Psychological Safety

Why the First Man to Speak Carries the Whole Room

I will be honest with you. These last few weeks I have been so caught up in grief that writing anything at all has felt beyond me. I kept telling myself that my experience of grief was the thing I should be writing about, and yet every time I sat down the words refused to flow. What I needed was space. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for your own creativity is to stop forcing it.

So this week, after finishing my thoughts on a proposal for a male suicide collaboration, I picked up Andrew Pain's new book, 'Honestly Man', and turned to his chapter on psychological safety. His argument is a bold one: build psychologically safe communities, and we take a real step towards safeguarding men's wellbeing. It is a big claim, but I think he's spot on.

Learning where I could breathe

I recognise a great deal of what Andrew writes. I also know, from the inside, what its absence does to a person. My own childhood was far from safe, physically or psychologically, and a child who cannot find safety at home learns to find it elsewhere. For me that meant the tree at the bottom of the garden, the homes of friends that felt calmer than my own, and, in the end, moving as far away as I could once I'd graduated. Back then, I didn't have the language for any of it. I only knew where I could breathe and where I couldn't.

That radar doesn't switch off when we reach adulthood. Looking back, I can see exactly where I felt psychological safety at work, and where it was absent. There were leaders and mentors, rarer than they should be, who encouraged me and built the kind of environment in which I could thrive. There was also one whose authoritarian style created a dominant hierarchy that took me straight back to childhood. I fought back for a while, until I couldn't any longer, and I collapsed under the weight of it. It came close to costing me my life.

It was never the man, it was the room

I've sat in men's groups that felt genuinely safe, and equally, I've sat in rooms where that dominant hierarchy left no space for me or anyone else to breathe, let alone grow. That difference is the very thing Andrew is pointing at, and it is why his reference to Amy Edmondson's work landed for me the way it did. Edmondson, the researcher who drew our attention to how much psychological safety matters to the success of teams at work, describes it as a feature of the setting rather than a trait of the person. It's the shared sense that you can ask for help, admit you got something wrong, or offer a challenge, without being punished for it. The setting shapes the person far more than we like to admit. I'm living proof of it.

Even where you would expect psychological safety

There's an irony that still frustrates me. Even in my therapist training, the one place you might expect to be safe, I felt both things at once. With some peers and tutors I felt safe enough to be the person who modelled vulnerability, sharing parts of my past out loud. With others, I felt none of it. I remember being expected to sit with my back to the door during a peer supervision session, when they knew that doing so would keep me hypervigilant and unable to settle. I remember an occasion when trust and confidentiality were broken, and a tutor defended their position without leaving any space for challenge or reason. Is it any wonder that I found myself bottling things up again?

What the body knows first

Here is where my own work and experience draw me in a little further. There is a reason the body reacts before the mind has caught up. Stephen Porges calls it neuroception: the nervous system reading the room beneath conscious awareness, deciding whether it is safe before the thinking mind gets a say. It's why I couldn't settle with my back to that door, and why two men can sit in the same, objectively safe group and experience it completely differently. One feels grounded whilst the other stays on guard. That's certainly not a flaw in the second man, but a learned response, one that comes from everything he's lived through. I know, because I've been that man.

Built, and borrowed

So the task, as I see it, is to hold both at once: the safety of the group, and the safety of the individual within it. They're not separate. More often than not, the group is the very thing that grows the individual's felt sense of safety. I've experienced it more times than I can count. A guarded man sees another man say the difficult thing out loud, and survive it. Nothing bad happens. In that moment he is able to borrow a little of the other man's safety before he can feel his own.

That is why the first honest voice in a room carries such weight. It's not just one man speaking. It's one man showing everyone else that the ground will hold. It is also the reason I care so much about how we build the men's groups I run within Stand Tall Empower CIC. If we get the space right, the men will do the rest.

If you're a man who has never sat in a room like that, they do exist, and Andrew talks about them too in his chapter on Men's Communities. If the idea of a whole group feels like too much, it can help to start with a single safe relationship instead. For some men that is a trusted friend. For others it is a therapist, someone whose one job in that hour is to make the space safe enough for you to be honest. There's no weakness in looking for that.

Should you already have people you can be honest with, you might be the first voice that makes someone else feel safe this week. That's no small thing. In fact, it might be everything.

A word on the book. True to its title, 'Honestly Man' is an honest reflection on where we are today: masculinity, manhood, fatherhood, testosterone, and the issues around technology. Most importantly, Andrew brings together practical, actionable ways we can all play a part in addressing them. What's more, the profits go to men's charities, so reading it is a win for you, for the men in your life, and for men you will never know you have helped.

If any of this resonates and you are struggling to cope, please know you do not have to sit with it alone. In the UK you can talk to CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) free on 0800 58 58 58, or use their webchat, every day from 5pm to midnight.

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