I Feel Safe, Seen, and Understood – How Emotional Safety Shapes Love, the Body, and Even Fertility
- Brainz Magazine
- Oct 22
- 10 min read
Love doesn’t just touch our hearts. It affects our health and well-being, ignites creativity, transforms our bodies and hormones, and shapes our ability to create life. When we feel emotionally safe, the body puts down its guard, softens, and opens to receive love, abundance, and life itself. When we don’t, it contracts and starts protecting itself by blocking the very things we desire.
The hidden ingredient behind love, health, and happiness
Emotional safety is the hidden fuel, the secret ingredient that can make or break our lives. The absence of it can kill love, break up families, and shut down our bodies. It’s not just an emotional state. It’s a biological, energetic, and spiritual foundation that supports healing, connection, and the natural flow of creation. Essentially, emotional safety gives birth to happiness, lasting relationships, and even children.
What does it mean to feel safe in love?
Love is the most beautiful and, at the same time, terrifying necessity of life. We all long for it, yet we all fear it for the same reason. We believe it’s the foundation of happiness and fulfillment. We were told so as children. Every fairy tale ends with “they got married, had children, and lived happily ever after.”
We grew up believing that love alone brings happiness. But what about all those times it doesn’t? What about those times, when love makes us lose ourselves, shrink to meet someone else’s expectations, give up on our dreams and goals, or become caretakers instead of partners?
Love on its own is not enough. Without emotional safety, love can easily turn into pain, tears, and disappointment. It can make us disappear or become someone we are not.
So, is it still worth loving?
Absolutely. But for love to last, it must be paired with safety. How many times have you said or heard “I love you”, and yet the love eventually faded?
“I love you” is not the measure of a healthy, long-lasting relationship. We all know we can love deeply, even in toxic relationships, but in those, we never/rarely feel safe, seen, or understood.
When emotional safety is missing, love begins to fade
Not because the love itself disappears, but because the body and heart can’t stay open where they don’t feel safe.
Somewhere along the way, we gave way too much power to those three little words, “I love you.” We were taught to see them as the expression and ultimate sign of love and safety, as if hearing them could guarantee connection or belonging. But love alone isn’t what makes us feel secure. Words can comfort us for a moment, but without presence, empathy, and consistency, they slowly lose their magic.
True safety isn’t found in what we say, it’s found in what we feel
It’s in the voice that soothes, the eyes that truly see us, and the arms that hold us even when we’re not at our best. Love may start with words, but it only lasts when we feel safe enough to stay open to it.
Emotional safety is the quiet confidence that you can be your full self, messy, joyful, imperfect, vulnerable, and human, without fear of rejection or shame. It’s the deep breath your body takes when your partner’s presence feels like home.
The person you feel safe with is the one to keep. The one who lasts. The one your body won’t reject. It’s the person you’ll never cheat on, hurt, or abandon, the one you’ll joyfully return to after a long day because with them, you feel safe, seen, and understood. This is the kind of love that lasts, that doesn’t break up families, and that can even create new life.
In my work as a Fertility & Mama Coach, I often see couples who love each other deeply, but struggle to conceive. Beneath that struggle, there’s almost always a lack of emotional safety and trust, rooted in painful childhood experiences.
The body always reacts to our sense of safety
When a woman feels truly seen and understood, her nervous system shifts from protect to create, from infertility to fertility. The stress hormones that once kept her body in fight-or-flight begin to ease, and her natural cycles of emotion, energy, and fertility start to harmonize.
When a woman feels safe, she can finally surrender, trust, and open, not only to love but to life itself. Love isn’t just an emotion. It’s a biological signal. It tells the body whether to open or to close.
How do unresolved childhood wounds shape adult relationships?
Relationships are mirrors, reflections of the places within us that still ache to be seen, held, and healed. No matter how old we are, we remain extensions of our inner child. Everything that our younger self didn’t heal will eventually resurface in our relationships.
Love has a way of stirring up old wounds. It triggers us in the very places where we are most tender and vulnerable, our loneliness, our fear of not being good enough, the ache of always coming last, the pain of broken promises, or the repetition of unhealthy patterns we swore we’d never repeat.
