Why a relationship may not make you feel safe and loved
When talking with clients or even just those who comment on my content on social media, there is one phrase or opinion that I probably hear more than anything else. When I ask the question, what do you think you’ll get to feel when you’re in a relationship?
The answer: “to feel safe and loved.”
Now I think this is absolutely admirable and true - it’s a deep deep desire we all have to feel safe and loved.
I’ve got a hot take on this one - the relationship is not the solution.
Pursuing a relationship so that you get to feel safe and loved is misguided because it’s highly likely that when you get into that relationship, you’ll be looking around doubting it because you don’t automatically feel safe and loved. You’ll wonder - is it that I’m with the wrong person? Is it that I’m self-sabotaging? I have what I’ve been looking for for so long, why don’t I feel the way I expected.
Well my friend, I’m here to unpack exactly this point and point you in the productive direction so you can actually fast track yourself toward getting there.
But before we dive in, let’s get two important caveats right out of the way here:
This post is not talking about true physical safety. If you are feeling unsafe in your relationship, where your well-being is at risk or what’s going on might be considered abuse, please seek out whatever support you need to get yourself out of the situation.
In this entire post, we’re talking about a healthy relationship. I know you aren’t out here saying to yourself, “I just need a boyfriend, any boyfriend and then I’ll feel loved.” This post is starting from the basic assumption that you’re dating selectively and looking for someone that you think is really a fit for you, someone with long-term potential and trying to solve for feeling safe and loved in a relationship with someone you like.
Okay, now that we’re clear - what I need you to understand is that you can be in an objectively good relationship with a great guy and still feel unsafe and unloved.
There’s two ways this plays out.
First, a situation where you sometimes feel safe and/or loved but sometimes you don’t.
When you are experiencing this, it’s often a situation where “things feel good most of the time” but then there are times in the relationship where you feel completely unheard (which leads to you feeling unsafe) or you feel like they’re asking you to ignore real feelings that you’re having (which makes you feel like you aren’t being loved for who you authentically are.
The key element in this example is the “sometimes.” Often the dynamic that then plays out is you spend a ton of time analyzing whether there’s something objectively wrong or whether this is your anxiety getting the better of you. You ask yourself (and probably your three group texts and multiple of your close friends) whether your standards are too high or if you’re being too picky.
The hard part about this situation is that there’s not an objective right or wrong.
Sometimes, inconsistency in a relationship dynamic is a sign of a bad fit. Sometimes it’s a sign that you struggle to feel safe even when things are going okay because you’re so used to always being on guard for danger.
So how do you tell the difference? Keep reading 🙂
The second way this plays out? It sounds like this…
“Yeah, I mean he’s great - he’s consistent. He communicates well. He shows that he likes me. He’s cute. I just don’t know… I’m not sure I feel that spark? Like something feels missing?”
This, my friend, is something that will not magically go away if you find another great guy.
Because what we’re describing here is that you don’t feel safe when things are going well (notice the parallel to the previous example?). If someone likes you and is consistent, your nervous system and your subconscious are teaming up to say “hey this feels really weird and new, I feel like something’s wrong?”
But when I hear stories like this it is almost always from women who have come to me bemoaning the pattern they’ve had of inconsistent situationships, the love bombers, the here one day gone the next guys.
If you often question or get suspicious when things are going well, it’s a sign that your subconscious is only comfortable with the drama.
And girl, I get it. This was my story for years.
If they were interested in me and showed it consistently, if I’m being really honest with myself, I got suspicious. “What does it say about them that they’re so available?” Looking back it’s heartbreaking that I thought it so implausible that somebody could just be interested in me and showing it!
Which brings us to the why of this phenomenon.
Why a relationship doesn’t automatically make you feel loved and safe
Other people don’t make us feel things. We make ourselves feel things.
When we say, “she hurt my feelings,” what we really mean is “she did something that I decided hurt me.” You have agency that ultimately dictates whether or not you’re hurt by the comment.
This is why if somebody walked up to you today, full of hate and vitriol and said to you, “I hate your purple hair,” you’d probably look at them and think to yourself, “wow that’s weird” because you don’t have purple hair (I’m guessing) nor are you insecure about it and so them insulting you doesn’t feel insulting.
Now on the other hand, if you are constantly obsessing about whether people are judging your love handles and then your best of friends, with completely innocent intent says to you, “that dress makes you look so curvy,” you might take the compliment but also immediately think to yourself about your love handles and feel insecure OR you might even be hurt by the comment she said.
Notice it’s actually not the intent of the comment that determines how it affects you and it’s not the content, it’s what existing feelings you have about yourself.
So when we think about wanting to feel loved and safe, it comes back to our own beliefs about ourselves. If we don’t believe that we’re worthy of love, then it’s really difficult to believe that somebody new in our lives is truly loves us.
