The concept of the Safe Place occupies a structurally pivotal position across the depth-psychological and trauma-therapeutic corpus, functioning simultaneously as a technical procedure, a phenomenological orientation, and a philosophical precondition for therapeutic work. In EMDR literature, most extensively developed by Francine Shapiro, the Safe Place is a formalised eight-step preparatory exercise in which a positive imagery resource is conditioned through bilateral stimulation to serve as an affective regulator during abreactive processing — a kind of intrapsychic refuge the clinician installs before disturbing material is approached. Najavits, working within the Seeking Safety framework for comorbid PTSD and substance abuse, reframes safety not as an imaginal destination but as a stage-model imperative: the first and non-negotiable condition of recovery, without which mourning and reconnection cannot proceed. The Polyvagal-informed perspectives of Dana extend the concept into neurophysiology, dissolving the spatial metaphor in favour of an autonomic state distinguished by neuroception of safety rather than danger. A more archetypal register appears in Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Ingrid Clayton, where the safe place is interior — an inward orientation, a felt somatic condition, even a symbolic animal guide — rather than a visualised scene. Tensions within the corpus centre on whether safety is an endogenous resource to be evoked and strengthened, a relational condition co-created within the therapeutic frame, or a first-order clinical prerequisite that must precede all deeper processing.
The clinician and client identify an image of a safe place that the client can easily evoke and that creates a personal feeling of calm and safety.
Shapiro provides the canonical EMDR eight-step Safe Place protocol, establishing the technique as a structured resource-installation procedure preparatory to trauma reprocessing.
, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001thesis
Identify a place that gives you a feeling of safety. Or if you prefer, it can be a feeling of calm. What we are looking for at this point is a memory that will help you retrieve a positive emotion that you can bring up and use to replace a feeling of disturbance.
Shapiro frames the Safe Place as a retrievable positive memory serving as an affective counter-weight to disturbance, foregrounding its self-regulatory function in psychoeducational EMDR practice.
, Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy, 2012thesis
For both PTSD and substance abuse, safety is the first stage in healing, according to a great deal of research and clinical wisdom.
Najavits positions safety not as a technique but as the foundational stage-model prerequisite for all subsequent therapeutic work with PTSD and substance abuse.
, Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse, 2002thesis
If you were able to identify a Safe or Calm Place, then you already have a very useful technique to help get rid of a disturbance if it arises. It’s important to use it daily when you aren’t upset in order to make sure it stays powerful enough to work.
Shapiro emphasises that the Safe Place requires regular reinforcement outside of crisis contexts in order to retain its regulatory efficacy, positioning it as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time installation.
, Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy, 2012thesis
If you feel triggered, find a safe place by leaving the room, the area, or the neighborhood; taking a drive or a walk; throwing out the drug accessories; or changing the TV channel.
Najavits operationalises the safe place as a concrete environmental and behavioural strategy for reducing proximity to triggers, extending the concept beyond visualisation into physical space management.
, Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse, 2002supporting
Being alert in this constantly dangerous world is exhausting. It is important to have a safe place where it is okay to relax and rest. A first step in recovery for the ACA Teen is often simply finding this safe place.
The ACA framework presents finding a safe place as the inaugural act of recovery for children of alcoholics, linking hypervigilance in unsafe households to the recuperative necessity of a refuge.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
He felt like they were trying to tell him something. Be yourself. Drop the mask. You can be soft. Expose your underbelly. That is the safe place.
Clayton reconceives the safe place as an interior somatic and symbolic condition — authentic self-exposure rather than a location — discovered through shamanic imagery work in the treatment of fawning.
, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back, 2025supporting
Learning to ask for help from safe people, utilizing community resources, exploring ‘recovery thinking,’ taking good care of one’s body, rehearsing honesty and compassion, increasing self-nurturing activities.
Najavits expands the safe place concept into relational and behavioural dimensions, presenting safety as an ensemble of life skills rather than a single technique or setting.
, Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse, 2002supporting
Safe place, 67, 143, 164, 166, 169, 180, 194, 230, 292, 306, 313 creation of, 125–127, 282 imagery, 125–127, 244 visualization of, 71, 75, 94, 164, 167, 244
The EMDR index entry reveals the safe place as a pervasive structural component across assessment, preparation, abreaction management, and special populations, underscoring its systemic centrality in the protocol.
, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
The therapist may work with these parts to help them become more oriented to the safe present and to regulate themselves, but must keep in mind that it is the primary responsibility of the patient as a whole to learn to accept and cope with these parts.
Van der Hart reframes the safe place temporally as orientation to the ‘safe present,’ situating it within structural dissociation theory as a condition that dissociative parts must be guided toward.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
From a neuroception of safety, the sympathetic and dorsal vagal systems are inhibited, the ventral vagal system is in control, and the social engagement system is available.
Dana grounds the safe place in polyvagal neuroscience, identifying it not as imaginal content but as the ventral vagal autonomic state generated by neuroception of safety.
, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018supporting
Home is where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us because something else is demanding our time and attention.
Estés renders the safe place as an archetypal interior dwelling — a psychological home of sustained inner life — connecting it to feminine self-continuity and contemplative tradition.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
It also carries a sense of safety that has been conditioned by the therapeutic relationship.
Shapiro notes that the relational bond itself functions as a conditioned safety cue, suggesting the therapeutic alliance as a live component of the safe place phenomenon.
, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
Be sure patients understand the idea of safety. The treatment is designed to convey one idea above all: Stay safe, no matter what happens.
Najavits distils the entire Seeking Safety treatment philosophy into the imperative of safety-as-priority, presenting it as the supreme organising principle of therapeutic intervention.
, Seeking Safety: A Treatment Manual for PTSD and Substance Abuse, 2002supporting
Imagination seems anyway to be the only safe place to keep the bomb: there is no literal positive place on earth where it can be held.
Hillman deploys the ‘safe place’ rhetorically to argue that imagination is the only domain capable of containing the most dangerous psychic contents, inverting therapeutic usage toward archetypal-political reflection.
, Mythic Figures, 2007aside