Psychological Safety Quotes

“It wasn't that I gave up on her healing, but, as she continued to struggle to get in the door and actively needed her self-hatred to stay functional, I began to realize more deeply that her patterns had meaning and that it wasn't useful for me to predetermine what recovery might look like for her.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“As long as I was aligned with listening rather than with an intention to receive a particular response or to shift something, we would stay on safe ground.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Remembering that the impulse to control is an indication that we are having a neuroception of danger, perhaps we can be compassionate rather than critical of ourselves when we do step in to overtly manage the process.

Perhaps we can begin to ask inside about the nature of the threat that brings on the need to assert control and fix.

As always, dropping the questions into our right hemisphere and not expecting a particular answer in this moment opens the way for a deeper understanding to emerge bit by bit.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Safety IS the treatment. -- Stephen W Porges, 2016”
― Bonnie Badenoch

“the practice of nonjudgmental, agendaless presence [is] the foundation for safety and co-regulation.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“we are adaptive rather than disordered”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“lack of agenda is the primary essence of safety, giving our people implicit permission to bring forward any aspect of themselves that needs attention.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“In these pages, we keep returning to one foundational principle: providing the possibility of emotional/relational safety for our people, be they patients, children, partners, friends or strangers.

We are able to make this offer when they are experiencing their own neuroception of safety, not continuously, but as the baseline to which we return after our system has adaptively moved into sympathetic arousal or dorsal withdrawal in response to inner and outer conditions.

When we neuroceive safety, we humans automatically begin to open into vulnerability, and the movement of our "inherent treatment plan" (Sills, 2010) has a greater probability of coming forward.

When we have a neuroception of threat, we adaptively tighten down at many levels, from physical tension to activation of the protective skills we have learned over a lifetime (Levine, 2010). In that state, our innate healing path will often wisely stay hidden until more favorable conditions arrive.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Since we began with a felt sense of safety this day, several neural streams are initially supporting the renewal of our connection.

In our midbrain, the energies of the SEEKING system are animating the CARE system, which can both foster the good feelings between us and support offers of repair should we have a rupture (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).

Once in connection, our ventral vagal parasympathetic system is affecting the prosody of our voices, our facial mobility, and the attentiveness of our listening, maintaining social engagement (Porges, 2011). Since ventral lateralizes to the right hemisphere, we more easily stay rooted in the right-centric way of attending that keeps us in connection with this moment and with each other (McGilchrist, 2009).

In this intimacy, our brains are coupling in many regions, so there is an experience of social emotional engagement and embodied communication as we become a single system in two bodies (Hasson, 2010).

Because we are trustworthy partners in this healing process, social baseline theory tells us that our amygdalae are calming just because we are together (Beckes & Coan, 2011).

All of this is happening without doing anything, even without saying anything, in microseconds below conscious awareness because of the safe space we have cultivated over time.

We can more clearly understand why Porges says, "Safety IS the treatment".”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We are deeply sensitive to one another's presence”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Sometimes people begin, discover how much pain and fear they are holding, and adaptively decide to take whatever gains they have made and stop. Occasionally we reach the limits of our competence or capacity and must help one of people find someone or a nest of people who can hold their wounds when we can't. We could likely add other situations in which we have parted with someone early in the relationship or at a time that seemed premature. All of this is part of human limitation in both of us.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“I have other stories just as mysterious, just as beautiful, just as sacred, but it seems good to stop here and wonder if it is possible for us to begin to let go of our expectations about the shape in which healing may arrive, to trust the treatment plan lying dormant and waiting within our people, to cultivate a gradually gathering stillness so that, in the safety of the space between, healing pathways have the possibility of revealing themselves.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“PSA: If you decide to label a behavior as gaslighting on social or in real-time, be sure you are correct. Because if you are not, you’d be the one gaslighting.”
― Richie Norton

“In one study investigating employee experiences with speaking up, 85% of respondents reported at least one occasion when they felt unable to raise a concern with their bosses, even though they believed the issue was important.”
― Amy C. Edmondson

“... we might be drawn into a more left-centric way of hearing ... and experience the promotion of safety as a somewhat mechanical process in which A inevitably leads to B-- [ie: the belief that 'my being in a ventral state will automatically draw you into one, and if it doesn't then there is something wrong with one of us'.]

