Psychological safety is a term that we will borrow from organizational psychology to look at inner dynamics within a DID system. Psychological safety is described as a shared culture within a group that makes it safe to speak up, express needs, ideas or doubt, take risks, make mistakes, and learn from failure. Tools that are not used within this culture are humiliation, blaming, shaming or punishment, dominance and submission. Some of the things we have shared in the past, like shifting hierarchies into teaming or being unpunishable are based on this concept. I believe it is a useful concept that makes work easier.
Why we need psychological safety
First of all, nobody performs well when they are anxious. People who are scared of being beaten down by criticism and degradation will try to hide their weakness, they hide mistakes and they do their work as demanded but never offer their own ideas how to improve things. They barely learn because they hardly ever try something new and that means the whole system in which they are active is not innovating anything. They are stuck. We might know this feeling from our own inner experience.
In addition to normal needs for safety everyone has, we have a history of trauma and not ever feeling safe. We probably experienced a culture that was adverse to psychological safety and used all the forbidden interrelational tools. We need a change in our inner culture to heal from these experiences. If we keep reenacting them inside, the trauma will be a life-long experience, even after memory processing is finished successfully. Worst case, we take the psychological safety out of our environment because we act in all the ways that undermine psychological safety: blaming, shaming, punishment, always seeking dominance over others. Healthy people won’t tolerate that for very long.
With DID, we cannot afford that parts hide mistakes from us when we have amnesia for what happened. The aftermath will just grow exponentially. We also can’t afford having a culture where nobody is able to try new things without getting punished. We need new things to create a new life. We need to give each other enough space to learn something new.
Steps to psychological safety
I will try to explain how a new inner culture like this could be approached. This is probably not exhaustive and just the beginning of a new concept that needs to be developed privately.
Good faith
We start by assuming that everyone does their best according to their knowledge and abilities. Nobody is actually trying to ruin it all. Even parts who seem like adversaries have very good reasons for their behavior that fit into their knowledge of the world. We take a mental stance where we assume that everyone is in this team together and doing their best. Places where the system doesn’t work well can be looked at later. First we need to know that nobody in the internal space is actually the enemy we need to fight.
Belonging
We assume that everyone in the system has a right to be there and a role to play. It can take some time to understand what kind of role that used to be and what it will be in the future. But everything belongs. There is no thought or belief or need that is easily abandoned. We belong together, we work together to make life better for everyone and when we face difficulty, we don’t throw anyone under the bus. We can establish the idea of our inner culture long before we actually get to the feeling of it. Knowing that we will not be ‘kicked out’ or ostracized when something doesn’t work well is needed for psychological safety, especially with attachment trauma. Some of the worst fears can be triggered by abandonment. By choosing each other, we make a choice for a different kind of culture we want to live in. We choose connection over control.
Generosity
In a generous mindset we assume the best instead of the worst when we notice something we don’t like or support. It is incredibly easy to find small errors, things that are missing, things we personally believe shouldn’t be there or should be different. That comes from a critical mindset and it is surprisingly unhelpful when it comes to improving things. People who expect constant criticism will get defensive. They will not become learners. When we notice something, we assume the best. Someone did their best and there is still something there we can ask them about or add to. It is an opportunity for an open conversation. Kindness, openness to hear their perspective and the understanding that it isn’t a big deal in the broader scheme of things are helpful. Smaller issues that have no effect whatsoever might even be generously overlooked instead of pointing it out. This is a bit more than a ‘live and let live’ approach. It is the first line of safety that is needed for effective learning. If teenage parts manage our cooking for the first time I will praise the meal and not confront them with the cleaning afterwards. There is something like ‘good enough’ even when it isn’t perfect and we could easily come up with things to criticize. Just let it pass, I know it is hard at first.
Learning system
It helps to develop an image of our own system as a Learning System. We don’t know how everything works today. We might have known how things worked in the limited world of TraumaTime. But this adult life and recovery might not be our area of expertise. It needs freedom to ask seemingly ‘dumb’ questions. We have to try new things to see if they work or not. Then we keep doing what works and we keep learning from our failures. Someone once explained it as ‘failing forward’. Defining ourselves as a system that learns things takes a ton of pressure from everyone. When something goes right, we are happy. When something goes wrong, we learn from it. And that is all that is needed to manage failure. No need for punishment or even just the harsh criticism we know so well. We just try again. Controlling EP’s are described as parts that have the goal of control and use control as their tool to get there. In our new culture, our goal is to learn and our tool to get there is learning. Learning replaces the need for control quite effectively because it gets closer to what we actually need than the illusion of control does. ‘We are a learning system’ can become a mantra for managing difficult situations.
