How to be Safe? Rapport & Belief Change

Being “out of rapport” with ourselves is a deeply painful experience. We feel ourselves, in some way, as our own enemy or to be unsafe for ourselves.

When we look deeply at something we want in our lives that we are unable, despite great effort, to experience, we discover that something deeply unconscious in us finds the desired experience to be fundamentally unsafe.

Every day, my intelligent, creative and committed clients are unable to have the experience of life they would like, not for lack of effort, but for lack of internal safety.

How do we acquire this kind of safety? There are two ways forward.

1) Rapport: The experience of being safe with anyone & anything, especially ourselves

Basic interpersonal rapport is a learnable skill. Many years ago the founders of NLP discovered its principles. The basis of interpersonal rapport is mirroring: demonstrating to others that we are “of like kind,” and therefore fundamentally safe. As we learn and practice interpersonal rapport, we can begin to apply this experience of rapport to ourselves, offering ourselves that mirroring, letting our own minds know we are “of like kind” to ourselves, and safe.

This is a process, best done in a supportive, learning environment where you can get practice in rapport techniques, and take workable steps in allowing your self to create personal safe space. Over time, it becomes internalized and grows spontaneously.

2) Beliefs: The unconscious meanings that provide us with our wanted & unwanted experiences of life.

Unconscious beliefs stabilize the sense that what we want may be unsafe for us. At the same time that we begin to really understand and experience rapport, we are also shifting those beliefs that say so much about danger—after all, if we are experiencing rapport, maybe those beliefs about what is and isn’t safe are beginning to be revised, and new beliefs are starting to take root.

This is an intricate and necessary dance between new experiences of safety and unconscious belief revision. Together, they make a new experience of life possible, bit by bit. You can feel it as it happens—what I feared may not be so true anymore; what I hoped for may be possible. And that is the beginning of change.