How we respond to these wounds, whether we suppress them, project them, or finally allow ourselves to feel them, is a topic for another time. But one thing is certain, unresolved childhood pain shapes every relationship we have, with our business partners, life purpose, body, friends, family, children, and even love.
The inner child wants nothing more than to feel safe, loved, and accepted. If it has experienced rejection, inconsistency, or emotional neglect, it learns to protect itself. In adulthood, these protective patterns show up in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We seek validation, avoid vulnerability, overgive, or unconsciously attract partners who mirror the pain we never resolved.
These are not flaws. They are coping mechanisms, the body’s way of trying to stay safe. Healing begins when we stop judging these patterns and start listening to them. Every trigger, every emotional wall, is really a message from our inner child, a cry for help and reassurance.
“I’m scared. Can I trust this? Is this safe?”
When the inner child feels truly safe, it relaxes. And when it does, so does the heart and the body.
The biology of safety: How the nervous system mirrors love
Emotional safety isn’t abstract, it’s physiological. The autonomic nervous system, particularly the vagus nerve, constantly monitors whether we are safe or threatened.
When we feel safe, the parasympathetic system, often called the “rest, digest, and create” mode, takes over. Heart rate stabilizes, digestion improves, hormones balance, and blood flow returns to the reproductive organs. This is the biological state where conception, creativity, and deep connection are most possible.
When we feel unsafe, emotionally or physically, the sympathetic system takes charge. Cortisol and adrenaline flood the body, diverting energy away from non-essential functions, like digestion and reproduction. In an unsafe relationship, love and reproduction often just shut down.
When that happens, it doesn’t mean your body is broken. Your body is just protecting you from danger, resurfacing childhood pain, the wrong person, unsafe choices, or harmful patterns. It’s the same mechanism that stops ovulation or delays menstruation during famine or danger. The body reacts to perceived physical or emotional threat to keep you and your future offspring safe.
For women, especially those who have experienced early trauma, emotional safety is essential. The body needs to know it is truly safe, not just to be open to love, but to create life. Deep down, the body seeks reassurance. That this partner is trustworthy, that together they will not repeat the pain of the past, and that any children born from this union will be loved, protected, and free from ancestral wounds.
Women are guided by their inner mother archetype, the instinct to nurture, protect, and create life. When that inner mother feels safe, and the inner child within us feels seen, held, and understood, love blossoms naturally. And when love feels safe, the body follows, it relaxes, opens, and creates with ease.
In other words, without emotional safety, the mother archetype blocks the heart and body to protect both herself and her future children. Even the deepest desire to conceive may be subconsciously blocked to prevent entering an unsafe or toxic relationship. Emotional safety isn’t just supportive. It’s biologically essential for love, intimacy, and fertility to thrive.
Conscious relationships as a path to healing, love, and fertility
Luckily, love is not always a reflection of unhealed childhood pain or a source of heartache. When experienced in emotional safety, it becomes a powerful medicine, unlocking passion, creativity, fertility, and inner peace. Conscious, emotionally attuned relationships provide a corrective experience, one where our nervous system learns that closeness doesn’t have to mean danger.
And that is the beauty of love. It can heal and rewire us. When we feel safe with someone, our body begins to rewrite old stories:
“I’m good enough.”
“I’m not too much.”
“It’s safe to love and be loved.”
“Love doesn’t disappear when I reveal my true self.”
This emotional rewiring has a profound impact on well-being as well as fertility. I’ve witnessed women who, after years of struggle, conceived naturally once their emotional landscape shifted, when they felt safe enough to open, trust, and receive.
Healing the heart often opens the womb.
8 simple ways to create emotional safety in love
Now, let’s be real, no relationship is perfect, nor is it supposed to be. Emotional safety isn’t something that only exists in flawless relationships. It’s something we can cultivate with loving intention, persistence, and care, in any relationship built on mutual respect and a willingness to grow together. It’s rarely something that magically appears overnight, and if it’s still missing in your relationship, it doesn’t mean you have to walk away.
Every love story deserves to be fought for.
When both partners give and receive equally, emotional safety can slowly be created and strengthened over time. Love, like anything we truly value, our health, our business, or a strong, fit body, needs regular attention, care, and daily nourishment. Love isn’t something to take for granted. If we don’t show up, nurture it, and grow together day by day, it can fall out of balance, just like a body without exercise and a healthy diet, or a business left unattended.