Diversity as a positive state
In a DID system, parts are often divided into extremes that cover different areas of being a person. Some hold anger and assertiveness, others hold care and gentleness. We as a group cover all areas but no parts alone can do that by themselves. Being different is not a problem. It is the hallmark of who we are. We are not meant to all be the same because then who would cover the other areas that are not-me? A system works because everyone is different. It can feel like a challenge to accept that. Western cultures have lost a lot of their vitality over the past years because they lost their tolerance for things that are different from themselves. Somehow, the only right way to be or to see things has become our way. Even people who insist that diversity is a good thing are surprisingly limited in their distress tolerance for people who are different from that norm. We are culturally forgetting how to live with people who are not identical to us. When the world around us teaches us that everyone who is different is the enemy it can easily become an inner culture where we silence voices for bringing something different to the table. In psychological safety, we listen to everything that is shared. We actually need these different perspectives. Sometimes parts know things we don’t. A healthy dose of humility can go a long way. We as a part are not the cream of the crop, in all areas, at all times. A less ego-centric approach moves the team into the spotlight. The team can do a lot more than a single part can.
Having different opinions or perspectives is not a threat. There isn’t one right way to see and understand things. That seems to be such a tricky thing to see in our current culture. The dualism of a clearly right thing and a clearly wrong thing happens less often than we think. We all need to practice tolerating contradicting opinions or perspectives in one room. Without feeling the need to exclude the people who think differently from us. Different perspectives bring new learning, that’s all. Our fight against the Not-Me hinders us from learning anything. Things can exist next to each other without diminishing each other. One might think that this is obvious for someone with DID but in reality, parts often fight because they firmly believe that only one right answer can exist and it has to be theirs, otherwise they fear elimination. Lived diversity that makes room for other perspectives can reduce this existential fear.
Relief
You might have felt a physical response to the descriptions of safe and unsafe environments. I often notice a sigh of relief in myself when I hear about psychological safety. It feels like a heavy burden is lifted and I can breathe again. There is research on psychological safety in teams that work on very difficult tasks, including Nasa. There is less unnecessary pressure. Energy can be invested in better ways than trying to protect oneself, never making a mistake or hiding mistakes. These teams are happier, more productive and they push the boundaries of what is possible through innovation. They really do learn together and create new things together. An unsafe environment sucks the energy out of a team. We need the freedom to speak up when we think that something is important. And life actually feels safer when others double-check what we are doing to make sure we will succeed. Having someone we can trust to speak up when we have a limited perspective is a surprising relief when it is done with generosity instead of nitpicking. It feels like support. And we all need reliable people who can freely tell us when we are wrong. These people will not be strangers, they are teammates who know how to behave within our shared culture of safety.
Growing culture
A new inner culture like this does not happen over night. It needs parts who choose it and who start treating other parts this way. In my own system, one part following through with this was enough to convince the others over time. For a while, there will be parts who want to participate in psychological safety and others who don’t and that is ok. We treat them with the tools of our new culture and they can hold on to their tools as long as they want to. The invitation to join us is always there. They can take their time. There is no force in this. Just the offer of belonging and cooperating in a cool team where people learn new stuff without impossible pressure or fear. There is no trick. It is just a different kind of inner culture that works differently from what we used to know. It is like moving to England and driving on the other side of the road. A bit unusual at first, but not a trick. They just do things differently and we just do things differently ourselves now.
We start with a seed, with an idea. We don’t know how to do this yet. We enter the process as learners with good faith and generosity. And then we learn how to do this one situation after the other, failing forward. Over time, we will get better at not reaching for old patterns to manage situations. We grow our own patterns that are supportive and create a sense of belonging.
Community
With an inner culture of psychological safety, we will notice that there is little psychological safety in a lot of spaces in the outside world. We might notice that the kind of ‘discourse’ we see online is often in bad faith, not generous or supportive at all, filled with attempts to humiliate others and it is generally not safe. We might feel drawn to engage with that when we are in constant hyperarousal because it gives us a war to fight but it is not healthy or happy. Find safe spaces. Places where it is ok to be merely human and to not know things. Places where people want to learn together. It is where true community is found.