The Relational Safety Framework: The Root of Trauma and Connection

The Relational Safety Framework: The Root of Trauma and Connection

Written by: Stephanie Underwood, RSW

Trauma therapies have evolved, yet relational patterns persist. Trauma therapies have evolved, yet relational patterns persist. This blog series will take you on a journey from fragmented insight to integrative understanding, exploring how safety, meaning-making, attachment strategies, and nervous system responses interact in real time inside relationships. Together, we will examine why awareness alone often isn’t enough, and how relational safety may be the missing organizing principle in trauma recovery.

My name is Stephanie Underwood. I’m a registered social worker and graduate researcher specializing in relational patterns and trauma. And today, I’m doing something a little different.

My work has always been about reaching the root causes of these patterns, understanding not just what happens, but why it happens. I’ve never believed in band-aid solutions. Real, lasting change comes from identifying and addressing the core mechanisms that drive our behaviors and relational dynamics.

The Persistent Pattern

In both clinical practice and academic research, I’ve noticed a recurring theme: people gain self-awareness, they learn their attachment style, recognize their triggers, understand their past, yet familiar relational patterns persist. Insight alone rarely creates transformation.

The Focus of This Series

In this series, we’ll explore relational trauma, what lies at its root, how it develops from neurobiological and evolutionary perspectives, and how we can treat it more effectively. Think of this as a guided journey, like Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus, just without the bus.

Central to this exploration is the Relational Safety Framework, a model I’ve developed for clinicians working with clients who have experienced relational trauma.

Why Another Framework?

Have you ever understood your trauma intellectually but still found yourself repeating the same patterns? Maybe you’ve done the therapy. Read the books.

Learned the language of attachment, regulation, and triggers. And yet something still feels fragmented.

Over the past few decades, trauma research and therapy have evolved enormously. As of 2026, we have access to more models and methods than ever before: EMDR, Somatic Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Emotion-Focused Therapy, and many others. Each offers valuable insight into how trauma shapes emotion and behaviour.

Despite this progress, there’s a crucial gap in both research and practice. Most studies still focus on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) rather than Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) or relational trauma, forms of trauma that unfold within relationships over time. In clinical settings, these are far more common.

This disconnect between research emphasis and clinical reality leaves practitioners and clients alike piecing things together from multiple frameworks, attachment theory, cognitive models, somatic approaches, neurobiology. Each perspective offers something vital, but they often exist in isolation.

The result?

Clinicians struggle to integrate disparate approaches. Clients sense that something essential is missing.

What’s often absent is a coherent explanation of how safety, meaning-making, attachment strategies, and nervous system regulation interact dynamically within relationships.

The Relational Safety Framework

The Relational Safety Framework was created to address this gap.

It’s an integrative, research-informed model that weaves together meaning-making processes, attachment strategies, and nervous system safety appraisal into one cohesive system, not as competing theories, but as interdependent processes.

At its core, it rests on a simple premise: Humans don’t respond merely to events. We respond to the meaning we assign to those events.

In relationships, those meanings form patterns, patterns that determine how safe we feel, how we regulate emotion, and how we relate to others.

When safety feels threatened, our attachment strategies activate, our interpretations shift, and our nervous system reorganizes in response. These processes are not separate, they are parts of one adaptive system.

This framework is not a fixed or final theory, but an evolving model built on evidence, clinical observation, and ongoing research. Its development is being documented publicly, inviting collaboration and dialogue.

What Comes Next

In the next post, we’ll begin where the framework begins: with safety.

We’ll explore:

• What “safety” truly means from a neurobiological perspective.

  
  

• How the nervous system continuously evaluates safety and threat.

• Why safety, not trauma, attachment, or schemas, may be the central organizing variable in relational distress.

If you’ve ever felt that something was missing in how we understand trauma, this series is for you.

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References

Brewin, C. R. (2014). Episodic memory, perceptual memory, and their interaction: Foundations for a theory of posttraumatic stress disorder. Psychological Bulletin, 140(1), 69–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033722

Cloitre, M., Garvert, D. W., Brewin, C. R., Bryant, R. A., & Maercker, A. (2013). Evidence for proposed ICD-11 PTSD and complex PTSD: A latent profile analysis. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 4(1), 20706. https://doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v4i0.20706

Courtois, C. A., & Ford, J. D. (Eds.). (2013). Treatment of complex trauma: A sequenced, relationship-based approach. Guilford Press.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Main, M., Kaplan, N., & Cassidy, J. (1985). Security in infancy, childhood, and adulthood: A move to the level of representation. In I. Bretherton & E. Waters (Eds.), Growing points of attachment theory and research (pp. 66–104). Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. Norton.

Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect regulation and the repair of the self. Norton.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema therapy: A practitioner’s guide. Guilford Press.