Safe Spaces

If you’ve ever said “I just want a safe space” and meant “I’m tired of walking on eggshells,” this conversation will land. I’m talking about the kind of emotional safety that lets you breathe, speak, and exist without shrinking yourself and also the hidden trap of making your peace dependent on other people’s approval.

We start by naming the real need: safety is a basic human requirement, and for many Muslim women it’s been tangled with family expectations, marriage dynamics, community judgment, and spiritual language that can sometimes be used to silence pain. I share an Islamic framework for protection that isn’t one sided control but mutual allyship, and then we pivot into the part most of us miss: if you’re waiting for people to stop judging you before you feel safe, you’ll be waiting a long time. The work is learning how to create internal safety through your mind, your relationship with yourself, your relationship with Allah, and nervous system regulation without normalizing harm.

The turning point is understanding discernment versus judgment. Discernment is calm and clear; it helps you recognize patterns that violate your dignity and take action. Judgment is charged and draining; it keeps your focus glued to what others “should” do and recreates an unsafe environment inside you, even if you change rooms, friends, or communities. We also cover the hard nuance: how internal responsibility can sound like blame if you’ve lived with chronic invalidation, and how to hold your reality while refusing to make other people’s opinions your identity.

You’ll leave with practical embodied prompts for walking into tense spaces, plus a faith anchored way to center tawakkul so your dignity isn’t up for debate. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs a safer inner world, and leave a review with one boundary you’re ready to practice this week.

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Transcript

What A Safe Space Really Means

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Kamal Abdar.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today we're gonna be talking about the topic of safe spaces. I hear a lot of women talking about this and how they want to be in a safe space and how they admire women that are able to have safe spaces around them. And this is a very basic biological need. To be able to exist in an environment where you don't have fear of harm, but even beyond that, you don't have the fear of someone's judgment. What a safe space offers is an environment without judgment, and that is a huge blessing where you're able to exist in a space where you're not on constant guard. So I tried to make this podcast about the regular 20 minutes that I usually do, but I was unable to, mostly because I do want to provide you guys some criticisms that you might hear that you might yourself be wondering about in the background but not be able to put language to it. So first I'm gonna give you all the concepts, then I'm gonna give you some possible criticisms that the listeners might have. And you can decide if the critical feedback I'm talking about applies to you or not. And if it does, in that case I would ask you to come back and listen to the podcast from the beginning again, just so you'd be able to hear it from a different lens. So in this episode I'm gonna talk about how to create your own safe space. I will teach you how to choose safer people without becoming bitter or reactive to your situations or without spiritually bypassing harm. To me, everyone deserves a safe space. Place where you can exist, that you can express yourself, and you can be creative, where you don't have to alter yourself beyond recognition just to be able to survive. And by that I don't mean that you don't change the way you present yourself like in front of your mother versus your husband or your employee. Of course your demeanor changes when you're in different company, but I'm talking about even in the presence of these people, you don't feel like you have to censor yourself just to get your point across, or that you're not walking on eggshells and you're in constant fear of other people's reactions and sensitivity. I'm going to teach you how to create your safe space for yourself because you deserve it. Everyone deserves that. And for that to happen, you have to know that if you're waiting for other people to stop judging you, for you to call it your safe space, then you'll be waiting for a long time. Some people out of their mild intentions or just out of their ignorance can't help but judge you. That's how they relate to the world. Their nervous system is calibrated to judge the external so that their own internal judgments never surface, and they're living their entire life in this very fragile way. And if there are too many of these people around you, then how are you supposed to feel safe in a space? So the options are that you either change people, which in my experience has turned out to be pretty impossible, or you can change the situation and go to a different space entirely. A different space where it has safety for you, both physically and psychologically.

