In our last post, we began a discussion the increased difficulty for children to stay safe with the current state of political and social relations in the US and many parts of the world.
Children are seeing mixed messages everywhere they look and many of them will be ones with which you as a parent may not agree. Of course, you can try to block these types of images from your children but that can often lead to them hearing misleading or misunderstood claims from someone on the Internet or at school.
There was probably a time when this sort of intervention could have been effective due to the dearth of information sources available until the turn of the century. News and newspapers were pretty much the only sources of the information for almost all of the country.
Now there is no shortage of websites, television channels, or social media outlets telling your children any number of versions of events that could have taken place on a given day. This can lead to a loss of safety in their lives that can be difficult to cope with.
In the first part of this post, we looked at Dr. Sandra Bloom and her idea of dividing safety into four different domains: Physical, moral, psychological, and social.
We saw that physical safety was a bit more than just not harming yourself or others physically, it was also fostering your own ability to be proactive in addressing one’s own physical and mental health as well.
Physical safety also would seem to be the easiest form of safety for a family to recognize and intervene with, at least in terms of physically harming themselves or others.
Moral safety is seen as somewhat more vague but still important to a person’s overall feeling of safety. It is basically a person’s ability to see that power is wielded in responsible ways around them, be that by their family, peers, teachers, politicians, police, etc. If a person watches the news or looks on the Internet and sees example after example of different people in power making and breaking promises to people they vowed to keep safe, this can be a blow to their ability to sit and feel safe in their life.
Today we will look at the dimensions of Psychological and Social safety. As we will see, all four dimensions will have some areas of overlap and all dimensions can have some affects on the others especially the outward signs of difficulty.
In Bloom’s conception of psychological safety, when a person becomes gradually overwhelmed by their emotions, either by trauma or other more gradual means, they begin to lose the ability to use their own internal resources to help themselves cope with stressful situations in their lives (Sanctuary, pp. 115-116). In a time of turmoil such as this a child or adolescent who has lost their ability to remain safe psychologically will often turn to other means of helping themselves by using external sources to help themselves cope.
In some cases an older youth may turn to drugs or alcohol as a means of self-medicating as a means of perhaps creating a false sense of safety or at least not caring for a little while. Getting drunk or smoking marijuana are common means for teens to forget stressful areas in their lives. Of course, once the substance wears off, the problems that drove the behavior return creating a cycle that can last for years if not interrupted.
Another frequent symptom of a loss of psychological safety is called self-injurious, self-harm, or “cutting.” Of course, there can be other forms of self-harm like burning or punching one’s self but it is all typically done as a means of coping momentarily with intense emotions.
Social safety, on the other hand, is the ability of a person to remain safe in their interactions with others (Bloom, p117). As in the other domains, when we lose that sense that things are within our ability to maintain ourselves emotionally we can begin to engage in behaviors that can have larger ramifications down the road.
A person who is looking for escape from distressing feelings or a loss of control over their emotions can often engage in risky social behaviors like unprotected sex. This is typically a symptom of someone who struggles to maintain appropriate boundaries between themselves and others. People with poor boundaries are also often susceptible to being swayed by peer pressure into other risky behaviors and can be subjected to different kinds of abuse by peers or adults.
On the other end of the spectrum, some who struggle with social safety can also become isolative and being to avoid social contact with others. They may become socially anxious and awkward which can exacerbate the problem in the long term.
Of course, some parents may see this as a good thing as it at least could serve the purpose of protecting the child from possible exploitation but this often causes them to become dependent on a peer or significant other to help them through social situations and impede their ability to form healthy relationships down the road.
As you have seen, all four dimensions of safety have interplay and overlap with the others but all are problematic on their own. As a parent, it is your role to provide an environment where children can express their concerns in appropriate ways without being dismissed or scoffed at.
It is often the case that a person’s fears can be overblown or a simple misinterpretation of the situation. However, it is up to you as a parent to have open communication with your children and help them accumulate accurate information regarding the situation so they may practice appropriate coping skills and learn to form accurate depictions of the events that could be causing them anxiety.
Please visit psychdomain.com to find tips on how to help your child navigate the world as it exists today.