Strengthening your ability to keep yourself safe as an adult.

Strengthening your ability to keep yourself safe as an adult.

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • March 20, 2022

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Felt safety is the nervous system’s embodied experience of being genuinely safe—not just knowing it intellectually, but feeling it in your bones, breath, and body. It is not the same as simply being physically out of harm’s way or convincing yourself you’re ‘fine’ in your head. Felt safety matters here because without it, your nervous system remains on alert, making it harder to trust your perception, set boundaries, or respond effectively to threats. For you, developing felt safety means practicing real, somatic experiences of protection and calm that rewire your body’s default response, allowing you to finally rest in safety instead of constantly scanning for danger.

• If you grew up in a relationship where safety felt unreliable or unpredictable, you might still struggle to recognize or create safety for yourself as an adult, even when there’s no immediate threat around you.
• Felt safety is more than intellectual understanding—it’s an embodied, nervous system experience that must be rebuilt through consistent practice, nervous system regulation, and gradually learning to trust your own perceptions.
• Building your adult capacity to keep yourself safe often means learning new skills your childhood didn’t teach, including how to regulate your nervous system and create emotional boundaries through trauma-informed therapy.

Many people take it for granted that they know how to protect themselves well and that others would, of course, know how to do the same.

But, much like how two weeks ago we discussed the criticality of tending to your basic medical needs as an adult, strengthening your ability to keep yourself safe can likewise be something that folks who come from relational trauma backgrounds struggle with.

To learn why this may feel like a struggle, and to learn practical, tangible ways to practice keeping yourself safer as an adult, please keep reading.

1. Why is it hard for those from relational trauma backgrounds to keep themselves safe as adults?
2. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
3. But what does it even mean to keep yourself safe as an adult?
4. And this list is just the tip of the iceberg.
5. Rebuilding Safety Foundations Through Protection-Focused Trauma Therapy
6. Wrapping up.

Why is it hard for those from relational trauma backgrounds to keep themselves safe as adults?

It may seem obvious that keeping yourself safe as an adult should be a top priority. You would know, inherently, what exactly this means and how to do it. In my personal and professional experience, those with relational trauma histories may struggle with this life skill – sometimes mightily so.

Why?

As I’ve written about before, coming from a relational trauma history can leave one with multitudinous, biopsychosocial impacts that can lead to deficits in seemingly basic life skills that their non-traumatized peers don’t struggle with.

And one of these “seemingly basic” life skills can be how well or poorly one is able to keep themselves safe as an adult. 

When you come from a relational trauma history – the kind of trauma that results over the course of time in the context of a power-imbalanced and dysfunctional relationship (usually between a child and caregiver) – you may experience some following biopsychosocial impacts.

Having maladaptive and dysfunctional beliefs about yourself.

For example, conscious or unconscious thoughts and beliefs that look like: “I’m a broken person who deserves to be treated poorly.” or “I can only attract assholes and cheaters. A nice guy would never give me the time of day.” And these thoughts and beliefs inform your actions or lack of actions to keep yourself safe.

Having maladaptive and dysfunctional beliefs about others.

For example, conscious or unconscious thoughts and beliefs that look like this. “He’s not really that abusive – that’s just how he shows love.” “Everyone gets screamed at sometimes in their relationships. That’s just marriage, right?” And these thoughts and beliefs inform your actions or lack of actions to keep yourself safe.

Having no appropriate ideas of adequate safety measures because of a lack of modeling.

For example, a child who grew up with a father who drove after drinking. Or a mother who never called the police because she thought all police were bad. He might struggle to reach out to proper authorities for help protecting themselves. Or might condone friends and partners driving under the influence with them and their own children in the car. Our early relationships and experiences inform what we later internalize as normative beliefs about the world. And if we have no models, we may lack functional ideas about safety as an adult.

Struggling to feel connected to your body and thus not able to access your more subtle somatic sensations (and therefore sound instincts) that warn you of danger. 

