Safety First
Our nervous system's need for safety can inhibit repair. The remedy is mutual courage and mutual generosity.
I watched Xander’s eyes brim with tears, as he let his gaze settle in the middle distance past the camera, probably somewhere on a wall or bookshelf or piece of art. A space in their shared apartment I’d never see behind the laptop they were both hunched over. Ali didn’t move. She studied Xander. After a quiet beat she spoke. “Because I understand now. I was spinning out. I was so angry and so sure that you knew you were hurting me. I couldn’t hear your side of things. But I can now. ”
Finally Xander spoke up. “Thank you. I just want you to understand. And to trust me.”
***
Most relationship conflict is not about the thing we say it’s about. It’s about our inability to see each other, because our fears and our desperate need for safety is barring our capacity for understanding.
When relationships begin to fracture, both people are often asking for the same thing in different languages or on different terms. Each wants to feel seen and understood. Each wants to assert their story, and to be met with reassurance. But when both people are operating in that space, both partners meet each other with defensiveness - ultimately and often a rejection of the feelings that each partner so desperately needs validated. And this creates a divide, because each is waiting for the other to show up first. This is how repair stalls. Not because love is gone, but because fear is puppet mastering both partners’ behaviors.
When we feel unsafe, we become fixated on the other person’s behavior. We track the details of what they do and say. We set unspoken expectations. We believe that we need our partner to do things differently so that we can finally relax.
But trauma, fear, an activated nervous system creates a filter that informs how we perceive our partner’s behavior. We look for danger first. We make assumptions and construct narratives that support the narrative that we’re unsafe.
In this state, that safety becomes conditional. Honesty must be met without reaction. Emotion must be mess free and expressed perfectly. Growth must happen quickly, or even immediately. We crave perfect behavior from the person we love so that we don’t have to feel afraid anymore. Within these constricted expectations, we’re asking our partners for perfection so that we can feel comfortable.
But you probably already know that perfection is never a reasonable expectation.
Take the common pairing of a people pleasing partner and a more emotionally reactive one. The people pleaser has learned, through traumatic experiences and then patterning over the course of many years, that their truth can cost them connection. The idea of disappointing someone, especially someone they love, is terrifying. When their partner reacts with anger or overwhelm, the people pleasing partner’s body remembers: this is dangerous. So they retreat. They withhold the harder truths - not out of malice but as a survival impulse.
On the other side, their partner feels the absence. They sense the half truths, the delayed disclosures and the subtle avoidance. Uncertainty makes them anxious. Anxiety ramps up their emotional response. They long for clarity, for kind directness, for honesty up front.