Feeling safe is an essential aspect of wellbeing that is rarely given attention in modern health, education, and public policy.
When humans feel safe, they are healthier: their bodies and minds are calmer, they sleep better, form relationships more easily, see things more clearly, and create more freely.
Sensing safety is a whole person experience that is commonly understood across cultures. It can be impacted by place, people, perspective and embodied history.
Sense of Safety is an integrative lens that helps health, education, and public policy practitioners to prioritise whole person wellbeing.
A shared language for health
Signs, Symptoms, Behaviours & Tests
Many forms of care in our community rely on measurable forms of evidence that are observed from the outside – like the leaves of a tree. These define much of modern diagnosis, outcome measures and understanding of human distress.
Relationships, Experiences, Meaning & Context
Some impacts on the tree are more difficult to observe, subjective, relational and meaningful data often hidden beneath the soil of culture, history, and environment. Each tree has roots that connect them to the forest – to neighbouring trees, to community, to our history, and to place. These roots, studied by the social sciences, are an important part of understanding health.
Connections, Dynamics,
Patterns & Flow
The trunk of the tree carries unseen, and often unnoticed processes that connect the roots and the leaves. These wired and wireless communications and movements flow within the trunk to bring nutrients and growth. These processes impact the whole tree. Understanding these integrative processes is the key to seeing the whole, not just the parts. Seeing the whole is a sophisticated generalist skill.
People are like trees – a whole organism with roots, trunk, and leaves. Noticing the processes and patterns of impact on the whole tree is a gift of generalism across the disciplines.
One of these connecting and moving dynamics is: Sense of Safety.
Whole Person Domains
Initial studies have identified domains of the whole that impact Sense of Safety:
a broad map that helps us to see what is important to the whole person.
Click on a bubble to find out more!
Environments
Social Climate
Relationships
Body
Inner Experiences
Meaning and Spirit
Sense of
Self
Whole Person Dynamics
This research has identified active processes that build Sense of Safety:
Dynamics that can guide how we offer care as well as becoming a shared healing goal of care.
A complex sensory, relational, neurological, and intuitive process of attending to and noticing of self, other and context that is a building block for integrity, connection and coherence. It requires concurrent attention or co-awareness and contributes to sense of humour, creativity, capacity to relate and dialogue, as well as capacity to hold the tension of uncertainty, dialectics or paradoxes.
“Loss of Broad Awareness can be due to scattered, fragmented, blocked, entranced, or hyper-focused attention. Each of these processes decrease awareness of the whole – whether physiological (eg,. intoxication or illness), neurological (eg., dementia, or trauma related altered states of consciousness), functional (eg., preoccupation, or distraction by noise), relational (eg., disconnection or loss of trust), or intrapsychic (eg., rumination, or avoidant inattention). Derealisation, depersonalisation, flashbacks, amnesia, emotional numbing, dissociation, somatisation, dysmorphic body experiences, distractibility, and experiences of self as empty or divided are names for some of these altered states. At its most extreme, loss of Broad Awareness can cause a kind of blindness, a switching off, a forgetting, a numbing, an absence.”
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