Someone who can’t at all feel her somatic sensations – especially the subtle signals – might miss important cues and clues her body is trying to send her about unsafe situations, places, and people. Often those from relational trauma histories learned it wasn’t safe to exist in their bodies, and so later, without access to the body’s wisdom, this might lead to an impaired ability to keep one safe as an adult.

And these are just a few of the ways growing up with a history of child abuse, neglect, or chaos might lead to maladaptive and dysfunctional ways of viewing safety and being able to practice safety as an adult.

Thus, learning, re-learning, and refining the life skill of keeping yourself safe as an adult is a critical part of relational trauma recovery.

What does keeping yourself safe as an adult actually look like in practice?

In essence, I personally and professionally believe that keeping yourself safe as an adult means protecting yourself as a good enough mother or father would have done for you.

This definition is, I admit, subjective (meaning it will be unique for all of us however we define good enough parenting), so, to catalyze your thinking about this, I’ll share a list of practical examples that come to mind for me.

Keeping yourself safe as an adult may mean:

Doing whatever it takes to live in a safe, peaceful environment without the presence or threat of abuse, violence, and pain inside and outside of your home.

This may include choosing safe neighborhoods (not to mention cities and states) to live in and renting and buying structurally sound apartments and homes to dwell in. This may mean living alone and getting away from your family of origin or romantic partner if they are a source of abuse and/or ensuring you live only with safe, trustworthy people if you share your housing. (And I have to acknowledge how huge a privilege this ability to choose your environment is. It’s a privilege that some people – because of financial insecurity and the systemic forces oppressing them that led to such insecurity and poverty of choices – may simply not have).

Designing your primary personal environments – your home, your car, your workplace, etc. – to help you feel safe in whatever ways you can.

This may mean installing multiple locks on your doors and/or installing Nest cameras to monitor the inside and outside of your home. This should mean making sure you have functional, working smoke alarms, carbon monoxide detectors, fire extinguishers, escape ladders, and go bags/earthquake kits (or other version of necessary tools for your unique geographic climate that help ensure safety). This means making sure your car runs smoothly and is kept updated to maintain your safety while in it, and more.

When, in public and outside of your primary environments, making choices that honor what your somatic sensations and instincts want to do to keep you safe.

Maybe this means sitting with your back to the wall while at work and at restaurants so you have a plain view of the door. Maybe this means rapidly and confidently crossing the street when unknown figures are walking toward you and you don’t feel comfortable (and not worrying or caring that you may appear rude while doing so!). And maybe this looks like wearing masks in environments big and small because doing so helps you feel like you’re better protecting yourself regardless of what other people think and feel about your choices.

Being able and willing to explore next-level interventions to remove and block unsafe people from your life. 

This may look like estranging yourself from certain family members. Or blocking them on social media (or getting off social media altogether), blocking their numbers on your phone, and filtering their email addresses to folders so their messages never land in your inbox and startle you. This may look like you getting a PO Box versus listing your street address on any mail. This may look like insisting that no one shares your home address, email, or phone number with anyone else without your explicit consent. Or this may look like being willing to call 911, pursue restraining orders, or hiring an attorney to act as a buffer between you and the abuser/aggressor so you don’t have to deal with them directly.

What else goes into rebuilding a felt sense of safety as an adult survivor?

There are so many other ways a good enough parent might take care of their child and thus countless other actions you could take to help ensure your own safety as an adult.

Now, you might read this essay and think that the above actions seem excessive.

But I want to invite you to consider that, if you’ve spent your life feeling unsafe and unprotected by those who should have protected you well against life circumstances (not to mention if you’ve spent your life feeling unsafe and unprotected because your caregivers were the very people who directly abused you and/or threatened your life), these action steps – far from being excessive – are, instead, necessary and reparative.

Taking all and every action step that helps you feel even moderately safer and more protected in the world may greatly help regulate your nervous system and bring you back into your Window of Tolerance.

And, more ephemerally but still equally important, these actions may send a signal to the little child inside of you who needs strong, fiercely protective and assertive reparative inner parenting to help heal from her relational trauma history.

