Welcome to the Emancipate Your Mind podcast.

I'm your host, certified religious transition and trauma recovery coach, Terry Hales.

I help people step out of the shadows of religious fear and shame and embrace their

authentic selves with love and empathy.

If you're ready to throw off the shackles of learned binary thinking and explore a more nuanced

approach to life, this is your playground.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Emancipate Your Mind podcast. Last week, we talked about the

basic building blocks of creating emotional safety for young children. And this week, I want to

continue that discussion and talk about how we create emotional safety for older children,

teens, and young adults. And this is a little bit of a

trickier topic because you and your teen likely already have well-established relationship patterns.

And some of these patterns may have been influenced by the authoritarian nature of the high-demand

religion you used to adhere to. Some of those patterns may have been

what you experienced as a child. So you usually aren't creating an environment of emotional safety

from scratch with this team. You're building upon your past relationship and their past experience

with being accepted and their ability to belong. And if you've had a relationship built on

authoritarianism or codependency or emotional fragility in the past, we're going to have to

address that elephant in the room before safety can begin to grow in the relationship. We have to

begin working on those old patterns,

and we may have to be accountable. In fact, we will have to be accountable about things that

have happened in the past and ways that we've related that perhaps weren't healthy or

weren't conducive to them feeling safe, opening up and being

...