Emotional Safety in Relationships: Learning to Trust Love, Yourself & the Unknown
So many women quietly whisper to themselves:
“I’m struggling to feel consistently safe and at peace in my relationship.
I’m going back and forth about being here.
Most of the time, I just want to run.”
If this feels like you, you are not alone.
And you are not broken.
In this post, drawn from a live Q&A I shared inside my Living in Love community (which is now also a podcast episode), we’re going to explore emotional safety in relationships, nervous system regulation, and how all of this connects to manifesting the love and life you truly desire.
Why you don’t feel “consistently” safe (and why that’s not a failure)
When we think about emotional safety in relationships, we often imagine a finish line:
“Once I heal enough, I’ll feel safe all the time.”
But emotional safety is not a static destination. It’s a living, breathing process.
If you’ve had relationships in the past that felt unsafe – or if your childhood dynamics didn’t give you a secure, regulated template for love – your nervous system is going to carry that memory.
Even when you enter a loving, healthy relationship, your body can still be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This is where pendulation comes in:
You feel safe… then you don’t.
You feel regulated… then suddenly you’re triggered and overwhelmed.
You feel open and connected… and then you feel like shutting down or running.
This doesn’t mean you’re failing.
It usually means your nervous system is in the process of recalibrating and expanding its capacity to hold more love, intimacy and connection.
Nervous system regulation in relationships
One of the most powerful foundations for feeling safe in relationships is learning how to regulate your nervous system.
That looks like:
Recognising when you’re in a survival response (fight, flight, freeze or fawn)
Having tools to self-soothe and come back to your body
Expanding your window of tolerance so you can hold more sensation, emotion and intimacy
A simple practice I love is inner resourcing:
Close your eyes and breathe, allowing your exhale to be longer than your inhale.
Scan through your body and notice where you feel anxiety, overwhelm or fear. Name the sensations out loud.
Then, look for a part of your body that feels a little more at ease or grounded – your feet, hands, belly, tailbone, etc.
Breathe into that area and name those sensations out loud as well. Let that sense of ease slowly expand through your system.
This doesn’t mean all your fear disappears in one go.
But it gives your system a felt sense of, “There is somewhere inside me that feels a bit more okay. I am not completely overwhelmed.”
From that slightly more regulated state, you can begin to access your deeper truth.
Don’t make big relationship decisions from your trigger
When you’re in a moment of intense emotional charge, it can feel like the only option is to leave, run, shut down, or blow everything up.
That’s your survival system trying to keep you safe.
In those moments, your mind often tells stories like:
“See, this proves I can’t go all in.”
“See, they don’t care about me.”
“See, I’ll never be truly safe in love.”
Your deepest truth does not live in that reactive state.
First, you tend to your body and emotions:
Breathe and self-soothe
Name what you’re feeling
Take space if needed
Offer care to the younger parts of you that are activated
Then, once the charge has softened, you can ask:
“What is my truth here?
Is it really time to leave?
Or is there still more for me to explore and experience in this relationship?”
This is how we build self-trust and emotional safety from the inside out.
A personal story about safety & staying with myself
In the Q&A, I shared a recent moment in my relationship with my partner, Liam.
I was deeply triggered. A boundary had been crossed. In the past, this is where I would:
Pull up the entire past
Build a case against him in my mind
Attack, shut down or go into a fury spiral
Tell myself, “See, I can’t trust this. I have to run.”
This time, something different happened.
I felt the intensity in my body. I knew a boundary had been crossed.
But instead of going into the old pattern, I chose to stay with myself.
I didn’t pull up the past.
I didn’t attack him in my mind or out loud.
I gave myself space to feel, regulate and process the emotional charge.
I slept.
And I spoke to him the next day from a grounded, clear place.
We were able to repair, honour the boundary and move forward – and it actually created more safety in our relationship.
This is what becomes possible when we do the deeper work: the same trigger, a completely different response, and a new level of intimacy and trust.
Feminine energy, masculine energy and feeling safe
Another big question that came through in the Q&A was:
“How do I connect with my feminine energy? I feel stuck in my masculine and the need to control everything.”
The first thing I always name is:
Your feminine cannot fully come forth if she doesn’t feel safe.
I often see the feminine and masculine like this:
The masculine is the banks of the river.
The feminine is the water flowing through.
Without solid, present banks, the water (feminine) just goes everywhere. Chaos.
So rather than trying to get rid of your masculine, we want to heal and empower him so that he can:
Create presence
Offer structure and containment
Hold space for your emotions, creativity, sensuality, chaos and joy
Help your body feel safe enough to open
If you grew up without examples of healthy masculine and feminine energy, you’re not alone. Many of us are learning this now, as adults.
Working with your nervous system, your family patterns, your mother line and father line, and building a sacred inner union is powerful work in this area. That’s a big part of what we explore inside programs like Heart Speaks, Grounded In You and The Sacred Art of Loving Yourself.
Manifesting from emotional safety and self-trust
Emotional safety in relationships is deeply intertwined with manifestation.
Whether it’s:
Calling in a new relationship
Reweaving the relationship you have with your children
Creating a deeper connection with yourself
Opening to more support from life and the divine
…your nervous system and inner world are part of the manifestation equation.
Some reflection questions from the Q&A:
What are the patterns that keep replaying in your relationships?
Where did you learn them?
What are you no longer willing to tolerate?
What kind of relationships do you actually desire to have – with your kids, with yourself, with a partner?
Are you embodying those qualities now, even in small ways?
And when doubt or fear around receiving comes up, ask:
“What am I actually afraid of here?”
“What does receiving this bring up in my body?”
Meet that part of you with tenderness.
Receiving is vulnerable precisely because we’re not in control of it. That’s part of its magic.
You don’t need to clear every last doubt and fear to manifest love or support.
You’re allowed to grow, learn and soften into trust as it arrives.
Surrender, aligned action and living in the unknown
One of the final questions from the Q&A was about balancing surrender and aligned action:
“How do I stay open and receptive when the external world feels uncertain? And how do I know when to surrender vs. when to act?”
The truth is: the external world is always uncertain.
The only constant is change.
Manifestation is stepping into the unknown. We don’t know exactly how or when our desires will arrive. Often, they come in unexpected ways, at unexpected moments – when we’re not obsessing, but simply living.
Aligned action isn’t:
“If I do this, will it make it happen?”
Aligned action is:
“This is what I feel genuinely called to do.
This is who I’m becoming in the process.”
Your life is not just about ticking off manifestations.
It’s about who you become — more grounded, more loving, more expressed, more connected to your body and your truth — along the way.
Want to go deeper?
If this sparked something for you, I invite you to listen to the full Q&A episode, where I walk through all of these questions in real time:
If you’d love practical support with emotional safety, nervous system regulation and coming home to yourself, you can access my free Integration Program, which includes guided practices like inner resourcing and more:
🌿 Access the free program here
And if you’re ready to dive deeper into this work around relationships, self-love and embodied manifestation, you can explore the different pathways to work with me here:
💗 Explore ways to work together here
I’m so glad you’re here.
Your desire to feel safe, loved and connected is sacred — and it’s absolutely meant for you.
With love,
Monique 🤍