A place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, age, or physical or mental ability; a place where the rules guard each person’s self-respect, dignity and feelings and strongly encourage everyone to respect others.
Creating a safe space is an ongoing process versus a stagnant destination. There is a flow towards inclusion with the help of input from participants & staff.
This means that there is a need to regularly review your group’s ethos, boundaries & feedback from participants & staff.
It is important for autistic people to have spaces that feel safe because autistic people process the sensory features of the world differently from neurotypicals. For example I like wearing long sleeves even when it’s a sunny day because I like the feeling of my arms being covered. More than that, safe spaces for autistic people are a way of letting them know that their reaction to the world is understood.
What Makes a Home Feel Safe For Autistic People? — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
We and our children are in regular states of stress due to our conditions and societal expectations. This wears down our neurological, metabolic, and immune functioning over time. Safe spaces give us a break from stressors and help us to regulate.
What Makes a Home Feel Safe For Autistic People? — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
All people need environments, interactions, routines and relationships where they feel safe. Without safe spaces, discomforts, tensions, anxieties, and dysregulation can develop. The differences in sensing, thinking, and communicating that come with the autistic experience can make the world a challenging and stressful place to navigate, especially if our identities are misunderstood and our needs go unsupported. Autistic people need safe places we can trust, depend on, and exist in; where we can soothe and regulate our bodies and minds.
What Makes a Home Feel Safe For Autistic People? — THINKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AUTISM
What does a safe space mean to you?
Safe spaces to us mean everyone feeling welcomed, comfortable and heard, and their privacy and autonomy respected and protected. It’s of utmost importance that all participants feel they have been given the opportunity to have their voice heard (wherever possible). Offering nurturing, non judgemental spaces is key.
The Autistic Collective, Creating Safe Spaces for Autistic People
Spaces that I can be authentically and unapologetically autistic, adhd me. Where the people around me do not feel that they like me ‘despite my differences’, but that they like me because of my differences.
Alice McSweeney, Creating Safe Spaces for Autistic People
A safe space: to my adult self – a safe space means a place where I am sensory comfortable, allowed to be my authentic self, doing what I enjoy (my work) and being next to my husband or kids (even if we aren’t doing the same thing). As a child a safe space would have been illusive— but for a start it would have been a place free from bullying and judgement by peers and adults.
Dr. Jennifer Huffman, Creating Safe Spaces for Autistic People
Being able to be my total self without any hesitation because of fear of being unsafe, judgement, or cruel comments. Taking the deepest sigh that ends in a smile. No mask. No fake identity. Just be me. This is built by the people that are in this space, requiring all involved to put in that effort. It’s a space where EVERYONE advocates so you are never alone in standing up for inclusion, effectively making that space safe.
Dr. Tiff Lanza, LCSW, M.Ed., Creating Safe Spaces for Autistic People
Making Spaces Safer
The reality is that marginalized people experience discrimination in public spaces. As they move through their lives and through various spaces, they cannot predict if they will be treated with respect, let alone if they will be safe. When they attend a show or event at your space, they should be able to know what to expect, or at least what you intend to have happen—and not happen—within your walls. So, how can you let them know? You can’t just open the door; you have to put out a welcome mat.
Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You Work, Play, and Gather
But you’re not doing all this just to avoid litigation, right? You’re doing it because you want people to feel welcome. I encourage you to exceed legal requirements and even people’s expectations.
Of course, making safer spaces is more than a checklist. You have to think both holistically and specifically. For instance, don’t overlook the little things that make up the overall feel of your space.
Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You Work, Play, and Gather
Belonging and Authenticity
Belonging is very close to the idea of feeling safe.
Belonging in School: Resource Introduction Webinar – YouTube
Masking is a survival mechanism of suppressed needs that so many Autistic people feel they have to perform just to get through their days. Not having enough safe spaces or safe people around you to enable you to be your authentic self has severe consequences on mental health and well-being.
