Written Together: Working Class Safety, Being Sound and Being Known

Safety doesn’t arrive through declarations or tick boxes. It lands like a frequency, like resonance. You feel it before you name it, that gut-level recognition: I know the shape and depth of you.

This kind of knowing lives beneath language. It’s familiarity that settles in the nervous system. Home being reflected in the eyes of another. And for working-class people, that familiarity often carries the weight of both nostalgia and survival. It’s the memory of being read right, without needing to perform or translate.

We have a language for this. We say: “They’re dead down to earth.”,” He’d give you the shirt of his back to walk in the rain”, “She’s sound”.

This is the beauty of working-class language as relational code. They name who feel safe because they’re not trying to control your experience of it. People who let you breathe without asking you to shrink or demand adjustment of who you are.

The Elements of Being Sound

Those people carry a kind of emotional fluency that systems often mistake for simplicity. It’s not simple, at all. It’s skilled empathy and recognition of not only how people are shaped, but also the the depth of their context. A quiet, steady thread of someone who knows how to hold a room. without needing to dominate or correct it, someone who attunes to understand.

“I won’t flatten you to soothe myself.”

People who are not uncomfortable when you bring contradiction, grief, voltage because they’re versed in it themselves.

I’m proposing an idea, that this a common frequency, running through many working-class people. We will call it the elements of being sound. Its a working title.

A way of being that holds empathy without performance, presence without control. Because the logic of middle-classness, as the ultimate human ideal, can infiltrate being sound. Especially when shaped by proximity to power, or the seduction of it, especially when when you’ve had none.

It shows up as mimicry of the systems that harmed us: hustle culture, rigid identity scripts, the online showcase of aesthetic aspiration - a life bought on tic. In other words, incongruence.

But into me the elements of being sound still live underneath in people who’s compass points to the lies systems tell us. They’re not erased when someone nicks it, just obscured. True north remains. Even when it’s buried under performance or posturing — and let’s not shame, because for many people it’s survival.

Recognition Before Language

When we talk about safety being co-authored, I don’t mean collaborative in the way trauma-informed training modules often declare. I mean it’s forged in tension. In risk. In the real. It’s the safety net underneath rupture and people booting off, not a protocol, but a practice built in the thick of it.

Working-class people already know what it is to scan a room. To read the mood. To clock who’s dangerous, who’s posturing, who’s silently holding things together. We learned to pick up on rhythm, tone, silence, eye movement.

Your grandad knew when a punch might land from an ill-timed punchline. A nod over a crowded pub can hold you in a thousand words. We know when a work policy is written to protect those higher up.

Therapists might call it “hypervigilance.” Wellness influencers might sell you out of it through a course on “co-dependency.” Managers say it’s “disruptive.” Systems throw in blame and shame.

But we know what it is. It’s survival literacy. The wisdom of people who held others long before anyone in power was handed a clipboard or learned to mimic the language of privileged comfort.

And when you meet someone who knows the same codes? That’s beautiful recognition. That’s the echo back of something true. Before the words. Before the structure. That’s what the body remembers. That’s what makes you exhale.

Agape in a Pub Glance

Sometimes recognition arrives before language, before self-understanding, before any framework is in place. This is where legacy lives too. Legacy as accurate witness.

The legacy in the person who finally saw your story, your ethics, your harm-patterns, your instinct — and didn’t distort it to fit their own narrative.

This kind of resonance is a soft string. Not existing to bind or define. It simply reveals what’s possible when two people meet at the level of real instinct, clear moral weather, rather than smoke and mirrors.

James Baldwin said it best:

“I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself. And this has happened to everybody who’s tried to live. You go through life for a long time thinking, No one has ever suffered the way I’ve suffered, my God, my God. And then you realize. You read something or you hear something, and you realize that your suffering does not isolate you; your suffering is your bridge. Many people have suffered before you, many people are suffering around you and always will, and all you can do is bring, hopefully, a little light into that suffering. Enough light so that the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend his suffering and begin to live with it”

What feels like an exception is often a bridge. And that bridge — that moment of being seen in your full complexity — is what the Ancient Greeks called Agape. Fierce, connecting, dignity-restoring love, witness, in all its forms.

That’s the beginning of co-authored safety. A shared recognition that says: I know the shape of you. And I won’t look away.

That’s what makes safety possible. Because safety isn’t about calming someone down for your comfort.

It’s about saying: you don’t need to hide here. You don’t need to apologise for the full hum of your beautiful aliveness. Your grief is not inconvenient. Your rage is not too loud. Your tenderness is not embarrassing. You’re not the things that happened to you. You are not a disruption to my process. You are the process.

The Bridge to Safety

Co-authored safety meets on a bridge and some of us start miles away from it.

For some, therapy offers a return to something familiar: a memory of being held, resourced, seen. But for many working-class people, there is no “return.” There’s no material baseline. Safety is something we’ve learned to navigate without, often while pretending we had it. We’ve built it in chaos, in contradiction, in the middle of grief and gossip and buses not turning up.

This is where the counter-ethos compass kicks in. Many of us aren’t just carrying personal wounds. We’ve grown up inside harm. Witnessed it. Absorbed it. Been shaped by it — especially when your community or roots have been failed, policed, pathologised, while being asked to perform gratitude.

