Most people know about the fight, flight or freeze reactions to fear. But few people realize there is also a social engagement branch of our nervous system – the ventral vagus nerve – that soothes and restores us to a feeling of safety after we’ve had a scare. This positive part of our nervous system prompts us to turn to others for comfort, guiding us toward physical proximity, touch, a soothing voice, and warm facial expressions. These welcoming behaviors from other people don’t just tell us we’re physically safe; they also tell us we are emotionally safe around them. 

     Emotional safety is not just a feel-good emotion, like whipped cream on a sundae. It arises from the activation of this social-engagement nerve, which allows you to engage with others or enjoy the present moment. Emotional safety makes you relaxed, open, and willing to express yourself, promoting wellbeing instead of tension or vigilance. In this state, worry diminishes and you feel present, grounded, and engaged.   

     You feel most emotionally safe around friendly people or while immersed in an absorbing activity. You may also feel emotionally safe when walking in nature, playing with your dog, or a few days into your vacation. When your social engagement nerve is turned on, it produces a sensation of emotional safety that brings relaxation and inner contentment.

     It’s hard to maintain emotional safety if you are around people whom you find threatening in any way. Some people give us a feeling of unsafety even if they’re not overtly intimidating because we react to their judgment, criticism, or sarcasm as stressors, sensing the possibility of conflict. 

     Consider how you feel if you are in a situation where friendliness is rare and the people around you are standoffish, critical, easily irritated, or have an unwelcoming facial expression. Your nervous system reads such behavior as an unsafe situation and keeps your fight-flight-or-freeze alarm systems ready to go. This can result in stress-induced symptoms that compromise your health.
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     Lack of emotional safety in childhood also can have effects on our adult relationships. For children, a blank face is not an emotionally neutral experience; it is a potential danger signal. A child’s nervous system reads an emotionally unengaged parent as possibly rejecting, a terrifying prospect for a child. Instead of being able to reach out and comfortably engage with others in a state of trust and calm, such children might learn to keep their guard up and keep the motor running for a quick escape. Anything less than explicit acceptance from others can feel threatening to our sense of emotional safety.

     This is why friendly reassurances and engaged attention are so important in our most intimate relationships. It’s not insecure to want frequent feedback about mattering to our loved ones; it’s a biological urge to move ourselves into a good neurological state of connection. We have all noticed that people who are most happy together are reliably responsive to each other’s feelings and requests. Social engagement signals don’t have to be flamboyant. The slight crinkling of warm eyes, a passing touch, or a barely discernable nod is all it takes to make us feel seen and safe.

     Likewise, we may not realize how much we are contributing to other people’s neurological wellbeing when we treat them nicely and give them real smiles. Every time you warmly interact with someone, however briefly, you are literally shifting his or her nervous system into a safe state.

     We can strengthen the social engagement branch of our vagal nerve by spending time with safe, emotionally responsive people. Warm interactions, however brief, help tone this nerve and contribute to feelings of well-being. Such reassuring contact helps us think better, feel more optimistic, initiate more emotional connections, and enjoy our social activities.

     How do you tell who is a safe person for you? You know by how you feel after you’ve been with them. Do you feel happier, lighter, and more hopeful? Or drained, unsatisfied, and stressed? And how do you feel before you see them? Are you looking forward to it and feeling happy, or dreading it and wishing you could spend your time elsewhere? Your sensations reflect how emotionally safe you feel with that person. Your ventral vagal nerve can tell who lowers your energy or affects your mood.
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     If you make a point to fill your life with people who readily engage with you, you not only will feel emotionally safe, you will be lowering your stress too. Time spent in soothing connection is time not spent in fear or stress. Once you’ve realized how stressful it is not to be emotionally responded to, you will be motivated to find more nourishing relationships. Then you can trust your feeling of emotional safety to point you in the right direction.
 

​​With the recent release of the new Mr. Rogers movie-- Won't You Be My Neighbor? -- I was reminded of how precious his manner and message was to so many children. Although I originally knew him through watching his show with my toddler son, I recently watched the movie through the eyes of someone interested in the plight of children with emotionally immature parents. I realized what a godsend Mr. Rogers may have been to many adult children who needed a real, empathetic grown-up to care about their feelings, not force them into the adult's world. With that appreciation, I am posting this article.

     People are psychologically stretchy. I call this the Gumby effect, after the green rubber toy that can be pulled all kinds of ways, always to return to its original shape. When we try hard, we are all able to stretch beyond what’s comfortable and briefly look more capable than we really are. The Gumby effect allows us to be overachievers for short bursts of time. But when the pressure is off, we return to form.

