In recent times, the term ‘psychological safety’ seems to have become something of a buzzword. Outside the therapeutic circles I tend to move in, I’ve also heard people talk about it in relation to team meetings, political disagreements on social media platforms and other situations involving groups of people. And I must say, I am pleased to hear terms like this used in popular discourse (as long as they’re meant genuinely).
Safety is a concept that can’t have been far from anyone’s mind lately. This may be a more practical, rather than emotional form of safety – assessing the risk of a trip to the local shop during lockdown, asking ourselves ‘should I self-isolate?' when we perceive the slightest tickle in our throats, weighing up the pros and cons of meeting a friend in the park for a socially distanced catch up. These decisions might weigh heavily on the psyche for some of us. Our perception of safety, or lack thereof, is psychological. Material risks may not be directly altered by the power of our minds – they exist regardless of our acknowledgement. But our individual relationships to managing risks have a bearing on how we go on to interact with them. At the risk of shaming different approaches to dealing with Covid-19, it’s an interesting study in our different approaches to safety. From those who were furious about joggers continuing their exercise regime in public because they assessed the risk to be critical, to those who flat out denied that anything out of the ordinary was taking place and that the virus is ‘just a flu’, perception informs behaviour, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever before seen an example of this scale where our choices could so profoundly affect the lives of others.
When I talk about psychological safety, I’m not just referring to the mental risk assessments we all regularly carry out, but they’re a crucial part of the picture. For me, psychological safety is about creating an environment where people feel emotionally safe enough* to allow themselves to be vulnerable and to be seen and heard as they truly are. The term appears in the therapy and coaching worlds because they are about self-reflection, making sense of things that have hurt us and allowing ourselves to be witnessed in a state of vulnerability. In order to feel safe enough to do this work, we need to be able to trust the person or people we’re sharing with. Our mental risk assessment might involve asking questions like ‘will they keep my story confidential?’, ‘do they have my best interests at heart?’ and ‘are they reliable?’ As someone who is trusted with the gift of other people’s stories, emotions and thoughts, I take the responsibility of building a safe enough environment for my clients very seriously. This influences the physical environments I work in, how I set up and contract at the beginning of a relationship with a client, how I organise my time in order to be consistently available and how I respond to clients in session. Occasionally, things go wrong in a client-coach relationship – with enough rapport, trust and safety built up, we can move past any misunderstandings and use them as a powerful learning process.
This way of thinking has influenced how I am outside of my professional practice. I tend to be acutely aware of how psychologically safe a given situation feels, and will adjust my choices accordingly. I should also add that I am a naturally risk-averse person. Or perhaps it’s less ‘natural’ and more learned. I grew up in a family that had endured an unusual amount of tragedy by the time I came along. My life, health and safety were upheld as the most precious commodity – not to be squandered by doing dangerous things. Of course, there were times in my youth when I rebelled against this as hard as I possibly could. But the tendency to shy away from risk remains. It’s something I work to override when I perceive a risk to be worth taking.
And so, as we cautiously creep out of our homes after three months of relative isolation, my risk assessment process threatens to go into overdrive. While large gatherings are not yet permitted in London, there will soon come a time when I need to use the city’s notoriously busy public transport system. The question of trust appears in this context as I consider whether those running services will prepare adequately to manage risks, whether I can trust my fellow commuters to take necessary precautions and whether the ‘powers that be’ are offering sensible guidance (I’ll let you guess my take on that last question). And hopefully, before too long, it will be safe to congregate in larger groups again. I imagine that, in our first forays into a wider social life, many of us will experience feelings of elation, relief and a new appreciation for experiences we may have previously taken for granted. But I also expect there to be anxiety and awkwardness for those of us who tend towards a more cautious relationship with risk. How can we reach a place where we feel able to trust not only the people closest to us, but the people we share cultural and physical space with? How do we build psychological safety on a grander scale? This question feels especially pertinent in the current climate of oppression being brought fully into the light, civil unrest and resistance. And it’s one that I do not claim to have an answer to, but we can start with a moment of self-reflection. We can ask ourselves questions like ‘what makes me feel safe and why?’, ‘how do I react when I feel threatened?’ and ‘how do I react when my view of the world is challenged?’. An honest examination of these questions may yield some hard truths. It can be helpful to discuss these with someone we feel psychologically safe with. I believe that getting to know what makes us feel safe and why we feel, think and act the way we do is at least the first step towards collective safety and from there, on to healing the deep rifts in our societies.
*I refer to ‘safe enough’ or ‘safer spaces’, rather than ‘safe spaces’ because we can only take steps that contribute to another person’s sense of safety. We can’t create it for them. If someone has a deep internal sense of being unsafe due to trauma, we can mitigate by building enough trust and a secure enough environment for them to begin working on this. It’s neither transparent, nor realistic to claim that “you will feel safe here”.