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When you don’t feel safe in a relationship, your focus shifts from connection to protection.

Instead of turning towards your partner, you’re turning inward or turning away in an attempt to avoid a sense of increasing danger.

And relationship safety is often misunderstood. We tend to oversimplify the state; believing that as long as physical threats are not present, there is no reason to not feel safe (yet there are many ways that we can feel emotionally unsafe in relationships). Additionally, we often dismiss or misinterpret feeling a lack of safety in a relationship. We may chalk it up to our own insecurities or blame it on anxiety arising from within.

You also may be unintentionally behaving in a way that lessens your partner’s sense of safety in the relationship. And so that disconnect or tension that you may sensing could be their attempt to protect themselves.

What Does Not Feeling Safe in a Relationship Look Like?

• Not knowing what to expect from day to day or moment to moment.
• A hesitancy to initiate affection or intimacy because of a pattern of rejection.
• Biting your tongue out of fear of the repercussions of speaking your truth.
• Your emotions being mocked or dismissed.
• Always being asked to change your appearance or demeanor in order to be accepted.
• A feeling of walking on eggshells because of repeated emotional outbursts or unexpected and over-the-top reactions.
• Intimacy and connection are used as both reward and punishment – if you’re “good,” you get attention and if you’re “bad,” it’s withheld.
• A feeling that you have to put on a front or hide certain aspects of yourself in order to avoid rejection or ridicule.
• Your partner frequently threatens to leave or divorce.