The starting point to feeling safe
In a recent Facebook post I wrote about our ability to show courage was proportionate to how safe we felt.
When we don’t feel safe, a normal reaction is for us to avoid the ‘thing’, be that an event, activity or person, to protect ourselves.
We construct barriers and walls to keep out the threat. If avoiding and distancing doesn’t work then we retreat further building higher walls between us and the external source of the threat. For some, the walls become so high, and you retreat so much that your previously constructed walls to keep you safe become your prison.
Yes, you keep out the unwanted thing, but inevitably you also block out the positive opportunities for connection, joy, fun, growth and love.
In order to start to move forward with courage, we need to have some element of feeling safe.
So what do we need in order to feel safe?
From my experience this will look different for each person. But there are some starting points that we will all have in common.
Firstly Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.
Maslow’s model showed us that our basic needs are on a scale of what needs must be met first. Our unconscious mind and brain will always seek out meeting our basic needs first.
Meeting our basic needs, having enough rest, shelter, nourishment and water, clothing are key to our survival and something we all share.
Once our basic human needs are met it allows us to move up the scale to meet other needs we may have.
Safety is next on the list and this includes having a home, personal security, employment, and resources.
In the last year many of us have had concerns and worries over these areas. It is easy to see how this impacts our ability to access the upper levels of the hierarchy when our needs at the bottom are on unstable ground or the foundations are being rocked.
But what if we have a history of adversity or trauma in our past, how does that effect things?
Our past experiences shape our current reality.
Whether it was just a one off challenging event or our experiences have been off on-going toxic stress, this will impact our ability to feel safe.
The more incidences of stressful, frightening or traumatic events we have, the more sensitive and reactive we are to stressors around us.
Our tolerance levels also drop. We become overwhelmed more quickly and don’t have the same bounce-back ability- what we commonly refer to as resilience.
The old adage of ‘what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger’ does not necessarily ring true!
The more past threat we have the more vigilant and cautious we will be, which makes sense in evolutionary terms.. it will keep you alive should you need to survive in a life threatening environment.
The stage of life we are at when we experience toxic stress or a trauma will also play a part.
In early life we are still growing and developing. Our psychology as well as our physiology.
In our psychology, the foundations of our core beliefs about how the world functions and our place in it are being developed. The quality of our relationships with our caregiver and other significant people in our life are a key component in this. It sets the framework of how ‘things work’ and our expectations for the future.
Physiologically our brains keep on growing and evolving until around 25 years old. And our nervous system is also evolving during our development.
The levels of stress hormone in our bodies, such as cortisol, impacts how parts of our brain develops as well as how our nervous system develop. These things play a part in how easy we find it to calm down when stressed, to let go off negative emotions and to rationalise the level of threat to us.
All these things together will lay the foundations to what each of us perceive as being safe, how readily available safety is to us and how to get it.
Once we have a clearer understanding of what is influencing our perception of how safe we are in the here and now, we can start to make the adjustments needed in our life and way of being to begin to feel safe again in our thoughts, body, environment, or relationships.