3 Ways to create emotional safety.

1. Creating a container.

There’s a place in Omokoroa where the trees remind me of something sacred in my heart. It feels magical, innocent, and pure, but it also hurts, a bittersweet ache. I lie down under the trees and watch the leaves above my head. For some reason, this always makes me want to cry. It feels like I belong there, yet it’s somehow out of reach.
When I feel emotions bubbling below the surface, I go there and move them through, I cry or express them in a way that matches the state: stomp, moan, curl into a ball, dance. Now my body knows this place and feels safe there to express.

Creating a container for emotion, whether with a therapist or under a tree, signals safety to the body. It says, you’re allowed to let go now.

2. Music as a bridge.

Music can meet your joy, anger, and sadness like no words ever will. It is a clear stream that allows emotions to flow through. I have a bittersweet playlist. These songs hit me at my core every single time; sometimes I play them in the car to have a good cry:

Black Friday – Tom Odell
Singing in My Soul – Fly My Pretties & Age Pryor
Skinny Love – Bon Iver
Awards Season – Bon Iver
Creating a Dream – Xavier Rudd
The End. – November Ultra

Music bypasses thought and speaks directly to the nervous system. Slow, emotionally resonant music gives feeling a rhythm to move through instead of getting trapped inside.

3. Creative translation.

Painting and writing help me translate emotion:

Emotion → Vision → Sensation → Language.

Moving experience from one perceptual system to another is called cross-modal mapping. It’s used in hypnotherapy for chronic pain and across many therapeutic modalities. Another term is synesthetic translation (or synesthetic metaphor): when an inner state (emotion, sound, sensation), is deliberately re-mapped into a different sensory form.

Painting, writing, or moving turns emotion into form. When feeling becomes colour, shape, or language, it creates enough distance to be felt without overwhelming you.