Protection, Alliance, And Personal Agency

SPEAKER_01 3:23

In Sura Taba, Sura nine seventy one, the Quran says, and this is a Sahih International Translation, the believing men and believing women are allies for one another. They enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong, and establish prayer and give zakah and obey Allah and his messenger. Those Allah will have mercy upon them, indeed, Allah is exalted in might and wise. I think here protection is meant to flow both ways. Men and women protect each other, physically, emotionally, spiritually, even in reputation that includes withholding harsh judgments or opinions just so other people can feel safe around you. When protection becomes one sided, which in the lessons of the men being the protectors, it has become one sided in the current society, it turns into control. So your responsibility in creating your safety and safe space is in doing this work required to create this space of protection that enhances your dignity and agency. So instead of one sided protection that is supposed to be created by men for women, so that women are at the mercy of having this protection being created for them, and if it is not being created, then you're basically screwed. So yes, while men have responsibility to create a safe space for you, you have the responsibility of creating your own safe space through your agency and independence of thought. So you're not hundred percent reliant on an external party to do that for you. So in the ayah that I mentioned, I think it speaks to the flow of the back and forth, the rights and the responsibilities of creating safety. When you reduce your protection to only one gender protecting the other, you unintentionally strip yourself of your God given agency, and this way you fall into passivity, which is what gives rise to a lot of victim mentality, meaning some guy in your life is not able to give you your safe space, or your relatives are not able to provide you your safe space. So this verse reminds me that you as a believing Muslim woman is meant to be both a source of protection for yourself and others and humble enough to receive it. This ayah is describing believing men and women as allies for one another. It is commanding both physical protection and spiritual metaphysical safety, where it's actively commanding you to do what is right and forbid what is wrong. So taken all together, I don't see protection as something that flows from a man to a woman, or from a woman to a man in that case. But it is bidirectional. We both create each other's safety, especially in the matters of Iman. I wanted to emphasize this point because in the majority of my coaching about safety, what ends up being the topic is the frustration that women carry about how people in their life don't give them the safe space they deserve. So while yes, it is other people's responsibility and they will answer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala if they failed at that responsibility, you fighting with reality that he or she must provide you with emotional safety and not judge you is not gonna do you any good. Again, this is you fighting reality. This is you asking for something that is not currently happening. So we're moving forward from this space of demanding something that is not currently true into the space of responsibility that is your responsibility. And yes, it is work. It is a lot of work if you haven't done this before. But I also don't think that you're disillusioned into thinking that you wouldn't have to do any work. That is basically the theme of all of my podcast episodes. In this effort of creating your safe space, you always have the option to change your physical location, to go somewhere else, to change your situation. But it also turns out that you might not be able to change your immediate family situation or your employment so easily. That might not be an option for you, or at least not an immediate option. So then how are you supposed to create your safe space? So again, it comes back to your responsibility.

Internal Safety Without Accepting Harm

SPEAKER_01 7:52

You're not supposed to depend on people to create all of your safety for you. Your mind, your relationship with yourself, your relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, your ability to regulate your nervous system, that is what creates your safety. And it does not mean that you should stay around people who constantly make you feel small. There is a difference here, and this is the main concept. The difference is between the state of discernment and the state of judgment. So for example, if somebody gives you an awkward look and your mind spirals into they hate me, they don't want me, or what is wrong with them, this is your internal interpretation creating suffering for you. Here you're perceiving the world through the lens of criticism and judgment for yourself and for others. But let's say you're in a marriage or family or a friend gathering where you're constantly feeling like you cannot speak, you can't relax, you can't express yourself, you are always afraid of backlash, then your nervous system might be actually picking up on something real. And this is your discernment speaking. So the balance is this. You should not expect the world to never judge you, but you should also not normalize environments that are constantly harsh and crushing your spirit. You have to create your internal safety that helps you stop overreacting to otherwise normal human behavior. Your discernment helps you choose people who do not repeatedly violate your dignity. And the goal is never that you should be so healed that toxic people never affect you. The goal is you become so internally strong that you stop depending on approval, and you become wise enough to prioritize spaces where you're genuinely respected. So I don't want you guys to confuse discernment with judgment. In reality they are completely different energies that live inside your body. Discernment is calm, and judgment is very emotionally charged and draining. I want you to listen for the energy behind these two states that lives within your body. This is so you can determine where you're at. Discernment keeps the power with you while judgment gives the power to the other party. Judgment demands that reality rearrange itself before you can feel okay. While discernment says that this environment is not aligned with the kind of life I want to create, so I'm going to take action. Judgment says these people should be different. Discernment says I deserve a relationship where I can grow, rest, and feel safe. Judgment says why are people so toxic? Why can't they just accept me? Discernment says they're allowed to exist in their element and I'm allowed to make my own choices. Again, listen to what your body experiences when you hear these sentences. High level discerning thought sound very peaceful where you value your nervous system, you prioritize your emotional safety, you tell yourself that you deserve relationships that feel nourishing, where you respect yourself enough to leave environments that are constantly harming you. These are the thoughts that feel clean in the body, they feel grounded, they move you towards safety, and they lead you to trust your internal experience. But judgment based thoughts are externally focused. They're obsessed with what other people should be doing differently. Thoughts like they shouldn't judge me, they should understand me, they should stop acting like this, they should be more emotionally intelligent, they should know better. And while you might feel very justified in thinking these thoughts, they create a very toxic emotional environment inside your body. You're gonna feel frustration, bitterness, resentment, and also a sense of superiority, and all of this will create sheer exhaustion because you're attempting to control variables that are not in your control. In both cases you are technically trying to leave an unsafe environment. You are technically trying to create safety for yourself, but when you are judging others, you're generating an unsafe environment within yourself, which you cannot change regardless of how many external situations you leave. This is why women sometimes leave one toxic environment only to recreate another one somewhere else. Because your internal lens never changed. The nervous system still felt unsafe and critical this entire time. It is stuck in hypervigilance. So even you are in this quote unquote new safe space, it will eventually start to feel dangerous as well. And this is why your mindset has to change before you change your environment. If your mind is full of judgment and you start cutting people off from emotional reactivity, you will start confusing human imperfection with toxicity. As a high value Muslim woman, you do not demonize people because you know you can leave without hatred and you can create clean boundaries without a sense of superiority or arrogance. When you start to define a safe space from the lens of discernment rather than judgment, this whole phenomena removes the luxury of blaming others for your discomfort, and it puts the responsibility of change on you, where luckily you do have control.

