe they want to go for a swim, but now it’s really scary. The ocean is scary for most of us, I hope. So they do the dance several times now. Go to the edge, come back, go dip a toe in, come back. Returning to the base, over and over, each time getting a little farther away until they’re standing in the surf. “Mom! Watch me!” They carry a little of the base with them to help them be brave until they can swim.

They keep accessing the safe haven, with repeated and increasing risks away, until some part of it lives within them and they can go farther and farther before it’s too scary.

The secure base’s full name is the secure base for exploration, and I think the last part gets dropped, in childhood and later when we apply it to a romantic bond. Why did we do Stage 2? Not just for the felt experience of being with a responsive partner who knows you all the way down and loves you fully, though that is wonderful. We also did it because humans are explorers.

We are built to reach, to seek out new territory, to evolve. The secure base of a relationship allows us to become something new, both by revising our old stories in the context of a real person who loves us, and by building roads that branch out from that core, in ever-expanding and infinite ways. We seek out relationships to feel safe, yes, but we do that in the service of something larger. We seek out relationships to become ourselves, again and again and again.

Every time we leave the security of our bond and take another step further into an unknown territory, we expand as people to incorporate that new experience. We bring that new person back to the bond: “do you still love me now?” When the answer is yes, we go further yet, seeking more, becoming more, being loved in a new dimension.

We build safety so we can explore the world and expand ourselves. We bring every step of that unfolding back to a core base that gets richer and deeper with each iteration, so we can explore again.

We need safety because humans are not built only to survive love, we are built to journey from it and come back changed. Secure love is not a porch we sit on forever because nothing bad can happen there. It’s the porch light that stays on while we expand further and further into the dark.