6 Ways for Practitioners to Re-Consider Safe Space

As practitioners, we are accountable for the space we create. This is true whether we are working with clients 1:1 or offering workshops and trainings for groups of participants. A good habit for practitioners is to regularly examine our ideas about safe space. How do we offer a welcoming and affirming space where we commit to skillfully responding to difficult and challenging conversations when they arise? What happens when the safety of the room comes into question? Are we ready to pause and give our attention to what has come up? I appreciate Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s use of the term “brave space” instead of “safe space.” ¹

Below are some ways we, as practitioners, can offer a welcoming and affirming (and brave) space. This is not an exhaustive list. I hope the suggestions and reflection questions at the end are generative toward more insights.

1. Set clear community agreements

Being accountable for a space includes creating community agreements that set the container for how a group will interact and share the space together, and a structure to rely on when navigating difficult moments in a co-created space. The practitioner is accountable for ensuring the community agreements are followed skillfully and without harm.

Community agreements go beyond confidentiality and respectful interactions. They can include allowing vulnerability, speaking from our own lived experience, not generalizing, a right to pass and practice self-care, being aware of the power attributed to identity, making space for everyone to engage, questioning to understand and embody rather than to debate, and being curious and open.

2. Be transparent about your own positionality

Practitioners have an ongoing responsibility to reflect on our own positionality. For example, I am a white, Westernized person who was born, socialized, and educated in the dominant language of a colonizing country (Canada). I have conscious and unconscious biases. I have walked through life with privilege. I have my own lived experiences that inform all that I do, regardless of how much self-awareness and healing practices I have.

Some practitioners choose to speak openly about their positionality in their introductions, and some choose to integrate it into the content or speak about it when questioned. The most important point is that we do not pretend to have the “view from nowhere,” ² as though we are perfectly objective individuals who happen to be giving a workshop or training in a subjective space. ³

3. Show up with humility

It takes a lot of self-confidence to offer services and teachings from a place of humility rather than from a place of being the only expert in the room. When we practice with humility, we also acknowledge that we are learning too, and that the learning environment is co-created by the practitioner and the participants. Sometimes our material might be questioned or challenged, and we need to be prepared to acknowledge other perspectives and generate discussion that creates an opportunity to enrich the space.

4. When there is emotion, don’t label it bad or negative

People often attend workshops and trainings because they want to grow, learn new skills, engage in social change, work on their own healing, or learn how to support other people’s well-being. If we, as practitioners, are only comfortable with expressions of calm, joy, or happiness from our participants, we might be conveying that truthfulness and authenticity are not welcome. Our community agreements don’t give us permission to ignore power dynamics or impose positivity where a situation demands truthfulness and authenticity. Emotions such as anger or fear are not inherently bad or negative.

I appreciate the work of David Bedrick, who focuses on “unshaming” practices with his clients. ⁴ Unshaming is important for practitioners to understand if they genuinely want to offer spaces that acknowledge, validate, believe, and fully welcome our participants.

5. Be responsible with how you describe your work

It is becoming increasingly common to speak about trauma-informed spaces, sometimes with an assumption that calling a space "safe" makes it a trauma-informed space. When we conflate these terms in descriptions or promotions of our services, we are potentially misleading people who are intentionally seeking out a trauma-informed service or training. You might challenge yourself to ask, Exactly how, as a practitioner, am I making this space safe? ⁵

6. Practice your own self-care

Regardless of the topic of a workshop or training, our capacity to self-regulate in the present will impact our delivery. Self-regulation is self-awareness about our embodiment and our capacity to resource ourselves in the moment with grounding practices, breath, nourishment, asking for a pause, or giving some space for reflection. Our ability to self-regulate impacts our capacity to contribute to co-regulation when we are with another person or a group of people, such as when we are in a workshop or training. ⁶

Coming back to our container

To close, our community agreements container allows us to weave and integrate the complexity of being human. Welcome everything with curiosity. Let people know what is going on. We are not trying to surprise people; rather, we want to be transparent.

Our skillfulness is in our macro approach or meta skills, integrity, allowing space for multiple truths and realities, finding balance, attunement, being centred and grounded.

• What are the meta skills that you bring into your spaces, and how do these skills support how you show up as a practitioner?

• What kinds of containers do you create?

• Are you uncomfortable when someone expresses anger, grief, sadness, frustration? Can you normalize these feelings in the room?

• Do you openly make space for narratives other than your own?

• Are you comfortable acknowledging and validating other people’s lived experience?

Resources:

1. In March 2023, during an online Love Your Brain Yoga facilitator training, Michelle spoke about “brave space” and during this training, I observed Michelle as she worked through a challenge from one of the participants about the material she had just presented. Michelle’s capacity to pause and have an open and brave conversation with the participants was the most important teaching of that day. You can learn more about Michelle’s work here.

2. Drawing on the work of Thomas Nagel, 1986, sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour, 2018, used the term “the view from nowhere”  in his book Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine Porter, Polity Press, Cambridge: UK.

3. You might be interested in Tema Okun’s work.

4. See David Bedrick, 2024, The Unshaming Way: A Compassionate Guide to Dismantling Shame, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley: CA.

5. We can also ask how are our servies trauma-informed or trauma-responsive? I will save that for another article.

6. I have some self-care practices in this article. If you are interested in regulation from a polyvagal theory perspective, you might read Porges, Stephen W., 2017, The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe, W.W. Norton & Company: New York.