Discernment Versus Judgment In The Body

SPEAKER_01 13:26

If for you as a woman a judgment free space does not exist, you're only able to create it because you're coming to it with a regulated mind. Now one of the big disclaimers here, and I'm gonna give you more disclaimers and possible criticisms of all of these point of views later, but one of them that I wanted to mention here is the big risk I'm taking while speaking to you through this podcast is if you're a woman living with chronic emotional invalidation and controlling family dynamics, you might feel a sense of blame, especially if you lived through spiritual manipulation or subtle misogyny that we might all have experienced at some point. Because as a Muslim woman, you're probably already told to have subur and lower your expectations and stop taking things so personally. So if this balance is not extremely clear, parts of this podcast can accidentally sound like that you are the reason you feel unsafe. Even though my actual point is your internal state determines if you are accurately able to discern safety and create it sustainably for yourself. If you are at any level hearing that I'm saying your unsafe environment is mostly your thoughts in an invalidating way, please stop listening to this and get coaching if you can. I do not want to participate in perpetuating more harm. So the idea of a perpetually judgment free environment is very appealing but also somewhat unrealistic. Because human beings categorize, compare, and evaluate by design. It is how we make sense of the world. So waiting for a space where no one ever judges you is like waiting for the deep water to stop being dangerous while you have not yet learned to swim. You learn how to swim and then no body of water is dangerous. If you're constantly irritated at a lack of presence of safe spaces around you, then create safety and regulation with your own mind and safe spaces will start to emerge all around you. The real skill, the one that actually changes your life, is building a nervous system that does not fluctuate every time it senses someone else's potential evaluation. Safety is not the absence of triggers, it's the presence of regulation through those triggers. When your consciousness set point is low, your mind is hyperfocused on threat, on perception of others, on how you're being received. At a higher SQ, your mind becomes more self referential and more grounded. This is why two women can sit in the exact same gathering while one feels judged and the other one feels completely at ease. Because the difference is not the environment, the difference is the internal operating system interpreting it. You are not hurt by words, you are hurt by the meaning of them. And this is where most women underestimate their power. If you're not trained in this skill, you're most likely trying to control other people's speech, actions, and behaviors instead of mastering your interpretation. When you understand that the meaning is created in your mind, not delivered through somebody else's mouth, you stop outsourcing your emotional state to other people's vocabulary. And when enough women lack that skill, wanting a safe space becomes a sophisticated form of avoidance. And this is what I'm afraid is happening in the IG era. If you're constantly needing environments to adjust so that you can feel okay, you're unintentionally reinforcing the belief that you are fragile. But when you start developing internal safety, you expand your capacity to be in rooms that are imperfect or even unpredictable. The room can be uncomfortable without you harming yourself. The deepest level of your safety is not when everyone accepts you. It is when you stop needing them to. A lot of married Muslim women tell me I want my husband to be my safe space. That only works if your mind is a safe space for yourself first. When you say someone is your safe space, what you're really describing is how your nervous system responds in their presence, and that response is created by your internal state. If your mind is dysregulated, even the safest person will eventually feel unsafe because your interpretations will distort their behavior. But when your internal world is grounded, relationships become amplifiers of safety instead of sources of it. And trust me, you do not want to outsource your sense of safety to anyone else. Even if they have the responsibility to protect you, they are still human. There is a chance they might slip up. There is also a possibility that they will keep their end of bargain and will actually put measures into place to protect you and provide you safety. But either way, your safety is not outsourced. That is the whole point. When your internal world is grounded, you will come to an accurate conclusion when a space is not safe for you and it's time for you to leave. Another very subtle barrier that I see in my coaching is when women don't trust safe spaces because you don't trust safety. You don't know what it feels like to experience safety. What is happening in this case is that you don't struggle to find safe spaces, you're struggling to trust them when you are in them. Even when people are kind, even when the environment is calm, even when nothing is wrong, there's just a part of you that is waiting to be disappointed. And if that is the case, you have to let your guard down and allow yourself to enjoy safety. And if your body has no experience being safe, then allow yourself the privilege through your discernment. Trust yourself in experiencing the safe space, even if it is for the first time, your body will get used to it. Your addiction to being understood keeps safe spaces away from you. Learn to forego this addiction and safe spaces will start popping up all around you. At lower levels of consciousness, you will need validation, predictability, everyone's agreement for you to feel okay. As your soulful intelligence increases, your dependence on these external conditions decreases. Because there are women out there that I've coached, myself included, who have done enough internal work that they can sit in rooms filled with gossip and criticism and remain untouched. Because in that case, your sense of self is not changing, so your environment does not have the power to destabilize you. I am not suggesting that you actively seek out toxicity, I'm saying if you already have such a situation in your life, this serves as a perfect curriculum for you to rise above it. So as a practice, stop asking is this space safe for me? And start asking am I the safe space within myself that I need right now? This question returns you to the only place you have ever had control, the only place safety is ever truly created within yourself. And when you remember Allah enough, remind yourself of the possibilities and the mercy He has on you. That level of God consciousness renders every space safe because no human being can strip you of your dignity that Allah has ordained. A safe space for you can be a space of close friends who accept you with all of your quirkiness, or it can be while you're alone in your home. A safe space could also be a place full of toxic people that otherwise don't care about you, but you also don't care that their toxicity exists, and you have evolved so far beyond their pettiness and their bickering that to you their presence does not take away from the safety of that

