Felt safety is a topic that comes up over and over again when working with adoptive and foster parents.  It can be an unusual concept to consider, but it’s one that is essential to fully embrace when parenting children with hard starts.  Because they’ve so often been in situations where they actually were not safe, it can be terribly difficult for kiddos to feel safe even when they are safe.

Unfortunately, fearfulness can look a lot like bad behavior, defiance, shutting down, emotional dysregulation, or difficult tantrums for kiddos with hard starts, which can continue until felt safety is firmly established.  And even then, a new trigger may cause reactions in our kiddos that we’re not always expecting.  Especially as we approach all of the Christmas festivities, triggers and reactions can be really ramped up.

So what is Felt Safety?

Dr. Karyn Purvis defines felt safety this way: “When you arrange the environment and adjust your behavior so your children can feel in a profound and basic way that they are truly safe in their home with you. Until your child experiences safety for himself or herself, trust can’t develop, and healing and learning won’t progress” (p.48, The Connected Child).

In our parent training classes, we dive into the many different ways that we, as parents, can try to provide felt safety for our children.  The thing to keep in mind, also, is that creating felt safety looks different for every child.  It truly is so dependent on what each child needs, based on their past and their responses to stressors.  We parents need to be detectives as we uncover the true needs behind our children’s behaviors.

One of the ways we like to foster felt safety in our home is using the plant power of essential oils.  There are so many ways to use oils in empowering ways, but they are especially helpful in promoting a calm environment to reduce stress.  In fact, reducing stress and encouraging a feeling of peace are some of the best ways we can create felt safety for our children with hard starts.  Diffusing oils and creating rollers for them to use when needed are both very helpful.  Not only that, oils can be a perfect solution to meet many of our children’s other needs, too.

It’s in the meeting needs, over and over and over again, that our children learn to truly feel safe.  The repetition is so very necessary, especially when they come to us with a request or concern.  While we rush to put a band-aid on our kiddos if they get a cut (even the smallest scrape that you can barely see!), we can go one step further with an oil blend to support healthy skin.  Likewise, we can use essential oils to help them work through big feelings or even relieve head or neck tension, tired muscles, tummy tightness, nose stuffiness, and a myriad of other requests.  We can also take advantage of oils to proactively empower felt safety in our children with things like helping to focus on completing homework, sleeping more soundly, supporting the immune system during the winter, or offering a dose of liquid courage when walking into a new experience.

One of my favorite rollers is our Chillax blend, but I also offer a FREE 21-day Oils 101 email course to learn about how to use many others.  We use oils in our home for so many situations, it’s difficult to remember a time without them in our natural toolbox.  It would seriously make life so much harder!

There truly is no end to the use of essential oils, which makes them a perfect, natural way to empower our children in healthy ways.  And it’s an easy solution that we parents can always keep tucked away in our felt safety tools.  As our children learn to trust that we can meet some of their needs with essential oils, we can teach them over time that they can meet their own needs, too.  It’s a slow process initially, because they need to learn to rely on us first as we establish trust.  This part is absolutely critical and cannot be missed.  But eventually, how incredibly awesome it is to empower our children with the knowledge and confidence to meet their own needs, too.

When you are ready to empower your family with essential oils and natural wellness, I will be here to support you wholeheartedly. I feel passionate about wholistic living and want to help as many families as possible enjoy it as well. Simply click on the link below to get started.

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