     In relationships, when people are trying their best to make a good first impression, they enlarge themselves like Gumby-in-stretch-mode. Now imagine Gumby retracting to normal size as the person relaxes the stretch and sinks back into who he or she is at core. Consider Gumby in his normal shape as a person’s real level of psychological maturity. Maturation allows us to hold our shape in a way we don’t have to think about. Like Gumby, once people reach their mature form, their personalities don’t change much.

     However, when people don’t fully develop psychologically, they often compensate for their emotional immaturity by learning to stretch in order to look good, or to get what they want.
If you meet someone in stretch mode, you will think they are more emotionally available than they really are. When they recoil back to their true shape, you may wonder where that wonderful person went. They suddenly seem more selfish, less sensitive, more defensive, more fault-finding, and more controlling. In short, they begin to show their immature shape, their true Gumby form.

     Many people get to know their partner when that person is trying hard to make a good impression. In Gumby terms, the partner is stretching mightily. In the early days, the partner may have done thoughtful things, professed love, or showed tender sympathy. But over time the stretch wears thin and then contracts to a more comfortable shape. That’s when you see their true form.

     When Gumby people shrink back into their less desirable comfort zone, you might think they could return to their previous marvelous self if only they really tried. That’s true enough, but who lives daily life trying hard? It’s a mistake to think of the selfish behavior as a choice, or that the person could be nicer if he or she wanted to. Such people don’t because they can’t, just like a child on good behavior can’t keep it up forever. Remember the physics of a stretch; it’s a temporary state.

     When you meet immature people in stretch mode, you won’t be able to see right away that they are incapable of sustaining their niceness. Only time and experience with them will tell you that.
The best approach is to give the relationship time to develop so that you can see whether their caring behavior is Gumby overachievement, or their normal functioning. Metaphorically, is that person really that tall, or are they stretching on tiptoe?

     This is particularly true in the area of emotional intimacy, where people open up and communicate with each other about their deepest needs, feelings, and dreams. In the early days of a relationship, Gumby people will stretch themselves into a more expanded version of themselves, trying hard to listen and care. But there will always be moments where Gumby snaps back into the original shape, if only for a second. That snap-back moment is a preview of whom you will be living with.

     Ask yourself if your new love interest is kind and reliable in a relaxed way over the long haul, or just when stretching for the moment. Are you seeing true kindness and caring in them, or is it the temporary exertion of a more immature personality, sure to retract under the next period of sustained stress?
The answer to this question is not immediate, because expansion fatigue takes time to show up. It is the best reason for not jumping into commitments too fast. (Gumby types always pressure you for quick decisions and commitments because it’s a strain to be nice for so long. They long to bag you, so they can then contract into a more comfortable shape.)
     In old-fashioned terms, the opposite of the Gumby effect is character. It refers to who you are when there is nothing to be gained from acting otherwise. Character is not who you are when you try hard; it is who you are when there’s nothing to gain. Like Gumby, you can’t tell a person’s real shape when ulterior motives are pulling them this way and that. Let them relax and feel like they’ve got you, and then see how they behave.
     We can never afford to stop asking ourselves this question about new people in our lives: is this who this person is naturally, or are they stretching hard? It can be a long and painful process to extricate yourself from a negative relationship once you have fallen for the Gumby effect, because you keep hoping that the next stretch will stick. But step back and observe what shape they resume when nothing’s at stake. Watch how they treat you when they are confident they have you. That’s the real Gumby.
 

