Emotional Safety in Relationships: Who Is Responsible?

We talk a lot about emotional safety in relationships.

It shows up everywhere — in therapy language, Instagram posts, dating conversations, and breakup explanations. “I didn’t feel safe” has become both a truth and, sometimes, a catch-all.

What we talk about far less is how safety actually works in relationships.
Who holds it? Who creates it? Who repairs it when it breaks?

Often the conversation collapses into extremes. Either the focus is on the other person — they’re not safe, they don’t make me feel safe — or it swings hard in the opposite direction, where safety becomes a purely internal job: I just need to regulate myself better, heal more, be less reactive.

Both of these frames miss something essential.

From the perspective of interpersonal neurobiology, our minds and nervous systems are not operating in isolation. We are constantly referencing ourselves in relation to others. The brain’s default mode network helps us make sense of who we are, who the other person is, and what’s happening between us — moment to moment.

At the same time, our nervous systems are always scanning for safety or threat through a process called neuroception (Porges). This happens beneath conscious awareness. Tone of voice, facial expressions, pacing, silence, eye contact — all of it is being taken in and interpreted. This isn’t a flaw. It’s biology. We’re social animals. Connection has always been tied to survival.

So the issue isn’t that we’re sensitive or scanning for safety.
The issue is how narrowly we define responsibility for it.

What’s often missing from the emotional safety conversation is a relational truth:
relationship exists both within us and between us.

It’s bi-directional. Recursive. Alive. Emergent.

My internal state shapes how I hear you.
Your response shapes my nervous system.
That shift shapes how I respond next.

And around we go.

This opens up more useful questions than “Who is unsafe here?”
Questions like:

• How am I experiencing safety or threat inside myself right now?

• What histories, protections, or expectations am I bringing into this moment?

• How might those be shaping how I’m interpreting you?

• And how are you simultaneously shaping the relational field?

This is where differentiation becomes so important.

Differentiation allows us to stay connected to our own experience without collapsing the relationship. It sounds like:
Something here doesn’t feel safe for me — and I can stay connected to myself while staying in relationship with you.

Not bypassing.
Not blaming.
Not disappearing.

Fusion is where this gets tricky. When differentiation breaks down, responsibility for safety often gets externalized. The other person becomes the regulator, the problem, or the solution. Or we flip it inward and decide everything is our fault. Neither position leaves much room for complexity, repair, or mutual influence.

An integrated, nervous-system-aware view invites a wider frame:
emotional safety is co-created.

It emerges from nervous systems in constant interaction — shaped by our internal worlds, our relational patterns, and what’s happening between us in real time. Safety isn’t something one person gives and the other receives. It’s something that arises, wobbles, and gets repaired between us.

This doesn’t mean ignoring harm or avoiding accountability. It means widening the lens. It means asking not only:

Do I feel safe with you?

but also:

How are we — together and individually — contributing to safety or threat right now?

That question alone can shift a relationship from stuck and polarized to curious and alive.