Aspects of Psychological Safety

The 10 aspects of psychological safety aim to move towards a felt sense of safety. At the same time, it is about moving from a trauma-based understanding of “I know I should be safe… but somehow I don’t feel safe” to an understanding of “I can sense and feel that I am safe, and therefore I know deep down that I am safe.” This embodied understanding of safety makes it possible to process and integrate trauma.

In the following sections, I will briefly introduce each of the ten aspects,

• how trauma affects safety,
• how this aspect of safety feels, and
• which specific interventions (exercises, therapeutic attitudes, everyday strategies) help to regain safety.

Each aspect can be strengthened in a targeted manner. At the same time, the levels influence each other: those who feel safe in their environment can feel their bodies more easily. Those who feel their bodies can regulate their emotions better—and so on. This provides you with a practical roadmap for those affected or their companions.

Each aspect can be strengthened in a targeted way. Restoring psychological safety requires integrating cognitive, emotional, relational, and physiological aspects.

1. Environmental Safety & Safe Places

• Effect of Trauma: During traumatic events our body and / or our emotions have been fighting for survival. Trauma sensitizes the nervous system so that even neutral environments may feel dangerous or unpredictable. The body stays primed for threat, making rest, stillness, and basic self-care difficult.
• Environmental safety means creating living environments and routines where your body is protected from harm, especially protection from perpetrators or past sources of danger. It includes the basics: secure housing, financial stability, access to food, and predictable everyday rhythms.
• Rebuilding physical safety means establishing more places where we can rest and repair, where our system can exhale. We need a safe home and additional places of safety as a “back-up system”. – These could be a favourite spot in nature or places where we can seek refuge (like a friends house, where we can feel at ease).

You need real safe places, where you can stay and where you can go – Not just an inner sanctuary.

2. Relational Safety – Safe People

• Effect of Trauma: Trauma often occurs in relationships – through neglect, rejection, betrayal, or harm. In moments when we needed support, we may have been abandoned, dismissed, or unseen. As a result, closeness can feel dangerous, trust becomes fragile, and we may rely on hypervigilance, withdrawal, or self-reliance to avoid further pain.
• Relational safety means having people around you who are emotionally attuned, respectful of boundaries, and consistent in their behavior. It exists on many levels—from loose acquaintances and community or professional contacts to friends, support groups, trusted individuals, family, and intimate partners. It also includes people who can offer practical or professional support in times of need. Each layer contributes to your sense of belonging, stability, and support. A resilient life is built not only on close relationships but on a broad network of emotional, social, and practical connections.
• Rebuilding relational safety in therapy builds on a non-judgmental attitude, consistent attunement and co-regulation. We create a safe space where you feel emotionally held and in control. This gradually allows to seeking out additional environments and people who feel steady, respectful, and predictable. It includes building upon what is already working, i.e. growing the network with additional interactions and gradually deepening selective ties. It also means finding safe people who can support in times of crisis, so that a real network of safety and trauma prevention is created. Over time, these layers of safe connection restore your confidence in others and rebuild a secure relational foundation.
  
  

You need real safe people. People, which respect your boundaries. A network, you can rely on in times of crisis.

3. Safe Temporal Orientation

• Effect of Trauma: Trauma impairs our temporal orientation. The traumatic events of the past, once triggered, feel as if they are happening in the present. Symptoms of PTSD / Complex PTSD include visual and emotional flashbacks, intrusive memories, and difficulty staying oriented in current reality. Even with milder symptoms, we may lose the objective view on current reality and may perceive the present through the lense of past hurt.
• Temporal Safety is the ability to remain oriented in time. This means knowing that the traumatic event is in the past and over and that the present is different from the past. Understanding that we are a grown up, capable, responsible adult now, not overwhelmed by the event and not a helpless child. Temporal orientation in time means distinguishing past, present and future: Learning from the past, acting responsibly in the present and planning the future.
• Rebuilding temporal safety in the present involves separating past and present and establishing a clean observer state. This means for therapy, that we stay with at least one foot fully in the present. We look at the past from an observer perspective, applying grounding practices and using anchors for the present moment. We may also support temporal orientation by naming “what’s now” (in the present) versus “what was” (in the past) and slowly uncoupling past threat from present experience.