              One look at this little guy and you know what he's feeling: emotional loneliness. It is a familiar experience for children who grow up with emotional deprivation. But most people do not connect their feelings of emotional isolation and loneliness with a childhood of emotional neglect.
             Most people are much more familiar with the definition of abuse than they are of deprivation. It is always easier to identify errors of commission rather than errors of omission. It is harder to tell when we have not gotten enough of something. We might not recognize our own emotional deprivation because we grew up in it.
            Emotional deprivation means that we missed important bonding experiences essential for our security. Our parents did not supply these reassuring experiences, nor did they think it was important to give them to a child. In the old days, many parents believed that feeding and sheltering their children fulfilled their parental responsibilities, a belief still supported by our culture. In the past, providing material things was seen as the hallmark of good parenting, probably because our society was not as affluent as it is today. A child's feelings were not valued and were often suppressed. Actions, not empathy, were what it meant to be a good parent.
            Now, however, we are beginning to realize it is no longer enough for a parent just to be physically present or technically available. It takes more than that to raise a secure human being. It is not enough for a parent passively to allow children to cling or make sure they get their shots.
            Children crave active, interested engagement by the adults in their lives. When a parent takes the time to get into a back-and-forth engagement with their child, the child feels worthy and lovable. When parents reach out for their children, and honestly enjoy their company, a powerful message is sent to that child that he or she matters. As children, we all want to feel as essential to our parents as they are to us. Without this reassurance, we are left adrift in emotional loneliness.
            Children also need to feel that the parent is keeping a protective eye on them. A parent who will step in when a child is feeling overwhelmed makes the world a safer place to explore. Parents who defend a child from bad experiences teach the child that help is available. 
            Emotional loneliness in adult life is a tipoff that one's relationships in childhood were not nurturing or supportive enough. If we have suffered emotional deprivation, we will be familiar with feeling unseen. A lack of social confidence is another cardinal signs of growing up in an emotionally depriving environment. If you grew up with emotional neglect within your family, in adulthood you might find yourself attracted to people who avoid emotional intimacy and who are inconsistent in their lovingness.
            If you often feel emotional lonely, the first thing is to understand is that your feelings have good reason, that it was never about you being deficient or unlovable. It was about you being emotionally deprived. The next step is to find chances to interact with other people under conditions that feel safe to you, preferably through mutual tasks or activities rather than social chitchat. Finding comfortable opportunities to interact with kind, interested people can reverse the effects of earlier deprivation. People can heal each other. Volunteer activities or educational classes are great opportunities to meet people interested in the same things. Another good idea is to sincerely ask receptive, friendly people for advice on straightforward decisions.
            Reaching out to others may feel a little uncomfortable when you are emotionally lonely, but it is the way to change the direction of your life. If all of this seems too daunting, psychotherapy or other kinds of support groups can be enormously helpful. The important thing is to do the very thing for yourself that your parents may not have been able to do: cherish yourself as an adorable being and find interesting ways to be engaged with others.
 
 
           
            

     All you have to do to make a woman depressed is to use a simple three-part recipe: 
1) listen to her ideas and desires, then talk her out of it; 
2) substitute someone else’s much better idea; and 
3) when she protests and gets upset, tell her to calm down and explain in a slow, rational voice why the other way makes much more sense.

     This will work especially well if you can convince her that the better idea will save money, time, and inconvenience. If you keep this up whenever she has a good idea, she will begin to have trouble making up her mind, followed by a mysterious loss of initiative. Over time, she will start to show classic signs of depression: low energy, hopelessness, poor self-esteem, self-doubt, feelings of worthlessness, sadness, and trouble sleeping. At this point take her to a mental health professional who will identify her medical illness of depression. It is so easy!

     Women’s depression is just like men’s depression, yet we often miss the causes that seem so transparent in a man’s case. For instance, we would have no trouble understanding when a man becomes depressed following the loss of his job, title, or relationship partner. It would be no mystery to us why the poor guy was down in the dumps over being thwarted in his quest for personal prestige and satisfaction. It’s a simple equation. We get it.

     However, the lead-up to a woman’s depression is such a slow accumulation of frustrations that we often do not see it happening. The events contributing to her emotional downfall are frequently so small and commonplace that we overlook them as causes at all. The ones that do catch our attention – a loss, a marital problem, a difficult child –are likely to be just the big last straw in a long series of personal frustrations. Women are able to put up with a lot, but there comes the point where it catches up with them.

     One depressed woman I knew began to feel better as soon as she stopped letting her husband make “innocent” changes to her plans and choices. For years if she came up with an idea for something she wanted to do, her husband would show her why her way was inefficient and offer her a more sensible alternative. She was systematically being deprived of her own autonomy in choosing the actions she wanted to do. 

     When you repeatedly interrupt an individual’s natural sequence from forming an idea to carrying it out, you puncture that person’s initiative. It is very subtle but very destructive. A little unwanted change in an idea is all it takes to create a rapid drop in interest and energy. There is no satisfaction or fulfillment in carrying out someone else’s version of your own idea.

     Many men would instantly grasp this concept if applied to the work world; they know what it feels like to have someone mess with their idea, or have it implemented in a way different from how it was envisioned. In these cases, men know the ripped-off feeling, the exasperation of seeing a great idea being turned into something mediocre. This is exactly what happens to many women in little ways at home, when someone else’s ideas repeatedly modify her own, or when plans have to be changed or given up at the last minute. Somehow women homemakers are supposed to tolerate this interruption of their initiative by loved ones, when it would drive anyone else crazy if it happened in the workplace.

