Felt safety - inside, outside, and between (made visible and open to change)

I've been listening to this podcast series on the various aspects of felt safety:

→ Inside Felt Safety — Robyn Gobbel

→ Outside Felt Safety — Robyn Gobbel

→ Between Felt Safety — Robyn Gobbel

...and I realized that the tools I use map directly onto the three layers Robyn describes.

Inside felt safety

A Kirlian photo is a direct measure of a person's inside felt safety. It shows which organ systems are under strain, which brainwave patterns are dysregulated, and whether the person is in their body enough to receive what life — and treatment — has to offer.

This photo was taken of my youngest seven days before I wrote this article:

At the time, she had a wet cough in her sleep, very cold legs, and was grinding her teeth — a sign of chill, dampness, and inability to let go. From the RestoreChi Monthly Tracks, I played two Chill Release tracks and a Spleen Dampness track with the speaker around her waist and she slept more peacefully.

Looking at her Kirlian photo, I could see that it was more than just a cough. Stress in her left foot (delta) showed she was having trouble with deep sleep and cellular repair (tied to stomach/spleen, worry), and stress in her left hand (alpha) showed she was having problems being calm while she was awake (tied to kidney/bladder, fear).

Alpha brainwaves come online at around age six. Before that, children are delta and theta dominant — hypnagogic, with no ability to protect themselves from the programming of others. This is one of the reasons I was happy to keep her out of school until she was old enough to defend who she wanted to be.

Her inside felt safety was also affected by how she entered the world. She was induced at 37.5 weeks. A foley balloon was inserted into her safe space, inflated and weighted, to force her to enter the world on my schedule rather than hers. This registered in her body (as a crooked coccyx) and visible in her Kirlian as an information barrier (hands look different from feet).

I tried to keep her feeling safe, but her left big toe closed again after a stressful week. What was a risk to her brain was now also a risk to her heart:

She became more aggressive, more reactive. I thought we had moved past this, but now I know: this is where she may regress to, from time to time...

And this is not the worst her photo has ever been.

In July 2024, after spending a month with an intrusive cousin on the tails of a year with an intrusive friend, this is what her photo looked like this (left big toe open, right little toe closed, hands almost completely missing, she was coping by dissociating):

When I tried to pull her into her body, her left big toe shut down:

This doesn't mean that what I did was wrong. It means more time and support were needed.

Seeing this on paper can help us have more compassion for everyone — including ourselves. The distance between these early photos and where she is now — shown on the Felt Safety page — is a true testament to what is possible. Many aspects of what looked like being on the spectrum have resolved. She attends school and feels safe, because of the time and work we put in, to understand and give her what she needs.

Outside felt safety

Outside felt safety comes from the degree to which a person understands and is living in alignment with their Unique Psychology. When a child's parent understands and supports their child's Unique Psychology, they stop trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. The child experiences the world as a place that has room for who they actually are. They have outside felt safety.

It is common for me to share someone's Unique Psychology and for the recipient not to know what to do with the information. Unlike people who are inspired to experiment and see what works, many are looking for guaranteed action steps. Someone with between felt safety (see below) is more likely to be able to make use of their Unique Psychology.

Between felt safety

Between felt safety comes from the willingness to engage in trial and error, serve and return, rupture and repair. It comes from being able to ask a question and be corrected without fear of the relationship collapsing.

It also comes from being able to make peace with who we are and how others may judge us. Many people have anxiety because they are afraid of what might happen if they are wrong. Between felt safety is built by being wrong and seeing the relationship can survive it.

A parent who has had enough Esogetic treatment to have good enough inside felt safety can begin to offer this to their child. We cannot give what we do not have. The state of our nervous system is contagious — in both directions. When the parent's inside felt safety improves, the child's outside felt safety improves automatically, because the parent becomes a more regulated environment for the child to exist in (and vice versa).

This is the sequence. Inside first. Then outside. Then between. And it is not linear — each layer feeds the others.

When we can see aspects of a person's inside and outside felt safety, we do not have to throw our hands up and say there is nothing we can do. We can help the inside feel more safe with Esogetic Medicine and compassion. We can help the outside feel more safe by understanding unique differences, needs, and limits through Unique Psychology. And as both improve, between felt safety follows — because it becomes easier to serve and return, repair what ruptures, and to stay in the relationship rather than run from it.

What you can have access to

You can have images like these too — to understand why you, your child, your partner, or your student may not feel safe inside, and what can be done to support them without force, without anything that makes things harder to heal in the end.

→ Learn about Felt Safety and Kirlian Photography

→ Mental Health — what partially absent and double deficient photos look like and what this means for treatment

→ Parent-Child — supporting your sensitive child

→ Book a free 15-minute consultation