Just as we take steps to protect our physical well-being, it’s equally important to develop strategies to safeguard our emotional "health" for more fulfilling experiences.
Emotional safety can be defined as the set of behaviors we use to protect our emotional well-being.
Just as we look after our physical health, creating strategies to care for our emotional well-being is key to enjoying meaningful and satisfying experiences.
This doesn’t mean maintaining a constant state of positive emotions—that’s simply impossible.
As we’ve explored in earlier modules, we create emotional moments to make sense of internal and external contexts that hold significance for us.
These contexts are always shifting, and they won’t always lead to pleasant emotions.
Staying in a constant state of "happiness" when it doesn’t match our reality isn’t adaptive or helpful.
We might generally feel content, but that doesn’t mean we’ll never experience discomfort or unpleasant emotions—and that’s perfectly normal. It’s not negative, bad, or anything to worry about.
It’s just a natural part of life as we navigate our surroundings.
It’s important to remember that protection and safety don’t mean hiding away in a bubble.
Avoiding certain situations or isolating ourselves to escape challenging contexts won’t do us any good.
When we act this way, we’re relying on avoidance as a coping mechanism.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with these strategies, they become problematic when they’re the only tools we use.
Over time, this can hold us back from developing important skills and strengths, like resilience, and can make us overly dependent on our environment to maintain emotional stability.
There’s a big difference between leaning on our support network and becoming dependent on others to regulate our emotions.
At the same time, it’s not adaptive to "jump into the deep end without looking."
Choosing to expose ourselves to situations or contexts we’re not equipped to handle can lead to unnecessary suffering. We might call this emotional recklessness.
The key is to take things step by step, at our own pace, while respecting the boundaries and timing of the person we’re interacting with. It’s about enjoying the journey, not just the destination.
Shibari, as a form of interaction between two people, can help us grow and learn more about ourselves in this regard.
Developing these kinds of strategies is important, first and foremost, for our personal growth.
But it’s especially crucial in interactions like those in shibari, where we lower our guard, bring emotional patterns to the surface, and connect on levels we might not be used to.
Personal Responsibility
To better understand what personal responsibility means, let’s break it down word by word.
First, we have “responsibility.”
We could define it as the aspects within my control that have contributed—or could contribute—to something happening, whether positive or negative, for me and/or my environment.
This definition highlights three crucial characteristics that help us develop our management strategies.
First, it gives us agency over the situation by focusing on what’s within our control and where we can have some influence.
Second, it provides us with the capacity for change, as it directs our attention to modifiable factors that, if approached differently, can lead to different outcomes.
Finally, it helps us define a course of action by identifying the areas we need to work on to achieve the desired results.
Often, responsibility is confused with blame, or we focus solely on the latter. However, they’re not synonyms, and they don’t serve the same purpose.
Blame is a moral concept, a value judgment.
We could define it as the emotion that points to the supposed cause of a situation we perceive as negative for ourselves and/or our environment.
Therefore, blame only gives us information about two things: who the supposed agent is and what the circumstance is that occurred.
Blame doesn’t help us identify areas of control, define a course of action, or recognize our capacity for change.
Its only utility is labeling the who and the what, and without the how, it’s hard to create change or learn from the situation.
As a result, and since we only use it for negative outcomes, blame often leads to compensation for the harm caused or to avoidance strategies to hide what we’ve done.
When we act from this place, we’re not addressing the root of what led to the negative situation. Instead, we’re trying to patch things up to minimize the consequences for ourselves.
Next, we have “personal.”
This is straightforward—it refers to something that’s mine, something that belongs to me and no one else.
It might seem irrelevant, but in practice, it’s crucial. You’ve probably heard people blame others for certain outcomes: You distracted me, I had bad luck, you’re not doing it right, someone told me to do it this way, you don’t know what you’re doing… The list goes on.
When we do this, we’re placing the capacity for agency on other people or situational factors outside ourselves.
This leaves us with no room to act on the outcome we’re getting.
In this scenario, my ability to manage the situation is zero. And considering that in shibari, interactions are based on an asymmetry in access to and management of resources, it’s easy to see where the root of the problem lies. No one is fully taking charge of those resources—or at least, not entirely.
Our approach, therefore, always starts with personal responsibility.
We focus on what’s within our control, within our scope of influence, and not on what we can’t control.
When practicing personal responsibility in shibari, it would be impossible to list every single aspect involved, as they depend on the situation and the individuals in the interaction. However, we want to offer some questions to reflect on, which can help you identify your personal responsibility in each specific case:
- Who am I interacting with?
- What’s my level of trust with this person?
- Why am I doing this?
- What do I want to achieve?
- What’s the worst that could happen (specific situations, not abstract ideas)?
- Would I know how to—or be able to—handle the situation if X happens/doesn’t happen?
- What management tools do I have?
- What’s within my control (specific actions, not abstract ideas) to make X happen/not happen?
- What can I do (specific actions, not abstract ideas) if X happens/doesn’t happen?
Intention
The questions above not only help us better understand where our personal responsibility lies within the interaction but also lead us to the second point we’ll address in emotional safety: intention.