Rebuilding Safety Foundations Through Protection-Focused Trauma Therapy

When you tell your therapist you still let dangerous people into your life because “it’s not that bad” or you ignore every alarm bell your body sends because feeling nothing kept you safer than feeling everything as a child, you’re revealing how profoundly relational trauma disrupted your most basic protective instincts—but therapy can help you recognize the 15 signs that your boundaries need work and rebuild your capacity to protect yourself with the fierce care you always deserved.

Together, you examine the maladaptive beliefs that normalize danger: the unconscious conviction you deserve poor treatment, the idea that abuse equals love because that’s how it was packaged in childhood, the assumption that everyone tolerates being screamed at because your family made it seem normal. Your trauma-informed therapist helps you recognize how disconnection from your body—once a brilliant survival strategy—now prevents you from accessing the somatic wisdom that signals threat, those subtle gut feelings that could guide you away from unsafe people and situations if only you could feel them.

The therapeutic work involves both cognitive restructuring and somatic reconnection—challenging thoughts that minimize danger while gradually rebuilding your capacity to feel and trust bodily sensations without overwhelm. Your therapist helps you develop a personalized safety plan that might seem excessive to others but feels reparative to you: multiple door locks that finally let you sleep, blocking family members without guilt, sitting where you can see exits, crossing streets when uncomfortable without worrying about appearing rude. Through role-play and gradual exposure, you practice asserting boundaries and implementing safety measures, learning that protecting yourself isn’t selfish or dramatic but the sacred responsibility of reparenting the child who was never properly guarded.

Most powerfully, protection-focused therapy helps you understand that every safety measure you take—from installing security cameras to pursuing restraining orders—sends a crucial message to your nervous system and inner child: someone is finally, fiercely protecting you, even if that someone has to be yourself, proving that you matter enough to be kept safe in ways you never experienced but always deserved.

Where to Start: Three Concrete First Steps

Let me offer something concrete before we close. Because driven, ambitious women can intellectually understand everything in this post and still feel paralyzed about where to actually start. So here’s a sequence.

First: start with the body, not the behavior. Before you reorganize your home security or block numbers on your phone, spend a week simply noticing what your body does in different environments and relationships. Where do your shoulders drop? Where does your jaw clench? Where do you hold your breath? These micro-sensations are the data your body has been trying to share with you. Getting literate in that data is the first step — because you can’t make aligned safety choices when you’re disconnected from the signals that tell you when you’re actually unsafe.

Second: identify one small, concrete act of self-protection and do it this week. Not a comprehensive overhaul — one act. Setting one limit with one person. Installing one additional lock. Blocking one contact that sends your nervous system into high alert. The goal isn’t a perfect safety fortress. It’s the repeated, accumulating experience of your own self-care delivered by you to yourself. Over time, that repetition updates the internal story your inner child carries about whether you matter enough to be protected.

Third: if you’re blocked — by guilt, by fear, by the sense that you’re somehow being dramatic — bring that specific block to a therapist. That blockage is where the old beliefs live. And those old beliefs are where the most important healing happens. You don’t need to have this all figured out to begin. You just need to be willing to look at what’s stopping you — and to trust that what’s stopping you has a story worth understanding.

Dani, a former client who is now a trial attorney, described the shift this way: “I used to think keeping myself safe was about being strategic and vigilant. What I learned was that it was actually about believing I was worth protecting. Once I actually believed that, the strategies came easily. Before that, they never stuck.” That belief — that you’re worth protecting — is the both/and underneath all of this. You are.

Wrapping up.

So, if you read this essay and thought to yourself “I see myself in those maladaptive beliefs.” or if you don’t even know how to feel your body and get in touch with your subtle somatic signals, I want you to please consider reaching out for therapy support: you matter way too much to dismiss or devalue your safety.

Now, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

Did you relate to today’s essay? Does keeping yourself safe as an adult feel like a skill you’ve had to learn and/or is it something you still struggle with? What’s one more action, step, or behavior you personally take to help keep yourself safe as an adult after your adverse early beginnings?