Traumas pull us into the past. Therefore, finding and anchoring security in the present is fundamental to processing and integrating trauma.

4. Neuroceptive Safety – Body & Nervous System

• Effect of Trauma: Trauma alters the body’s neuroception, causing the nervous system to detect threat even in safe situations. This leads to chronic fight, flight, or freeze responses, dysregulated stress hormones, and difficulty accessing calm, restorative states.
• Neuroceptive Safety means experiencing the body as a safe home and having environments and routines that signal safety to the nervous system. This includes adequate sleep, regular nutrition, movement, sensory regulation, and a balance of rest and activity.
• Rebuilding Physiological Safety involves gradually learning self-self awareness: This means helping the nervous system notice safety through breath, movement, grounding, and co-regulation. In therapy, we track bodily sensations, practice titration and pendulation, and strengthen the system’s ability to relax, allowing the body to release tension accumulated from past threat responses.

Rebuilding calm in the nervous system often requires biological completion and processing of stored high energy trauma states.

5. Emotional Safety

• Effect of Trauma: Traumatic events can overwhelm our emotional processing capability. The emotional intensity moved beyond the normal range (sadness, constructive anger, disappointment) into survival-level states (grief, rage, collapse). Without people who could meet or soothe our emotional distress after the event it was difficult to land those strong emotions. This can create fear of expressing feelings, fear of being judged or shamed for our emotions, and chronic emotional overwhelm or numbness.
• Emotional Safety is the ability to meet your own emotions with curiosity, compassion, and steadiness. It means the freedom to feel and express emotions (e.g. anger, grief, joy, shame) without judgment, urgency and without without fear of being shamed, rejected, or overwhelmed. Emotions become experiences you can notice and process rather than threats to your survival.
  • It includes cultivating self-attunement to one’s own emotions and needs, self-compassion and appropriate self-expression.
  • In addition we need emotionally safe people, i.e. least a few people who can receive our honest emotions, people we can trust and where we can be authentic.
• Rebuilding Emotional Safety means regular mindful check-ins, welcoming all emotions and practicing curiosity and self-compassion. In therapy, we build resources and resilience through breath, movement, and self-soothing, so emotions feel manageable rather than overwhelming. Stuck emotional processes can be completed. Emotions are processed step by step by allowing them to surface in small, tolerable increments (e.g., through Somatic Experiencing Titration). By honoring what our system can handle today we strengthen the window of tolerance, practice self-compassion and build a toolbox of internal and relational resources to process and integrate emotions.

Restoring emotional security requires attunement to oneself, processing emotions, and emotional completion.

6. Cognitive Safety & Clarity

• Effect of Trauma: Trauma can disrupt cognitive processing, making it difficult to orient, focus, plan, or think clearly. Intrusive thoughts, re-experiencing, hypervigilance, and self-blame may create mental chaos and interfere with decision-making. Stress hormones like cortisol, released during hyperactivation of the nervous system, further impair focus and cognitive function. Emotional and neuroceptive safety both support and are reinforced by cognitive safety.
• Cognitive Safety means having the mental space to reflect, reason, and make decisions without being overwhelmed by past trauma or intrusive thoughts. This involves manageable information flow and being able to enter a clean observer state and review memories from multiple perspectives.
• Rebuilding Cognitive Safety involves stabilisation, somatic support for cognitive processes and cognitive reorganisation:
  • Work begins with stabilisation – establishing neuroceptive and emotional safety (see above) so the nervous system can settle and thinking can occur without fear, anger, or other overwhelming emotion. Mental clarity and effective cognitive functioning return more easily once the physiology has stabilized and difficult emotions have been processed.
  • It is also essential to reduce cognitive and sensory overload, helping the mind stay present and improving focus. In addition, somatic techniques for grounding, reality testing, and spatial orientation, as well as practices that support cognitives grasp and mental organization are being applied to support this process.
  • Cognitive work then builds on this foundation by initially focusing on the observer state, and subsequently strengthening the ability to take different perspectives. This lays the ground for clarifying distortions, gradual pacing of new ideas or challenges, and strengthening conceptual understanding and mental flexibility. Mental reframes are only used late in the process of trauma therapy. With adequate support and nervous-system regulation, cognitive clarity, solid decision-making, and a renewed sense of mental agency can be restored.