     Your ideas and hopes for the future are vital for your mental strength. They generate the energy for doing things, and give you confidence that you have control in your life. Don’t forget that your vitality comes from thinking up ideas, whether simple or profound, and then seeing them through start to finish. People who try to help by taking over or by making unsolicited suggestions just don’t understand that the excitement lies in the autonomy of action, not just in getting the thing done. Have the courage to defend your choices, and make plans that accommodate your instincts. Being a little inefficient or bullheaded is a small price to pay for preventing depression.

 

            When men think about sex a lot, we assume it has something to do with testosterone. But men’s urgency about sex is not always about physical desire only. Sex can satisfy multiple needs at several levels for a man, giving him an opportunity to feel closeness, vulnerability, reassurance, and self-transcendence all in one experience.

            What most women don’t understand is that for many men, sex is the deepest level of intimacy. This is not an inferior type of intimacy; it is a male type of intimacy. To him, sex can feel like the most profound, genuine sharing of himself he can imagine. It is not just a robotic release of sexual tension, it is the experience of giving his all in the drive to feel as close as possible to his partner, whether he is in love or not. It is the fulfillment of the most essential human need to connect.

            For the man, sex may replenish his soul, but to the woman, his interest may feel only physical. Because a woman can get those same needs met partly in other ways, it is hard for her to imagine that a man may get that primarily, and sometimes only, from lovemaking. Women naturally create connections in their lives, so they have other sources of emotional fulfillment that men may only attain through their sexual experiences.

            Women think that emotional intimacy is best achieved through talking about feelings and opening up to one another. When their man is not interested in this kind of intimate sharing, women can feel lonely and unheard, lowering their interest in further intimacies. Unfortunately, women who feel emotionally disregarded perceive the man’s sexual pressure not as a need to connect, but as a need to take. Many women feel that if their partners would be more emotionally responsive, they might want to have sex more.

            Although emotional openness is increasing between the sexes, there is still an unspoken limitation on how much emotional openness is acceptable in a man. Women have societal permission to express their emotional needs, but males have been trained to be stoic. Only in the privacy of lovemaking does the man feel free to share himself at all levels with his partner.

            Another thing men get from sex is a rare opportunity to be vulnerable. By its very nature, the sexual experience reassures him that he is safe and accepted. Vulnerability goes back to earliest childhood bonding when it was okay to depend on someone. Because there is so much social emphasis on men being tough and strong, it is easy to overlook how much men need to be vulnerable sometimes, to be released from preoccupations of control and success. For just a little while, a man can surrender in safety, and finally let go of it all.

            Sexual connection for a man can also feel transcendent. Good sexual experiences take people out of themselves, lifting them out of their egos, and expanding them beyond the little workaday self. The experience of transcending the mundane reminds a man there is more to life than his daily routine. Lovemaking softens tough male defenses and moves him into the sublime experience of merger with another person. Men are so pressured to be practical, rational thinkers that sex becomes one of their only ways to rise above the tyranny of what everyone expects of them. They can leave their brains and reconnect to their souls.

            But problems occur when men try to meet emotional and transcendent needs in sex without acknowledging that is what it means to them. Sex can then take on a driven, addictive quality, as unspoken emotional needs are compulsively expressed in action not words. The man is not aware of how truly needy he is, nor in which ways, and so sex becomes never enough, just like any intoxicant that is used to satisfy needs it was never meant to.

            Men have to realize that if they are trying to meet all these needs primarily through sex, their female partners will get burned out. Women typically do not meet their emotional needs primarily through sex, and so sex with an emotionally driven man may feel more like giving than getting. In other words, she correctly senses that he is trying to make a deep emotional connection under the guise of sex, but because he himself is often unaware of this motive, he does not understand why she seems to see sex as tiring. It is not the sex that is tiring, it is the man pretending his needs are only about sex, as well as his reluctance to open up emotionally and communicate in the rest of their relationship.

            The more a man is aware of his strong need for intimate connection, vulnerability, and reassurance, the more he can find additional ways of getting his emotional needs met with his partner outside the bedroom. Through sharing his feelings more with his partner, his emotional needs can be met directly in a way that replenishes the woman too, making her feel closer to him so that sex is an experience to be looked forward to, not avoided.

            Meanwhile, women can have a new appreciation for the meanings sex can have to a man. He needs some understanding too. Sex for him is about a lot more than it looks like.