On this page are strategies I sometimes introduce in sessions to help clients cultivate their ability to feel calm, safe and self-compassionate.
Strengthening your inner sense of calm, safety and self-compassion can help support your day to day functioning.
It can also create an important foundation for processing painful feelings and memories in therapy, as returning to painful experiences can be either healing or overwhelming depending on the background sense of security in yourself and the world you feel as you revisit those experiences.
Some of these exercises may only make sense to you if/once you’re in therapy and exploring Internal Family Systems or other parts work. Not all the exercises will helpful or safe for everyone, so listen to what works for you and make any adjustments you want. Practicing the exercises that feel helpful to you even when you’re feeling quite centred increases the chance they will be useful when you most need them.
Typically the aim of safe place imagery is to help you create a place in your mind in which it feels totally safe to relax and feel calm and peaceful. However you can give your imagined place any of the positive, healing and protective qualities that feel best to you.
Try to practice being in your safe place every day, at least for a minute or two, to strengthen your ability to feel a sense of wellbeing.
How to create a safe place:
If you’re trying this for the first time, pick a time when you feel relatively calm.
Get as physically comfortable as you can, closing your eyes if that feels safe for you.
In your mind, let a place emerge that is completely safe, in which nothing bad has ever happened.
It can be a real place, a place you’ve made up, or a mixture. It can be indoors or outdoors. You can use any or all of your senses to create your safe place (i.e. it might be visual, but it could potentially be entirely made of feelings, sounds, smells etc).
Once you’re in your safe place, begin to notice what you’re seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and touching.
Take in how all these qualities of your safe place contribute to your knowledge that this place is safe and right for you.
Notice that you have complete control over this safe place. If anything doesn’t feel quite right, observe how it dissolves and is replaced by something that’s better for you, or that you see something or think something that helps make your safe place just right.
If at any point it doesn’t feel okay to carry on with safe space imagery, make a note of what happened and bring this to therapy to explore.
As you’re in your safe place, you can experiment with:
Before you end, take a moment to breath in the positive energy of this place, and take in the awareness that this place is just for you, and that you know where to find it and can return whenever you want.
To come back to the present fully after a safe place meditation, you could try the 54321 exercise below.
This exercise will make most sense if you read the ‘safe place imagery’ description above first, and if you’re familiar with Internal Family Systems and have already met some of your parts.
As well as creating a safe place in the way described above, you could create specific places for different parts of you, including any ‘main’ part of you who tends to run the show and manage your life day to day, as this part is often especially exhausted.
You could create a place for:
If multiple parts are sharing the same safe place, you could add different areas or rooms that are just right for each part and/or ways of visiting each other.
Safe places can provide a way for parts to:
Although the focus is usually on safety for this exercise, you could also create a place with a different focus – for example your part might want a place for having fun, or expressing creativity or some other aspect of themself.
Unless you already have a part who is activated and wants a safe place, get started by checking inside to see if any parts are open to volunteering to try safe place imagery first. You could invite all your other parts to watch the process so they learn more about it.
Generally it’s best to let parts take the lead on developing a safe place that feels right for them, however if the part who needs a safe place is very young, it’s more likely that you or another part will need to step in and help create a safe place for this young part, including things the young part needs to feel safe and comfortable. As the part’s needs develop as they heal and grow, the safe place can keep up and change to adjust to their changing needs.
You can add elements to the safe place to control what information comes in and out. For example:
Some parts appreciate orienting information in their safe place, to help them remember or learn about the present day, as many parts are partly or entirely trapped in the past.
For example:
Eye gazing meditation is usually a partner meditation practice, however you can also make loving eye contact with a part while in Self to strengthen your compassionate relationship with the part.
Set a timer for a few minutes to start with. Locate a part inside you that you want to connect with for this time, either by inviting it to step forward, or by recalling the feelings, body sensations or images you associate with the part.
Once you’re in touch, rest your inner gaze lovingly on the part, making eye contact if that feels right (and possible – not all parts appear with a physical form). If eye contact doesn’t feel right, you could try sitting next to the part or making physical contact with it and sending it compassion.
If any other parts show up, ask them if they’re open to softening back so you can spend some time with this part. You could also check around your heart and if you notice any tension or sense of something blocking you from connecting lovingly with this part, gently invite this to melt away if it’s willing to.
It’s common to keep a lid, conscious or unconscious, on some painful memories and feelings. This exercise is a way of strengthening your ability to do this and doing it more intentionally by creating a container in your mind for storing disturbing or overwhelming feelings and memories.
Storing difficult material in a container can help with everyday functioning. Containers can also be useful during the processing of traumatic memories in therapy, allowing the experience to be processed bit by bit, preventing it being overwhelming. If you’re aware that some of your trauma is currently dissociated (i.e. you can’t remember any details), developing a container before working on the trauma will give you more control while you work on it.
It’s best to try this exercise for the first time in a therapy session if you have any concerns about feeling overwhelmed during the exercise. However, it’s useful to practice it regularly once you’ve tried it in therapy.
Creating a container
Decide what kind of container you’d like. It can be anything that feels right to you – a tupperware, bank vault, file drawer, etc. Focusing on it as an image or sense in your mind, notice that it has a completely secure entrance/exit, that only you can open it, and that it’s stored out of the way somewhere in your mind, away from your safe place so as not to contaminate it. Add whatever details feel right to make your container totally secure.
Identify something you’d like to put into the container. Notice that the material is going into the container in just the right way, and that the container gets stronger and stronger with every bit that goes into it.
If you prefer, you could practice by first putting something that isn’t emotionally charged into the container, like a mental image.
Notice also that there’s a commitment built into the container that everything stored inside it will be worked on when the time is right, and that now the material is stored, things are already changing in a positive way because it isn’t used to being stored in a container.
Allowing parts of you to create their own containers
Parts of you can create different containers for storing memories or feelings of their own that trouble them – in this case allow the part to let you know what kind of container feels right for them, how it should be designed and where it should be kept. Invite the part to place whatever they want to store into the container.
A part can put just a percentage of a burden they carry into a container if they’re more comfortable with this than storing all of it. Parts can also practice putting material into a container and taking it out again, starting with something like an unrelated image or object if they want to test how it feels to store something in the container.
Notice how the part feels different in their body or mind as they store material in the container, and try checking a couple of times with the part to check they’ve stored as much as they want to for now. Notice that the part knows the container is totally secure, and that they have total control over when they store material in the container and when they open the container.
Fold your arms across your body so you’re hugging yourself with a hand resting on each arm.
Very slowly tap your body with each hand, alternating sides.
As you do, think, notice or say aloud something that you find supportive. This could be:
This is an exercise to help you feel grounded if you’re feeling overwhelmed or disconnected from your current time and place.
Look around the room you’re in, and identify 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste (you could keep something like chewing gum or fruit on you for the purposes of doing this exercise).
Keep a list of what helps you feel better when you’re struggling with difficult emotions. It might be easier to think of these things when you’re feeling relatively well and then refer to the list when you’re struggling.
Ideas for what you could include: