Safer Communication: Playing with assumptions, projections, and owning your experience

Let's be honest: healthy relationships are difficult for most people. Sure, it may be easy to start a connection. But if you want  meaningful friendships, partnerships, and family relations to last… that's a whole different story. 

It's not easy because we’re constantly negotiating between our need for safety and our need for expansion.

The closer the relationship, the more apparent this becomes. On the one hand, we want to feel safe, loved, and  “just be ourselves.” On the other, we want to try new things, experiment, and push edges - in other words, grow alongside people closest to us.

We want our relationships to evolve with us. That's how we know they're meaningful.

But for this to be possible, a baseline of safety must come first. Only when we feel a solid foundation are we able to take up risks. As John Bowlby, a British psychologist and the first attachment theorist noted, “life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.” 

How to build that secure base in relationships is a question both universal and individual.  As mammals, we're wired to live in tribes, we respond to certain social cues as a species. At the same time, due to our individual stories, we all have different pieces in our jigsaw puzzle of establishing safety.

In this series of Safer Communication workshops, we explore different aspects of how to create more of that safety as a foundation for growth and learning through relating. 

This month, the theme will revolve around assumptions, projections, imaginings, and stories that come up in relationship. How do we navigate these to communicate safer? 

More info coming in the next few days, as I am designing this experience.