Please, if you feel so inclined, leave a message in the comments below so our monthly blog readership of 23,000 plus people can benefit from your wisdom and experience.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Both/And: You Deserved Protection Then — and You Can Build It Now

In my work with clients around safety, I encounter a specific paradox again and again: the women who most urgently need to build safety in their adult lives are also the ones who feel the most shame about not already having it. The implicit belief runs something like: “If I were stronger, smarter, more together, I would have figured this out by now. Other people just know how to keep themselves safe. What’s wrong with me?” (PMID: 9384857)

The both/and that liberates this shame is a simple but non-trivial one: you didn’t learn how to keep yourself safe because no one showed you how — and you can absolutely learn it now. These aren’t in conflict. The first is a historical fact about your formation. The second is a present-tense truth about your capacity.

Take Leila. She’s a data scientist in her mid-thirties who came to me after leaving a relationship that had slowly convinced her that her instincts were wrong. For years, she’d override the flutter of unease she felt when he raised his voice, the tightness in her chest when he checked her phone. “I told myself I was being irrational,” she said. “He told me the same thing. Eventually I believed it.”

What she needed to hold simultaneously was this: her instincts hadn’t been wrong — they’d been systematically overridden by someone who benefited from her not trusting them. And she now had the capacity, in a different context, with support, to rebuild access to those instincts. She deserved to be protected from the beginning. She also had everything she needed to protect herself going forward. Both. And.

You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you didn’t get. You can love someone and acknowledge the harm they caused. You can be strong and still need help. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the texture of a fully lived life. And of healing that actually holds.

The Systemic Lens: Safety Was Never Meant to Be a Solo Project

The dominant cultural narrative around personal safety places the entire burden on the individual: be smarter, be more aware, be more vigilant, make better choices. When this narrative meets someone who grew up in an unsafe environment, the compound message is devastating: “You should have known better. You should have protected yourself.”

Peter Levine, PhD, psychologist and developer of Somatic Experiencing therapy and author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, has written that safety is fundamentally a co-regulated experience. Mammals — human and otherwise — regulate their nervous systems partly through connection with other regulated nervous systems. An infant cannot establish felt safety alone; she requires an attuned caregiver whose calm, regulated nervous system communicates to hers that the world is safe. When that co-regulation is unavailable or inconsistent, the developing nervous system doesn’t learn safety. It learns vigilance. And vigilance, practiced over years, becomes the default operating system. (PMID: 25699005)

This matters because it reframes the question entirely. The question isn’t “Why can’t I just feel safe?” It’s “Where are the regulated, trustworthy relationships and environments in which my nervous system can finally update its model of what safety feels like?” Safety isn’t a cognitive achievement. It’s a relational and somatic one — it develops through accumulated experiences of being in the presence of people and environments that reliably don’t threaten you. This is the neurological basis for why trauma-informed therapy works: it provides a consistent, attuned relational context that the nervous system can use to practice safety in real time.

There’s also a structural dimension worth naming. The ability to choose a safe neighborhood, leave an unsafe relationship, access therapy — these are not equally available to everyone. Systemic forces constrain what safety-building choices are actually available to a given person. Acknowledging this doesn’t excuse anyone from the work of building adult safety — it contextualizes that work within the real conditions in which it must happen, and it asks us to hold compassion for the people for whom safety-building is structurally harder, not just emotionally harder.

Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking “What conditions do I need — and how do I start building them, one step at a time?”

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Heal: Building a Genuine Felt Sense of Safety as an Adult

What I see consistently in my work with clients like Dani and Leila is that the call to “keep yourself safe” lands differently when safety wasn’t something your environment reliably provided. For many driven women who grew up in relational trauma environments, safety wasn’t modeled — it was something you read the room for, something you earned through perfect behavior or strategic invisibility. So the idea of actively building safety as an adult can feel almost conceptually foreign. The impulse instead is to white-knuckle it: try harder, trust no one, or stay so busy that vulnerability never gets a foothold. None of those strategies actually build safety. They just give you more sophisticated ways of managing danger. The path I walk with clients is different — and it starts from the ground up.

