No place outside you can be ‘safe’

On a hike in Virginia, USA, in 2016

Safety is wonderful — if you can feel it. But that’s the thing: you have to feel it, not be given it, or be told by someone else it exists.

This is the issue with guarantees of safety like “this is a safe place”. According to whom? If safety is a felt experience within the body — a well-regulated nervous system spent mostly in the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) state — how can someone else, a person or an organisation, proclaim it for you?

Safety, the personal felt experience, is dependent on how easily you get triggered, and how capable you are at handling those triggers. These are highly subjective qualities based on life experience, sensitivity, privilege, and more.

Instead of our societal expectation that people and places be ‘safe’, how about us as a collective turning within, acknowledging that safety is a personal responsibility, and that no one else can be blamed for its momentary non-existence.

In my view, the bodily feeling of safety comes when:

• you experience embodiment — spending less time in your mind, and more time in your body, through yoga, lifting weights, ocean swimming, meditation, etc. You get used to your body as your home (instead of your external environment).

• you know what triggers you — what sends your nervous system into fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop. So you can be aware in those moments instead of unconsciously reactive.

• you have the tools and practices to move from activation to regulation.

• you, with support, go to the root of your triggers and attend to what was needed in those historical moments when you felt unsafe (i.e. you feared for your life).

None of the above requires someone else’s behaviour to change. That doesn’t mean you don’t say something to someone, but it no longer comes from a place of accusation. It’s more of a direct report:

“When you raise your voice, I feel scared.”

Instead of:

“You shouldn’t raise your voice; it makes me feel unsafe.”

And if they keep raising their voice?

Well, it won’t reach you, so long as you’ve got you.

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