Nuance, Disclaimers, And Common Objections

SPEAKER_01 21:43

space. So now I'm gonna say some of the criticisms that you might have while you're listening to this podcast, and I'm mentioning them because I want to create a safety net for you, for you to hear the message in this podcast without any further harm. One of those possible criticisms is that this podcast is swinging very heavily towards internal responsibility. In which case I'm risking underemphasizing systemic relational harm. Meaning you as a listener may think, so what am I supposed to just spiritually transcend toxic people forever? And this is a risk because many Muslim women are trapped in an environment they cannot immediately leave because financial or religious reasons. As a reply to this objection and this criticism, I want you to hear that I acknowledge your grief. I acknowledge your anger, your betrayal, the sense of legitimate oppression that you might carry. The solution is not to become emotionally invincible. The solution is to create real change through these realities. Another criticism that might arise is that you might challenge the idea is judgment is not what they do, it's what you agree with. Because while psychologically this is very insightful, you can argue that as a woman you are objectively being judged, controlled, mocked, shamed for the reasons of keeping you small. You're being actually punished. So I want to create this point with extreme careful nuance, otherwise it can sound intellectually true but emotionally invalidating. So what I want to say to that is yes, people may genuinely judge or mistreat you, but their judgment only becomes your identity level suffering when your mind agrees with it. And through the evolution of your mind, you preserve your accountability without denying your reality. Another place of tension that might have existed through the subject of this episode is the phrase that you can sit in a toxic room and still be safe, which philosophically seems to imply that I'm saying you should just regulate harder. But what I'm actually saying is your regulation will help you see whether you should stay in a situation or a relationship or not. Many Muslim women are enculturated and socialized to over spiritualize endurance. This is not what I'm saying here at all. So if you are falling into that category, I urge you to create your safe space with a different method. Another risk I'm taking through what I described in this podcast is the risk of sounding like high, soulful, intelligent women become untouchable robots who no longer care what anyone thinks. But it does not happen because human beings are wired for belonging. With practice you get better and better at that skill, but you might not completely out evolve this design. Because the goal is not emotional numbness, it is secure attachment to yourself and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala while still deeply valuing connection, while being discerning of when you see disrespect, and being able to call that out and create safe boundaries for yourself. This distinction matters because otherwise you might have a tendency to think that healing means becoming emotionally detached from everyone. This is not what high soulful intelligence is about. The more connected you are to another human being, the higher chance that you will feel betrayed, criticized, and possibly even controlled by them. And if that does happen, you work on your healing. That can also happen at a high SQ level. And so far I have told you a lot about how to think differently, but I also want to emphasize the practice that it requires for you to do within your body.

