How To Create Safety After Childhood Trauma

Welcome to Trauma Demystified, a podcast brought to you by Bright Horizon Therapies. I’m Natalie Jovanic, a trauma counsellor and resilience coach, and I’ll be your host on this journey.

In today’s episode, we’ll explore how to create safety after childhood trauma. This episode is primarily for adults who have experienced childhood abuse or neglect, though it may also resonate with anyone healing from complex trauma.

As I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, re-establishing safety is a vital part of trauma recovery. But what does safety actually mean? I don’t know about you, but when I began my healing journey, I didn’t have a clear concept of safety. For many people who’ve experienced relational trauma, feeling safe, especially in relationships, can be deeply unfamiliar. Whether your trauma stems from abuse, neglect, discrimination, or racism, these experiences are inherently unsafe. So if you struggle to feel secure in your relationships or the world around you, know that you are not alone. That response is a natural result of what you’ve lived through.

In this episode, I’ll explore what safety can look like after childhood trauma and share practical strategies for increasing your sense of safety. As always, trust your intuition—take what resonates and leave the rest.

Creating safety is a layered, ongoing inner journey. It’s rarely as black and white as psychology sometimes makes it seem. Like physical fitness, it requires consistent practice, patience, and a commitment to growth. Over time, you’ll build greater mastery and feel more empowered in your everyday life.

Understanding the dimensions of safety in healing from childhood trauma

Before we dive into the different dimensions of safety, here are a few essential things to keep in mind.
Safety is a deeply personal experience—there isn’t a one-size-fits-all definition. What feels safe to one person may not feel safe to another. As you move through your healing journey, your sense of what safety means may shift and evolve. That’s not only okay—it’s an integral part of recovery.

The following dimensions are meant to guide you in exploring your relationship with safety. Let them support your reflection, but always return to what feels true for you. Your lived experience, your needs and boundaries matter, and your definition of safety needs honour that.

Physical Safety – The first Step in creating safety after childhood trauma

Physical safety means that immediate harm is absent and that you know, at least on some level, that you are safe in your environment. Even if certain parts of you don’t feel safe, your surroundings are free from physical danger. Physical safety includes clear boundaries around physical touch and full consent regarding touch and any sexual activity. It also means that physical violence, such as hitting, kicking, or other forms of physical aggression, is absent.

Establishing physical safety is often a first step in trauma recovery. If you’re currently in an abusive relationship, it’s usually best to prioritize increasing your physical safety before engaging in deeper healing work.

It is essential to recognize that physical safety is not entirely within your control. For example, you cannot always prevent someone else from being violent, but you can choose how you respond. If you’ve experienced childhood abuse, your ability to protect yourself may feel compromised, especially if certain situations activate old trauma responses. In these moments, reaching out for professional support can be crucial.

While I haven’t personally experienced physical abuse in a relationship as an adult, I’ve made a promise to myself. If I ever found myself in one, I would immediately seek counselling support. This is one way I protect and care for myself—and I offer it here as a possible step others might consider too.

Emotional Safety – Relearning to trust and be seen

Emotional safety is an essential part of how to create safety after childhood trauma, since many survivors struggle with feeling judged or unseen. Emotional safety means you can be yourself, express your feelings, and trust that you won’t be judged or rejected. You feel seen, accepted, and validated for who you are. Emotional safety is a cornerstone of healthy relationships, including the therapeutic relationship with a mental health professional.

Healthy boundaries play a key role in creating emotional safety. Boundaries help protect you in relationships and give you the ability to respond when someone crosses a line. This doesn’t mean you’ll never feel hurt again, but it means you can take care of yourself and set limits. That’s why boundary work is such an essential part of trauma recovery.

Here are two questions that can help you assess your emotional safety:

• Can I share my true feelings without fear of being judged, shamed, or dismissed?
• How do people respond when I am vulnerable? Are they supportive, or do they dismiss or invalidate my feelings? How do people respond when I am struggling? Is their behaviour healthy?

Psychological safety – Feeling respected and heard

Psychological safety is closely connected with emotional safety, but focuses more on respect. You experience psychological safety when you can speak up, share your thoughts, disagree, or admit mistakes without fearing ridicule, shame, dismissal, or rejection. It’s about knowing that your voice matters and that others will respectfully treat your thoughts and feelings.

You might reflect on psychological safety by asking:

• Do I feel safe enough to express my thoughts and emotions?
• How do others respond when I share my experiences or opinions? Is their behaviour respectful towards me?

