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Social Safety Social safety describes the sense of feeling safe with other people. A socially safe setting is one in which we feel secure, cared for, trusted, free to express our deepest thoughts and feelings without censure, unafraid of being abandoned or misjudged, unfettered by the constant pressure of interpersonal competition and yet stimulated to be thoughtful, solve problems, be creative, and be spontaneous. A socially safe environment will provide nonabusive attachment opportunities and a willingness to tolerate and contain the expression of affect within the social environment. This is the kind of setting that human beings need to maximize their emotional and intellectual functioning in an integrated way. Since all human development originates in the group context of the family, the most powerful way of providing people rapidly with a corrective relational experience comes in a social context of social safety in which the entire community serves as the agent of change. Our social system is created to produce human beings who will fit into a highly industrialized, competitive, often cutthroat capitalist environment that still prepares at least half of us for mortal combat. Our social system is not designed to maximize the human potential for growth, self-exploration, mutual co-operation, nurturing of the young, artistic endeavor, or creative expression and exploration. People who have been interpersonally violated often have an unclear sense of normal individual and group boundaries and need the experience of healthy boundaries within the therapeutic environment. They have been exposed to abusive authority and therefore the social environment must model responsible authority at every level of the staff. Victims of trauma- particularly interpersonal trauma - have serious difficulties in their ability and willingness to trust other people. Experience has taught them that people are dangerous, betraying, and duplicitous. If they have been injured as children, then they have come to expect bad treatment and are often suspicious of kindness. They expect that other people will violate their boundaries and may have learned that the way to get along in the world is to violate the boundaries of others. They will exert pressure on the other to conform to their normative expectations of abuse. Creating a safe social environment requires a shift in perspective away from viewing only the individual, towards viewing the individual-in-context. In so doing, the entire community serves as a model of “organization as therapist” (Whitwell, 1998) so that all of the chaotic, impulsive, and painful feelings of the members can be safely contained and defused. A strict emphasis on the individual is exchanged for the work of creating and sustaining a well-bounded structure within which all the therapeutic interactions can safely take place (Campling, 1999). It is also the social milieu that provides our patients with the very necessary “reality confrontation”. As people inevitably recreate the relational patterns they have learned as children within a social context, they are afforded the opportunity to change those patterns in order to achieve a higher degree of psychological and social safety. One of the most important challenges to the therapeutic environment is the successful management of traumatic reenactment. Individualism has been such a dominating force in American psychological theory and practice, that relatively little attention has been paid to understanding how environments help - or hinder - human healing and growth.
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