If the body keeps the score, mate, then the working-class body holds the whole bloody book.

And when you’re far from the safety of home — culturally, socially, emotionally — it takes longer to arrive. Not because you’re resistant, but because you’re carrying more bags. You’re trying to co-author safety while also translating your language, justifying your grief, and checking whether you’re too loud or too quiet to much like a stereotype to be taken seriously.

Co-authored safety isn’t about inviting someone into calm. It’s about meeting people where harm has shaped them, and walking alongside — not to fix, but to honour what they already know. It’s not about flattening working-class experience into poverty porn or resilience cliché. It’s about recognising how proximity to cultural fluency impacts the emotional cost of showing up.

Some people walk into a therapy room already speaking the language. Others have to translate themselves first. And that translation costs. It takes money, energy, effort, risk.

It’s not like a lad from the Boro can’t access safety. It’s that he’s starting further from the centre of what safety looks like in that room. He’s already doing the maths in his head:

Will this therapist judge me? Do I sound too stupid or angry? Can I swear? Will they get what I mean without thinking I’m unwell or ungrateful?

Safety, in this context, isn’t just about feeling held. It’s about being recognisable.

That’s why co-authored safety isn’t a service the therapist provides. It’s a relational bridge they have to be willing to build. The closer they are to the client’s cultural world, the shorter that bridge needs to be.

But when it’s a mile long? They better start bloody walking.

Electric UPR: The Voltage of Being Seen

And when they do — when they meet you not with management but with presence — something else can surface. In therapy, this energy can emerge when there’s deep unconditional regard. But it’s more than Carl Rogers in a woolly jumper. It’s what happens when two nervous systems recognise each other’s survival. When dignity is returned through attention.

Audre Lorde named this energy the erotic. Not sex and sexuality as such — but the deep, resonant charge of presence, intensity, and truth between people.

The erotic as aliveness. As voltage. As the felt sense of being seen, known, and co-creating something real in the space between.

Mick Cooper and Dave Mearns describe these moments in therapy as Relational Depth — mutual, embodied, timeless. The kind of contact that doesn’t transform you into someone else, but into more of yourself.

For working-class people, this energy already lives in our life history. It looks like the electricity of being fully present. The beauty of mutual recognition. The grief-love mix in a mam’s voice. The sacred chaos of someone sitting with you at when you’re not yourself. Dancing together and being silly. It feels class.

I’m calling this Electric UPR — because it’s not just unconditional positive regard. It’s charged. It’s relational. It’s full of generational context and survival-aware.

Depth Without Context Becomes Performance

Systems try to sterilise this energy. Pathologise it, then own it — as theirs to manage you out of. Or worse, commodify it through coaching culture, breathwork gurus, or a therapist doing an interpretative TikTok dance titled “5 Reasons Why You’re the Problem.”

But co-authored safety isn’t flat. It doesn’t live in a box. It’s alive, written and unwritten. It’s a signal of shared humanity

Working-class relational intelligence is emotionally sophisticated. That voltage, that resonance, that “you okay, pet?” broad as it is wide with fifty generational layers behind it — it’s always been there.

We just didn’t call it relational depth or erotic presence. We called it being there for each other.

Middle-class therapy might stick wellness slop or a journal article on it, but working-class people have been co-authoring safety through this embodied knowing forever — in hospital waiting rooms, in queues, over kitchen tables with too many mugs and not enough money.

This emotional aliveness is more common in working-class spaces. Because being emotionally “too much” is actually a form of relational literacy. Because this is what gets pathologised in therapy rooms that can’t handle depth without control.

That’s the contradiction at the heart of many therapy spaces:

Depth without context becomes performance. Empathy without class analysis becomes voyeurism.

The Long, Slow Walk to Safety

Working-class clients often bring this depth instinctively. They read the room. They clock the power dynamics. They don’t always say it outright, but it hums underneath. That’s the string. But too many therapists want the affect of intimacy — the tears, the rawness, the catharsis — without doing the political and emotional labour of holding the client’s reality. Not just their grief, but why they’re grieving. Not just their shame, but who put it there.

So to really meet working-class clients, therapists have to:

• Stop mythologising their own neutrality. If you’re not naming power, you’re reinforcing it.

• Understand that classed resonance lives in tone, rhythm, silence. A client saying “I’m just tired” might carry twelve years of survival in it.

• Recognise that showing up without understanding context is not presence, it’s performance.

In therapy, especially when it holds hands with the bastards in power, can miss this because they often arrive thinking safety is something they create, manage, or offer. But in working-class life, safety is something you clock — or don’t — based on a lifetime of reading the room to survive.

Steadiness in the face of someone’s aliveness — that’s the raw, radical core of co-authored safety.

It’s not just about soothing, or “regulating” in the Instagram-therapy sense. It’s about staying present — holding your ground without holding someone back — when someone brings the full, electric of their pain, power, humour, history, contradiction.

And that’s not just therapeutic skill. That’s relational courage. And it’s something working-class communities have often done instinctively: we allow bigness, because we know what it is to be made small.