An important note before we dive deeper: All aspects of safety—whether physical, emotional, or psychological—aren’t entirely within your control. While we can build inner resilience and tools, physical, emotional and psychological safety also depends on how others treat us. If someone repeatedly dismisses your needs or boundaries, it’s worth paying attention. Your experience matters. Feeling safe is not just about coping but also about connecting with people who respect your needs and boundaries.

How social dynamics influence safety after childhood trauma

Social dynamics like oppression, particularly privilege deeply influence your experience of physical, emotional, and psychological safety. In this context, privilege refers to individuals’ unearned advantages due to their membership in dominant social groups. These advantages affect how safe a person feels and how easily they can access environments that support their well-being.

The more privilege a person holds, the easier it is to establish emotional and psychological safety. For example, in white-dominated societies, Black individuals tend to face greater threats to their safety. Similarly, trans and gender-diverse folks are generally less safe than cisgender people. Please note that these are just a few examples to give you an idea and don’t represent the complete picture of oppression. While these dynamics are harmful and not okay, they impose another unfair loss and emotional burden on people with marginalized identities.

Recognizing those dynamics is crucial if you hold one or more marginalized identities. Learning to navigate harmful or toxic dynamics in dominant group settings is often a necessary part of healing. For instance, while I hold white and settler privilege and have more safety than BIPOC individuals, I’m also a non-binary immigrant in Canada, and I’ve been in environments that were emotionally and psychologically unsafe for my marginalized identities. Part of my healing has involved building the skills to protect my well-being while navigating systems that weren’t designed for me.

Being targeted by oppression is harmful, and oppression, while prevalent, is not okay. But it also doesn’t mean you’re powerless or that emotional and psychological safety are entirely out of reach. It means you may need different strategies, more support, and a deeper awareness of how to move through unsafe dynamics while honouring yourself.

Building self-safety – Trusting yourself after trauma

Let’s talk about the final dimension—self-safety. At its core, healing from trauma is mainly about increasing self-safety. This means developing the ability to assess your inner experience, relationships, and environments to determine how safe they truly are for you. While you can’t always control other people’s behaviour, you can build your capacity to care for and protect yourself.

Self-safety is also about increasing confidence in your ability to set boundaries and make decisions supporting your well-being. Furthermore, it’s about learning to trust yourself and your intuition. Since these abilities often get disrupted after trauma, rebuilding them is essential to your healing and sense of empowerment.

Re-defining what safety means to you

Part of how to create safety after childhood trauma is developing your own evolving definition of safety.

When I began my healing journey, I had a naive idea that being healed meant I would always feel safe. Over the years, I’ve understood that safety isn’t a permanent state—it’s about being safe in this moment. I can’t predict the future, and while I hope to remain safe, what matters most is trusting my ability to protect myself and care for my well-being if someone jeopardizes it.

For me, that also includes creating safety plans when needed, even though I hope that I will never need them. Additionally, safety is deeply connected to respecting myself and honouring my boundaries. Knowing I can show up for myself—even in challenging situations—is vital to feeling safe in my body and life.

Here are some ideas on how you can start to create your definition of safety:

• What is safety for you?
• Why does it matter to you?
• How do you notice when you’re safe? How do you notice when you’re not safe?
• Who or what contributes to my sense of safety—and who or what diminishes it?

Remember, your definition of safety may change over time. That’s a natural and healthy part of recovery.

Practical steps to increase safety after childhood trauma

There’s no quick fix for creating lasting safety. It’s a journey of continuous growth—one that involves healing trauma, setting healthy boundaries, learning to assess your environment, and developing trust in your emotions and intuition.

A key part of this journey is learning to assess your level of safety. This involves several interconnected layers:

Learning to assess safety in the moment

If you feel unsafe, acknowledge the feeling—and also explore what’s going on in your environment right now. Ask yourself: Am I exposed to a real threat in this moment, or am I likely safe?

For example, when I’m alone in my apartment and feel unsafe, there’s no real threat present, so that feeling is probably a response to something in the past. Suppose I’m talking to someone who is yelling at me and blaming me over the phone. In that case, there is a threat, perhaps not to my physical safety, but to my emotional or psychological safety.

Checking in with your nervous system

The more dysregulated your nervous system feels, the less safe you’re likely to feel, regardless of your external circumstances. Past trauma can keep the nervous system in a chronic state of alert, so part of healing involves gradually increasing your internal sense of safety.

