Most women were taught that safety, when it comes to telling the truth, relies on controlling the outside world; it’s a belief that makes sense—and helped us survive. And yet, it’s also a belief that has its own consequences. External safety is important, of course, but it keeps us in a state of hyper-vigilance and anxiety. External safety, as it turns out, is only the first step in the process of creating deep and reliable safety—the kind that the body genuinely trusts.

After external safety comes internal safety, the next evolutionary step. Learning to speak your truth out loud, what I call "truthing," involves fundamentally shifting the way you define safety from something that’s provided by the external response you receive and the current weather in your emotional landscape to an internal state that rests on your own capacity and practice. Your fundamental well-being becomes solid and trustworthy when it is no longer dependent on harmony, agreement, or approval.

We’ve been taught to think of safety as a fragile state that’s mortally threatened by conflict and discomfort, a feeling that cannot survive bumpy emotional circumstances. But safety must shift from this fleeting, conflict-allergic definition (that usually requires inauthenticity) to a deeper understanding and acceptance. At the end of the day, safety is knowing that conflict will happen, that it's unavoidable, even with all your vigilance. But—and this is the primary shift—that conflict is not something that needs to or will destroy you.

True........

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