Here’s the path I walk with clients, in roughly this order:

1. Start with your body, not your willpower. A felt sense of safety isn’t a decision — it’s a physiological state. If your nervous system has been organized around vigilance since childhood, you can make all the intellectually “safe” choices in the world and still feel chronically unsafe inside. Before anything else, we work on helping the body access more settled states. This might look like consistent sleep and food routines, reducing substances that spike cortisol, or beginning a gentle somatic practice — even something as simple as noticing your feet on the floor or placing a hand on your sternum when anxiety spikes. Understanding the connection between trauma and your nervous system is often the first revelatory step: your body isn’t broken, it’s doing exactly what it learned to do. That understanding changes the relationship you have with your own responses.

2. Name specifically where safety feels absent — and where it doesn’t. “I don’t feel safe” is too broad to work with. Safety is contextual. Leila felt quite capable in her professional role — strategic, decisive, controlled — but stepped into certain interpersonal dynamics and felt immediately like a child who couldn’t trust her own perceptions. Mapping the terrain matters: Where do you feel most unsafe? In conflict? When you assert a need? When someone you love is unpredictable? In your own body? Once you can name the specific contexts where the absence of safety shows up most strongly, you can begin to understand what your system learned to fear — and what you’re actually trying to protect against now.

3. Build small, concrete safety-building practices into your existing life. Safety is built incrementally, through repeated experiences that gently challenge the old story. This might mean practicing one small act of self-advocacy per week — sending back the wrong order, saying no to a social obligation, telling a trusted friend what you actually need — and noticing that the feared consequence doesn’t arrive. It might mean building physical safety practices: knowing where exits are, having a reliable transportation plan, keeping your phone charged. It might mean setting one boundary with someone in your life who routinely crosses yours, and staying in your body while you do it. None of these are large moves. But each one builds new evidence that safety is something you can actually generate.

4. Do the deepest safety work inside a reliable therapeutic relationship. Leila told me something that has stayed with me: “I thought I understood that I hadn’t been safe. I didn’t know I’d never actually felt safe — that I didn’t know what it felt like to exist in my body without bracing.” That kind of discovery happens inside relationship, not in a workbook. Individual therapy — particularly approaches like somatic therapy — can help you develop what practitioners call an “earned secure base”: a relational experience that is consistent enough, attuned enough, and safe enough to genuinely re-pattern how your nervous system expects to be met. This is where the deepest shifts happen, and it’s not work that needs to be rushed.

5. Identify and address the structural conditions that undermine safety. Internal work is essential and it’s not sufficient on its own. Safety is partly built from the outside in: from relationships that are actually safe, from environments that don’t require constant vigilance, from financial stability that reduces the low-level hum of precarity. As we explored in this post, the systemic lens matters here — safety-building is structurally harder for some people than others, and that’s not a character flaw. This step asks: What are the external conditions in my life that are genuinely undermining my sense of safety? And what is one concrete thing I can address? Sometimes that’s a relationship. Sometimes it’s a living situation. Sometimes it’s a financial buffer that creates more room to make choices from something other than fear.

6. Practice receiving help as part of safety — it’s not weakness. One of the most consistent patterns I see in driven women from relational trauma backgrounds is an overdeveloped self-sufficiency that functions as armor. If you never needed anyone, you could never be let down by anyone. But that strategy also prevents the co-regulation that safety actually requires. Learning to let other people help — to reach out when you’re struggling rather than managing it alone, to allow yourself to be seen in moments of need — is itself a safety-building practice. It’s a quiet act of courage, and it almost always feels wrong before it feels right. The inner child who learned not to need anything is the one who needs this most.

Building a genuine felt sense of safety is not four-week work, and it’s not linear. Dani would tell you there were months where she felt she was going backwards — and then a moment where something quietly settled in her body, and she realized the baseline had shifted. That shift is available to you too. If you’re ready to explore this work, I’d encourage you to look into individual therapy, the Fixing the Foundations self-paced course, or schedule a consultation to find the right place to begin. You deserved safety then. You get to build it now.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer