Safety

We can’t talk ourselves into safety, we either feel safe or we don’t. There is no quick fix when it comes to feeling safe, it takes time to rewire our systems from being primarily in flight, fight or freeze; responses which are supposed to be temporary, not permanent. If the situation in which we find, or have found, ourself is chronically and repetitively threatening (very common in early developmental trauma which often leads to complex traumatic stress syndromes), these survival responses become essential, we don’t have the luxury of turning them off, they are needed for our very survival.  However, when they are employed long term they take a huge toll on our systems. Learning how to feel safe again is about being able to determine a real threat from a perceived or imagined threat. Both threats feel very real and have the same responses in our organism but usually only the real threat requires immediate action. When we internalise a threat, or threats, that’s trauma.

Somewhere along the line we started distancing ourselves from our instincts in order to appear more civilised, many humans forgot how to discharge the freeze response (tonic immobility), and as a result, these responses often become the enemy, or the threat. This is why saying that trauma is in the past is just not true. Traumatised people live with a present and current sense of internalised threat which can be excruciating as brain research shows.

Just like love might be our ultimate goal, so might safety. But there are stepping stones on the way to these bigger goals that can empower us and make us feel good on our journey. We don’t have to have 100% safety or love in order to feel ok. For example, when tapping you might ask yourself where in your body do you feel calm, grounded or neutral. What you’re looking for is to find a place that feels safe enough to go to if there are other sensations in your body that are too much for you right now leading to overwhelm and flooding. Peter Levine calls the movement of our attention from a place of overwhelm to one of neutrality or calm, or contraction and expansion, pendulation, and it is a really great resource to use at any time.

Try tapping on:

Even though I feel a lump in my throat, I also notice that my left knee feels quite calm and I’m going to move my attention back and forth between the two

Even though it feels better to let my attention rest on my knee for now, there’s a part of me feeling I must pay attention to my throat too, I completely accept how I feel

Even though there’s a part of me that feels I have to fix this feeling in my throat or make it go away, I’ll let my attention rest on my knee for now and see what happens

Even though I don’t feel safe (how do you know this, on a scale of 0 to 10 where are you?), there are places in my body that feel calm/grounded/neutral and this makes me feel …

Even though I don’t love myself right now, I can accept and even like some parts of me and that feels …