Mental clarity enables you to enter an observer state, take on different perspectives, and find new interpretations of the past yourself.

7. Intrapsychic Safety – Sorting Your Parts

• Effect of Trauma: Trauma can fragment the inner world. As a result we may see conflicts between parts of the self, harsh internal critics, dissociation or avoidance of internal experience. For sufferers of PTSD this can mean that parts (often “Difficult Parts” or “Firefighters”) are easily triggered and then take over our behaviour in destructive ways.
• Creating more Internal or Intrapsychic Safety means creating more harmony your own inner world. It means accepting our internal complexity and pacifying our inner conflicts. This includes exploring deeper layers of our thoughts, urges, emotions, impulses, and “parts”, and discovering how even “Difficult Parts” can contribute to safety. Intrapsychic safety grows through strengthening healthy parts, softening inner critics, befriending difficult and protective parts, and cultivating a compassionate inner dialogue.
• Rebuilding internal safety involves gently map our internal system and parts, building trust with disruptive or protective parts. It is important to create collaborative inner communication so your mind becomes a safer place to inhabit. In therapy, drawing from models like Internal Family Systems (IFS), we map and negotiate between inner parts, ensuring no aspect feels threatened, allowing for safe internal dialogue.

Curiously sorting through the various aspects and “parts” of inner experience enables acceptance, self-compassion, and integration.

8. Narrative Safety – Reclaim your Story

• Effect of Trauma: Trauma often fragments memory and distorts judgement. Our ability to form a coherent, compassionate story about what happened becomes impaired. After trauma we have to try to make sense of what happened, but we do after emotional and physical overwhelm and with the limited resources available at the time. Particularly as a child, we may develop severely limited believes, guilt, self-critical and self-blaming narratives.
• Narrative / Meaning-Making Safety means having the psychological and emotional space to make sense of your story without becoming overwhelmed, ashamed, or confused. Narrative safety includes the ability to reflect on what happened from a grounded place, understand sequences and causalities and integrate adaptations you had to make, and reclaim a coherent sense of self.
• Rebuilding Narrative / Meaning-Making Safety requires a foundation of a regulated nervous system. In therapy, we therefore initially focus on biological and emotional completion and this way build a foundation to look at the event from a different perspective. This allows to make sense of the event and its impact in a different way – without forced reframes . This may include slow storytelling, tracking body responses, clarifying what was not your fault, and forming a compassionate, empowering interpretation of your past.

Narrative Safety allows you to reclaim your story and make sense of it from todays perspective.

9. Identity, Systemic & Cultural Safety

• Effect of Trauma: As explored earlier, trauma can disrupt emotional regulation, distort our life stories, contribute to inner conflicts and strains relationships. All this can make it hard to feel a coherent, positive sense of who we are. Inherited family patterns, community histories, or cultural narratives that were never designed to hold our pain can add further layers of disconnection from ourselves and others. The result can be a fragile sense of identity and a feeling of being out of place or rejected by the surrounding world.
• Identity Safety: Cultivating an inner knowing that embraces every part of you — your experiences, personality, gender, sexuality, race, culture, abilities, values, and beliefs — with the quiet conviction: “I am okay as I am. Others are okay too. – I have the right to exist authentically and be connected to others, even if I am different.”
• Systemic Safety: Learning to meet societal structures (legal, medical, educational, governmental) as navigable rather than overwhelmingly threatening – developing personal strategies, knowledge, and boundaries so these systems become tools you can use rather than forces that define you.
• Cultural Safety: Feeling free to hold, express, and live your own beliefs, practices, and history while moving through the wider culture. The safety to belong and, when helpful, intentionally seeking or creating (maybe smaller) communities and sub-cultures where your whole identity is welcomed and you can feel belonging.
• Rebuilding Identity, Systemic, and Cultural Safety:
  • Start by focusing on processing your individual trauma history, which has shaped your sense of self. In carefully attending to yourself your own situation you can regain more individual agency.
  • As part of this process, you may discover additional aspects like inherited experiences, relational, cultural and collective trauma as well as how you have suffered specific injustice through prevailing systems. These specific collective / systemic aspects also needsattention.
  • Build from within by realising your resources, practicing self-assertion and living with dignity. It is not necessary to resolve every burden of your ancestral lineage or cultural entanglement before you can feel valuable today. – Externally, seek or create small, reliable connections – such as like-minded groups, mentors, or resources – that support your authenticity. Develop practical skills for navigating systems and cultural norms (e.g., learning boundary-setting and standing up for your needs).
  • Focus on what you can influence to foster an individual sense of place and worth.

