When & where do we feel safe? Do we always know what is safe..when we sometimes act on things that are not safe? We can be emotionally, physically or psychologically safe. Just to be clear I will mostly talk about how we psychologically have been conditioned to react and feel, not violence or real danger. ( Even if many things can feel like we are in real danger sometimes..)
To know when we are unsafe I think we first need to talk about when we are feeling safe.
When I think about the feeling of feeling safe, I think of when my body and soul are completely relaxed. I really need to tune into my body to know if I can feel safe or not, and trust my instincts. I try to notice in what areas of my body I feel tension in. What situations does my body react to..I didn’t always know how to be aware of this, but really taking the time to do so has made me trust myself and what decisions to take. We have to make a decision to protect ourselves, and sometimes it’s easy to ignore the signs in our bodies. Instead we tend to listen to our minds (ego) and unfortunately that is not always to be trusted..
I believe we have been conditioned to react and trust situations that are not always safe for us. We can visit a place or talk to a person and feel safe or not, but because someone or the majority has experienced something we sometimes listen to them instead of trusting our gut. Or we have been taught not to trust ourselves from an early age and therefore we make choices that might not be safe for us, and we ignore the signs.
So how can we then know when it’s safe or not then?
I believe if we listen to our bodies, and stop to take a gentle but firm decision to a situation, we learn to choose safer and make more productive choices, instead of creating stress and tension and making ourselves feel unsafe, which are very damaging to our whole being.
Now there are times we really need to remove ourselves from a situation, and there are times we have to separate when there is a real threat, or not. There are also times it is more crucial for us to feel safe as well, and one of those times is when we heal. If there have been traumas that haven't been resolved, it is very beneficial to have safe people and environments around us until we can start to handle other situations. There are also times when we have to challenge ourselves and move beyond our safety net to grow and excel. For example If we never felt safe growing up, emotionally, or perhaps even physically, we stop trusting our own judgements about safety, in our relationships, and when to make healthy decisions, and how to act or not in a situation, so we then stop challenging ourselves and that's not ideal either as when then live a very predictable life and we don’t grow. The reason it can become debilitating to our well-being, is because we have learned to dissociate to cope with pain and we don’t get to experience the very thing we need to learn and experience. We eventually stop trusting others and our own decisions, or we act and do things irrationally.
So how can we re-train ourselves to become aware of when we need to protect ourselves and when we can trust and challenge ourselves, so we can feel safe. Boundaries to ourselves and others is one crucial component, but also being aware when we start to hit the hills too quickly. I have learned the only thing we can trust is our bodies.
It always tells the truth.
The benefits of feeling safe is that we can feel free to be ourselves, either in the environment or relating to others. When we are ourselves we automatically draw safe, higher vibrations and experiences towards us.
I will give two experiences I’ve had with feeling safe and not safe.
One is from close friendship’s (emotionally) I’ve had, and one from different environments (physically) I did not feel safe in.
I have many friendships but they all are very different. There are some people I feel very safe around, and there are some I had to partially or fully remove myself from as they made me feel stressed and agitated inside and I didn’t feel I could be myself around them. It’s not to say I can’t be around the latter ones mentioned, but I don’t feel a need to deepen the relationship with them either. I’m also not saying we have to isolate ourselves because we don’t feel safe to be ourselves. I have become hypersensitive to my relationships when they interfere with my emotional wellbeing and there needs to be a balance between how much we decide to involve ourselves in a relationship to feel safe, so both of us can grow.
Another example is the environments I lived in, and what places my body and soul really wanted and felt safe in. There are many times we pick places to live from an idea we have of that place. How much money you can make is usually one big factor, but rarely do we really listen to how our body and soul feels about that place. As much as I have traveled and numerous places I lived, there are places where my ego has chosen a place to live in, and I discarded what my soul and body felt in these places. By not listening to my body & soul I ended up hurting myself.
To feel safe in an environment has many different factors to it, but making choices out of our external selves is not the way. When I finally started to listen to what my body and soul wanted, magical things started to happen in my life, with both my body and soul, and I felt more safe than I ever felt. The reality is we can’t always feel safe, and there are times when we need to leave a situation and a place, but on the other hand we also often predict and try to control situations that simply aren’t true. Stop and feel what is really going on, and quickly we can see many times it’s in our head. We can also get used to drama and to not feeling safe. Of course we don’t want to feel unsafe, but the feeling of feeling unsafe can sometimes give us a thrill, and it can start feeling more comfortable to feel unsafe than safe.. (When I say unsafe I do not mean physically unsafe.)
Our bodies respond to stress and drama by releasing hormones that increase our heart and breathing and they get our muscles to respond. If our stress response doesn’t stop firing, and these stress levels stay elevated longer than is necessary for survival, it can really take a toll on our health, so listening to our bodies and our instincts can really help us move towards safer environments and relationships.
Today’s assignment:
When you start to feel uneasy in an environment or around certain people, stop and think instead of removing yourself right away. Try to feel how your body reacts, and where in your body you feel it. Then perhaps ask yourself, Am I really in danger or am I just scared? Why am I scared? Where does this feeling come from? If you have a strong reaction to a situation, sit with the feeling you are having without judging it. If you are healing, maybe find someone you feel safe with and work through your feelings with them. But don’t ignore them.
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