The Importance of Feeling Safe with Your Therapist
You’re sitting across from your therapist, and there’s something important you want to share. But as you try to form the words, your throat tightens. Your mind goes blank. You hear yourself talking about something else entirely—something safer, more surface-level. You leave the session feeling frustrated, wondering why you couldn’t just say what you came to say.
At Televero Health, we hear this experience described often. “There are things I want to talk about, but when I get to my session, I just can’t.” “I find myself censoring what I share with my therapist.” “I worry about what my therapist will think if I tell them what’s really going on.” These hesitations make perfect sense—sharing vulnerable truths is difficult, especially if you don’t feel completely safe with the person you’re talking to.
What many people don’t realize is that feeling safe with your therapist isn’t just a nice bonus—it’s essential to the process. Without that sense of safety, the most important work of therapy often can’t happen at all.
What Psychological Safety Really Means
When we talk about feeling safe in therapy, we’re not just talking about physical safety or confidentiality (though those are certainly important). We’re talking about psychological safety—a deeper sense that you can be yourself, share honestly, and express difficult emotions without fear of judgment, rejection, or harm.
Psychological safety in therapy means feeling that:
You can speak your truth without being judged
Your emotions are welcome, even the messy, difficult ones
You won’t be abandoned or rejected for what you share
Your therapist can handle your pain without becoming overwhelmed
You won’t be criticized, shamed, or belittled
Your experience will be taken seriously and treated with respect
This kind of safety isn’t automatic. It develops gradually through consistent interactions that demonstrate trustworthiness, respect, and compassion. And it’s not just about your therapist being nice—it’s about them creating conditions where real exploration and change can happen.
Why Safety Is Essential for Healing
You might wonder why feeling safe matters so much. Can’t you just push through the discomfort and say what needs to be said? While it’s certainly possible to share difficult things even when you don’t feel completely safe, there are several reasons why safety facilitates deeper healing:
Access to Vulnerable Material
Many of our most significant issues—the patterns, beliefs, and wounds that most need attention—are also the ones that feel most vulnerable to share. Without sufficient safety, these core issues often remain hidden, even from ourselves.
When you feel safe, you can access and express thoughts, feelings, and memories that might otherwise remain buried. You can explore the tender spots, the shameful experiences, the painful truths that are central to your healing.
Authentic Presence
When we don’t feel safe, we unconsciously armor ourselves. We present a carefully edited version of our experience. We intellectualize instead of feeling. We focus on what we think we “should” say rather than what’s actually true.
Safety allows you to be authentically present, dropping the masks and filters that you might use in other relationships. This authentic presence is where the most meaningful work happens.
Neurobiological Regulation
From a brain perspective, feeling unsafe activates our threat-response system, putting us in a state of fight, flight, or freeze. In this state, the parts of our brain involved in reflection, insight, and integration—the very functions needed for therapeutic change—are less accessible.
When we feel safe, our nervous system can regulate, allowing us to be present, reflective, and open to new perspectives and experiences.
Relational Healing
Many of our deepest wounds happened in relationships where we didn’t feel safe—where we experienced betrayal, abandonment, criticism, or abuse. Having a new experience of safety within the therapeutic relationship can itself be healing, offering a corrective experience that challenges old relational patterns.
Signs You Feel Safe with Your Therapist
How do you know if you feel safe with your therapist? Here are some indicators:
You find yourself sharing things you haven’t told many people (or anyone)
You can express disagreement or disappointment without fear of retaliation
You’re willing to cry or show other vulnerable emotions in sessions
You think about your therapist or your sessions between appointments in a positive way
You don’t feel the need to please or impress your therapist
You can acknowledge when you don’t know or understand something
You feel a general sense of relief or comfort in your therapist’s presence
You find yourself becoming curious about aspects of yourself you previously avoided
Safety doesn’t mean you never feel challenged or uncomfortable in therapy. Growth often involves discomfort. But there’s a difference between the productive discomfort of growth and the unproductive distress of feeling unsafe.
Signs You Don’t Feel Safe
Just as important as recognizing safety is noticing when it’s absent. You might not feel safe with your therapist if:
You find yourself filtering or editing what you share
You worry about being judged or criticized
You feel a need to please or impress your therapist
You leave sessions feeling worse in a way that doesn’t feel productive
You experience anxiety or dread before sessions
You notice yourself becoming intellectually detached rather than emotionally present
You feel your therapist doesn’t understand important aspects of your identity or experience
You find yourself frequently wondering what your therapist really thinks of you
These signs don’t necessarily mean you have a bad therapist or that the relationship can’t work. Sometimes they point to issues that can be addressed and resolved. But they’re important to notice and take seriously.
Building Safety in the Therapeutic Relationship
Safety in therapy is built over time, through consistent interactions that demonstrate trustworthiness. Both you and your therapist play a role in creating this safety:
Your Therapist’s Role
A good therapist creates safety by:
Responding to your sharing with acceptance and compassion
Maintaining appropriate boundaries
Being reliable and consistent
Acknowledging and repairing misunderstandings or mistakes
Demonstrating cultural humility and awareness
Respecting your pace and not pushing for disclosure before you’re ready
Balancing validation with gentle challenge
Your Role
While your therapist bears the primary responsibility for creating a safe environment, you can contribute by:
Noticing and naming feelings of safety or unsafety when they arise
Being honest about what you need to feel more comfortable
Giving feedback when something doesn’t feel right
Recognizing that building trust takes time
Being willing to explore patterns that might affect how safe you feel in relationships generally
When Safety Doesn’t Develop
If you’ve been working with a therapist for some time but still don’t feel safe, it’s worth considering several possibilities:
The Therapeutic Relationship
Sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, a particular therapeutic relationship doesn’t develop the necessary safety. This might be due to differences in style, approach, personality, or other factors that affect the connection between you.
In these cases, it might be worth considering whether a different therapist would be a better fit. This isn’t a failure on anyone’s part—it’s a recognition that different relationships offer different possibilities.
Internal Barriers
Sometimes the barrier to feeling safe lies in our own internal patterns. If you’ve experienced significant betrayal or harm in important relationships, it might be very difficult to feel safe with anyone, including your therapist.
In these cases, the very work of therapy might involve gradually building capacity for trust and safety. This process takes time and patience, but it can lead to profound healing.
Structural Factors
Sometimes barriers to safety come from structural or contextual factors, such as:
Cultural or identity differences that feel significant
Power dynamics that mirror past harmful experiences
Practical aspects of the therapy arrangement that create stress
In these cases, it can be helpful to name these factors directly and explore whether adjustments might help create greater safety.
Feeling safe with your therapist isn’t a luxury or a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation that makes meaningful therapeutic work possible. Without it, therapy might still offer some benefits, but it’s unlikely to facilitate the deeper healing and change that becomes possible when we feel truly safe to be ourselves.
If you’re in therapy but don’t feel that essential sense of safety, know that it’s okay to seek something different. You deserve a therapeutic relationship where you can be fully seen, heard, and accepted—where you can do the work that matters most to you.
Looking for a therapist you can feel safe with? Let us help you find the right match for your unique needs.