Dr. Saliha Afridi On How To Create Emotional Safety For Your Heart And Body
Dr. Saliha Afridi, clinical psychologist, managing director of The LightHouse Arabia and Bazaar’s columnist, explains how emotional safety requires breaking armour around the body and a glass case around the heart
We all want to feel emotionally safe. Many of us will avoid threatening people and situations and go to great lengths to make sure we don’t suffer emotional hurt. From our very first heartbreak and then with every subsequent burn and betrayal, we make a deeper commitment to ourselves to keep our heart safe and never let it get hurt again. And while this is done with the noblest of intentions, we do not realise that when we put our heart behind a metaphorical glass case, sure, it is protected from experiencing pain and sorrow, but there it is also disabled from feeling rapture and joy.
The disconnect from the body
For many girls, the disconnect does not stop there. From the time she is born to the time she reaches adolescence, she receives hundreds of thousands of messages from media, caregivers and society about what her body should look like. With these messages internalised, the body becomes an object for her to judge, control and manipulate. The body, with its own mind and its own intelligence (the heart-mind and the gut-mind) senses the violence and lack of safety created by the egoic-mind and starts to build an armour of muscle tension and rigidity around it.
The body in armour and the heart in a glass case
Most of us experience difficult emotions or traumas during childhood and adolescence which is when we come up with our protective coverings and our defensive relational patterns. It is no surprise that we are self-protective because at that time a broken heart threatens our very existence and so we conclude that it is best to not feel certain feelings, and that means we have to avoid certain experiences, states, and people. And with every painful experience, we reassess: who will I trust, who will I let in, what emotions will I feel, what emotions will I flee… and all this happens before we reach adulthood. Then once we get to adulthood, we just hit the repeat button on our relational patterns and engage with life from an operating system that was created to protect a young child or a sensitive teenager.
So, by the time we reach adulthood, our hearts are in a glass case, our are bodies in protective armour and we are numb, dissociated from our life force. We pride ourselves on not hurting when someone causes us pain, or not letting things get to us as they do to ‘sensitive people’. It is not that we are not hurting, it is just that we do not feel the hurt because we are so disconnected from our body – but the body remembers every emotional blow. Dr. Gabor Mate, a psychiatrist and trauma expert, talks about unprocessed difficult emotions resulting in physical health diseases in his book When the Body Says No, and that is how eventually, after years of neglect and abuse, our bodies say no more through physical ailments or mental dis-ease.
Creating safety for our heart and our body
According to researchers of the Polyvagal Theory, difficult and unprocessed emotional events rewire our nervous system so that we are in a constant state of fear and defense, always scanning the environment and our relationships for signs of danger (the armour), or numbing it so that one cannot feel the threats in the environment (the glass case). When the nervous system is in self-protection mode, we are physically incapable of feeling safe, and when we feel unsafe we are incapable of connecting with others or to our true self. Feeling safety in our body is the path to feeling acceptance, trust, love, joy, connection and purpose.
The embodied pathway to safety
In order for us to re-engage with life and live open-heartedly, we must first reconnect to our bodies and our hearts and to do this we, as adults, have to go back and heal that relationship that got damaged and severed in childhood. This has to be done with compassion and care. Yes, we betrayed our bodies, but we did not know better. We were young and all the grown-ups around us had the same message of disapproval and judgment of the body. And yes, we encased our hearts, but we did it from a place of protection, we did not know that eventually the case would become a prison.
“In adulthood, we repeat our relational patterns and engage with life from an operating system that was created to protect us as a young child”
Dr. Saliha Afridi
Think of your body as a separate and small child. It has been wounded and it is very self-protective. In order for you to heal that child, you will need to show up every day with a loving devotional energy of love and care rather than a functional agenda of healing.
Try these practices for creating embodied safety…
1 Breathwork.
It is the fastest, easiest and most accessible way to start healing the body. There are many types of breathwork such as box breathing (in for 4, hold for 4, out for 4, hold for 4), or 4-7-8 (in for 4, hold for 7, out for 8), or extended exhale (in for 4, out for 8). A general tip: the exhalation should be longer than the inhalation, which is what calms down the fight or flight systems and makes the body feel safe. There is also resistance breathing – like blowing bubbles or blowing through a straw.
2 Self-touch.
A loving touch can create safety for the body. This can include putting your hands in places where the nervous system is going to respond with relaxation. This includes: hand on heart, hands on cheeks, hands on knees, hands in prayer, hands clasped, arms crossed, hands on the forehead or temples, back of the head, cupping the ears with fingers on the lobes, hand over abdomen, hand on the heart and abdomen. Do this with the intention of love and care for your body while saying affirmations like, “I am safe.”
3 Movement.
When we do not process our emotions, they become trapped in our bodies. One way to release trapped emotions is through dancing and shaking. Free dancing is a great release and the shaking can be done one body part at a time.
4 Long-hold stretches or yoga.
Try about 60-120 seconds to start to bring the blood flow and energy back into the hardened fascia in your body – this will help melt away the armour of muscle tension and rigidity and give you access to the creative life energy.
5 Alternative treatments.
Try things like ice baths, needling, cupping, massages, and equine therapy all with the intention of releasing trapped emotions, healing the relationship with the body, and creating safety so that there is a connection within us and around us.
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s January 2023 issue.