What are the safety protocols for a relationship?

​I gave a talk yesterday about safety in the workplace. When you talk about safety in a workplace, most minds drift to active shooter drills, natural disaster preparations, obstacles one might trip over in the hallway and how to avoid neck issues while slouching and staring at your computer screen all day.

These are all important safety concerns, but all of them combined don't create near the safety risk that comes with a lack of emotional safety in the workplace.

When we are born, our brains begin to wire in a way that hopefully allows us to anticipate a future of comfort and confidence. That happens when adults show up in our early distresses and bring us soothing and safety and security and a sense that we are seen by them.

But by the time those babies show up to the workplace, many of them no longer anticipate a future of comfort and confidence, because relationships in their lives, early and later, have not offered that soothing and safety and security.

Many of them are workers who have never felt seen.

While I was preparing for this talk, it occurred to me just how many areas in life where we prioritize safety, and yet when it comes to the most important element of our lives, our relationships - safety - especially emotional safety, is rarely if ever talked about.

Before a plane leaves the runway, safety drill.

Before my teen started driving, hours upon hours of safety instruction.

Starting an exercise routine, here's how to protect your back.

I spent 15 minutes last weekend listening to a pharmacist tell me how to safely apply ointment to my child's rash.

Everywhere we go it's "safety first."

But has anyone ever talked to you about the importance of an emotionally safe relationship? Has anyone ever talked to you about what that looks like and how you make it happen?

The answer is likely no. Because the general assumption seems to be that we know nothing about safety in almost all areas of our lives, so we are bombarded with safety instructions, but yet somehow we know everything we need to know about having emotionally safe relationships.

So, many of us have no idea how to process anger. We have no idea how to say things like I feel sad or I feel lonely or I feel unseen. We also have no idea how to HEAR those things with any level of comfort from someone sitting next to us.

We have no idea how to recognize that the silent treatment may be silent on the outside but it's a screaming hell on the inside. We have no idea how to recognize a screaming hell on the outside may feel like an angry attack at you, when it's really an angry attack at the demons inside me.

We have no idea about these things because where we've obsessed over physical safety for our lives, we've minimized the importance of and turned a blind eye to the reality of a workforce - a human race - living emotionally unsettled.

The reality is many people around us do not anticipate a future of comfort and confidence.

So more and more, we have a workforce that knows what to do in the unlikelihood that someone starts shooting at them in the workplace or that a tornado is racing down a nearby street, yet have little idea what to do about the people around them who feel like they have a tornado living inside them.

Obviously the answer to that is complicated.

It starts in our personal relationships. It starts with NOT assuming we are providing an emotionally safe space for the people in our lives and actually having the conversations with one another. It starts with asking the question, do you feel safe here?

Safe enough to say I feel sad or I feel alone or I feel like you don't see me.

And it starts in your place of work. It starts with assuming people don't feel emotionally safe and that they have no clue what to do about that.

As complicated as some of the answers are, many are quite simple. Because everyone is still looking for what they came into the world looking for.

They are looking for soothing and safety and security.

They are looking to be seen.

Looking to be seen for who they are today. And looking to be seen as full of the challenges and hardships they faced on the road to getting to who they are today.

Before a plane ever leaves a runway, we learn how to use our oxygen masks.

It's time we start helping people know that before we leave the runway of this relationship, at work or otherwise, I need you to know: I am you oxygen mask.

You are safe here.