Psychological safety is recognized as central to mental health, wellbeing (Sullivan et al., 2018) and posttraumatic growth (Nor-man et al., 2020) with increasing clinical interest and research attention toward its importance. Feeling safe is recognized as a distinct state important for rest, restoration and social bonding (Porges, 2011). As social beings perceived threat is often interper-sonal while safety with other people is communicated using com-passion (Gilbert, 2017). Compassionate interventions, such as the use of soothing voice tones and breathing, reduce the fight/flight response, decelerate heartbeat and facilitate parasympathetic rest and restoration (Kirby et al., 2017). A safe and compassionate early environment shapes the nervous system and aids the devel-opment of self-soothing strategies that enable self-regulation in later life (Gilbert, 2017). Trauma symptoms arise from unregu-lated threat preoccupation, when self-regulation is not available, which affects our biology, social interaction, and maturation (Mot-san et al., 2021; van der Kolk, 1994).
To date, psychological safety research has largely been considered within organizational and group contexts, describing the process of assessing risk in interpersonal relationships and occupational envi-ronments. The Team Psychological Safety Scale (Edmondson, 1999) is a 7-item self-report scale that measures perceptions of feeling safe within teams which has good reliability and validity (Ming et al., 2015). Increased sense of psychological safety at work facilitates em-ployee communication, improvements in learning, teamwork and work performance (Edmondson & Lei, 2014; O’Donovan et al., 2020). The positive impact of psychological safety has been found in other organizational contexts, including public spaces, education (Wanless, 2016), community building (Singh et al., 2018), and com-municating in medical teams (Real et al., 2021) and in health care workplaces to reduce levels of psychological distress and trauma (Ahmed et al., 2021). However, psychological safety and its mea-surement differs within teams differs from the individual.

Psychological safety for the individual, rather than within teams, has also begun to gain attention within mental health set-tings regarding clinical understanding of trauma related conditions and trauma informed practices (Isobel et al., 2020) where tradi-tional measures focus on pathology rather than prevention and positive adaptation. Difficulty in assessing danger or safety and modulating fear response is reported in individuals suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD; Jovanovic et al., 2012). A novel manualized cognitive-behavioural treatment for PTSD called ‘Seeking Safety’ which prioritizes feeling safe (Najavitis, 2001) delivered improved outcomes in symptoms of PTSD and psychiat-ric distress compared to controls (Desai et al., 2008). ‘The Feeling Safe Program’ aims to address safety feelings when treating perse-cutory delusions in psychosis and a clinical trial of this interven-tion showed recovery (Freeman et al., 2016).
The following psychological scales include a component of psy-chological safety. In the Activation and Safe/Content Affect Scale (Gilbert et al., 2008) safe affect is shown to negatively correlate with measures of depression, anxiety, stress, self-criticism, and insecure attachment. The same research team developed the Scale of Childhood Memories of Emotional Warmth and Safety (Richter et al., 2009). The Therapeutic Environment Scale includes a ‘feel-ing safe with others’ subscale, validated using clinical samples (Veale et al., 2016). The Child Safety Behavior Scale has been developed to measure safety-seeking behaviors (Alberici et al., 2018) but is less concerned with affective states. In medical settings concern for the sense of safety experienced by patients (Ellegaard et al., 2020; Morton, 2020) and when exposed to disempowering aspects of care (Morton et al., 2020)is of interest in terms of quality of experience and speed of recovery. In one study, feeling safe during the process of hospitalization was found to increase feelings of control, calm and hope (Mollon, 2014). Feeling safe has also been found to improve healing and re-covery during maternity care of women who have experienced childhood sexual trauma, while feeling unsafe with professionals could be experienced as retraumatization (Morton, 2020).