Autism & The Map of Neuronormative Domination: Stuck States vs Flow States | Autistic Realms
Belonging is about creating an environment where people feel emotionally and psychologically safe.
The freedom to BE, fully seen AND heard in all my glory is my heart’s deepest request. This is a prayer, self-love letter, a final notice to my inner critic, one more voice in the echo—thank you for witnessing my purest form.
The Journey of Undoing: An open letter to who needs it — SITI Girl Miami
The privilege of being oneself is a gift many take for granted, but for the autistic person, being allowed to be oneself is the greatest and rarest gift of all.
Autism and Asperger Syndrome in Children: For parents of the newly diagnosed
Never forget that authenticity and vulnerability are revolutionary in every capacity. Shame is the antithesis of progress.
The Journey of Undoing: An open letter to who needs it — SITI Girl Miami
The purest forms of belonging enable us to exist as unique, authentic beings within a larger whole, and yet to experience that whole within the multiplicity. The following lines in Walt Whitman’s epic poem “Song of Myself” in his evoke this feeling:
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel
Authenticity is our purest freedom.
The Journey of Undoing: An open letter to who needs it — SITI Girl Miami
Show Up in Wholeness
In the simplest sense, belonging is wholeness. It’s the experience of being at home in ourselves as well as the social, environmental, organizational, and cultural contexts of our lives. It’s the basis for human flourishing.
On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel
In most organizations—just like in most group settings outside of work—it can feel risky to show up whole. Almost everyone has learned in childhood that when we expose who we really are, the parts of ourselves we cherish most, we feel vulnerable with: we open ourselves to possible mockery and ridicule, or to have what we shared used against us. Much better, then, is to play it safe, to hide behind a professional mask, to show up in ways we know are accepted and expected in the work place.
That safety comes at a cost: We cut ourselves from the richness of our humanity. In the workplace, the mask we feel we need to wear is often mental, rational, masculine, self-centered. We cut ourselves off from our emotions, our intuitions, our body, our feminine side. We don’t heed our inner voice, our longings, our calling, our soul. We neglect our capacity for connection and compassion, for love for ourselves, for others, and for all life that surrounds us. We might feel safe. But the cost is a life that often feels empty and strangely lifeless..
Teal organizations have come to the realization that when employees leave so much of who they are behind, they also leave a great amount of their passion, creativity and energy behind. They are mindful to create a setting of safety—a safe space—where employees feel they can safely show up in wholeness.
This Space Is For Us
It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space but actively owning it; “This space,” I whisper to myself, “is for me.”Next to me, I sense my friend has the same electrified feeling. This space is for us.
Members of many marginalized groups have this shared experiential touchstone, this sense of unexpected and vivid belonging and an ardent desire to be able to pass this experience along. Some can remember the precise moment when they were in a space inhabited entirely by people like them for the first time.
Crip space is unique, a place where disability is celebrated and embraced-something radical and taboo in many parts of the world and sometimes even for people in those spaces. The idea that we need our own spaces, that we thrive in them, is particularly troubling for identities treated socially as a negative; why would you want to self-segregate with the other cripples? For those newly disabled, crip space may seem intimidating or frightening, with expectations that don’t match the reality of experience-someone who has just experienced a tremendous life change is not always ready for disability pride or defiance, needing a kinder, gentler introduction.
This is precisely why they are needed: as long as claiming our own ground is treated as an act of hostility, we need our ground. We need the sense of community for disabled people created in crip space.
How can we cultivate spaces where everyone has that soaring sense of inclusion, where we can have difficult and meaningful conversations?
Because everyone deserves the shelter and embrace of crip space, to find their people and set down roots in a place they can call home.
“The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People” by s.e. smith in “Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century“
Making people unsafe is just not OK.
In my work life in education, I’ve fought for all the kids who don’t have those safe spaces, because unless your spaces are safe, you are making children (and adults) unsafe. And making people unsafe is just not OK.
The Path to Equity Begins with Neuroqueer-Sensitive Learning Spaces – Stimpunks Foundation