Embodied Steps For Entering Unsafe Rooms

SPEAKER_01 25:56

You may be wondering what do you actually do next time you enter a room that feels unsafe to you. So this is an opening for your practical transformation. What you do is you add small embodied moments. You pause before you enter a room, it could be a second, two minutes, you notice your thoughts, you physically relax the muscles in your body, and you ask yourself, what am I making this mean? What do I have the potential of making their words mean for me? Am I in actual danger or am I anticipating judgment? What would a grounded version of me believe right now? These kinds of embodied questions help you bridge philosophy into real nervous system practice. Having said all of that, the talent of developing a safe space is life changing. It is an amazing skill and it requires for you to see other people's opinions as neutral occurrences. It requires for you to outgrow your internal patterns. So if you insist that people be able to create a safe space for you, you're just bypassing responsibility. And that is just the responsibility of you taking ownership of your thoughts, of doing the work that will serve you for the rest of your life. And whenever you're asking somebody else to change, meaning that you're insisting that your family create a safe space for you, you're insisting that your colleagues do it, even though you might not have explicitly asked them to, you're insisting on having them treat you differently, judge you less, accept you more? When all of these are only always your responsibilities. If they happen to come from other people outside of you that you're in relationships with, then this is amazing. Again, when you fulfill your responsibility, you're able to discern when other people are providing you this safety and when they're out to harm you. When you are not taking responsibility for this internal change, this is just a more modern, socially acceptable way of trying to ask for people to change. If you want that your husband become your safe space, that will only come secondary to your mind. If you want your friends to be your safe space, it will come secondary to your mind. What you have to do is employ your discernment, not your judgment. Do not confuse your healing with endless tolerance. It does not mean that you're spiritually evolved just because you learned how to survive constant emotional starvation. Internal safety does not mean accepting harm. The balance is that you're not expecting the world to never judge you, but you're also not normalizing environments that crush your spirit. Your regulation helps you stop overreacting to normal human behavior, and your discernment helps you leave people who repeatedly violate your dignity.

Tawakkul, Dignity, And Closing Dua

SPEAKER_01 28:59

Your safe space is your mind, your body, your heart. Only then can you create a safe space as it relates to other people and your environments. Being in a safe space and creating that for yourself is a deep spiritual practice. When you center Allah instead of people, your reference point shifts from creation to creator, and in that space all human judgment loses its weight. In that space you're anchored in what Allah sees in me and how He has created me. And that shift stabilizes your identity in a way that no social environment can ever do. Because in that case your mind becomes your safe space, so you can create safety anywhere you want. Your safe space is your bada, which is tied to your relationship with Allah. Because when you're practicing Tawakul in a very embodied way, you are creating internal safety. You are trusting that your worth is not in the hands of people, and your presence indicates a hundred percent worth because you were created by Allah. And when that reality lands in your body, not just in your intellect, you start to exist differently, and from that existence every space becomes safe. With that I pray to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, O Allah, make my heart a place of safety before I seek safety from people. Let my mind rest in what you know of me, not in what others think of me. Ya Allah, anchor me in Tabakul so deeply that no one and no room can destabilize me. Allow me to remember again and again of the dignity that you have written for me that cannot be controlled or taken by anyone else. Ya Allah, keep me and all of us among the dignified and allow us abundant safe spaces. Amin Yarabul Almin. Please keep me in your draas, I will talk to you guys next time.