Evaluating your relationships for real safety versus old fears

Evaluating relationships is a key part of how to create safety after childhood trauma, since toxic dynamics often blur the difference between past and present danger. Toxic or abusive relationships are inherently unsafe, though the level may vary. For example, Boundaries are often ignored in these dynamics, and your vulnerability or honesty may be used against you. Recognizing these patterns and adjusting your strategies accordingly matters to increase your safety.

There’s a big difference between feeling unsafe setting a boundary in a healthy relationship and a toxic one. In a healthy relationship, the fear may stem from past experiences where setting boundaries led to negative consequences. But in a toxic relationship, that fear may signal a real lack of safety.

I’ll explore this further in future episodes. In the meantime, you can download my free ebook, Toxic Relationships 101. The link is in the episode description.

Think of increasing your sense of safety as a growth process. The more you heal and grow, the more you feel empowered to increase your safety.

How to create safety after childhood trauma with Polyvagal theory

Polyvagal theory explains that safety is a state of our autonomic nervous system. Our nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety or danger in our environment, our relationships, and our bodies. This process is called neuroception, and it typically happens outside of our conscious awareness.

One goal of trauma recovery, is to create awareness about this unconscious process.

Explore the nervous system ladder of safety and survival

When we feel safe and connected, our nervous system is in the ventral vagal state. In this state, we feel calm, grounded, curious and engaged. It’s a good state in which to make decisions. However, if our nervous system perceives a threat, it moves into sympathetic arousal, and we are mobilized for fight-or-flight. In this state, we have overwhelming emotions, anger, and anxiety, and we feel out of control. If it perceives the threat as life-threatening, it shifts into the dorsal vagal state, and we feel immobilized, shut down, numb or depressed.

These shifts follow a hierarchy, often visualized as a ladder:

• Top of the ladder: Ventral vagal state (safety and connection)
• Middle: Sympathetic state (mobilized fight/flight)
• Bottom: Dorsal vagal state (immobilized/shutdown)

If our nervous system gets activated, it must move back up the ladder through these states to return to the Ventral Vagal.

Healing doesn’t mean you’ll always stay in safety and connection. Instead, you can return there more easily when the threat has passed. For many trauma survivors, the challenge is that the nervous system gets stuck in states of sympathetic or dorsal activation and have very few experiences of true safety and connection. That’s where the nervous system work becomes vital.

Practices to reconnect with your nervous system

The first step in connecting with your nervous system is to recognize how the different states of your body feel. Here is a simple exercise you can do if it resonates with you. Remember, you can also ask a mental health professional to support you.

What to do when safety feels lost – Responding to dysregulation

A big part of how to create safety after childhood trauma is learning how to respond when your nervous system gets triggered or overwhelmed. If you notice that you’re no longer in a state of safety and connection, the first step is to support yourself in returning to that state. Once you feel calmer, you can begin to explore what happened.

Important note: Not all triggers are “just from the past.” Sometimes, your body picks up on real and present danger, such as a crossed boundary or an unhealthy dynamic repeating itself. Each situation is different and deserves its unique exploration. Some questions that might help:

• What were the cues of danger that activated this response?
• To what extent is my nervous system reacting to unresolved cues from the past? To what extent is it connected to a real threat in the present?
• Who could I reach out to for support or perspective?
• What practices can help me return to a state of safety and connection?

Everyday practices for reconnect with safety and connection

Returning to safety and connection can feel challenging when you’re in an immobilized or mobilized state. The best approach will vary from person to person and the specific situation so it often requires some experimentation. What helps one person might not be the same for someone else. I invite you to experiment with it and learn what works for you and what doesnt.

For more information, check out the episode on polyvagal theory and the window of tolerance, as both of these concepts offer additional helpful practices.

Here are some questions and practices that might guide you in reconnecting with safety and connection:

• Who do I feel safe and connected with?
  • Think about the people in your life who make you feel grounded and secure. How could you reach out to them?
  • Tip: Pets are often a wonderful source of safety and connection, so consider spending time with them if you have one.

• What activities help me feel safe and connected?
  • For example, dancing or listening to my favourite songs can bring me back to a place of safety and connection. Other people like being in nature or writing. So, I am curious what activities or hobbies connect you with a state of safety and connection?

• What places make me feel connected?
  • For some people, a cozy corner in their home brings them a sense of peace. Visiting the zoo helps me reconnect with safety. Where do you feel safe?