Viewing it that way encourages us to turn social engagement into a technique, even a manipulation of the other person's nervous system toward what we view as a more desirable state. Ironically, when the left hemisphere is dominant rather than supportive of right-centric attending, we have already moved out of social engagement and thus are in no position to offer safe space to another. When we make an effort to return to it, we have forgotten that neuroception is continually arising automatically and not under the control of our will.

The very pressure to activate ventral makes the space between us unsafe.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“integration of right-centric relatedness and left-centric understanding comes and goes for all of us, but it does seem to gain strength and reliability over time.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“I smiled broadly. " ...This is your body's wisdom speaking to us, sensing when it is safe to go forward, pulling back a bit when it might be too much. You and I are just getting to know one another, so I really respect the caution and protection in your inner world." ...

With visible relaxation in her body and strong eye contact, she said, "All my life people have criticized me for being cautious. It means a lot that you like that I'm that way."
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― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“There are so many valuable techniques for regulation, for exploring and integrating traumatic experience, and so on. Once we get to know these protocols, they may pull on us in ways that invite us to seize control of the therapy.

The other pathway suggests that her system holds the answers and that if I can offer enough safe support, it will likely begin to speak with us.

At least cognitively, I can recognize that this person's inner world contains much more information about the root causes of her upset than I do.

From this perspective, I am less interested in dealing with symptoms than moving towards making room for the implicit origin to emerge so that the protective systems can take care of themselves.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“More important than the words or silence is my inner stance of making room for what is stirring within him, becoming alertly still enough inside that his inner world senses safety, the precursor to him opening into vulnerability.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“if our attention is what we're going to do next to accomplish a specific goal (often decrease a symptom) rather than openness to what the other person is bringing to the moment, we have stepped into our left hemispheres and out of relationship- and our patient will feel that as a kind of subtle abandonment. This interchange will likely happen below the level of conscious awareness and yet lead our person to step back a bit internally, awaiting the arrival of true presence, without agenda or judgement, so that safety can arise in the space in between. At that moment, the healing power inherent in this co-organizing/co-regulating relationship arrives. We have been returning to this crucial distinction in these pages, as much as possible with ongoing compassion for the challenge we experience as we open to the right remaining consistently in the lead.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“While good leaders care about business impact, great leaders focus more on psychological impact”
― Narayanan Palani

“Sullenberger later wrote about [air traffic controller] Harten, "his words let me know that he understood that these hard choices were mine to make, and it wasn't going to help if he tried to dictate a plan to me.”
― Amy C. Edmondson

“An implicit foundation of assumed security has slowly grown beneath our feet so that we believe we will go forward together through whatever stumbles may come.”
― Bonnie Badenoch

“When patients tell me of the mild anxiety that comes with them to each session, I no longer think of it as a problem, but instead as an indication of their aliveness at the brink of the unknown.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“implicit memory can change”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Struggles between our people and us over the pace of therapy can disregulate the process into a frenzy or stall it. Returning to following and responding may ease this.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Another way to foster a sense of belonging for employees is to form teams that are encouraged to engage in collective problem-solving. This affords regular opportunities for all members of the teams to express their views and contribute their talents. But leaders of these teams should establish the norm that colleagues treat each other with respect, making room for everyone in discussions and listening thoughtfully to one another. As we saw with high-status students leading the way in establishing an antibullying norm in schools, managers, as the highest-status member of a team, can set powerful norms. A key goal is foster what leadership scholar Amy Edmonson calls psychological safety, which she describes as "the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. People feel able to speak up when needed--with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns--without being shut down in a gratuitous way. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid." No matter how ingenious or talented individual team members are, if the climate does not foster the psychological safety people need to express themselves, they are likely to hold back on valuable input.”
― Geoffrey L Cohen, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides - Library Edition

“But the white collar workforce seems to consist of two groups: those who can’t find work at all and those who are employed in jobs where they work much more than they want to. In between lies a scary place where you dedicate long hours to a job that you sense is about to eject you, if only because so many colleagues have been laid off already.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream