You are getting ready to go out to dinner with friends, and your partner is getting quieter and less responsive.
By the time you are in the cab, they have called you twice.
By the time you sit down, you have a bunch of texts.
By the time you get home, there is a fight waiting.
If you have been on either side of that scene, you already know what this episode is about. It is about emotional safety.
A felt sense that you can be yourself with someone without being punished for it. When it is there, there is room to be yourself.
When it is missing, you spend a lot of energy checking someone else’s nervous system and adjusting yourself to keep things from erupting.
Here are five signs, and where they often come from.
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1. Lack of Trust
This one is easier to spot than the others. It can look like accusing your partner of things, checking their phone and email, or constantly verifying their faithfulness.
From the outside, it reads as jealousy or possessiveness, but underneath it is often a much younger part of someone asking whether this person is going to stay.
These trust issues do not usually start with the current relationship. If you grew up around infidelity, you may carry an unconscious assumption that all partners cheat. If the adults in your life did not keep their promises, you may have learned that the people who are supposed to be reliable are not.
I was in a relationship years ago with someone who was so convinced I was going to leave him that, for years, I kept asking him why he kept saying it. I had no intention of leaving. But over time, the lack of safety he carried inside himself seeped into the relationship, and eventually, it was part of the reason I left. You will find a deeper inventory of these patterns in the guide for this episode.
2. Hiding Your True Feelings
This often shows up in people with an avoidant attachment style. From the outside, the relationship can look fun, light, and high-energy. But when it is time to go deeper, the person may lack the capacity. Vulnerability did not go well for them at some point in childhood, and the system learned that the safest move was to keep things light.
The relationship can run on intensity or excitement instead of intimacy. Hard conversations get deflected, joked about, or avoided altogether. Vulnerability feels like a trap rather than the bridge that connects you, and endings tend to be sudden and can look like abandonment.
In my therapy practice, when a client describes a relationship that ended this way, I am less interested in why the partner did what they did and more interested in why my client was drawn to that partner. That is the material we can actually work with.
3. Constant Need for Reassurance
At the core of this is often a sense of inadequacy. In my twenties, I needed a lot of reassurance because I had not yet built much self-esteem, and someone mirroring back their desire for me felt like enough to take the edge off.
If you have a father wound as I do, part of that inadequacy can run along that line. I felt lovable because I was securely attached to my mother, but I felt inadequate because I was insecurely attached to my father, and I never felt like I measured up.
That really stoked my ambition. I was proving something all the time. People who need a lot of reassurance often get labeled “needy,” which feels unfair to me because the need is real. But reassurance from someone else cannot fix what is an inside job is. We have to go to the original injury.
4. Walking on Eggshells
When emotional safety is missing, hypervigilance shows up. You are always checking to see if everything is okay, and the nervous system never quite rests. You probably learned this early in life as a way to get your needs met or to stay safe.
This ties into what I call anticipatory planning in my book Too Much. You are projecting into the future, rehearsing the conversation so everything goes well, softening the ask before you even open your mouth. By the time you actually say anything, you have done hours of unpaid labor that the other person does not even know about. Day to day, it can look like waiting for the other shoe to drop, even in relationships that are good, or workaholism, which was certainly my go-to move.
If this is you, it is exhausting, and nothing is wrong with you. This behavior was adaptive in childhood and becomes maladaptive in adulthood.
5. Self-Sabotaging Behavior
If you grew up in an environment where your thoughts, opinions, and feelings did not get treated like they mattered, that message can land at the level of worthiness, and over time, it starts to drive behavior. You sabotage your own happiness because some part of you, somewhere down deep, does not feel like you deserve it.
In a relationship, this can look like picking fights when things are going well, leaving right before it gets real, ghosting, or choosing partners who confirm the old story that you are not enough. It can also look like numbing out with what I call shadow addictions, the socially acceptable ways we check out, like the doom-scroll, the nightly wine, the over-exercise. Self-sabotage really starts with self-abandonment, the ways we have ghosted ourselves long before we ghost anyone else.
What to Do With This
Wherever you saw yourself in this, these are not who you are. They are patterns you learned, and patterns can change. Next week, I am giving you six things you can do to build more emotional safety in your relationships, and you will find reflection prompts and practices in the guide for this episode.
As always, take care of you.
Terri Cole Answers Your FAQs From The Week’s Blog
What is the difference between emotional insecurity and emotional safety?
Emotional safety is the felt sense that you can be yourself with someone without being punished for it. Emotional insecurity is what shows up when that safety is missing, either inside you or in the relationship. This episode focuses on personal emotional insecurity, the patterns one person carries into their relationships, often without realizing it.
Where does emotional insecurity come from?
It usually traces back to childhood. If you grew up around broken promises, infidelity, inconsistent love, or an environment where your feelings did not seem to matter, your nervous system adapted. Those adaptations kept you safer then, but they can show up later as lack of trust, hiding your feelings, constant need for reassurance, hypervigilance, or self-sabotage. The patterns made sense once. They just stopped serving you.
Why do I feel anxious even in a relationship that is actually good?
This is one of the most common signs of emotional insecurity. When your nervous system learned early that calm was not safe, it keeps scanning for the other shoe to drop, even when nothing is wrong. The anxiety is not evidence that something is wrong with the relationship. It is often the residue of an older experience your body has not finished updating.
If I see myself in these signs, does that mean something is wrong with me?
No. These are behaviors and patterns, not your identity. They were adaptive once, often in childhood, and they became maladaptive over time. The good news is that patterns can change. Naming them is the first step, and there is real work you can do from there.