• What memories bring me a sense of safety and connection?
  • If you have positive memories, try to revisit them daily, even if just for a moment. Embodying these memories can quickly help you return to a state of safety and connection.

How to create safety after childhood trauma with affirmations

Affirmations can also help you to nurture a sense of safety. While affirmations alone are unlikely to release trauma that’s stored in the body, they can help shift your mindset and support a more hopeful outlook on your healing journey.

I used trauma-informed affirmations during my recovery from childhood and systemic trauma. Though they were just one part of a larger recovery plan, I found them to be a meaningful support. The key is choosing attainable affirmations, ones that signify positive change but don’t feel entirely out of reach.

I don’t recommend pushing through resistance or trying to override parts of you that feel unsafe. Instead, take time to understand their concerns and needs.

Here are some affirmation ideas—but please feel free to adapt them so they resonate with you:

• May I be safe. May I be protected. (I found this helpful in my recovery)
• I can learn to protect myself.
• I can learn to have healthy boundaries.
• The worst is over. I am healing.

Please remember that affirmations require strengthening your boundaries and assessing your safety. While they can be beneficial, they don’t guarantee that you will always be safe. True safety comes when you learn to trust yourself and your intuition and respond to situations in a way that feels right for you.

Befriending the parts of you that feel unsafe

As I’ve mentioned in other episodes, parts work can be a helpful approach to reconnecting with your inner world. In this context, “parts” can refer to emotions, body sensations, patterns, or roles you embody. They might even be associated with certain ages or stages of your life, like my three or 20-year-old part. If this concept doesn’t quite resonate, you can think of it as a recurring pattern.

In this practice, I invite you to have a conversation with the part—or pattern—that feels unsafe. The goal here is to approach it with curiosity and an intention to understand it better. One way to begin is by taking a piece of paper and simply saying: “Hey, I notice you feel unsafe right now, and I want to learn more about what’s going on for you.” Then, allow yourself to write down whatever comes up. Afterward, validate what the part has expressed. This might look like writing something like, “I hear you. I understand that you’re feeling unsafe right now.”

If writing feels challenging, another approach is to use two sheets of paper. Label one sheet “Unsafe” and the other with your name. Place both sheets on the floor, and physically move between the two as you ask and answer the questions. Stand on the paper labeled with your name when you’re asking questions, and move to the paper marked “Unsafe” and embody the sense of feeling unsafe as you answer from that perspective. Rotating between the sheets will help you engage with both parts of yourself.

Remember, parts work can feel unfamiliar or challenging if you’ve never done it before. If this practice doesn’t quite work for you, that’s okay. Consider contacting a trusted counsellor or trauma-informed coach who can support you through this process.

Increasing safety through boundaries

I’ll dive deeper into boundaries in future content, but here’s a simplified introduction:
Your boundaries protect you from harm and define what’s okay for you and what’s not.
If you’ve experienced childhood abuse, you’ve lived through repeated boundary violations. Reconnecting with your boundaries becomes a vital inner process.

Childhood trauma often disrupts one’s connection to one’s body, and because boundaries live in the body, this disconnection can make it difficult to sense, trust, or assert them. That’s why it’s essential to approach this work with gentleness and patience.

You can also use the Inner Safe Place Visualization I shared in episode “5 Effective Trauma Counselling Techniques” to support and strengthen your boundaries. Practicing this regularly can also help you to increase your sense of safety.

A gentle reminder about growth

Setting healthy boundaries is a continuous, evolving process. I would say I have firm, healthy boundaries—but that has come after years of healing work. It took time, patience, and commitment. Over the years, I’ve learned to:

• Trust myself and my emotions
• Reconnect with my body’s signals
• Care for the parts of me that used to talk me out of setting boundaries or excuse others’ inappropriate behaviour

I share this to remind you that recovery is multidimensional and layered. Inner attunement with yourself and boundaries go hand in hand. Reconnecting with parts of you, trusting yourself, and trusting your intuition are interconnected. All aspects of recovery support each other and help you create more well-being for yourself.

Remember, recovery isn’t a linear path, but every step you take—no matter how small—brings you closer to the safety, trust, and connection you deserve. Be patient, acknowledge your progress, and trust that each practice you embrace builds a stronger foundation for your well-being.

If you found this episode helpful, please consider subscribing and sharing it with someone who might benefit. Together, we can continue to support each other on the healing journey.