Safe enough spaces
Over the course of my career I’ve been thinking about, and working towards, creating safe spaces. Whether it’s research or support or facilitation, thinking about how we co-create a space where everyone is able to bring their authentic selves in a way that is supported, celebrated and encouraged is something I’ve been grappling with for twenty years.
My research work is grounded in my background in support, and so I feel deeply aligned to the goal of safe spaces and research as a therapeutic experience. Feminist research that is grounded in an ethic of care, isn’t just about asking questions and taking knowledge. It’s about building relationships, human to human, and creating a space where people want to share their insights and can trust you to hold those insights with care. It’s also about recognising that I am not an objective note taker, but that I am showing up to learn and connect as a human being.
Heart centred research means just that, recognising the basic dignity of that other human in front of you and thinking about how this moment can be a moment to connect. That their shard of truth combined with someone else’s and mine, create a more clear lens in which to see things through. This approach means treating connection with intentional and meaningful care. As a facilitator, this means building the structure in which people can come to, thinking about practicalities like tech, child care, buses, remuneration. Ensuring that I’ll show up prepared and on time, that I’ll keep what people say in the spirit of what they tell me, and that I’ll facilitate a group space where hurtful and harmful language and behaviour is challenged.
As time has gone on I’ve been wrangling with the phrase safe space as it doesn’t quite land right in me, and I’ve been unravelling why this is. In my work with survivors of gender based violence, I know that anything can be a trigger. For one, it might be the smell of coffee, for someone else it might be a word. Quiet spaces might be a trigger. Loud environments might be hard. As a facilitator, I don’t know what that is when I’m in a space with others, but similarly, they might not know what their own trigger is that day, that month, that minute. I might look like someone who has hurt them. A song might be on in the background. Because of this, I cannot offer safe spaces, but I can offer safe enough ones. This is not just about words, it’s about intention.
We desperately want to be and to find a safe space in others. But the reality is that trauma doesn’t work that way. If you are hyper-alert at all times and in flight or fight mode, triggers are everywhere. Because of this, shared safety can’t exist as a a blanket one size fits all approach. When we are intentional and importantly, relational, we let go of the need to be safe, and instead we embrace being safe enough.
Safe enough means that there is a shared responsibility in our shared spaces, that people show up in the best way that they can, that it is good enough. Safe enough is emergent, iterative, organic. It is not a destination. It can take us in unexpected directions, it can challenge us, it can be arresting, insightful, revealing. In the context of violence against women, this is particularly complex.
In the co-production group I’m working with at the moment, we’re thinking about what a safe enough space looks like, and we’ll continue to revisit it throughout our time together. Not quite a therapetic space, and not quite a focus group- maybe both, and maybe neither, this eight week programme with survivors of domestic abuse where suicide has been used as a tool to exert control, seeks to co-design something with women to help services, communities and systems respond better. Funded by Kent and Medway Mental Health Community fund, we’re uncovering what the experience of suicide as a form of coercive control looks like.
The participants speak of what it feels like to see their experience as “too much” in other people’s eyes and what this does around silencing and shutting down; behaviours that perpetrators and misogynistic cultures thrive on. Silence. Self-doubt. Shame. Alienation from your own reality, the sense that while you know that something is deeply, profoundly not ok, you are being told that it’s all in your head. You are being told that you are too much.
Shame then ripples out, and prevents others from seeking support, and prevents survivors from healing, because being a woman who is too much makes you too hard to look at- we become the woman in the attic.
I am very much supportive of being too much, as a feminist woman it has been a phrase I’ve heard and experienced many many times. As a woman in living sexism I feel duty bound to be “too much”, to push against the shame and stigma, to push against making ourselves neat and tidy and small and quiet. Those of us challenging violence and abuse need to be loud to remind abusers and sexists that this is not our shame to hold.
I do not want to silence women. I do not want to hold a space that encourages that. But what if the stories that are shared do trigger a trauma response in others? How can this be held? Don’t I also have a responsibility to the room as a whole? I do.
This is where intentional shared responsibility, relational practice and practical feminist facilitation tools come in. I’m co-faciliatating this group with two other workers, one from Amparo (a suicide bereavement charity), and one from Rising Sun (a domestic abuse charity), both on hand to offer support. We have agreed that folk can step away for breathers, that we’ll check in on each other's energies throughout the sessions, and we will be spending a lot of time thinking about self-regulation. We are in this space together. So the question for all of us sharing this space-whether we’re participants or facilitators is not how do we co-create a safe space but a bigger, more unwieldy one. What does it mean to take part in co-production groups that are aiming to sweep away shame and voice something that has been forced to be silent when we want to hold emotional safety for all in mind? Is it even possible?
This is complex work. And this is where the human approach works. I am not a professional over there, working with people way over there. We are in conversation and in community together, we are listening to each other and hearing each other as humans first. Our conversations, our agreement, the practical things we’ve put in place- it’s not perfect, and it is not safe. But it’s good enough, and it’s safe enough for now.