Focus on your individual resources and challenges. Develop individual personal agency and belongings to enable individual growth. – Larger systemic contexts (lineage, identity group or culture) may need mindful attention healing as well.

10. Existential & Spiritual Safety – Connection & Belonging

• Effect of Trauma: Trauma often shakes both a person’s existential and spiritual security. Trauma can shake one’s sense of purpose, meaning, or belonging in the world, leading to existential fear, emptiness, or disconnection. Spiritual or moral frameworks may feel shattered, unsafe or irrelevant after betrayal, loss, or violation. We may begin to distrust God and the universe, or turn away from spiritual or religious communities.
• Existential and spiritual safety means feeling anchored in a life that has meaning and integrity — whether through personal values, creativity, community, or spiritual connection. It is the sense that one belongs in the world and can live in alignment with what matters.
• Rebuilding Existential / Spiritual Safety involves exploring sources of vitality and coherence: Integrating trauma into a meaningful life narrative, reclaiming agency, and cultivating practices (secular or sacred) that restore hope, faith, connection, and a sense of place in the world.

Successful trauma processing can restore and deepen existential security (meaning, control, belonging) and spiritual connection.

Safety & Trauma Therapy

A lack of psychological safety is a consequence of trauma. It impairs our freedom of choice on all levels – where we live, whom we trust, what we feel, who we want to be. Without psychological safety, the nervous system remains locked in survival, replaying threats where none exists. Life after trauma may become limited by trauma-induced conditions and beliefs.

Psychotherapy aims to rebuild personal self-efficacy (agency). Restoring a felt sense of safety is a crucial step in this process, enabling individuals to gain greater personal responsibility and self-confidence.

Body-oriented Psychotherapy

The 10 Aspects of psychological safety reveal why generic “talk therapy” and “positive reframes” often fail: they cannot bypass the body’s veto power. When we fear danger, when our body is in a state of alarm, when an internal part is braced for betrayal, or when self-blaming narratives are replayed, insight alone often is not sufficient quiet the symptoms of PTSD.

This is where body-oriented psychotherapy can provide a complementary approach which is designed to enable psychological safety on each of its levels in a specific way. Establishing this embodied sense of safety is an essential element of the therapy process.

In body-oriented trauma psychotherapy, reestablishing an embodied sense of psychological safety is an essential part of the therapeutic process.

Therapy Process

Trauma therapy supports reprocessing stuck emotions and biological states. This process is non-linear and often requires loops and iterations. Nevertheless, the 10 levels of safety do provide clues to the sequence of a typical therapy or healing process:

By tending to each layer, titration by titration, resource by resource, the body, mind and nervous system can integrate the traumatic experience. In this process, the ten Aspects of Safety are interwoven. In therapy they will be revisited as needed, adapting to your unique journey towards safety, healing and integration.

Ultimately, trauma therapy is not about erasing the past, but about expanding the capacity in the present. This aims to accept, contain, and integrate both the traumatic wound and the life that arises from it. Safety is not an absolute end state, but a gradual process of improvement. However, once a sufficient level of safety has been restored, the focus can shift from mere survival to pursuing a better life.

Restoring a sense of safety enables agency in current life. This makes pursuing quality of life instead of mere survival possible.