This primarily applies to feeling loved. Safety, on the other hand, is related to our beliefs but it’s also deeply related to our nervous system. For this reason, you can be in a relationship with someone who really cares about you, who is showing deep affection and attention and probably progressing toward love but you may not feel safe if your body has stories running that tells you attention isn’t safe (maybe you were the quiet kid and you had a sibling who was the trouble kid who got all the attention so you learned safety was in staying invisible).
Or you can be in that same relationship and when your new partner is tired and slips on in effort for a few days and it brings up old stories in your mind about your past partner and all the sudden you’re completely anxious and overthinking. Your feelings of safety are not about the relationship that you’re in, there about your history and the fears that are coming up accordingly.
So in order to create a life where you are in relationships where you feel loved and safe, the goal is not to find the perfect person who will make you feel that way, but to address the stories that you’re telling yourself that might be stopping you from feeling loved and the deeper subconscious or nervous system stories that make it hard for you to feel safe.
The truth about feeling loved and safe
In all of my programs, this is one of the topics that we tend to come back to again and again. When you begin taking responsibility for the stories you’re telling yourself that are making you feel hard to love or not feeling safe in your relationships, it’s completely normal to begin to wrestle with: where does the feeling of safety really come from?
Really simply, feeling safe comes from a belief that we will be alright.
But the world is chaotic, people are unpredictable, and so much is out of our control. How can we ever believe that everything will be alright? Well, if you were paying attention, you’d notice that I didn’t say “everything will be alright” but rather “we will be alright.”
If we place our ability to feel safe in the outcomes in the world around us, of course it feels borderline impossible to feel safe because we understand that we can’t control the entire world around us or the actions of other people. If we are thinking this way, then of course we constantly feel on edge because the determining factor of whether or not we get to feel calm today is outside of ourselves.
Not very sustainable.
But on the other hand, if we can build our belief around our own ability to respond to situations good and bad and be alright, then we can live in an unpredictable world and still find safety.
Safety will always be unstable and unpredictable if they depend on other people acting or feeling in a certain way. Instead, if we can reinforce that we will be alright regardless of what situations occur around us, we create a long term, sustainable path to safety.
This exact same concept applies to love (and we dive way deeper into this inside of Exclusive, if you are particularly focused on improving how you feel in your dating life).
If we only allow ourselves to feel loved when the other humans in our lives exhibit certain actions, we make love an unreliable or unpredictable force in our lives, and our self-worth goes along for the ride.
On the other hand, if we can reinforce for ourselves that we love and support ourselves, whether the people around us are loving us or not, then love becomes more stable and dependable in our lives because we’re not held at the whims of other people.
How to feel more loved and safe in your relationships
With all this said, how are we supposed to approach relationships, you might be asking? Am I just supposed to not care whether I get love from other people or about the stability of my relationship?
Of course not.
The key takeaway here is about the foundation of feeling loved and safe. When we try to build stable, healthy relationships on the foundation of other people’s thoughts and actions, we’re building an unpredictable house. This is why we feel unsure and constantly questioning.
Once you begin building your own personal foundation, every relationship you add on top - friendship, romantic, familial - becomes more stable and rich. These relationships confirm what you already know - you will be alright and you are worth loving.
But if today, you don’t feel like you have the beliefs or the skills to create that foundation for yourself, to hold the beliefs that you’re worthy of love, you’re deserving of having what you want, that you’ll be alright no matter what, then this is your opportunity.
The world reflects back to us what we believe about ourselves (there’s a whole lecture on this inside of Exclusive because it’s such an important point!) so your ability to work on your own beliefs will amplify and improve all of the external factors of your life.
The best part of this is, you don’t have to dramatically change the structure of your life in order to start doing this.
If I were to give you a few starting steps to build yourself a more solid foundation of safety and love, I would suggest:
Begin to get curious about where you picked up the beliefs you have today. What patterns and experiences contributed to these stories? When is the first time you remember believing this about yourself? Are there any parallels with important childhood experiences?
Start to challenge these beliefs - you can use your logical brain for good here. How might these stories not be true? What evidence might you be overlooking? What’s an alternate interpretation of events?
Focus on supporting yourself first when things are difficult in life before you seek support from other people. This can be as simple as when you get a challenge or a difficult piece of news, taking a deep breath and repeating to yourself “I can handle this. I will be okay.” before taking any other action. The more you collect proof that you can handle any situation regardless of the outcome, the more safety becomes something you create for yourself.
Seek out resources to rewrite old narratives - we do some of this work inside of Exclusive - but the key is to work with the deeper subconscious stories that came from childhood so you can address your doubts at the root and begin healing them so you can start having a different experience today.
Questions? Reach out via Instagram DM and we can discuss your situation and see if there might be a way I can support you!