So, if you want to give your relationship a fair chance and create emotional safety where it feels missing, start following these 8 simple rules:
Listen to understand, not to fix. When your partner shares, hold space without jumping to solutions. Being heard is healing in itself.
Soften your body. Notice when you’re tense during a conflict. Don’t react. Take a breath and remind yourself, “I’m safe now.”
Use repair, not perfection. Emotional safety isn’t built by never hurting each other, but by knowing how to reconnect afterwards.
Share your inner world. Vulnerability invites intimacy. When you share what you truly feel, you teach your partner how to love you better.
Ask more and talk less. Show your significant other you care.
Allow your partner to vent, cry, and share safely. Don’t try to fix things for them. Help them release the pain and inspire them to find solutions.
Prioritize self-safety. Emotional safety begins within. The more you can self-soothe and stay present, the more your body feels like home and acts safe around others.
Make small gestures. Prove you remember, care, see, hear, and understand your partner.
Give each other small moments of safety, a kind glance, a calm tone, a long hug. These will accumulate over time, teaching the body to relax, open, and receive again.
Love, like anything we truly care about, thrives when we show up every day with attention, presence, and intention.
Why “I feel safe, seen, and understood” is the most beautiful compliment you can ever receive
Essentially, the greatest gift we can give or receive in love isn’t “I love you,” but “With you, I feel safe, seen, and understood.” That sentence carries the essence of trust, surrender, and healing. It signals to the nervous system, “I can exhale. I don’t need to fight, hide, or protect anymore.”
For women, especially when making huge life decisions like marriage, moving in together, pregnancy, motherhood, or navigating fertility challenges, that exhale can be life-changing. When the heart feels safe, the body follows, opening to intimacy, creation, and the possibility of new life. Because love, in its truest form, is not about fixing or chasing, it’s about allowing the body, the heart, and the spirit to feel safe enough to bloom.
How your level of emotional safety shapes your love, life, and fertility
Your relationships are not just emotional experiences. They are reflections of your personal and spiritual maturity.
The safer you feel within yourself, the safer others feel around you because as you heal, you cultivate safety, the kind that softens your body, steadies your heart, and creates the inner space where love and life can truly thrive.
Whether your goal is deeper intimacy, emotional healing, or conceiving new life, keep this in mind, “Like seeds in rich soil, people flourish where they feel safe.”
When your inner child feels held, your heart opens. When your heart opens, your body follows. And when your body feels safe, love, creation, and miracles no longer need permission, they simply happen.
How to step into emotional safety?
Whether you’re calling in love, preparing to welcome new life, or learning to balance motherhood and business, remember, you don’t have to do it alone.
Open up to your partner, a trusted friend, someone who’s walked a similar path, or a professional who can help you feel safe again. Healing happens in connection when you allow yourself to be vulnerable, seen, and supported.
I’ve been working as a Fertility & Mama Coach in Slovenia for over 12 years now, and I’m thrilled to have recently expanded my work and mission to an international audience.
If you’re ready to nurture emotional safety, create deeper connection, and step fully into love, family, and your own power, but don’t have someone to confide in right now, I’m here to walk this path with you. You are not alone. Together, we can help you feel safe again.
For any questions about love, fertility, or challenges with motherhood, you can email me directly at alneja@baby-spell.com.
If you’re trying to get pregnant and feel stuck, schedule a diagnostic counseling session with me. Or explore my signature 12-week fertility program, Unlock Your Fertility, designed to help you release hidden blocks and align mind, body, and heart for conception.
Read more from Alneja Gašpar Horvat
Alneja Gašpar Horvat, Special Guest Writer and Executive Contributor
Alneja Gašpar Horvat is a Fertility & Mama Coach and Transformational Mentor who helps women and couples unlock fertility, heal emotional wounds, and create conscious, loving families. With over a decade of experience, she guides clients through conception, pregnancy, motherhood, and the delicate balance between work, love, and self. Through her holistic and intuitive approach, Alneja empowers women to release ancestral patterns, reconnect with their bodies, and build healthier generations rooted in love, safety, and purpose.
